HEART IN MUSIC and RECORDING QUALITY ON CD's

Christine Trzyna here.

Wes and I were talking the other day about the music of the late 1950's and 1960's and the music "now." "The thing about the oldies," Wes said,"is that they had heart."

I agree. In the controversies about Rap music which seem to dwell on the values expressed in raunchy and often woman-hating lyrics, empathy and love - be it the wonder of love or the misery of a break up - seems to be missing. Rap comes off as stone-hearted. Beat and rhythm and poetry are there, as is amazing word play and rhyme. Sometimes a sense of humor is expressed rather than bitterness. Sound sampling is considered to be a new kind of musical rip-off that shows a lack of originality and is offensive to the original songwriters and singers as much as it can be taken as a great compliment that their work was chosen for a rip around the old turn-table.

Warmth too seems to be missing and that has to do with recording quality as transferred on to the music-carrier of the moment - the CD. Recently I read in Rolling Stone magazine about a group of Beatles fans who didn't like the thin, tinny quality of Beatles CD's. They had taken the recording of CD's into their own club, playing the old crackle, snap, and pop LP's and moving that recording onto CD's. To them the sound quality was THE ORIGINAL BEATLES, the way they heard it first and wanted to hear it. Then they posted on the Internet, and by becoming a member of their club, you could download the recordings they did.

I recall the days when the AUDIOPHILE existed. These were people who bought expensive equipment to hear tape or vinyl recordings with a lot of controls on the audio. They gleefully tweaked base and treble, or listened to just one speaker, adjusting the music to the way they wanted to hear it song by song, isolating a voice or an instrument. This is an active participation in the music that is barely possible with the CD players that most people own today.

I suspect that the beauty of original performanc music on YOUTUBE also has to do with the ORIGINAL SOUND of a recording.