“If music be the food of love, play on!” Like food, music can be comforting. It can also be stimulating, annoying, or cloying. Music releases dopamine, the ‘feel good’ hormone, just like sex and actual food. Music can arouse feelings of euphoria and craving. Dopamine release is at “peak emotional arousal” during music listening, so you really ARE getting a bang for your musical buck.
“If music be the food of love, play on!” Like food, music can be comforting. It can also be stimulating, annoying, or cloying. Music releases dopamine, the ‘feel good’ hormone, just like sex and actual food. Music can arouse feelings of euphoria and craving. Dopamine release is at “peak emotional arousal” during music listening, so you really ARE getting a bang for your musical buck.
Editor’s Note – Originally posted on January 21st 2015, this column bears repeating. Proud to say our track record is pretty good for sniffing out greatness in a sea of popular, financially successful mediocrity, but the continued confusion regarding the differences in worthiness and rose-coloured glasses steeped in nostalgia, needs to be addressed. When it comes to Greatness, consider the majority of what you hear on terrestrial radio as nothing more than Alternative Fact.
Another week, another childhood music idol walks among the immortal choir. No sooner had we hosed off the glitter and put away our vinyl copies of David Bowie’s “Ziggy Stardust” we learned that Eagles founder Glenn Frey had passed from complications related to his dependence on medication to control severe rheumatoid arthritis and acute colitis.
“If music be the food of love, play on!” Like food, music can be comforting. It can also be stimulating, annoying, or cloying. Music releases dopamine, the ‘feel good’ hormone, just like sex and actual food. Music can arouse feelings of euphoria and craving. Dopamine release is at “peak emotional arousal” during music listening, so you really ARE getting a bang for your musical buck.
Everything comes from somewhere. If you don’t build on what has gone before, you are creating something without the benefit of a rock solid foundation to grow from.
Trying to recreate the past is a mistake made often by people who are more invested in the times represented by the music than the music itself, and using their love and knowledge of that music in the creation of something new.
In the case of music, sounding like The Beatles won’t bring back the 60s…but learning from their music and the influences that inspired them can help create the future.
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We look at the past through rose coloured glasses.
Somehow, over a period of time, our perception of the past mellows. The bad things tend to fade until they are out of focus, disappearing in our rear view mirrors like the T Rex in Jurassic Park.
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Earlier this year, on a whim, I posted this sentence in the Status Window on my Facebook Timeline.
“It wouldn’t bother me to never hear another Beatle Record.”
…Apparently, I am The Antichrist.
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This is Part One of a column I have had to completely rewrite because I could not post the original for some reason I still can’t figure out. Part Two will be posted next week.
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My world in 1975 was earmarked with two rollercoaster events – the emotional and physical upheaval of my life when my parents bought a new house and uprooted us to the suburbs…and a two week trip across Canada with my grandmother in her 1972 Skylark. The trip trumped the 
upheaval and I slowly began to grow accustomed to my new surroundings, friends and lifestyle. So 1976 was a complete surprise when it introduced a number of firsts.
Bullseye Records of Canada
Segarini: Don't Believe a Word I Say 