“And somehow the music we all grew up listening to doesn’t relate to our adult reality and our new dreams. The music we grew up with doesn't speak for us in the new era we’re now going through. Our childhood dreams have become the basis for our adult fantasies. And now, simply, we all grew up to be something new.”
This is from Oneohtrix Point Never’s remarkable album Magic Oneohtrix Point Never, a bit of dialogue from a radio station changing formats midstream, which he adds in as interludes throughout. (There is an archive of them, I recommend it.) The album came out in 2020, but I listened to it a lot at the beginning of last year, as Daniel Lopatin’s music usually takes a while to gain a foothold in my brain, especially with a listening schedule as cluttered as mine.
There’s no better thinker about the musical past than Lopatin. He’s so wise about its allure, interpretation, and revision on every album he’s made and every interview he’s done, including a long section in Simon Reynolds’ Retromania, and on Lopatin’s defunct Tumblr where he coined the indispensable phrase “timbral fascism.” It is a phrase I think of every time I hear a slap bass or a Farlight synth or a 7-string guitar.
Just as I can hear Loptain wrestle with the past in his music, I find myself fighting way too much with the past as it informs my criticism. Increasingly I think this may be a faulty or insignificant or uninteresting way to think critically about music.
Maybe we should do away with the past. Not literally—like the bad guys (?) in Christopher Nolan’s Tenet—but the concept of it when it comes to music criticism. The idea that art evolves in a linear fashion, or even in retro- or revision cycles, will soon be (if it isn’t already) outmoded. Culture cycles so fast that it’s now adopted the illusory “wagon-wheel effect”—though it is spinning, it appears not to move at all. The past is static, a telescoped digital archive, one incomprehensible pool from which to siphon. A flat circle, that’s right.
Here’s a keyhole into my personality: I don’t play video games, but I reserve that adolescent space in my brain for an unconditional love for every Christopher Nolan movie. I think it’s an even trade-off.
In a year when the word “nostalgia” has made a remarkable evolutionary leap to mean “literally any time before this exact moment,” there is just so much hand-wringing about the value of the past, who has agency over it, who can speak for the primacy of its existence, what is gained and what is lost from invoking it, and what it is even worth. Just now on Twitter I saw someone discover “momcore” artist Liz Phair to the chagrin of a handful of people; a famous TikTok guy has a series called “indie songs from the 2000s that still slap” volumes 1 through 21—very few of them are from independent artists, and only some of them still slap.
Whenever you observe someone younger than you offer a unique opinion about a piece of culture you witnessed firsthand, please select one option from the to the four-quadrant Billie Eilish Doesn’t Know Who Van Halen Is Opinion Matrix: I respect this and don’t need to say anything about it; I don’t respect this and need to say something about it; I don’t respect this but don’t need to say anything about it; I respect this but I need to say something about it.
As life in the Anthropocene tips into a gradual decline brought on by the irreversible effects of climate crisis, the past becomes a highly valuable commodity in criticism because the future gets more volatile by the second. Those of us with a lot of time in the bank account sit comfortably on hundreds of thousands of pre-pandemic hours, while younger, more time-poor people wonder every day what kind of past they will actually inherit—what will their past be worth? This is an analog to the depletion of the social security trust fund in 2033, maybe.
It’s not just the value of pre-pandemic hours—though perhaps that will be an important bookmark in the future—but any hour where you maybe simply got through the day. I have almost 37 years’ worth of those now. Every time I speak to someone with fewer, I sense there is some kind of age-based intersectionality politics going on, that I have had the privilege of experiencing life, and therefore I should demure to someone who doesn’t have all that time saved up in the bank. Surely—surely—I’m projecting this, but it’s a fear nonetheless.
They covet my nest egg of glory days!
This idea is partly explored in HBO’s adaptation of Station Eleven—a very earnest and moving show pitched emotionally and aesthetically somewhere between The Leftovers and Watchmen. It addresses both my thought experiment about destroying the past and my once glowing artiste persona that believed Shakespeare could really, you know, fucking change the world. It’s very precious about the power of art, which is something I have silenced over the past 8-10 years as my brain grew an enormous teratoma called “online music critic” that is powered faintly by a mostly dormant “creative spirit.” I really want to begin to reverse that relationship this year, you know, like the woman in James Wan’s 2020 horror film Malignant.
