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The way that I’ve been formulating playlists has recently shifted. I spend a lot more time with them, sometimes weeks, and have had as many as five in progress, half-baked and untitled. I used to bang out a playlist in a couple hours, listen once through for transitions, and call it done. I find it difficult now to think of ten songs off the top of my head that go together that haven’t already been used. I panic sometimes and wonder if my project is finite, if I’ll run out of combinations and permutations of the things I know I like, if I’ll ever get old in that specific way of losing touch with new music and believing that everything made by people younger than me is hogwash. I surely hope not, but it’s possible.
I’ve been thinking a lot about my own taste and how much of my identity I stake in it. I take pride in what I believe to be my quirkier opinions, formulate takes on new music that seem sturdy but are often not supported by any evidence other than “vibes,” and actively listen to music that I think is good for me. I’ve recently written about chasing pleasure through music, but ultimately I think I spend a lot more time calculating, attempting to actively shape my own preferences, trying to like things. And I don’t think it’s all bad; it’s flexing the muscle of discovery and gaining flexibility in my palate, keeping myself fresh. The more I stretch, the more new sounds I find enjoyable, interesting, inspiring.
I like to think that I’m above average in terms of breadth and depth of my genre preferences. Still, I can’t deny that my most formative musical exposures were comically textbook: at age fourteen, I was on a steady diet of indie rock with supplemental pop, rap, and folk thrown in for good measure. At age twenty two, if you squint, I’m still listening to the same stuff. I catch myself even now scoffing at artists who are gearing their music towards going viral as a sound byte rather than making real art—I usually catch myself at this point and beat my brain with a stick—even though TikTok is the nexus of music discovery and it takes huge talent and ingenuity to create something so digestible with such a short window of opportunity for engagement. It’s disturbing to think that I could become another point towards the average on the bell curve and stop seeking out new music when I hit my thirties. At that point I’d still have so much life left to live, I can’t imagine doing it without the joy of novelty in my listening habits.
All these thoughts came about when I was making this playlist and reflecting on the perfect timing of my discovery of OK Go. At the tender age of twelve, primed for my pubescent cementation of taste, I saw a music video that changed my life:
OK Go is famous for making indie pop bangers that sold a lot of records and turning around and spending all that money on these absolutely bananas music videos. I’m not unconvinced that these guys were lukewarm on being musicians and saw their wild success as a means to an end of making the highest production value flash mob ever. When I first heard this song, I didn’t particularly care if they had ulterior motives; it broke me open:
And I, yeah, I still need you, but what good's that gonna do?
Oh, needing is one thing and getting, getting is another
Listening to the studio version, I’m realizing that “Needing/Getting” has all the elements that ultimately became my favorite things about my favorite songs: screaming guitars licks, well-placed harmonies, weird electronic sounds, really desperately sad lyrics that are still somehow very clever. The end gets all soft and slow and Damian Kulash laments about how this girl will never love him while a bunch of white noise plays over the band’s gentle groove. It’s incredible.
I didn’t have any sort of agenda at that age, but I was basically making footprints in the wet concrete of my preteen brain that still fill up with water every time it rains. I was listening to an interview recently in which journalist Michael Pollan explains how your thoughts are established things, retraceable and familiar. I wonder if inadvertently I set myself up to experience the world with a penchant for the anguish of a Radiohead lyric, a tendency to seek out the saddest song on the record. OK Go is a fundamentally fun band, but somehow my other favorite track off this album is the one that appears on this playlist, “I Want You So Bad I Can’t Breathe:”
I want you, yeah I want you bad
So bad I can't think straight
So bad all my bones shake
So bad I can't breathe
This guy is hurting, he’s pining for this person who’s left him or never loved him in the first place, and my teenaged brain said, That’s right. At that point I hadn’t touched a romantic relationship with a ten foot pole, but I gravitated towards music that was despondent in this way. I seem to have a nose for longing, and it started to show very early on. I’ve never changed; the music I love is rooted almost universally in being at least a little bit sad.
Exhibit B: LCD Soundsystem. The song featured on this playlist is mostly just fun, an exploration of a fantasy of Daft Punk playing a house party in someone’s basement, but my favorite songs by this band are deeply pained. “american dream” goes:
So you kiss and you clutch but you can't fight that feeling
That your one true love is just awaiting your big meeting
So you never even asked for names
You just look right through them as if you already came
It's a drug of the heart and you can't stop the shaking
'Cause the body wants what it's terrible at taking, oh
And you can't remember the meaning
But there's no going back against this California feeling
There’s an underlying fatigue in LCD Soundsystem’s music, like this poor man has seen things. You can feel it in the way he speak-sings, especially on the later records. Moreover, I think I like them because they were releasing music at the dawn of the alternative music craze and that scrappy, DIY ethos is still present in their records.
The last song on this playlist has been bouncing around for weeks now as I’ve tried to place it correctly. It gave me some trouble, but I think I ultimately used it well to put a bow on this mix. I used to listen to David Bowie because I knew I should; I liked “Space Oddity” and “Changes” and didn’t really care much for the rest. I can now wholeheartedly say that I love Bowie, but it took time to grow into a lot of his deeper cuts.
When he passed, I was in high school. I had listened to Blackstar (2016) and professed to understand it, but I was definitely bluffing. I don’t think I could really make heads or tails of his legacy at that point in my life, the history he had shaped with his music. I knew the album was weird and that David Bowie was dying and it was a huge deal, but I didn’t know why or what it meant to the larger cultural consciousness. I listened to it a lot that year—“Lazarus” appears on my Best Of 2016 playlist—but I don’t know if I actually liked it back then. I was just trying to be a David Bowie fan.
It was a worthwhile pursuit, and I don’t fault my younger self for being sometimes forceful with my formation of self. I took an active role in that specific arena of development, and now I think I have great taste. Perhaps it’s that uncomplicated; we can, in some ways, choose who we become. And perhaps all this will shift and cease to matter at all as my musical preferences continue to develop. I’m still changing—at least I hope so.
I can only speak for me, but that gap where I stopped looking for new music was very real. It's easy to get comfy, especially when (as you noted) one sees themselves as having good taste. Having kids and adulting doesn't help. The epiphany came several years ago on a trip home. I caught up with a friend I hadn't seen in years, and he asked what I'd been listening to. I rattled off the usual list, and he said, "no I meant /new/ stuff." I didn't have answer, and that sucked.
To take your (awesome) footsteps metaphor from a different angle; we like those puddles in the concrete--and grow used to them--but it's easy to get set in our ways.
P.S. Apropo of nothing, I have a coworker that's a dead ringer for James Murphy.