The (potentially) greatest song I can't find right now is 'Place I Love' by Nina Persson and the Sounds of NATO, which I heard on the soundtrack of a truly awful (and I'm a fan) Todd Solondz film called A Dark Horse.
i love the memories you share of discovering music, and how that changed over time.
for me, it was -- whatever played at npr at night, my parents' book of cds, visits to barnes and noble with the communal headset on, sharing earbuds with other kids on the bus, then Tumblr viral songs (boss ass bitch, cash diamond rings swimming pools, LANA), then studiously listening to whatever Pitchfork said was good... trading burned CD mixtapes > downloading poor quality rips from Youtube > Spotify. oh, the nostalgia!
The dumbest algorithms are indeed the best. The Spotify algorithm that told me that ppl who liked Lana Del Rey also liked Ängie changed my life and brought me here.
The algorithms supposed to make Spotify frictionless though, those are making it frissonless.
Regarding the celestial jukebox: everything is so clouded; the dust has yet to settle. Or will it ever settle? I've experienced many exciting new sounds via your weekly playlists and elsewhere, things that give me hope, well hope in the vaguest sense. Then, I'll also encounter things like seeing a Nepali trap video at a Nepali restaurant and aside from the difference in language and the Himalayan backdrop, it sounded just like dull American trap. But if lack of originality is my only gripe, it's not a bad one to have.
I’ve appreciated hitting upon a pretty universal “1% rule” for interesting new music — the other 99% usually isn’t that bad but it also isn’t very interesting.
Still listening to New Problems compulsively - I'm reminded of another lost classic. Friend of mine recorded this, artist fell off the radar before it got noticed.
this is great. one thing I'm being reminded of listening to 2001 indie is that there was real pressure for stronger and funkier drumming at the time, something I was noticing relistening to Dismemberment Plan and thinking about how I should write something about the percussion in Willow songs.
Perhaps your window into it is Apop, but really it's a meditation from a music-lover on the effect of the internet as a whole.
I'm not equipped to make any pronouncements, least of all about music, but because I still feel moved to say it anyway:
I would say that I think the internet enables fanaticism (even fanatic dilettantism) in pursuing one's interests, but its emergent effect in the listening public at large is to encourage a sort of shallow dilettantism. That is, while the response of many music critics/lovers to the internet -- including you, the other dave moore -- seems to have been to listen to as much music from everywhere as possible, I would posit that for most listeners it may be more and more the reverse: a cheapening/hollowing out, psychologically, in what music as a whole means to them, and an increasing desire to develop true emotional engagement with only a narrow slice of music.
Or, perhaps, a different way to say it is that the listener-centric view of the 'monsters in their lane' comment in you made in part 2 or 3 of this series, is a music fan whose engagement with music consists of deep engagement with the artistry and music of some subset of large-enough monsters (Taylor, Bad Bunny, BTS and Tyla), matched with a vanishingly small engagement at all with any sense of music-making beyond that.
Whether that eventually makes its way back into the production of music itself and what music is made, remains to be seen. I would argue -- again as a total lay person -- that realms such as clothing, writing, and food consumption have in fact been affected in similar such ways by technology, first in the consumption and later in the production, and that it can paradoxically lead to an ever narrowing samification even while the illusion of 'more' remains.
I do wonder how much (or whether) people are nudged to listen shallowly -- I can really only go by the people in my immediate circles that listen to music without being fanatics or fanatical dilettantes (great phrase). I think the question there is always what the comparison point is. Compared to older listening habits of the people I know personally, I think most of my "casual music listener" acquaintances do find more music generally now than they used to. But where they find it is perhaps more unpredictable, and there are fewer obvious guides -- guides that in the past would *usually* just push the popular thing but sometimes would use its gatekeeping power to introduce new stuff more regularly.
It's possible that the overwhelming feeling of all of the music induces a sort of conservative reaction. But I then I look at the social worlds of my acquaintances' *kids* and I see them opening up their parents to lots of stuff -- K-pop or alt-pop or Spanish-language pop, or a kind of fanaticism/fandom that reframes how the adults approach the music -- and wonder if that would have been as likely a generation ago. (Might get into some of this stuff in my series next year...there are lots of changes in parenting that makes the average parent more involved in the tasteworlds of their kids than they might have been in the past.)
Think the monsters are only tangentially related to these questions about whether overwhelm leads people to shut down and narrow their music selections, though. For one thing, most of the monsters have very active fanbases, so although the number of people focused on them is very high, I don't now if I'd call this "narrowly samey" in the same way as a person who simply ignores music because they don't know where to start. There must be more casual listener to hyperfandom converts (this is part of the Taylor Swift story), but I still sort of think those folks are more likely to end up finding more new music, not less, simply because music itself is just a bigger part of their identity.
Generally, though, my interest has always been in people who make music discovery a part of their identity -- it's just who I tend to hang out with -- and on that score, I think each year I'm surprised at how diverse individual tastes can be in conversations I have but how narrow the self-professedly adventurous critical tastes seem in publications where people actually get paid to sort through and listen to and write about this stuff! There's nothing new about that, I guess, but it gets more stark to me each year.
None of these are settled questions, though, and I think it would be naive to think huge structural changes don't come with negatives and losses.
The greatest song that I can't find streaming anywhere is "El Pito" by The Swinging World Of Johnny Rios And The Us 4.
https://www.discogs.com/release/4848901-Johnny-Rios-And-The-Us-4-Nuevo-Boog-A-Loos-The-Swinging-World-Of-Johnny-Rios-And-The-Us-4-Nuevo-Boog
The (potentially) greatest song I can't find right now is 'Place I Love' by Nina Persson and the Sounds of NATO, which I heard on the soundtrack of a truly awful (and I'm a fan) Todd Solondz film called A Dark Horse.