Anyone can hear the past on a playlist, but what if you lived it as it was happening? Can someone else have a better claim to the experience of that music? In the end, does this comes down to what it always comes down to in music: Drugs?
I still tense up every time I watch a scene in a television show where a group of people walk into a crowded bar or restaurant, maskless, as if they just stepped into the big cat exhibit at the zoo. Even two characters just coming in for an unselfconscious hug. I had so many years of not having to worry about any of that, and the generation below me and below them will have had so few. Will they hold that against us? Should they? I wonder if this will create a new wave of criticism—an epochal split—that functions with a big chip on its shoulder especially as it pertains to the more linear past, the pandemic, climate crisis, failing democratic systems, or Frank Ocean becoming a weird jeweler instead of ever putting out another album, whatever it may be.
PinkPanthress liberally cribbed Sweet Female Attitude’s 2000 UK garage hit “Flowers” for her great breakout single “Pain.” It was a fascinating moment for me, someone unfamiliar with “Flowers” until I heard “Pain.” Usually, I’m pretty good at picking up on samples—my first critical thought about any new piece of music is usually hmm sounds like… which, again, I am now interrogating—but “Flowers” was in my blindspot. I have no nostalgia for “Flowers” and so I just really loved “Pain” without any hangups about my knowledge and experience of the past.
I wish this is how I could experience all new music.
This summer, I broke my clavicle about five miles into the bike leg of an Olympic triathlon, which is a 1500m swim, then a 25 mile bike, then a 6.2 mile run. I took a sharp left turn going about 20 miles per hour, caught some loose gravel in the middle of the road, and my bike slide out from under me. My shoulder took the entire weight of my fall and I went sliding on my left arm and left leg about twenty feet across the asphalt and into the ditch. People passed me, Malcolm Gladwell’s relay team passed me, and just sort of looked as if they wanted to help but were helpless to stop. I was angry, screaming goddammit! and stomping around, knowing my first ever triathlon race was probably in the trash, entirely unaware of the crack in my collarbone and the tiny to not-so-tiny pieces of road that had dug themselves into the flesh of my arm and leg.
Bloody, sweaty, dazed, hastily gauzed up by a nearby sheriff’s deputy, I decided to get back on the bike and finish the next 20 miles of the leg. Then I finished the run. Then I went to a nearby Urgent Care. I would have personally beat Malcolm Gladwell and all of his entire relay team had I not crashed, I later thought as I sat in the car with my arm in the sling in which I would spend the next six weeks.
Endurance is a genre of sport I have pathologically thrown myself into over the past few years (marathons, triathlons; I’ll be doing a Half Ironman (1.2 mile swim, 56 mile bike, 13.1 mile run) in Roanoke this summer) and I’m still very in my head about why I do it. I suppose I like tangible, measurable progress in my life because it otherwise has so much subjective growth and validation.
The career ladder of a writer is…squiggly, and if you measure your place on it based on social media or money or career, you will be sorely disappointed by those metrics as it pertains to the actual art and craft of writing—something you can only guess that you are getting better at year by year. At best, you are writing something that you are at this very moment proud of. At worst, you don’t know what you’re writing because you hate who you are at this very moment.
I wonder if the decision to endure competitively says something inherently about your spirit, that it is especially fortified. When I do a 5k time trial on the track or a functional threshold power test on my bike or finish a triathlon with a broken collarbone, I enter what a lot of athletes call the “pain cave.” I seek it out because it is among the most stimulating events in a largely inert world, a high that is so difficult to achieve, that every time it happens it destroys you for a day or two, or even a week. Maybe it’s an exorcism of past emotional pain and suffering. Or maybe it is a blueprint of the pain and suffering that I haven’t experienced yet. Maybe it is, as my buddy Bill says, just an exercise competition.
I listened to a lot of Turnstile while I was running fast this year. A lot of the Armed (“All futures, destruction” is the motto.) My most played song while running or biking was “Assisted Harakiri” by the emo band Home Is Where, not entirely but chiefly because the tempo is about 190bpm, the pace that really forces me to lift up my knees at a clip and keep pushing through difficult speed workouts. I continued to miss the experience of hearing a song live, in a club, from a car—so these moments I spent with my running playlist and its psycho-physical connection is the strongest bond I made with music. I wonder whether the release of endorphins from running is similar to the release of dopamine from weed or MDMA when it comes to how you hear music, how it means something more to you because of it.
