>>when was the last time you listened to an entire album before while doing nothing else?
An excellent and resonant question... It makes me think of generally how our relationship to music has changed over the past 20 years.
I have often thought of the jazz of the 1950's as being about as good as it gets when it comes to American cultural production. Take the production of Mingus and Monk as examples and you have two very different kinds of genius that produced challenging music to listen to.
It is really hard to listen to that music and do something else. Except ride subways - back in the late 80's living in Brooklyn used to listen to CDs while barrelling home at night on the G train or L train... But is demands your attention in a different way and can frankly at times be upsetting to listen to.
In the right (or wrong) frame of mind a song like Monk's version of "The man I love" or Sarah Vaughn's "April in Paris" or Mingus' "Ecclusiastics" can unhinge me -
And even when the Jazz is more popular in orientation - if it is good it bears repeated listenings. "kind of Blue" - despite being overplayed stands up. The "Ella and Louis"
albums likewise. That stuff is way overplayed and yet you can listen to it and get something new out of it.
On the other hand most music today is designed to be what Tom Waits describes in the intro to "Better off without a wife", music that is:
"... you know, you put a little nice music on. Maybe you put on like... you know... like shopping music, something that's not too interruptive..."
Most music is designed to not interrupt the flow of commerce, not it interrupt advertising but to fall in line in a supporting role.
I am old enough to remember a time in which it seemed that some music was immune to commercialization. I know this sounds naive - and it is. It was very disturbing for me to see the Rolling Stones selling cars or Iggy Pop selling cruises. Or seeing pictures of Jack Kerouac in a Gap jeans ad. And yet I can see now that in most cases (Rolling Stones, etc) that it I was just a logical extension of the form itself. There was no real transgression - just my frame of mind.
There is a radio show on my local NPR (WNYC) - and I think it is syndicated on Sirius. Jonathan Schwartz - "American Songbook" or something like that. I find the music not mostly to my taste (he is a big Sinatra fan) but to hear Schwartz talk about songs and instrumentation and specifics of a performance (the drummer had a cold that day, etc, etc) and it is the closest that I listen to music in the course of a week. I really love the guy's ethos (if I can only take and hour or so of the show.)
On a different tangent - when I was back in college (late 80's- early 90's) I had a friend who was an audiophile. He had ridiculous equipment especially for a dorm/student apartment. Dedicated mono amps for each stereo channel, finely balanced belt driven turntables. We would listen to recordings and he would point out things like the low bass rumbling of the subway passing by Carnegie Hall. Or how in the dark you could almost visualize the spacial arrangement of a string quartet.
To be honest I am not that musical and most of the times the things he discussed went over my head. The one thing that I could hear at the time was the difference between digital recording and analog on his system.
But for me it was an object lesson in the specificity of a performance that is often lost today. And those days sitting in the dark with my friend might be the last time I really listened to an album...