Back when I was a teenager, the way you found out about music was either MTV or through friends.  While we all hated MTV, the fact was that Headbangers Ball was largely the only way to see videos from the bands we were into, so we'd tape it, and spend most of the time fast forwarding through it to see if anything GOOD was on.  Sometimes we'd get lucky.

One of the craziest things, was when I'd be into a band, and not know how many LP's they had.  Don Anderson got me into Savatage, for instance.  They had this big LP, "The Hall of the Mountain King" which was pretty huge at the time of its release.  So we were listening to that, and I stumbled on another Lp of theirs, "Power of the Night" which was also pretty good.  Don then called me and told me he found two more LP's.  Sirens and the dungeons are calling.  At that point, we thought that was it.

There were no less than 5 record stores in our town.  And it just so happened that I found another Savatage LP later-that-same-day at one of the exchange places.  "Fight for the Rock"  Don didn't even believe me.  He thought I was lying that I found another one.  Lucky for him, he didn't find it, because that LP was terrible.

Next thing you know, about a week later, they released Gutter Ballet as a new LP.  And we got that too.

  I guess my point, is that today, it's silly.  You just go on the net and find everything.  In fact, it's almost difficult to know what to listen to and what not.  There is so much.  Part of the fun of the music game back in the day was actually finding some of this stuff.

  KISS has this LP called "The Elder".  It's well known now.  But back then, it was rare to find it.  There weren't that many pressings, and if you had a copy of the Elder, that meant you had a pretty complete KISS collection.  Today, you can probably find The Elder on iTunes.  Not that you'd want it. 

  I think music has lost some of its mystery and mystique because nothing is rare or out-of-print anymore. 

  Like, I used to listen to Tori Amos in the 90s.  And in her fan club news magazine, there was a write-up about how her very first recording was a limited pressing on the back of a '45 that was limited to less than 100 copies.  Baltimore was what it was called.  Shortly after getting ISDN and "discovering" the world of mp3, I found the song on an FTP file sharing site.  What was once impossible to own, suddenly became easy.

  That reminds me, back in the day, some computers weren't fast enough to play an mp3.  My boss would take 15 mp3 songs and decompress them and burn them to a 1x speed burner.  It took an entire workday.  And the CDR discs were $10 a piece.

  Crazy.  Crazy how things change so fast.  It wasn't even that long ago.

I don't listen to KISS myself.  I never got into them.  But it is interesting that you said KISS sucked when you had Tori Amos there to choose from.  You must really hate KISS.

I'm just indifferent to them.  If I'm gonna watch someone in makeup parade around on stage, it'll be King Diamond.

Kevin, you sound like my older brother when he rants about the good ol' days of music.  :D  He will go on about how he and his friends would pick up a rare metal lp or something and all sit around listening to it at a friends house (I was a little too young, but I remember some band that literally just screamed out the text of some medical books or something; it was kinda strange).  It was more about finding something new and sharing it with everyone (and probably smoking weed); seems like more of a social experience than sharing music is now.  I used to be really into Bjork and would track down all of her singles and imports.  Personally, I'm glad music is more available (that stuff was not cheap back then), but I know what you mean.  There was a much cooler feeling when I would find some new import album or live bootleg and finally get a chance to listen to it.  Now you can just stream it, download it from a torrent, or even find songs posted on Youtube with some shit slideshow running.  Ah, da memoriez.

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I just Found out about this guy who goes by Kavinsky. he makes IMO nice Electro music. I discovered him via a radio station in GTA IV and now im a huge fan of his work. but anyways, its a huge pain in the ass getting his work. He doesnt press CDs, he has a few .mp3s and shit from his older work on places like itunes and emusic and whatnot. but his new shit, is pressed on records. He has some new shit that I saw that I want, but need a record player to play. I am not sure what his reasons against CDs are, but im having a hell of a hard time getting his new stuff via the internet. Im currently about to look on craigslist and ebay, and possibly goodwill for a turntable and pick up the new Blazer EP from turntable lab or better yet localy from newberry comics (if they even carry it).

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"the dominus of the black megadus"

Yeah I know what you mean. Some of those tabs on these sites, even some with the highest ratings, are just wrong. And combine that with a handful of YouTube videos all playing the same song differently, and that will really confuse someone just starting off. So it makes you wonder if that's doing some real harm to young musicians today.

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I wasn't trying to do a whole, "Back in my day we walked in the snow..."  But rather, I wanted to point out how crazy things have become.  That music isn't this big mystery anymore.  You can know everything about it in seconds. 

