well there’s that principle that by applying enough sensitive attention to any old object you can glean all sorts of incredible insights which reveal that that particular old object is exemplary and fascinating in all kinds of ways that seemed obscured before.
with the history of places for instance, you can find out about the murderous past of your shit town and it can illuminate the high street in a different way, occasionally.
then if you tell someone about it they might go oh cool but that doesn’t make it special you could say that about anywhere if you looked couldn’t you. which is part of the point, that its possible to unearth all kinds of synchronious rabbit holes about any place in a way which has more vitality than just a chin stroky framing exercise.
obviously you’re still going to have a hard time convincing anyone that barnet high street has just as much mystical resonance as silbury hill.
and to contrive that kind of insight you’ll have to play the game, knock at the door, its the same with any religious conviction.
or its like you can fall in love with someone and be overwhelmed and caught up in it partly against your will, maybe its a bad time to be getting involved in a relationship, maybe you should really be putting the final touches to your cricket themed garage record etc but part of you might also really be willing yourself to fall in love, because it’ll be a great idea and the meaning of life etc.
in that instance its hard to delineate what a conditioned desire would be versus a natural desire, and i don’t know where you’d draw the line or what it would mean.
loads of people on here are really good at that kind of willed, genuine, contrived knocking at the door when it comes to illuminating music. theres so many highly attuned sensitive and fantastic responses to what are sometimes really mediocre tunes. it mostly comes from people trying to plot the effects of what is in front of them rather than just whether they like it or not, why it was important at the time etc.
it could leave you in this vulnerable state though when you’ve got all these really enticing thoughtful frameworks that have opened up any old funky house record to the point that your personal barometer stops working so well and everything you hear sounds on the verge of meaningless. the music equivalent of going to silbury hill and saying oh reminds me of barnet high street.
but also maybe we’re getting to a point where pop music is more meaningless in lots of ways than its ever been.