Welcome to Only Child, and a Happy New Year! If you’re new, I’m glad to have you. Expect an email from me every Sunday, usually in the afternoon but sometimes in the evening if the weekend’s been absolute chaos.
Also, it’s naturally awkward right now to talk about anything besides the coup attempt that just happened, but I don’t write about topical anxieties in this newsletter (we get enough of that already). Just hope you’re 1) informed about what’s going on, and 2) not a MAGA insurrectionist.
Last year, I wrote an earnest piece about what I wanted 2020 to look like and what a naive soul I was (am). There are some obvious things to prioritize for 2021 (public health safety, exercise, experimenting more, etc.), but I’d rather get specific this year to avoid burn out. So to cut to the chase, my #1 New Year’s Resolution is to get more serious about listening to music.
I listen to enough as is—generally, I don’t know if I could plow through the minutiae of everyday living without some tunes to nurture my escapist tendencies—but the isolation of pandemic life has dulled that want. What I mean is that, like with reading a book, when I put on music, it feels distant, like it’s always just not *quite* the vibe I’m looking for, and I lose focus and turn it off to watch YouTube videos instead. I yearn for those days when I lay in bed, paralyzed by my own thoughts, the very idea of making a choice sending shivers down my spine, and all it takes is turning on Hiatus Kaiyote’s “Shaolin Monk Motherfunk” for the 45th time in row for me to complete tasks, like calling that nearby pharmacy and finding out what they’re all about, refills- and morality-wise.
It’s a tragedy, because listening to music, particularly through Spotify, is a thrill—there’s so much of it, and there’s such a culture around it. Each type of playlist has its own value: Discover Weekly for spice, Top Songs 2020 for comfort, old playlists for nostalgia/shame. Plus there’s the social angle. I look at the sidebar where I see my friend’s columns. Oh she’s listening to EARTHGANG? Okay that’s hot. Lemme toss on some Playboi Carti so she knows I have similar taste. I’m not on Private Session, am I? Okay cool.
Because of course, I want people to know my taste. This is also something I miss about consistent music consumption. Depending on context (social setting, dinner, etc.), there are some general rules for knowing what music to play when. Like don’t play the Breaking Bad theme song at a party (not enough kick drum), and don’t mouth along to lyrics you’re not certain of. Play something chill and safe. Billboard Top 40 is good, but also Justin Bebster, or Ariana Grandma or Lizzard or whatever. But then, after social time’s done and I go home, I make sure my appearance in the Spotify feed is good: I wanna be the wonky dude so brazen, so far removed from the musical mainstream that my favorite artists’ names are literally all symbols from a dead language.
I don’t remember adding this to my playlist…but it’s there.
But I also think about the long-term value of music, which feels like kind of an oxymoron nowadays, because every week Spotify delivers unto us a brand new gift-wrapped collection of data fodder—er, I mean, playlist anyways. Plus, music’s often tied to memes, dances, and other fleeting cultural touch points, so, as with the artifacts that house them, they quickly lose relevance, their creators scrambling to produce yet another addictive earworm for our upcoming collective impulse. Nevertheless, I try to resist this tide, so I’ll tell you my personal music-collecting secrets.
I stuff the songs I like into special playlists titled after notable “checkpoints” in my life. My older titles were straightforward, but as life’s barrage of formative twentyish-year-old experiences thickened my skin, my titles have become more and more cryptic. Early on, I made a playlist called “cold shower” for when I took cold showers every day for one and a half years after reading its supposed health benefits. Then, there was “chest pains,” a double entendre for, within the same week, 1) falling in love for the first time, and 2) developing serious anxiety and going to the hospital because I panicked from drinking too much coffee and thought I was having heart problems (I was fine). Later on, there was “zugzwang” for when I became addicted to chess and then later “gastroflub” for when I realized how my über-sensitive digestive system has played a role in my mental health. Don’t ask me to explain any further.
It’s tempting but meaningless to decipher my life’s narrative arc through these playlists—they just anchor me in time. Whenever I fall in love with a song, I dump it into my most recent time-anchor playlist, and then forget the song within days, its value completely lost because of time’s overpowered ability to scrub nearly every single meaningful experience from my oversaturated brain. Months later, when I’m starved for catchy music, I can revisit these anchoring playlists (the folder is affectionately titled “Inflection Points”), which is nice, but it also feels weird and self-serving to use other people’s creations for my own identity. (I don’t feel this way about fashion and clothing though it’s the same-shit-different-toilet, but that’s a topic for another time.)
But, if I may remove my advisory hat and step out of my self-excoriating shoes and speculate for a moment, I do wonder what music was like hundreds, thousands of years ago when it wasn’t a metric by which to measure human preferences and tastes. We’ve seen medieval movies and studied Shakespeare so we have a vague, tarnished idea, but I’m hesitant to believe that music’s main role was to just, like, share war stories or unite tavern brawlers. Maybe it was, but I wonder whether people also curated music the same way we do today, collecting songs to shroud themselves in, dispatching recommendations for clout. It’s hard to say—it wasn’t industrialized as heavily, but I don’t wanna assume anything. I just want to challenge my cheesy belief that the purpose of music has twisted and turned (corrupted, if you wanna be dramatic) “too far.”
But you know what? That’s all good and well. Because I’m preparing myself to devour as much new music as I can in 2021 and truly enjoy it. I want to avoid listening to things solely because they were recommended, or they’re prestigious, or they’re from a famous artist. Soon, I hope to have new playlists named after like the subway station near me or the street sign I walk past on the way to the bodega or the brand of the face mask I wear. Who knows? Maybe I’ll start attending virtual livestreams, or even making my own music. And hopefully I’ll have a playlist entirely comprised of songs whose titles are in non-ASCII symbols, and maybe I’ll keep it a secret, my own little slice of sanity that I’ll be madly in love with and none of my Spotify followers will ever see.
Other Things Of Note
You gotta watch the show Ramy (Hulu) about an Egyptian-American family’s experience in New Jersey/New York. Incredibly well-written, sharp, hilarious, meaningful, and honest about a particular immigrant experience that goes overlooked.
Only Child is a weekly newsletter about finding excitement in the mundane. Tell your friends and enemies to subscribe!
—Chuckry Vengadam (@churrthing)