I can not recall a whole song.
I don't know when this started, but suddenly I realized that I have not been able to sing a whole song for quite a long time. Even songs that I liked a lot, I can't remember their full lyrics.
I used to be able to sing a whole song, even foreign songs whose meanings I didn't completely understand (with lyrics I found online, of course). But the worse part is that this forgetfulness does not apply only to song lyrics. It also applies to both the song title and the singer. Most of the time, all I can remember is the melody. Not only that, it's usually only the melody of the refrain.
This Fiirus really has become such an inconvenience when I find a song to be good but forget to like it (I stream music), and then can barely remember even its melody.
I'm sure getting older plays some part in this phenomenon. But I feel the main reason for this situation is the saturation of the market itself. In the past, especially before internet access became a daily fact of life, our exposure to music and songs was mainly through TV and radio, where if we missed the timing, we simply couldn't listen to them.
This created a scarcity that elevated the experience of listening to music.If you were born in the early 2000s or late 1990s, I'm sure many of you have seen the rise of TV programs whose whole shtick was ranking songs every week.
For many people at that time, listening to a song was an event in itself. You were waiting for it, you were excited about it, and of course, you were paying attention to it. The easy access to music today, combined with the sheer number of songs available, has made them a part of daily life.
Which means we now barely pay attention to them. Listening to music is no longer an event. It is now just part of daily life. You do it while doing chores, you do it while working, and you do it while going to and from work.
Their abundance has literally made them feel less valuable, even though they are not. Our brains have simply normalized their presence and placed them in the category of "something not really special."
Of course, I do not wish to go back to the time when I couldn't afford to buy CDs and had to resort to recording broadcasts from the radio or TV with the low-quality microphone on my mid-2000s phone. Or spending massive amounts of cellular data to download MP3s from the internet over a slow-ass GPRS connection.
I just feel that we lost something important along the way to this current age of abundance.
