Tomorrow night we’re putting on a special show in collaboration with Perraneu Magazine and we have a limited number of pay-what-you-want tickets right here through Google Forms/PayPal.
We only have 4 of these left so if you’re at all interested, consider getting one now. Full price tickets are available here on Eventbrite. The flier is at the bottom of this post.
Below is a personal essay I started about a year ago. I was inspired to revisit it after reading Mood Machine, an excellent book by music journalist Liz Pelly that came out last month. It’s about physical media, streaming, and music listening habits. I hope you enjoy it.
I’m Trying Cassettes
I’m old enough that I’m probably one of the last people to really grow up with physical media as a part of my musical life.
When I was a kid, my parents split up and I saw my Dad on Wednesdays. I would get out of school earlier than my younger brother, so Dad would pick me up and drop me off at a local bookstore to wait, leaving me with 20 dollars in cash.
This went on for a few years. Books were expensive and I loved sci-fi. Cheap pulpy Star Wars novels and things like that.
When I turned 13, I started to get interested in music too. One afternoon, it occurred to me that they didn’t just have books, they also had CD’s at the store. I spent my two hours alone rifling through CD’s.
I remember sifting through the album art, trying to decide what I might like. I remember the Ramones in their leather jackets. I remember Springsteen leaned up against Clarence as they played.
Eventually, I settled on Van Halen’s first album. It was the perfect pick. Dad’s eyes lit up, he laughed and turned the sound as high as it went. He sang along to every word and the rapid fire guitar licks set off fireworks in my brain.
CD’s started trickling into my life. Christmas Day the next year brought me Led Zeppelin’s Mothership, Abbey Road, and a particularly obnoxiously named Bright Eyes album. My 17th birthday and a series of drivers ed courses bought me access to my Grandmother’s black Honda CRV, which contained a trove of old Irish folk songs.
I started going straight to the public library after school, figuring out how to order CD’s from all over Suffolk County, and burning them onto our Hard Drive at home. Brief and unsuccessful relationships brought mix CD’s into my life.
All of this disappeared around 2012 when, as a freshman in college, I signed up for Spotify.
There is no question that it has offered me a lot as a music consumer. The chance to access whatever I wanted at any time was an enormous privilege. Throughout the pandemic, I made playlists for my students to give them ways to enjoy music. My friends and I all started an Album Listening Club, where we’d meet once a week over Zoom to talk music, all enjoyed through Spotify.
A little over a year or two ago, I felt my love for music listening start to wane. I was a little more disconnected from the local music scene than I had been in years, and having trouble getting excited about new music.
There is a commonly accepted belief that as you get older, people have less time for new music. For whatever reason, people tend to gravitate to the music of their youth.
At the same time, there has been a trend in publishing these last couple years of books critical of Spotify and other algorithmic platforms. These, mostly millennial, authors address a perceived “flattening” of culture. Some of the books I’ve read in the last year that come to mind include Mood Machine by Liz Pelly, The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haldt, and Filterworld by Kyle Chayka. I recommend them all.
Songs bleed one into the other on Spotify, intentionally so. The algorithm selects for songs that sound the same, artists produce songs for the algorithm. In the end, it all sounds the same.
I’m torn reading these books. They ring true to me, but I also question myself. Am I just getting older with these authors? Are we just aging into irrelevance? Dissatisfied with new mediums like TikTok and the art of a younger generation?
About a year and a half ago, I ended my Spotify subscription.
Most of my music listening now is done through cassettes. I like to hold them, I like how they look. I like interacting directly with artists and labels, either through the lens of an online store or a merch table. I like how the album stops at the end and you have to decide if you want to flip it over. I like going to the record store in my neighborhood and picking up something based on cover art I like. It makes me happy. It's something I enjoy doing.
It’s helped make music listening fun again, in a way that had been somewhat lost. The purchase of an album has some stake to it, will I like this? Will I not? An ambient album I disliked at first this past summer demanded repeat listens simply because of the $10 I had spent.
I’ve found myself surprised by my own taste at times. I’ve fallen in love with the singer Miriam Makeba, a South African singer-songwriter and anti-apartheid activist who sang primarily in traditional languages. A delayed shipment from Chicago label Dead Definitions led to the discovery of Sargasso, an indie rock band from Philadelphia.
On some level, it feels good to reclaim some autonomy from the algorithm. It feels good to be alive and engaged with music in a way that isn’t mediated by Big Tech. On another level though, I can acknowledge that this little hobby is just something that makes me feel like a kid in the bookstore again. It makes me feel happy. It makes me feel good. It makes me feel young when I’m not, and if I’m being honest, that’s kind of nice too.
