i’m really digging this season of the sopranos so far. don’t read this if you’re waiting to watch it on tivo tonight, but the part where they had a tony, a gangster rapper and a lab scientist in a hospital room watching a boxing match and talking about schrodinger’s cat… man, that was priceless. spectacular writing.

in other written word news, i continue to somewhat enjoy/somewhat puzzle at chuck klosterman’s monthly column in spin, in which he discusses topics covered in bygone issues of spin (e.g. nirvana & grunge, smashing pumpkins & billy corrigan’s ego, or this month, nine inch nails & the rise of ‘industrial’ music). as someone who basically went through his teen years during the time during which the subjects of his reflections took place originally, i do get a nostalgic pleasure out of them, and he’s still very clever with references and wordplay. still, i can’t help feeling a little bad, because they almost paint a picture that he’s just slowly becoming washed up and irrelevant and stuck reminiscing about the prior decade because he’s not young enough to keep up with this one anymore — especially to the spin magazine readership which is supposedly looking for the latest in borderline-popular music. it’s equal parts depressing and amusing for someone like me who thinks he has a lot of talent to be wasting on almost-VH1 style flashback filler…

but that gets away from what i originally wanted to share, which is one of the moments in which he isn’t just getting starry-eyed over his unique take on why this or that 90’s phenomenon was never actually that cool. here he put down in a paragraph something i think is especially relevant in the race-to-obscurity world of pitchfork and an army of mp3 blogs that seem to hold all the power in indie music these days. (i figured it was okay to share a decent-sized chunk, since the march issue’s no long on newsstands and you can read the whole column on their site anyway…)

There are many people — in fact, you may be one of them — who devote much of their daily energy toward hearing about things first, even if those specific things don’t particularly matter. This has been exacerbated by technology; the degree to which a rock song is new has become nearly as important as how interesting it sounds, even though there’s no inherent advantage to hearing a song today as opposed to five weeks from now (when it will still sound exactly the same). I sometimes think it would be to my benefit if I never listened to any album until two years have passed since its release date. I suspect I would avoid a lot of crap whose only value is that most people haven’t heard it (yet).

haha, and that makes up for all the 90’s wankery you could possibly want to indulge in, chuck. bravo, bravo.