(Boys on the Shore 1910 by Magnus Enckell)
Drinking warm beer on shitty blacktop rooftops in Greenpoint in the pre-Trump years, sweating through dirty Vans, heels blistered while staring at a blasted pollution brown skyline and thinking about how maybe this was all life needed to be, but feeling the itch to keep it all moving forward—this felt like everything. The last vestiges of job security had eroded in 2008, and then slowly, invisibly, built back up in shadowy board rooms where wealth was accumulated in the abstract. “Business is better! We swear! You just will not be seeing the money that comes from the business that is better!”
Living those lean years, unable to get more money, was, in its own way, comforting. When you are constantly undervalued you learn to believe truly that you deserve more. Imposter syndrome, for a brief second, blinks out of existence, the word DESERVE endlessly scrolling behind your eyelids, eradicating any uncertainty about what you aren’t sure you’re capable of in favor of, instead, clawing toward some approximation of what you imagined comfortable adult life could be.
Writing about music felt like an exercise in writing about life. Metrics were important but not yet quite the point, musical discovery was exciting (let’s put aside the problematic term of “discovery” for now. None of us were truly discovering anything, we were happening upon what was already made, imprinting our own memories and experiences onto music in the absence of concrete information) because it allowed for a kind of complicated world building: degraded psychedelic cassette music was perfect for those humid days of rooftop hopping, or for those times when sand got embedded so deep in sneaker soles that its grit became a structural element of the shoe itself.
A bit later, after the romance of those shitty humid days had worn off, hearing French Montana repeat AINTWORRIEDABOUTNOTHIN on loop outside my apartment was at first annoying, and the celebratory.
AINTWORRIEDABOUTNOTHIN
(wow that car is playing French Montana so loud. Good song, but do I really want to hear it right now?)
AINTWORRIEDABOUTNOTHIN
(does the car playing French Montana outside just have the song on loop, or are they physically starting it over every time it’s about to end?)
AINTWORRIEDABOUTNOTHIN
(what should I have for breakfast tomorrow? Or is it today? And if it’s today why is someone listening to French Montana on repeat at such a weird hour? And since I can’t control what I’m hearing or not hearing, maybe it’s easier to just enjoy it?)
All of the above writing—an exercise in misplaced nostalgia that conflates multiple periods of my writing career under the aegis of YOUTH, or rather “youth”—was brought on by the rediscovery of a lo-fi drone rock tape on Bandcamp that came out an entire three years after the times I’m reminiscing about. Listening to the muffled, mournful vocals, the guitar struggling to climb out of the muddy pits of itself, I was brought back to a time that was simpler than right now, just by virtue of back then not having a president Trump or a pandemic in it.
I am often lured in by this kind of nostalgia, and then left trying to make sense of what to do with it. With if it matters at all. Professional music writing is all about the big pop albums, and when it’s not about the big pop albums it’s about lists that seek to contextualize massive swaths of information that probably should not be all presented at once, even if it seems like maybe it should.
The fall of traditional music media, and then the generalized entertainment journalism that allowed music media to limp along prompted a newsletter exodus to this very platform. Often when people talk about their Substack newsletters, they speak in the language of service: “my newsletter will offer recommendations”, “my newsletter will be interviews”, “my newsletter is about the business of newsletters” etc etc etc etc etc forever. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this futile but noble effort to give context to a pop culture machine that spews out an unfathomable amount of new and worthy material on a daily basis, but I cannot stop thinking about what’s been lost:
-The joy of writing just to write. To express enthusiasm for a song or an album because it’s what you want to talk about. To do this without worrying about what purpose it serves.
-The strange middle period of music that we aren’t sure we’re allowed to canonize. How do we talk about what is not right now, but is not the distant past either? How do we carve out the time to do so? How do we bring more things like this into the world?
I often get the sense that so much music writing today is essentially about writing hagiography. An attempt to be definitive instead of incisive. It’s not sustainable for everyone to go for this, and it’s part of the reason that so much goes unwritten.
I’ve tried to write 10-20 newsletters about music since the pandemic began, but can never get very far because I start interrogating myself about what the point of all this is. Maybe there isn’t a point. Maybe the writing itself is the point? Will anyone read this? Does it even matter?
There’s no musical promised land, just an endless stream of newsletters and Twitter self-promotion. We forget what we don’t bother to write about, and then we forget some more, and soon we don’t remember what we’ve forgotten, all we can do is just try to keep up with what’s right in front of us.
My friend Matthew Schnipper has a newsletter now. It’s mostly playlists with some notes. I really enjoy it. He’s inspired me to make small public playlists too. I hope he does not think I am copying him.
Anyway, here’s a playlist.