Back in Neil Young’s day they used to walk 15 miles in the snow just to listen to a record at the local music shop, or maybe not. But that hasn’t stopped the music icon from looking back on the ‘good old days’ and trashing the current state of music.
But it isn’t the music that’s being released that Young has a problem with, although we’re sure there’s more than a few modern artists that don’t exactly float his boat. Instead Young has the common MP3 firmly in his sights.
Speaking to MTV in Utah where he is currently promoting documentary ‘Neil Young Journeys’, the 66-year-old singer songwriter admitted that he has “a little bit of trouble with the quality of the sound of music today. I don’t like it. It just makes me angry.”
“Not the quality of the music,” he continues. “But we’re in the 21st century and we have the worst sound that we’ve ever had. It’s worse than a 78 [rpm record]. Where are our geniuses? What happened?” Young goes on to argue that MP3s feature only 5 percent of the data from an original master file.
“If you’re an artist and you created something and you knew the master was 100 percent great, but the consumer got 5 percent, would you be feeling good?” he asked. “I like to point that out to artists. That’s why people listen to music differently today.”
“It’s all about the bottom and the beat driving everything, and that’s because in the resolution of the music, there’s nothing else you can really hear. The warmth and the depth at the high end is gone. It’s like Occupy Music — the 5 percent, that’s who we are now. We used to be the hundred percent!”
Fans of Young and his group Buffalo Springfield have been eagerly awaiting news on a world tour that was announced mid-2011 but then postponed until around now. Industry insiders are pointing towards the end of 2012 as a probable timeframe.
In an interview with Rolling Stone last year, bandmate Richie Furay’s manager said “This delay happened for a multitude of reasons, The plan is still to tour next year. There’s not a timeline at this point. Buffalo Springfield is at the top of Neil’s list of priorities. It’s just a matter of finding a time that works for everybody.”
