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-- can you return to the "plur" after you've become jaded
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can you return to the "plur" after you've become jaded
it's a small question but it's really complex if you think about it. most people who listen to electronic dancemusic (or essentially any genre: rock, jazz, classical etc etc) eventually learn more about the genre, till you get the point that you can with diamondlikeprecision sort out the crap to find the gold.
but this has a downside, the more you get involved as a listener, you eventually get jaded, cynical and basicly very negative until the point where the new arrivals think, where is the love to the music?
can you get back into what is reffered as "PLUR" and start showing enthusiasm for the genre again or do you just become stuck in the ever growing elitist-zone?
it would be fun to hear your opinions about this, and please spare me the eternal "this is real [insert genre here], and this is not it"-discussion. even tho that discussion is actually pretty close to this on
I am currently jumping in and out of plur mode and jaded mode. I find as long as I keep things fresh around me and attend a variety of music events, things are nice and crispy.
For me, it's happened with just about every type of music I've listened to, but I wouldn't describe myself as "jaded," but rather as someone who's tastes have changed and grown (I'd have used the word "evolved" but that would more than likely be misconstrued and cause some to take offense).
I don't think I've ever really lost that "PLUR" feeling for any of the music I've loved, in some cases, however, what gives me that feeling has changed.
For example, whereas three to four years ago, just being in a huge club and hearing EDM surrounded by a bunch of tweeked out party kids was all I wanted to do, now it's either hearing a mix that's so well programmed it makes my like a track I generally either don't care for or hate outright. I'd describe the feeling itself as exactly the same, but the causes are different.
I think that's the most concise answer I can give, great thread montana.
this is interesting.
i think it has a lot to do with maturity as well. You rarely find people over 25 discovering dance music and getting into "PLUR".
Naturally then as you mature your tastes change.
If you ever see like 40 year old candy ravers you can bet they have personal problems.
I think it's like a decay of PLUR to PLU to PL to finally L and then S or XXX.
Personally, I feel very connected whenever I am with a group of jaded and cynical people enjoying music that we like. I love sharing my new music with people who haven't been exposed to it. I feel a PLUR feeling among people of similar music tastes. So I guess that goes back to my point about PLUR or PL haha
I only really started getting cynical after starting to DJ. At this point you get more picky with music, it gets harder to enjoy yourself at some parties because you would rather be playing when a shitty dj is up, etc.
i think i know what you're talking about and as a romanticist myself, I was almost delerious (unknowingly) until i opened up to all the new music available. really there's so much amazing music and it wasn't until i let go of all the cookie cutter crap thats been coming out the past 4 years (imho ofcourse) that I was able to really fall in love again. I've been listening to a lot of the deeper sounding acid tech thats coming out and its absolutely amazing and really reconnecting me with my roots and how i got into the scene in the first place.
i'm not gonna lie, my relationship with edm and the scene overall was starting to grow stagnant until i sort of broke the cycle for myself. i stopped trying to define myself as a dj, opened myself up to the new and beautiful and i love EDM all over again!
i realize you're talking more about the idealism of plur rather than music itself, but without a strong foundation of connection to your subculture (ie in my case the music) there's no point in idealisms.
cheers.
edit: also bear in mind that a lot of that feeling has succumbed to the jaws of the great clubbing empire! so much commercialism its hard to trap that feeling once again.
Another thing relating to maturity:
When I got into dance music I was an angsty young teenager, like most people who get into dance music. I fully bought into the PLUR idea because dance music brought me both the counterculture attitude and ironically the sense of belonging that my angsty self needed growing up.
Having grown up a bit you get to the point where you can make your place in the cosmos without relying on other people telling you where it is. You develop tastes, learn to do things yourself, experience things first hand. When you're getting into it, you join a website like this and because it has the word trance in it you think it's the best thing since sliced bread. You willingly let yourself be swept away with whatever shit gets thrown at you because to you it's your new identity, which makes you different from everyone and the same as everyone who you want to be like.
