Le mystère et la musique

J.J. Abrams, vous connaissez ? J'espère bien. Co-créateur de Lost, il a aussi créé Alias en plus de réaliser Mission Impossible III et le nouveau Star Trek. Il nous écrit un article très intéressant dans le numéro d'avril de Wired, dont le sujet principal traite de cet art perdu du mystère dans cette vie de fou où toutes les réponses sont disponibles à l'instant, sans effort, instantanément, là. Puisqu'elle s'applique bien à ce qui me plaît, je choisirai de vous faire part d’une section marquante :

“Think back, for example, to how we used to buy music. You would have to leave your apartment or house and actually move your ass to another location. You'd get to the store, where music would be playing on the stereo. Music you may not have heard before. Perhaps you'd ask the clerk what it was and she'd send you to a bin—those wooden containers holding actual albums or CDs—and you'd look through it, seeing other album covers that might catch your eye. You'd have a chance to discover something.

But wait, you say, iTunes gives you the chance to browse! To that I nod, concede the point, and say, "Bullshit." Those little icons you scroll past mean almost nothing to most of us. Why? Because we didn't get on the train, brave the weather, bump into strangers, and hear music we didn't choose. In other words, we didn't earn the right to casually scan those wooden bins. Lately I go to Amoeba Music in Hollywood just to watch people flip through albums. It's a lost art.

Sure, in the days before recorded music, you'd need a live performance to hear music at all. So isn't technology actually enriching our lives? Well, of course. This is not meant to be an antitechnology diatribe—some clichéd Luddite treatise (in an issue of Wired, no less). On the contrary, I'm a massive fan of most everything electronic. I use, appreciate, and drool over far too many high tech innovations. I'm an embarrassed whore for the stuff. But tech has made us thankless. Back in the day, it would've been unthinkable to go to the music store, actually purchase a record, and then get home and not listen to it. But today? How many of us have downloaded albums or songs that are still sitting, months or years later, unplayed in our iTunes library? My hand just slowly went up, too.”

À part le message évident qui ressort de cette réalité, qu'est-ce qui frappe l'imaginaire ici ? Amœba. Le magasin de disques d’occasion le plus incroyable qu'il me fut donné de voir dans ma vie. Je souhaite à tout amateur de musique de laisser tomber ses mp3 pour quelques heures et de s'y déplacer s'il en a la chance. 

Le mois dernier, mon ami Bobby et moi y avons passé plusieurs journées à visiter les trois principales succursales : Berkeley, San Francisco et Hollywood. Je ne vous dirai pas la quantité de CDs qui sont revenus à la maison avec moi, vous ne me croiriez pas... Fascinant.

A once in a lifetime opportunity!