The paradox of listening - how to decide what to listen to?

One of the tiredest remarks around is that one that goes, "But how can you read all these books/listen to all these records/watch all these DVDs?". "How will you ever find the time?" (And the subtext: What kind of person ARE you, anyway?). Yeah, some people seem positively threatened by the sight of a large collection of cultural artefacts, especially ones that require a significant time commitment. But, tired and faintly annoying though the comment is, there's also an interesting point that the blundering comment-makers are missing. If you have - say - a lot of records/tapes/CDs/music files, then it could easily be true that you will never find the time to listen to every single one all the way through from end to end. Even if you gave up every other activity in life (paid employment, reading or watching anything, leaving the house, eating, sleeping ...), you might still never get to the end of it all if you have a sufficiently big collection of stuff to listen back to. Never! Such, I think, is my situation. I can't be bothered to calculate (even roughly) the amount of time it would require in a single hypothetical sitting to listen back to all the music in my possession, but apparently I have 76.7 days worth of music in my PC's iTunes. Then there's all the other computer stuff not linked through to iTunes. And the thousands of other files on a separate hard drive. And then the tapes, the records ... blah blah blah. And, of course, there's the fact I also keep acquiring more music - probably at the rate of 5-10 hours of new music added to the pile each week. Blimey. It's daunting. One the one hand, it's a drop in the ocean compared to some of the people I see online, with their airy talk of massive car boot "hauls". These people are the fishing trawlers of the music-buying world, scooping up massive quantities of slippery discs, shimmering in the daylight as they're rudely hauled out of the second-hand music depths. For them it's less a question of whether they can ever listen to it all - more a matter of can they ever find enough room for it? And this, dear reader, brings me to my main point. Leaving aside the rather idiotic notion of consuming the whole lot ("Have you read all these books, you poseur!"), the more burning question is how to decide what to listen to at any one time. Seriously - it's a dilemma. And I don't really know the answer ...

For a long time I was anxious not to get "stuck", endlessly listening to the same few favourite recordings. Influenced by John Peel - including by the way he gradually distanced himself from his show's stultifying all-time Festive Fifty list (always dominated by the Sex Pistols, the Clash and Joy Division) - I tried to be sparing in listening back to stuff I'd long liked. Yep, I was going to resist the malign seductive powers of the familiar and much-loved. And so I have ... sort of. For years, I've more or less rationed the already-listened-to-several-times stuff, deliberately and purposely inclining to new (or new to me) music. But, guess what? I may have overdone it! Yes, I think I've been too strict, virtually fetishising the that-which-I-have-yet-to-hear, and almost completely ignoring a mass of brilliant music that's effectively ended up relegated to an "old stuff" category. Hmm, difficult. Apparently, this is what psychologists call the paradox of choice. Faced with a wide range of options, the chooser will often be gripped by a fear of making the wrong choice - retreating into either an overly-scrupulous attempt to carefully weigh up all the options or formulating some (probably irrational) rough set of rules to govern their decision-making. Or panicking ...

What's a poor boy to do? With my music, I could on the one hand map out a sort of A-Z or beginning-to-end listening plan which would mean ploughing through everything, slowly, incrementally. Which to me sounds ... hopeless. Or at the other extreme, you could, I guess, just "go with the flow", playing whatever you feel like at any given time. Hmm, maybe. Or, as I'm now inclined to think, you can keep shifting your loose listening "rules" (not really rules, more "guidelines"), adapting them as technology changes and your overall mass of musical matter changes. Whatever. My latest wheeze is to show some love (as the millennials apparently say) to my tape collection. Not the originally-released-on-tape stuff, but the hundreds of LPs (and quite a few singles) I've recorded onto C90s. Part of a 20-year-long home-taping criminal enterprise, these have been almost squeezed out of my current listening behaviour by digital and streamed music. Time to redress the balance! But then another tricky decision arises: which of these to play and in what order? I'm going for a two-randomly-pulled-out-at-a-time-from-a-specific-part-of-the-top-shelf approach to begin with. (Photo below of what I've played so far). Yeah, keeping things random - semi-random - is itself somehow a key element to the pleasure of listening. The paradox of listening - savouring the expected/enjoying the unexpected.

Home taping is killing music; so is the paradox of choice