When you get older you realize you can be your own person. But there has always been a cynic for every plur kid
With knowledge comes self-consciousness, and with self-consciousness comes cynicism (or realism, maybe) about what to expect from newbies, producers, DJs, clubs, "the scene," etc. Any ideals you may have had are tempered (adulterated?) by your knowledge of how things actually are, and the simple pleasure you once took in your introduction to EDM is tempered by the knowledge that there are better things than the most popular and easily accessible.
You can't unknow what you've already learned, but maybe trying to strike out for new territory (or unexplored old territory) can help.
Or you could try taking a long break and then coming back to see what has happened in the interim. 
that's when the nostalgia kicks in though
Another thought: saturation.
When a lot of people get into something, they really immerse themselves in it as much as possible (I know I do), and in the digital age it's ridiculously easy to saturate yourself with new electronic music of all kinds, discussion with likeminded listeners, DJ sets, production, etc. Anything you want (except for that old fresh feeling of "newness") is right at your fingertips, a few clicks or keyboard strokes away.
When I think of what EDM culture must have been like before the Internet, a metaphor comes to mind: starvation. If you lived anywhere but in a few big cities, your exposure to new electronic music would be extremely limited. When you found a record of some previously-unheard-of genre of music in a shop, it must have felt like a little miracle happened or something, like finding an oasis in a desert.
I dunno, maybe it wasn't anything like that and I'm romanticizing this needlessly. I wasn't clued in to EDM in those days anyway, so I have no firsthand experience. The grass is always greener on the other side, right? And you can't really "go back." How could you? Stop using the Internet for music? Yeah right. And anyway, you might miss out on lots of good stuff if you did that.
So now music is everywhere and trivially easy to access. This situation kind of reminds me of "The Machine Stops" by E.M. Forster. Everything's right there for you. There are millions, billions of options, billons of new spectacles and ways to entertain yourself, but maybe that makes each one less significant, subjectively. Or maybe it doesn't. Probably depends on the individual.
Horizons are open like never before. As your view improves and you can see the layout of the whole land, your options proliferate. You're no longer relegated to a little corner of the world, musically. But at the same time perhaps the sense of "mystery" and "unknown territory" diminishes, and I think that might be a part of the kind of naivete you referred to in the opening post. It was for me.
Maybe I'm being as silly as "vinyl purists," and maybe this isn't what you're after, but I've felt like writing something on this for a while. So there you go.
I don;t know if this will directly link to your thread but I hope it does in some way. Recently I have definitely felt a bit disheartened by the state of dance music these days. Sure theres always decent tracks out there and ones I purchase but then after i've purchased them and listen to them I don't feel too much any more. 
I mean linking to the internet point raise above, I never feel that chill down my spine or hairs on the back of my neck stand up when theres a truly amazing tune or riff setting in. Before the dawn of the internet in the scene I felt these feelings.
I think i'm a bit lost myself with dance music lately as i'm searching other types of EDM wishing theres something different and great out there but on the whole i'm disappointed. I don't know where i'm heading with my tastes myself. I don't even feel as if I want to listen to my music as much anymore. Good to see other people feel kinda the same anyway.
I used to listen to whatever I could find - stuff that played on the radio, MTV, shitty top 40 pop, all because music wasn't really an important part of my life, it was a casual thing. When I started getting more into it, I got more and more picky. After a few years I started becoming cynical and bitter, but I like it that way. You can listen to junk music your whole life but when you taste quality you never go back.
I never really got into the whole 'PLUR' thing when I was younger, think I was too much of an angry bitch
Though looking back on it, I had some truly ghastly taste in music dating across anywhere between 1978 and 1995 where I'd quite happily listen to Madonna, Cindy Lauper, Abba and then come crawling back to the house with an armful of hardcore techno, acid house, Industrial, EBM and all kinds of pop-cheese-dance-crap from wherever I'd been last in the world 
But I think the real trial by fire has to be that after enough exposure to cheesy crap is that you learn to pick though it for some gems, a lot of people seem say that trance back in the late 90's and turn of the century or any genre you care to name with a heyday, was all good, the 'heyday' of popular consensus. I'd strongly disagree because I seem to have an awful lot of it which is just plain awful.
