Me and music have fallen on tough times. I take the suggestions and I humor the algorithm, but nothing hits quite like it used to. It's a drag. Because certain songs throughout my life have seemed to change my brain chemistry in real time. Or make a memory forever paired with its own soundtrack. Or elicit goosebumps, at least. But for the last two or so years, the magic has been slip sliding away.
If I'm being a little hyperbolic here, it's only a little. I do find myself constantly thinking about this development, in part because of how much I love music and partly because of how novel it seems. But lots of things seem novel in our time. You hear phrases like, "I can't get through an entire book anymore" being thrown around often enough to think that there is something almost universal to it. This feels similar. Because I know, at least anecdotally, that I'm not the only one who can't get through an entire album anymore. It's easy to imagine a comment section full of detractors here telling me that I'm out of touch and how there are tons of great new bands out there. And who would I be to tell them that they are wrong? They could be on to something. But I'm interested in the why.
Let's start with an obvious one. The culprit behind the hijacking of our collective attention span is pretty well documented at this point. The Internet. Social Media. You've heard about them. And even if you hadn't already been told that it was all melting your brain, it would probably be your first guess as to why everything feels so eerily sideways. I've become hyper-aware of my own compulsion to scroll through the hubris and drivel of the other addled masses at every available moment, yet I continue to do it. It's strange. But everyone else with a computer phone in their pocket (everyone), knows exactly what I'm talking about. And because anyone only has a finite amount of attention to give, some amount that I could be spending on listening is going towards scrolling. It's also quite possible that the technology has so compromised my attention span that I can't stay engaged even when I give myself the time. That arithmetic all seems easy enough. I would refer you to Tristan Harris and friends if you wanted to wade further into the weeds on this subject. But be warned-you seek their wisdom at your own psychological peril. The truth is a bummer.
Then there is another thing that comes to mind. The music industry has drastically changed over the last couple of decades. You don't need to be on a record label anymore to get your stuff out there, and the whole endeavor has become an entirely democratic one thanks to recording equipment getting cheaper and streaming platforms being accessible to all. This sounds superficially like sweet, sweet freedom and nothing more, but we might now be seeing some downsides from such a hard swing in the opposite direction. There was a sort of renaissance in the late 00's and early 10's where tons of great lo-fi bands coming out on small labels were getting popular, like early Kurt Vile, War on Drugs, Thee Oh Sees, and on and on. But it was pretty short-lived. As of this year, Spotify claims to have around 11 million artists on its platform, which is up from 8 million in 2022, and less and less every year prior. When the new band pool keeps growing exponentially, it gets harder and harder to separate the wheat from the chaff.
This last point has been an especially tough pill for me to swallow. The new paradigm has not only devalued music in terms of the paltry returns that artists get for listens, but also in a deeper sense. How could anything that is so abundant, convenient, and free for the taking not feel disposable? I've had an ongoing recording project of my own since 2012 and was initially inspired by those bands that I mentioned. And while my first couple of releases got some attention from local radio and music writers, the response to my latest album has been crickets. This is hard to suss out. It's totally possible that my music has gotten worse, or that no one wants to hear guitars this year. Or it's possible that I am just another hopeful struggling to be heard in the sea of noise. Somehow the third option is the least damaging to my ego but also feels the most hopeless.
There is another little website called Submithub that further adds to the creeping sense of music losing its value. It's a place for artists to pay and vie for attention from blogs and other "content creators" in the hopes that they might post about their work. The concept seems to be something like this: "because there is such an overabundance of content out there, why not create a competitive marketplace where music and exposure are the sole commodities?" Or something like that. I feel dirty every time that I use it, but I understand why it exists in the current landscape. Maybe music has become more of a cheap commodity than anything else. Content is the perfect word for it.
I was listening to an interview the other day with Eric Weinstein, one of the more brilliant and interesting people to listen to these days, and he was off-handedly talking in a similar vein. One quote that stuck with me was this: "Our artists have no idea what world is happening and so their reflection of it back to us is really much more meaningless than say, the artists of the 1960’s, who seemed to have their finger on the pulse of the time." I broadly agreed with his point, and it made me think of something else. Because of the fact that everyone is getting slightly different realities fed to them from different sources, it's hard to agree on how anything happening in the world is actually going down. But despite this, and despite the most self-righteous outliers who have it all figured out (which I would grant might be more people than I am imagining), I think that there are some universal themes to our time that we could all agree on. Anxiety and confusion are two that come to mind. You could throw existential dread in there as well. Sunny stuff. But maybe the vibes of the time alone aren't enough of a foundation for a scene to stand on, so we get bubblegum pop and caricatures of other genres that don't speak to anything genuine or topical. I dunno. Just a theory.
It also occurs to me that every music scene historically has been very attached to a place and oftentimes was a reaction to an existing trend. For example, the NYC punk movement of the 1970's being inextricably linked to lower Manhattan and the venues that hosted those bands, as well as being a response to the bloated arena rock of the time. Or the grunge scene starting and forever being linked to Seattle, as well as being a response to the reigning hair metal scene of the 1980s. The list goes on. But is it even possible for a scene to incubate and grow in isolation anymore when everyone is virtually linked to everyplace at all times? And would it mean as much or even happen in the first place without the context of other distinct scenes already existing? It's hard to say.
Let me get extra self-indulgent for a minute and talk about the first album that I was truly obsessed with. It was an LP called The Downward Spiral by Nine Inch Nails. I bought it on cassette in 5th grade after seeing the music video for the song “Closer” on MTV and being disturbed and drawn in. Like I knew that I probably shouldn't be seeing it. I played it so often that the audio started to fade in and out on the tape, and I had to cough up a few dollars to buy a new copy. Also, there was that ambiguously creepy album art. I have even more vivid memories about the music itself, like trying to research where all of the samples that were used came from (I remember that one was from THX 1138 and another from an 80's movie called Robot Jox.) Or the sloppy, awesome drum outro on “Piggy”. Or how Side A builds up the tension to a peak on “Big Man With a Gun”, and how Side B starts off hushed and pretty with “A Warm Place”. Or wondering what those weird blowing sounds at the beginning of “Eraser” were. Or how the album closes with the ridiculously loud and sustained guitar stabs at the end of “Hurt”. I could go on forever but I won't. The point is that this is a sliver of the impact that one piece of music can have on someone. Which is why I ultimately refuse to believe that it can ever truly become just another cheap commodity, regardless of all of the pessimism on display here. It's too powerful for that bullshit.
And so I somehow remain a reluctant optimist about where this all ends up. I have no idea how or when things turn around, and I would hesitate to do any prognosticating even if I did. It's just hard to imagine how much humanity would have to change before we were willing to part with one of the small handful of things that has been with us for as long as we have existed. I also want to make clear that this is not the rambling of a bitter, elder millennial who is nostalgic for better times (although I am generally nostalgic.) It's an attempt to be as honest as possible about something that I care about and something that is moving so quickly that it's hard to keep up with. Like everything is, I suppose. I've heard certain voices shun this sort of reasoning as being conservative, or purely nostalgic, or whatever other deflection, but fuck that. That’s just a cop-out from having to think too hard about it. Because everything is rapidly changing, music being just one example, and there are always good and bad outcomes of those changes. And if you want to consider yourself progressive about anything, you should want to honestly consider what you might be progressing towards. So here's to hoping we make it out alive with music still intact.
The intimate is now the only universal, which is why your music is relevant. Everyone who’s fallen in love in the last 10 years has looked at the pictures. Everyone in love will sacrifice and change. Don’t value your art based on the audience. It stands strong on its own and provides those rare goose bumps. Success.