My Very Own Digital Copy
of an Unreleased Remix by an Unheard-of Producer Somewhere Across the Ocean
I can’t remember the first time I downloaded music. Was I 16 or 17? Was I in my mom’s basement, hunched over a Dell desktop, typing into a Napster search bar to the wheeze of a dehumidifier? Was I using the computer my brother built instead of doing his homework? Were we in the house on Goodhill or on Catbrier?
I remember other things. I remember my girlfriend driving me 40 minutes to buy Quasi’s Featuring Birds, which I’d specially ordered at a record store that no longer exists. I remember going to visit my father in New York every weekend and always telling him I’d be getting in an hour later than I actually did get in, so I could spend time at another record store—that no longer exists—and listen to whatever they played on the stereo. I remember buying things before I’d heard them just because I read that they were great—in magazines!—and just being forced to live with them like they were new family members who you didn’t always get along with. But this was before 2000.
***
So a bunch of friends are sitting around having a beer and one—an archivist and library-science type—starts wondering, half-joking, half-seriously, about whether or not we’re too deep in cultural waste to even recognize the real, transcendent art of our era. “It’s Outkast,” I tell him. Another friend, from Atlanta, says: “Shit, Aquemini came out on my mom’s birthday when I was 13, and she drove me through a tornado to Blockbuster Music to buy it.” In 1998.
“Blockbuster Music?”
“Yeah, it doesn’t exist anymore.”
***
My first review for Stylus was of Ariel Pink’s The Doldrums, in late 2004. I was 21. I didn’t have a computer then, so I typed out the review on my mom’s house over a holiday weekend. It was the first and last CD I bought at a store because I wanted to review it. Since, I get them for free, steal them, or steal them and then buy them later, sometimes after I’ve already reviewed them. Starting in 2005, my music collection existed almost exclusively inside an IBM Thinkpad I’d been given by the company I worked for. Then I moved everything onto a Macbook I bought in 2006 after quitting. When I get CDs now, the first thing I do is rip them—I can’t think of the last time I put one into a CD tray.
***
When I started writing for Stylus, I’d never heard of the site and had only written about music once or twice, reporting on events for my college’s alternative paper. I applied to write at Stylus because a friend said, “I’m tired of hearing you talk about music.”
Recently, a friend sent me an email about a movie we’d been discussing: “I mean, it's intuitive to talk about [movie], I think I learn about it by writing about it—but on the other hand, there's this other range of things one could do to share in the movie or reckon it or process it with others. I guess this gets pretty hippie, but you know, instead of talking about the movie, you could run down a hill about the movie. Ha, but you know. I guess sometimes if you’re with a couple, you might experience something and then make out ‘about’ it.”
Think about it that way for a second: What albums would you make out ‘about’? What albums would you run down a hill ‘about’? When I ask myself those questions, I realize that my care for my favorite new music of the past decade—by Joanna Newsom, the Hold Steady, Ghostface, the Mountain Goats—is better measured in tears, or gin, or people I enjoyed it with, or hours, but not words.
***
At the time, it didn’t occur to me that what I was doing was, on the one hand, becoming less important every day, and on the other hand, more important than it’d ever been. By 2005, it was easy to get whatever album you wanted whenever you wanted it, so you didn’t need anyone to tell you if it was good or not. But all of the sudden these new sounds and subgenres were made available in ways they hadn’t been before. Ignoring them felt like willful ignorance. These outlets—bloggers, friends, sites like Stylus or whatever—became more important to me than Spin was in high school. It was like I didn’t realize how big and dark the room was until people started lighting matches.
Was I listening like a dilettante? Probably. Was I writing like one? A little, probably. And what’s wrong with that again? Some people like fiction, some people like journalism, some people like opinion—music writing could be a mix of all three. Sometimes I came away learning about music but not necessarily wanting to listen to it; sometimes I came away wanting to listen to the music but probably not learning a lot about it.
Though it probably makes me sound like part of the problem and not the solution, I realized that it’s the second kind of writing—the one that made me really interested in the music, or trust the writer writing about it—that I really cared about. Sometimes I find myself saying things like “Country music is important—it’s what a lot of America listens to.” But isn’t the fractured feeling of the 00s what makes it so special? I could exist in whatever subculture with which I most identified. Or exist in a mishmash of all of them. Maybe it makes me a dummy by a certain set of criteria but a sage by another.
