Letter Boxed September 14, 2022 Answers

first time getting official! 🙂

DIVERGE—EUTOPIAN
15/2

A few scattered thoughts in relationship to music: To me, music is a life-long friend. At times, I felt it was my only friend as well. I was ten, in mid-70s, when I started picking & choosing my music (as you do), which coincided with an intensely tribal setting where you, essentially, had to take sides between being -largely- a Rock or a Soul-Disco music fan -involving unbridgeable lifestyle differences, which I privately (& immediately) felt were there to transcend. Soon enough that rivalry shifted towards Rock vs Punk and so the story goes…
As a result, I haven’t developed a ‘pigeonholeable’ (is THAT even a word?) musical taste, letting music fit or determine my mood instead. I’ve also oriented myself towards what many regard as difficult listens. Subsequently, I’m rather reticent about recommending music to others, although I do have a stock answer as my desert-island-disc, that being The Who’s Quadrophenia (1973) which, among other things, touches on conflicts of the afore mentioned sort.
At present, of course, musical genres are sidelined and blended to form all sorts of hybrid sounds (which is not a bad thing in the grand scheme of things) but what I really fear has been lost are the various rituals connected with listening to music, be it slapping the record on the turntable, brushing it off and sinking the needle into the groove or adjusting the radio aerial to capture the elusive ham radio -those having at best been replaced by a couple of clicks here and there. I say ‘at best’ because I feel that, in this day and age, we’re constantly being exposed to music; even at the store I work in, there’s a playlist incessantly shuffled away day in, day out…