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| Another thought: saturation. |
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| Originally posted by Semirk I don;t know if this will directly link to your thread but I hope it does in some way. Recently I have definitely felt a bit disheartened by the state of dance music these days. Sure theres always decent tracks out there and ones I purchase but then after i've purchased them and listen to them I don't feel too much any more. I mean linking to the internet point raise above, I never feel that chill down my spine or hairs on the back of my neck stand up when theres a truly amazing tune or riff setting in. Before the dawn of the internet in the scene I felt these feelings. I think i'm a bit lost myself with dance music lately as i'm searching other types of EDM wishing theres something different and great out there but on the whole i'm disappointed. I don't know where i'm heading with my tastes myself. I don't even feel as if I want to listen to my music as much anymore. Good to see other people feel kinda the same anyway. |
btw, when i meant plur, i was speaking about the really entuiastic state of mind the beginner listeners have, not the exact early 90's PLUR movement
I've thought about this in regard to production as well. I think that in an era of cheap software many people no longer have a certain sense of "respect" and fascination that might have come from owning just one or two hardware synths. A hardware synth is this unique physical thing sitting there on your desk (or whatever). There's only one of it. It's not easily duplicated. So it's easy to "fall in love" with it, so to speak, which might sound kind of silly, but I've heard hardware owners talking about that feeling, like this thread. When you have a bunch of easily accessed software, it seems like people tend to try to "plunder" synths for certain sounds, fiddling with them superficially for the perfect supersaw (or whatever), like somebody ransacking a room in search of some cash, moving right onto the next room (synth) when the objective isn't found. I think this is part of what leads to shallow musicianship and boring sound engineering, to people who care little for the craft and everything for belching out something that sounds like a certain narrow subset of "professional music."
But, you know, it's affordable to do this now, and not everybody does it anyway, so...whatever.
A bit off-topic, sorry.
I see what you mean by 'plur', and I can even extend the discussion to the creative part of the music, I mean everything related to production.
At the beginning a producer will enjoy a kind of sound that he has created and try to develop it. For instance I used to make long breakdowns with a breakbeat sequence, now I like short breakdowns with a more danceable swoop.
Both on production and listening I also think it's a question of maturity, I was more elitist before, now I can listen to every kind of music and enjoy it if it's well made, schei�egal if it's rock, pop, progressive house, minimal, whatever you want... I surely wouldn't have been able to tell such thing some years ago.
Edit: shit Mr Jivo you beat me to it
I find it the opposite. The more I'm listening to EDM, the more I find tunes I wouldn't have liked before I listened to EDM. I would've never listened/liked the majority of my songs before I listened to EDM, but now I feel that I might be buying too many tracks that I'm overrating because I like EDM.
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| Originally posted by ballmouse I find it the opposite. The more I'm listening to EDM, the more I find tunes I wouldn't have liked before I listened to EDM. I would've never listened/liked the majority of my songs before I listened to EDM, but now I feel that I might be buying too many tracks that I'm overrating because I like EDM. |
I don't think anyone said they like less music after becoming cynical..
I've never liked dance music more than right now. It's just that you get very good at finding what you like and you find that you start liking other things.
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| Originally posted by Semirk So isn't that a contradiction? |
probly not, maybe when i'm in really really really good mood. In fact I rarely enjoy music nemore.
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| Originally posted by ballmouse Yes. I'm saying I'm finding so much stuff I like that I can't help to wonder should I actually be liking this? I don't really know how to explain it. It was that feeling when I listened to Papua New Guinea and I instantly realized that I loved it, yet then I listened again and I realized that I don't actually love it. I've just been sucked into EDM and I feel like I'm loving everything, but I don't. I only love it because I'm so used to EDM and that I love it that I just love it. See, it's hard to understand; I don't know how to word it. |
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| Originally posted by Semirk Theres nothing really that mindblowing out there anymore i've found, not to me anyway. A lot of good tracks but nothing that stands out. I'm finding more and more my collection is one-dimensional but brancing out into other EDM genres is not getting me anywhere in terms of uniqueness either. |
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