On Saturday, Brigid and I headed out to West Seattle to hear a friend’s partner DJ at Revelry Room. We don’t get out to West Seattle much, more from a psychological barrier than anything else. As a neighborhood, it always feels much further away than the 15 minute car ride it actually is. I suspect it’s due to the fact that we spend a lot of time in Belltown, so we implicitly think of it as “across the Bay”.
Revelry Room turns out to be small but nicely appointed. It has a decibel meter hung up behind the bar. Its capacity is apparently 32 people. There was probably about two dozen there at peak while we were there, and while it was snug, I never felt like I was in anyone’s way.1
At some point in the night, the DJ played something that included a sample from “Walk Like an Egyptian” and Brigid immediately picked up on the line and started singing along. She then started talking about how her favorite Bangles track is “Manic Monday”. Then she continued to reminisce about her personal relationship with the Bangles for the entire rest of the night and into the next morning.
It’s amazing that you can still learn new things about your partner’s taste, even after more than a decade together. Eleven years and I had no idea that I was sharing my life with a Bangles superfan.
I’m been struggling to write about music lately. Part of this is the normal background problem that makes music hard to write about: if it could be expressed in words alone, the artist wouldn’t have had to write a song about it. Music is far, far older than the writing and, in comparison, writing is a clumsy medium.
Part of the trouble is something I’ve written about before, that I first developed my critical voice for music in an era when reviews primarily served to help readers make a decision about how to spend their money. In the era of free streaming, that scarcity is gone.2 It’s proven harder than I expected to change my critical relationship with music and I still find myself trying to give detailed, contextualized reviews for the purpose of letting people know if they should “get” the album or not.
My personal relationship to new music has also changed, largely due to that same shift away from album purchases to streaming. Even though I buy everything I review, my exposure to new music is now zero-cost and abandoning an album comes without any real penalty. As a result, I can (and sometimes do) find myself listening to one or two songs and then just moving on, never listening to the album again. I don’t relisten to songs to see if they grow on me. I don’t sit down with an album and listen to it start-to-finish before forming a judgment. If something doesn’t grab me immediately, well, there’s plenty of other new3 music out there.
I’ve come to think of this as one of the most aesthetically hazardous facts about the modern world. Some of the best music requires relistening to internalize. Albums that form cohesive wholes greater than the sum of their tracks make some of the best modern musical art. If we guide our musical diet only by consuming things that sound good on first sampling, then we’re likely to all end up exclusively with music that only sounds good on first listening. The kind of pop that elicits a “huh, catchy” in the listener and then fades off the palate as soon as it’s over. In short, we’ll consume only the fattiest, sugariest music.
Maybe this process is already starting to rot my aesthetic teeth a little bit. I picked up the new Modern Woman album, Johnny’s Dreamworld, when it first came out at the start of the month. I can feel it growing on me, but I also keep putting it down halfway through and moving on to something more accessible. The album makes good use of extreme contrasts. It swings from raucous, clattering rock songs (“Johnny’s Dreamworld”) to frail, pensive meditative songs (“Daniel”) and back again, covering a lot of territory in between. I find myself using those switches as a place to get off and go listen to something else.
And I’m definitely the problem here. There are a lot of things I like about the album. I’m especially charmed by the dreamy, swaying 7/8 “Neptune Girl”. Sophie Harris’ vocals switch between lilting charm and steely, barked punches and the whole track feels like it’s barely holding itself together. I find myself repeating the track a few times, then wandering away from the album to listen to other weird noise rock, rather than let Modern Woman take me on the intended journey.
I think this aesthetic crisis is a call to try and rewrite my relationship with music. I’ve already started writing about art more broadly and I’m sure that trend will continue. I think not forcing myself to include music in every column will give me space to sit with albums and only write about things I’m truly passionate about. I don’t quite know how to solve the problem of my changing attention span and the shift of taste that easy access to music seems to have fostered in me.
If anything, they’ve convinced me of the value of the vinyl revolution we’re going through right now.4 Restrictions on how we consume art can serve as guardrails to ensure we consume it in the way most conducive to appreciating it. I have a bad habit of using “record” and “album” interchangeably. They haven’t really been the same thing in almost two decades, but vinyl forces us to collapse that distinction again.
I originally started this column for two reasons. One was to force myself back into the habit of putting words out into the world. The other was to sharpen my own ideas about art that I love. I think it still serves those purposes, but that both are better served when I don’t force myself to write about new music just because it’s what I’ve traditionally done. I hope this marks not just a change in my work here, but an improvement, as I focus more on art I actually care about and, as a result, work intentionally to care more about more art.
At 6’5” and broad shouldered, this is more surprising than it sounds. I almost always feel like I’m in someone’s way.
While it’s technically true that time and attention are finite, none of us act like they are on the Internet.
Or new-to-me
The new Barnes and Noble that opened up in Downtown Seattle has a whole vinyl section.