The most uncomfortable thing about judging music, for me, is having a sense of personal taste.
***
I guess I’m assuming that most people reading this are between 20 and 35—which is to say, people whose approach to listening has been threatened, enhanced, ruined, or generally changed by the internet and the digitization of music. And I guess, in turn, I realize I’m talking to a very small percentage of the world about what it probably not relevant to most peoples’ lives. (I am not being paid to write this—maybe that’s comforting, I don’t know.)
My Dad, for a counterexample—I remember when he told me he’d bought Animal Collective’s Merriweather Post Pavilion because he was “curious.” (His review? “Like nothing I’ve ever heard before, but too much reverb.”) I don’t even own that album, and they’re probably my favorite band of this decade. (Ironically, I fell for them after seeing them live during college—the band I was in shared a bill with them. We didn’t play all that well.)
***
I guess what I’m getting at is that this is just my story. I’m not sure how much of it has to do with growing up and how much it has to do with the 00s. A couple ofsummers ago, I saw Ghostface perform at the Pitchfork Music Festival (itself a kind of great nexus at which to think about music in the post-internet age: A website… that writes about music… has a festival featuring live human beings performing onstage!). Anyway, Ghostface is there, talking about all the trouble they had getting to the show, but how they’d never miss it because “Chicago’s one of our biggest markets!” Does he know what Pitchfork is? I wonder if his email account is @aol.com. Or maybe @juno.com.
Or I think about Paul Wall, famous back when people decided Houston was rap’s next capitol. He had this lyric: “I got the internet goin’ nuts.” What a thing to say. Paul Wall’s wedding photos are still one of my favorite things about the internet.
***
Did you know that there are companies out there trying to analyze and categorize the different qualities of music so that they can better sell it to you?
Rob Walker wrote an article about Pandora in the New York Times recently. Pandora’s founder, Tim Westergren, “likes to tell a story about a Pandora user who wrote in to complain that he started a station based on the music of Sarah McLachlan, and the service served up a Celine Dion song. ‘I wrote back and said, “Was the music just wrong?” Because we sometimes have data errors,’ he recounts. He said, ‘”Well, no, it was the right sort of thing — but it was Celine Dion.’” I said, “’Well, was it the set, did it not flow in the set?” He said, “No, it kind of worked — but it’s Celine Dion.” We had a couple more back-and-forths, and finally his last e-mail to me was: “Oh, my God, I like Celine Dion.”’
Maybe all that cultural context and information—those crumbling journalistic ideals—is part of the problem.
***
Recently I found myself hopelessly under the spell of James Blake, a young British dubstep producer with only one single and a few stray tracks and remixes to his name. I found the single. I Googled everything there was to Google on him. I know what James Blake looks like. I take James Blake single to friends’ houses just to play it for them because I think it’s so wild.
James Blake remixed a track by another producer, Untold, called “Stop What You’re Doing.” I’d heard about this track even before I heard it—that it was unlike anything that came before it. I searched and searched, and all I could find was a grainy Youtube clip of the song being played during a DJ set. Eventually I found it in a podcast done by Ben UFO, founder of the label Hessle Audio. I found myself importing the entire podcast into Garageband, cutting out the remix, putting a fade on it, and exporting the track so I had my very own digital copy of an unreleased remix by an unheard-of producer somewhere across the ocean. I remembered this feeling: before 2000, it was called “taping off the radio.”
***
Nobody ever made me mixtapes in high school because they complained that I’d already know everything they were putting on it—as if that was the point. I have not received a mix of music in a physical format—either tape or CD—since 2007. The other week, I made one for a friend, but accidentally left it at home when I went to meet her. “But I have it on this thumb drive,” I said, quietly surprised that I actually had a thumb drive in my pocket. “That’s fine,” she said, “I’d probably just rip the CD onto my computer anyway.” The jewel case—with cover art that I collaged from a lipstick ad—is still on my nightstand.
– Mike Powell |