It's like cell phones.  So crazy.  You can be standing under a bridge, in the middle of a park somewhere, at night, and talk to someone on the other side of the planet as though you are right next to them.  And it runs on a little battery.

Sometimes I think all this stuff is run by aliens.  They just tell you, "A signal travels through the air and into the phone."  And we all buy it.  We're like, "Sure, yea, it makes perfect sense."  But wait...  What?  No it doesn't.

Take a speaker...  Dude is all like, "We put this magnet here, and we wrap a paper cone around that.  When you talk, the magnet vibrates the paper, and listen... Perfect sound!"   Get the fuck out of here!  How is the sound traveling to my ear?  "Well, it vibrates air molecules which create sound."  If that was true, shouldn't it be that everytime I move my arms around in the air it should sound like an avalanche? 

Then they have records, and they are saying, "What we do is put this needle on this piece of plastic, and there are grooves that vibrate the needle, and listen...  It's REO Speedwagon."  What the?  That's not possible.  I know I can look it up, and there'd be some technical explanation about how it works, but it all just has a bunch of gimmies in it.  Like it'll say, "The needle will vibrate, reproducing sound, which causes the vibrations to echo off other sound molecules."  But never actually make you understand if that's even true or not.  They could just as easily say something like, "Sound is formed by the collapsing of small stars in the fabric of time, too tiny for the human eye to see, yet their destruction creates the music you hear."  You'd have no idea if any of it was true, and so you have to rely on alien scientists who pretend to be experts and tell you that it IS INDEED TRUE, and that you could test it yourself if you buy a bunch of crazy equipment (That they invented) to test it.  And nobody does.

Oh, and some guy made it in the 1800's, so you can't go back and ask him about it, because that might reveal the alien invasion.

Then they come up with laser.  They are all like, "You take this red light from your LED football game, and you aim it at this round plastic disc.  That sees a bunch of dots on the disc, and now we have music AND TV on there."    C'mon...

"Look here, we have this new TV technology, it's perfectly flat.  What we did was we have all these little crystals that we form into a matrix, and then apply an energy grid to the back which forms pictures.  And this microchip (Yes I know it looks like a plastic square) tells the matrix to form the pictures into video and sound."

Aliens!  It's a cookbook!

The sound your arms make when you flail them around is the sound of wind, so no, an avalanche would never be heard. Which is made by 100s of tons of crushing rocks, snow and trees plunging down steep mountain slopes, miles in length and nearly the same in width. My fan moves faster than my arms and it hardly makes a noise. I hear the engine turning the blades and the blades (if it’s on high enough) producing wind which makes a “whooo” noise.

The way I figure it, two solid things make sound, nothing else. That includes liquid too, because really liquids are just gay versions of solids. Air isn’t a solid so it makes no noise unless agitated. So, when you quickly swing headphones in a circle, blow in a wind instrument, whistle…all that makes noise because air is being fucked with.

Vibrating the needle on a record to make sound not possible? I think you forgot the electricity part. Electricity is a defining element of modern society and without it that record would make no sound. Think of a record as a drawing. I’m sure you have a record player, I do. Plug it in and play a record on it by manually moving the LP. At the slowest speed it sounds like inaudible mush, but quickly turn it left or right and you hear quickly played music. Those grooves act like strokes to a drawing. One stroke doesn’t look like shit, but stroke after stroke make up a drawing, same with groove after groove make up a song. The only difference is drawing is more primitive and record playing is modern technology.

Technology doesn’t perplex me too much though. If you’re the dominate species on a planet and you’ve been around for hundreds of thousands of years, you kind of hope you’d make some progress in improving the way you live your life. I know what you mean by looking around and going “holy shit” every now and then, but if you just talk to a few scientists/engineers/whatever and read a few books, maybe on sociology, you realize how we got here and how completely logical everything is. How the human race has that desire to be better and how this technology works. It’s not aliens. I like to be philosophical just as much as the next guy, but I base my thoughts on facts. Not crazy Scot Rubin-esq conspiracies.

When you get right done to it all though, I still believe science is simply the human way of understanding things. It’s this society’s explanation for how the world works.

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I know you were not passing judgment but just pointing out how fast technology has advanced the music industry.  I do disagree that there is no longer that feeling of discovery.  I feel it more so now that I am inundated with the horrible crap that most record labels call music.  When I find a gem online through a friend or blog, I am just as excited as the time I found the Tools Power bootleg at Salty's Record Attic.

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"What do you want for Christmas?" "Fraggle Stick Car." "What the fuck is a Fraggle Stick Car? Next!"

Or an LP is better because it's rare!  I got a lot of that growing up.  The reason the thing is rare is because it sucks.