I listen to a lot of music. I mean, a lot. On the order of 16,000 tracks on apps and sites tracked by Last.FM alone1. And I intentionally try not to be overly confined by genre or get lost for too long in repetitive, depressive listening to the set of touchstone songs that speak to me when I’m deep in that darkness.
Over the last few years, my Top 5 most listened-to artists have included Alice in Chains, Daniel Johnston, Taylor Swift, Elliott Smith, Regina Spektor, Glass Animals, Frédéric Chopin, Nick Drake, Steely Dan, Vampire Weekend, and MJ Lenderman. That’s already not that small of a span, but consider also that some of those reach the top lists with only 50-100 plays, and I average around 60% new artists in genres ranging from alt-country and Americana to hip-hop and trap rap, shoegaze and indie pop to Americana and indie folk, grunge and hard rock to folk punk and acoustic blues, yacht rock to—you get the picture. And that’s not even to delve into the depths of jazz to which I occasionally descend.
I’m not bragging. I am proud that despite nearing an age fairly considered well-advanced, I still intentionally listen to numerous new artists and genres when many of my contemporaries have settled solidly into the comfort of nostalgia and the music they already know and love, but this is really just to provide some context I can link to2 when I post about music, especially if it involves what might be taken as objective appraisal.
No matter what I might be writing about that could be seen to be implying some sort of objective hierarchy—be it music awards, list, drafts, tiers, or whatever strikes me next—such things are always, necessarily, just my opinion. Thankfully, in music even (sadly) more so than in life, everyone is free to love what they love without taking anything away from others. It’s not a zero-sum game. I might be mystified by your choices, as you could be by mine. I might even occasionally be irritated when something that doesn’t work for me achieves seemingly inescapable ubiquity. But ultimately, those things are ubiquitous because people—many people—who are no better or worse than me love them.
As a 1970 baby, my 20s were spent entirely in the 90s, an era in which everyone seemed obsessed with authenticity about everything, music perhaps most of all. I was caught up in it too. But the 90s were also (most) of my university years, where I arguably took a few steps up the eternal staircase to mythical maturity and simultaneously grappled with what I believe truly fed the authenticity machine, the also unending wrestling match with the untenable paradox that objectivity and foundational truth must be true if we want to live, but cannot be true if we are intellectually honest with ourselves.
There is no aesthetic experience I rue more than I do the time I wasted trying to inhabit—and display—authenticity. The books, music, movies, and other entertainments I was late to, and presumably have forever missed out on because they weren’t real enough, were too commercial, were too this or too that.
I’m fine with being a Swiftie while being enlisted in the Chains Army3. I’m happy to enjoy time deep in the same headphone with both Stay Inside and Belle and Sebastian. For that matter, I came to terms a long time ago with my favorite—and that is a meager word filling in for my feelings for them—fictioneers including Raymond Carver, a master of brevity, and densely digressive master of everything and nothing, David Foster Wallace. Actually, that’s putting it lightly. I’m ecstatic (to the degree I am capable of it) to be relieved of that burden, a rare, good thing I think about regularly4.
If you aren’t happy with that, or with me, that’s not my problem!
- Which excludes, most importantly, a fair amount of Bandcamp listening on my phone, since it doesn’t have a built-in function for “scrobbling” to Last.FM. ↩︎
- Else you’ll have to deal with not only more, but occasionally humongous footnotes. ↩︎
- I just made that up. I think. ↩︎
- Including, just this morning, when I devoured a poetic pairing of Berryman’s Dream Songs and Lorine Niedecker’s From This Condensery. ↩︎