Hush-hush, keep it down now: For two years some of my favorite albums featured people talking quietly into my ear. Last year it was the Microphones’ autobiographical memory-play, this year it was Dry Cleaning’s debut album. Florence Shaw’s droll and surreal recitatives arrived when cabin fever was at its peak; when my brain was sanded down and buffed smooth as a bowling ball. Cometh the time, cometh the album. Her fascination with words, phrases intonation, inflection inspired such an equal fascination with me: hippo, dick, Mighty Oaks, Elmo costume, useless long leg, reverse platform shoes, Sherlock Holmes’ Museum of Breakups.
I started therapy this year because I told my therapist I have too much clutter in my brain. There are too many knots. The Christmas lights, they all work they’re just in a big ball in a box in the basement. I just need them untangled. Psychologically constipated.
I felt Dry Cleaning was this codex to this feeling not just in my brain but maybe in the world. Drawing meaning from nothing, just seeing two random nouns together for the first time and projecting an entire worldview out of it without any context, knowledge, or history. Like the tweet says, “Getting a lot of ‘Boss Baby’ vibes from this...” or this joke format’s logical conclusion, “getting a lot of shadows on the cave wall vibes from this”.
A reversion to absurdity in lyrics (as opposed to lyrics that are meant to be understood by as many people with as little friction as possible) makes music mean more to me personally. Every time I played Dry Cleaning it was like doing Duolingo with a dead language, my language. This was a common strain of lyricism in ’90s indie rock (probably why Dry Cleaning lights up the same part of my brain that the Pixies do) and a very uncommon theme in indie rock today (outside of Black Midi and a few other logorrheic post-punk bands). It’s exclusionary, and some may see it as emotionally distant or hollow, but my largest emotional response to music this year came from not from hearing emotion rendered into song, but mostly out of jolted by a phrase, a sound, a style I haven’t heard before.
I’m wasn’t immune to bald emotionality. I wrote about the story I think Adam Granduciel is trying to tell with the War on Drugs, which is very simple and familiar. Both Adele and Jazmine Sullivan moved mountains with their voices alone. On the Armand Hammer album, Elucid spends a beautiful verse remembering a summer camp in the Catskills. Angel Olsen and Sharon Van Etten’s “Like I Used To” — probably my favorite song of the year — is all past, no future. I’m lured into the past so easily. It’s so great there. I love it! We should all go sometime.
“And somehow the music we all grew up listening to doesn’t relate to our adult reality and our new dreams.” I don’t think this is prescriptively true, but what I am trying to do is be on path of musical discovery that is increasingly less determined by what came before it. As I age, leave the city, separate from my past, settle into five years of an outstanding marriage, really get into cooking farrow, try to be a better more considerate person for my friends and family I am always asking myself this question: Does our identity determine what we like? Or does what we like determine our identity? It’s harder for me to hold onto an identity that I love, one that I think is interesting or valuable. But I think who I am is someone who is constantly searching for something to define himself by.
Which is good enough for now.
1. Dry Cleaning - New Long Leg
2. Turnstile - GLOW ON
3. Pharoah Sanders & Floating Points - Promises
4. Armand Hammer - Haram
5. Low - HEY WHAT
6. Jazmine Sullivan - Heaux Tales
7. Mach-Hommy - Pray For Haiti
8. Giant Claw - Mirror Guide
9. Yasmine Williams - Urban Driftwood
10. Chris Corsano & Bill Orcutt - Made Out of Sound
11. The Armed - ULTRAPOP
12. black midi - Cavalcade
13. Mdou Moctar - Afrique Victime
14. The War on Drugs - I Don’t Live Here Anymore
15. Nala Sinephro - Space 1.8
16. Skee Mask - Pool
17. Dean Blunt - BLACK METAL 2
18. dltzk - frailty
19. Faye Webster - I Know I’m Funny haha
20. The Weather Station - Ignorance
21. Iceage - Seek Shelter
22. Body Meπa - The Work Is Slow
23. Rosali - No Medium
24. PinkPanthress - to hell with it
25. Sam Gendel - Fresh Bread