Andrew Speaks/Types

I was reading up on profanity today (don’t ask why…haha) and I cane across this article.

Music: Profanity, Addiction, Piracy

The part that struck me was the addiction paragraph. And I qutote:

“Another problem that is sometimes caused by people’s musical tastes is an addiction to music. Some people simply cannot get enough music. They walk around with headphones in their ears, they turn on the stereos in their rooms, they listen to the radio in their cars, and they go to concerts when available, rarely taking the time to give their ears a rest!

Not only can this cause physical problems (i.e. deafness or impaired hearing abilities), it can also cause other non-physical problems. Once we ‘Lose ourselves’ to the music, we have given up a part of what makes us humans. We are admitting that we are dependent on music, as we could be dependent on a drug. If a person is listening to music so much that he ‘loses himself’ to it, he has put himself in a weary situation indeed!

There is a certain amount of music that can be healthy for a person, and this amount differs for every person. But a common problem amongst the people of our modern American society is their inability to cope with silence. Some people even have silonophobia (”fear of silence”), and become tense when there is no ambient sound. Jesus himself knew the importance of silence: “he would withdraw to deserted placed to pray” (Luke 5:16). Without this respect and acceptance of silence, we cannot truly have some time to ourselves—to actually think things over and pray.”

I put these words in a text to speech and recorded my computer reading them. I think I’m going to make a long instrumental song and play the words over it, because of how increddibly ignorant and ironic it is. I might put it over a video I’m going to shoot as well. I really like this idea though, who knows what’ll come out of it.

This last summer, myself and my friend Travis challenged each other to play our Pokemon Red and Yellow Versions (respectively), and once school started, we would do battle. It was a lot of fun while it lasted, but with Pokemon, it’s so addictive that once you play you don’t ever want to put it down. But, if you ever do stop playing for about a week, you just don’t feel the need to anymore. So our lives got busy and we lost track of our game.

Now that we have a Photography class where we do absolutely nothing, we decided to bring our cards to school, and hold competitions to pass the time. This was really awesome. Eventually, our douchebag teacher told us that we can’t bring them anymore, for reasons unknown.

But what I want to talk about are peoples reactions to us being associated with Pokemon. When I walk through school with a Nintendo DS, and people see that I’m playing Pokemon, I get laughs. Not “I’m laughing with you,” but most definitely, “you’re a loser, aren’t those for 8 year olds?”

The real children here are the ones laughing. When my retort is “hey, don’t you know that they’re really great video games?” I get laughs as well. Apparently, nowadays, people enjoy different things. While certain people absolutely love to play baseball, my opinion of fun is hanging out with my friends, playing a good game of Brawl, or Pokemon, or anything. Why would I want to play your game when it isn’t fun for me? Isn’t it in the definition of the word fun that fun has to be something you enjoy?

Right now, there is this “fact,” that Pokemon is on the same level as Dora The Explorer, or listening to Hannah Montana. But there’s nothing to support this. That’s what’s immature. Not standing up for something that you like because you are afraid of what your friends will think.

Actually, most people that play Pokemon are people that we’re playing video games when Pokemon was created. People who grew up with it. And if I recall correctly, there wasn’t one kid in my 4th grade class who wasn’t playing Pokemon, and wasn’t loving every second of it.

Back then it was fun. Why isn’t it fun now? It doesn’t have any blood or killing in it, so you don’t like it? Let’s be honest, isn’t there something that we all don’t do just because theres some rule that says it isn’t cool, even though you can’t explain why.

Don’t stop doing something that you enjoy just because someone else doesn’t.

I had a conversation today with someone about Limewire and illegal music downloads, and I don’t think he got my point. Edmonds (the guy I was talking to) said that all the music on his mp3 player was downloaded illegally. I have probably about a hundred or so single songs that I’ve downloaded from sites like dogpile.com and sonicx.com, but the thing is, for songs like that, I either am in two situations.

1: I’m downloading a single from an artist I’ve never heard before so I can see if I would enjoy their album, or

2: I only like one song by an artist and I don’t want to pay the price of 9.99 for just that song. And don’t even get me started on iTunes. 99 cents for about 2-4 minutes of music is ridiculous. And iTunes won’t even let you download songs that are any longer than that without buying the album, that’s greedy too.

But back to the point, yes, I will download single songs from time to time. There are plenty of songs I have on my iPod that have been downloaded illegally, like “The Answers” by Lemon Sun. Great song, but I don’t think I like their style of music enough to buy 9 dollars worth of their music. Money’s tight, you know?

But there’’s always those band, you know? Those bands who you love everything they put out and you just WANT to support them and pay for their albums so you can have the full experience of listening to their music. Your favorite bands.  The bands that no matter how expensive CDs became, you’d still buy their stuff. Good examples of bands like this to me are:

The Mars Volta
Queens Of The Stone Age
Green Day
Incubus
Motion City Soundtrack
Gorillaz
The White Stripes
Wolfmother
Arctic Monkeys

And many more. But bands like that to me make CDs that I have to have the full package to fully enjoy. (Well, with the exception of Gorillaz, because I buy their albums digitally. A digital band goes hand in hand with digital albums.) I want bands like this to continue making music and to succeed, so I buy their stuff. Bands you really love you shouldn’t pirate.