There is a tendency, as one learns about a particular field, to imagine knowing more than is really known. My life as a musician has been a constant back and forth in this regard, a see-saw between “soph” and “more.” As I’ve gotten older, the “I don’t know enough” sentiment seems to be winning out, and I’m feeling less and less informed every month.

On one hand, it doesn’t help that I’ve fallen out of the musical loop that I’ve lived in since I was 6. It’s been nearly 3 years now, and I can tell that things that felt familiar to me once are a bit foreign. On the other hand, it’s been a wonderfully enlightening experience, allowing me to partake of new directions that would most certainly have been frowned upon by my peers in academia.

In any case, I’m lacking in knowledge, and have started reading again.

I’m poring over a work by Ulf Poschart, DJ Culture. I’m not very far through the book, so a full review will have to wait, but even in the first hundred pages, I’m impressed, and have had some thoughts. One is a painful realization of how little I know about this slice of the musical world. Another has to do with musical “freshness.” Poschart (through his translator) says that in the 1930’s, a song had a lifespan of about 18 months, which was reduced to 4 months thanks to top 40 radio. People realized it, and started creating songs faster, to keep them fresh. What I’m curious about is if we extend this concept of musical shelf life can backwards and forwards in time, can we get a function. What was the lifespan of a popular tune in the 1850s? the 1600s? What is it today?

It’s most likely the speed of communication that is the influencing factor with freshness. In 1100, a song took an awfully long time to make it to Paris from Scotland, whereas now, a song is released, ripped into mp3 format and slung across the globe almost instantly. I’m curious to know if there is a correlation between shelf life and quality in general, or if those two things are by and large independent.

I’m curious to see just how ephemeral a popular song can become. Instead of a shelf life of 4 months, think about a song with a life of only 4 days, or 4 hours. What happens then? Does pop music becomes little more than improvisation, or does something unexpected happen? I don’t know if DJ Culture will answer these questions for me, but if it gives me some more musical hypotheticals to ponder, I’ll be happy.