B.B. King previously sang “The thrill is gone,” (sounding better on vinyl album) and when it comes to the present state of music, I have to agree. I’m not one to contrast one time to another and declare either greater; music is an art form that should forever improve whether we’re aficionados of those changes or not. When I say the thrill is gone, I’m talking about the way we, as fans, interact and consume our music. Let me explain.

I’m a part of a unique generation. I was born into what some people only a few years younger might call a world of Luddites. Vinyl LPs and turntables were the standard, but as technology marched on, our music became portable. What we sacrificed in matter, we offset in handiness, as is normally the situation.

But what makes my generation unique is that we entered a world with technological limitations yet emabraced any and all advances. I love my iPod at the moment. I admit it. The prospect of thousands of songs at my disposal is fantastic. And let’s come to terms with it, dragging crates of records, aside from turntables, amps and speakers along with me is just simply impossible. Still, awash in a sea of MP3s, torrents and burned CDs is the very knowledge that made music such an important part of my life.

Vinyl Albums – complete with the cover art, jackets, and linear notes – were more than merely a collection of songs. They served a personal introduction to countless artists, doorways by which you felt a deeper connection to their music. Every vinyl lp was a case study where you’d follow along with the lyrics in that perfect marriage between the written word and melody. You learned who wrote the songs, who produced them, where and when they were recorded and any other bit of information you could store away in your memory banks. Even the sequencing, that little nod from artist to listeners that said, “This is how I’d like you to hear my music” was important. Listening to music was an active pursuit, hardly a passive afterthought.

Now we’ve traded songs titles for track numbers, cover art for skins and perhaps the worst of all, quantity for knowledge. There are a lot of records I’ve discovered in the previous year that I’ve completely appreciated. Still, beyond a name of a band and maybe the name of the vinyl album, I don’t have much for you. I can tell you which tracks are my favorites but to name them would be just an educated guess. I couldn’t isolate them out of a magazine. I can’t even tell you their names. They are faceless, nameless, a sheer compilation of riffs. I can pick and choose the songs I like, destroying the lost art of the album. The thrill, B.B., is certainly gone.

If this is the heartbreak of digital music, then it is a depressing conclusion: the lost sense of a common culture that we experience through music. The plain analytics of bit rates or boasting of our iTunes libraries disprove the claim at hand. They’re a red herring, a track that only indicates to genuine heartbreak. I want my music to have heart again, to have a soul, to be mine. I desire it to be human again.

BB King / Gary Moore – The Thrill is Gone

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When the Thrill Is Gone (Paperback) $10.1 With expert subtlety, Walter Mosley takes the detective novel to new literary heights in this third book starring New York private investigator Leonid McGill. WHEN THE THRILL IS GONE starts with a classic detective-novel trope–a beautiful woman walks …

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When the Thrill Is Gone (Compact Disc) $22.53 Unabridged, 8 CDs, 10 hours Read by TBA Leonid McGill is back in the third-and most enthralling and ambitious- installment in Walter Mosley`s latest New York Times bestselling series.

Roy Hawkins – The Thrill Is Gone $22.35 Description Not Available

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