And of course all we've got of Haley Georgia's "Becky" is this snippet:
https://x.com/haleygeorgia/status/893882503915872256
Some of us have more than a snippet, but it's also weird to be the person to put the thing back on the internet after someone has taken it down.
Yeah. I agree. Seems to have been her decision.
But oddly, this isn't something I have a consistent position on, whether to spread or not spread a recording without the artist's go-ahead.
Seeker is the Court of Last Appeal
Even that snippet deserves the remix treatment, I'll check SoundCloud to see if anyone's done it
i love the memories you share of discovering music, and how that changed over time.
for me, it was -- whatever played at npr at night, my parents' book of cds, visits to barnes and noble with the communal headset on, sharing earbuds with other kids on the bus, then Tumblr viral songs (boss ass bitch, cash diamond rings swimming pools, LANA), then studiously listening to whatever Pitchfork said was good... trading burned CD mixtapes > downloading poor quality rips from Youtube > Spotify. oh, the nostalgia!
The dumbest algorithms are indeed the best. The Spotify algorithm that told me that ppl who liked Lana Del Rey also liked Ängie changed my life and brought me here.
The algorithms supposed to make Spotify frictionless though, those are making it frissonless.
Regarding the celestial jukebox: everything is so clouded; the dust has yet to settle. Or will it ever settle? I've experienced many exciting new sounds via your weekly playlists and elsewhere, things that give me hope, well hope in the vaguest sense. Then, I'll also encounter things like seeing a Nepali trap video at a Nepali restaurant and aside from the difference in language and the Himalayan backdrop, it sounded just like dull American trap. But if lack of originality is my only gripe, it's not a bad one to have.
I’ve appreciated hitting upon a pretty universal “1% rule” for interesting new music — the other 99% usually isn’t that bad but it also isn’t very interesting.
Still listening to New Problems compulsively - I'm reminded of another lost classic. Friend of mine recorded this, artist fell off the radar before it got noticed.
https://solamonday.bandcamp.com/album/the-swing-festival
this is great. one thing I'm being reminded of listening to 2001 indie is that there was real pressure for stronger and funkier drumming at the time, something I was noticing relistening to Dismemberment Plan and thinking about how I should write something about the percussion in Willow songs.
Very fun series, I have really enjoyed it.
Perhaps your window into it is Apop, but really it's a meditation from a music-lover on the effect of the internet as a whole.
I'm not equipped to make any pronouncements, least of all about music, but because I still feel moved to say it anyway:
I would say that I think the internet enables fanaticism (even fanatic dilettantism) in pursuing one's interests, but its emergent effect in the listening public at large is to encourage a sort of shallow dilettantism. That is, while the response of many music critics/lovers to the internet -- including you, the other dave moore -- seems to have been to listen to as much music from everywhere as possible, I would posit that for most listeners it may be more and more the reverse: a cheapening/hollowing out, psychologically, in what music as a whole means to them, and an increasing desire to develop true emotional engagement with only a narrow slice of music.
Or, perhaps, a different way to say it is that the listener-centric view of the 'monsters in their lane' comment in you made in part 2 or 3 of this series, is a music fan whose engagement with music consists of deep engagement with the artistry and music of some subset of large-enough monsters (Taylor, Bad Bunny, BTS and Tyla), matched with a vanishingly small engagement at all with any sense of music-making beyond that.
Whether that eventually makes its way back into the production of music itself and what music is made, remains to be seen. I would argue -- again as a total lay person -- that realms such as clothing, writing, and food consumption have in fact been affected in similar such ways by technology, first in the consumption and later in the production, and that it can paradoxically lead to an ever narrowing samification even while the illusion of 'more' remains.
Great comment.
I do wonder how much (or whether) people are nudged to listen shallowly -- I can really only go by the people in my immediate circles that listen to music without being fanatics or fanatical dilettantes (great phrase). I think the question there is always what the comparison point is. Compared to older listening habits of the people I know personally, I think most of my "casual music listener" acquaintances do find more music generally now than they used to. But where they find it is perhaps more unpredictable, and there are fewer obvious guides -- guides that in the past would *usually* just push the popular thing but sometimes would use its gatekeeping power to introduce new stuff more regularly.
It's possible that the overwhelming feeling of all of the music induces a sort of conservative reaction. But I then I look at the social worlds of my acquaintances' *kids* and I see them opening up their parents to lots of stuff -- K-pop or alt-pop or Spanish-language pop, or a kind of fanaticism/fandom that reframes how the adults approach the music -- and wonder if that would have been as likely a generation ago. (Might get into some of this stuff in my series next year...there are lots of changes in parenting that makes the average parent more involved in the tasteworlds of their kids than they might have been in the past.)
Think the monsters are only tangentially related to these questions about whether overwhelm leads people to shut down and narrow their music selections, though. For one thing, most of the monsters have very active fanbases, so although the number of people focused on them is very high, I don't now if I'd call this "narrowly samey" in the same way as a person who simply ignores music because they don't know where to start. There must be more casual listener to hyperfandom converts (this is part of the Taylor Swift story), but I still sort of think those folks are more likely to end up finding more new music, not less, simply because music itself is just a bigger part of their identity.
Generally, though, my interest has always been in people who make music discovery a part of their identity -- it's just who I tend to hang out with -- and on that score, I think each year I'm surprised at how diverse individual tastes can be in conversations I have but how narrow the self-professedly adventurous critical tastes seem in publications where people actually get paid to sort through and listen to and write about this stuff! There's nothing new about that, I guess, but it gets more stark to me each year.
None of these are settled questions, though, and I think it would be naive to think huge structural changes don't come with negatives and losses.