The Saturation Principle

I've got plenty of friends who enjoy them, but I just can't muster any interest in the Lumineers. Just my latest example of the hipster's lament: dismissing some popular band, even one that works within a broad genre (acoustic singer-songwriters) I listen to a lot.



It's fair for you to question whether I'm dismissing them for their popularity. Hell, I probably have dug a hole with those of you who have known me for a while by being pretty douche-y about those kind of arguments in college. (My wife is nodding right now.)

A lot of those college-age musical arguments were mostly just less-than-graceful efforts at self-definition. (My fellow socially awkward, indie-listening friends are nodding right now.) But older, fairer, more secure me still thinks the same way, and I think it boils down to two differences I still have with the sort of "average" listener that may like a popular band I dismiss.

1. I've listened to a LOT of music. I own around 850 albums, and that number grows almost weekly. For about the last 12 years, I've been listening to music an average of 6-8 hours a day, and that usually includes at least 15-20 minutes spent reading music-related sites and articles. 

2. I listen to music for its own sake. Less obvious, perhaps, but just as important. I don't primarily treat my albums as background music. More often than not, when I'm listening, I'm trying to actively engage with my music- listening to albums numerous times to catch their nuances, thinking about how it compares to that band's body of work or to other bands in the genre, listening to spot songs or moments that I think are great, maybe even starting a blog so I can pontificate about what I'm listening to.

In combination, those two facts make me vulnerable to what I'll call the saturation principle: the more music I listen to and actively engage with, the more likely I'll find it difficult to engage with a new piece of music, because to me it will sound similar to music I've heard before.

The effect of this principle is more or less a generalized version of the experience of listening to an overplayed song. You probably feel exhausted when you hear "Rolling in the Deep" or "Somebody that I Used to Know" or some other song you've heard literally hundreds of times in the past few months- the song becomes dull as you feel like you can predict the next notes, as the exciting or emotional moments lose their sense of surprise, as you can remember the lyrics in your sleep. Well, a similar thing happens for me with the Lumineers on much earlier listens, because even if I haven't heard the song, I feel like I've heard the instrumentation, the chord changes, the general melodic outline in a number of other songs I've already listened to. (In this case, Jay Farrar's work in Uncle Tupelo and Son Volt is one clear reference point.)

Which doesn't mean there's anything wrong with liking the Lumineers, at all- other people haven't listened to the same other music in the same way, and I might very well have liked their songs better 10 years ago, when I hadn't listened to the similar music that's now saturated my musical experience. It just means that at this point in my life, I'm looking for things that sound different, or that at least do a familiar thing in a unique way- and under my definition of "familiar," the Lumineers don't work for me.

I can only speak for myself, but I suspect that the saturation principle is relevant for a lot of my fellow, so-called hipsters. (At least the ones who get the title due to actual interest in music as opposed to just being irony-obsessed and annoying to New York Times writers.) The flip side of feeling "saturated" about a band like the Lumineers is finding an eccentric, hipster-loved band like Animal Collective or Sunset Rubdown or the Flaming Lips more appealing, in large part because they do sound different. What twenty year-old hipster me didn't appreciate is that it doesn't necessarily mean that music is incontrovertibly "better," or that others were missing out by not liking it- it just means that their musical experience was different (and probably less intensive) than mine.