30 May, 2025
Earlier this year, I embarked on a new project: listening to at least one album, front to back, each week.
I hadn’t intentionally listened to music in this way since the first lockdowns of the pandemic when I took to David Bowie’s discography on my daily walks (self-titled up to Let’s Dance). So over 16 years of music and months of isolation, I mapped out my entire neighbourhood on foot.
This year, in a daze of seemingly endless February—the doldrums of Canadian winter and the height of my yearly winter-induced mania—a part of me snapped in anger at the ennervating effects of the cold. I wanted a semblance of agency, of choosing something actively when everything else in my fugue life felt like it was happening to me. Taking control of what I was listening to seemed like a start.
♬⋆.˚.⋆♬
Nostalgia for my adolescence, a time when I was experiencing growing pains in tandem with the internet, partly fueled this project. I was deep in my daydreams of teenage reminiscence, specifically for the community my friends and I crafted around music. We'd browse through blogs, forums, music magazines and their websites; we'd find new music then go out into the world with it. We went to concerts. We attended comedy and art shows. We blogged about music on our respective Tumblrs. We regularly hung out at Amoeba Records and took our picks back to someone's house to listen together. We'd sit in one friend's backyard and literally just talk about music.
Now, not only has the practice of community in music listening virtually left my life, but so has much of the effort and dedication I used to invest in making sure I was contextualizing the art of real people. By contextualizing, I mean that I used to do deep dives on a band or artist's history. I'd read biographies, watch interviews and documentaries, learn about their influences for each album. It was these paratexts that helped paint a fuller picture of all the forces that begot a band, begot a record.
All this effort enhanced the music, humanized the artists, and deepened my connection to both.
♬⋆.˚.⋆♬
ADORNO & HORHEIMER INTERLUDE!!
Another contributing factor to this project was rereading Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception” earlier this year.
An alarmingly prescient term, the “culture industry” as Adorno and Horkheimer figure it is, in incredibly simplified terms, the guileless flattening of culture through the pursuit of capital.
The conspicuous unity of macrocosm and microcosm confronts human beings with a model of their culture: the false identity of universal and particular. All mass culture under monopoly is identical, and the contours of its skeleton, the conceptual armature fabricated by monopoly, are beginning to stand out. Those in charge no longer take much trouble to conceal the structure, the power of which increases the more bluntly its existence is admitted. Films and radio no longer need to present themselves as art. The truth that they are nothing but business is used as an ideology to legitimize the trash they intentionally produce. (95)
Next up:
- “let people enjoy things”
- dismissal - a weapon
- what we like is who we are
August 2024
Footnotes:
1. My starting point for these current reflections are Mina Le's substack post on elitism, Feed Me's "Machine in the Garden" post Le links in that substack post, and the "is booktok ruining reading?" online discourse as a whole.