What I'm Listening To, 2025.03.24

Returning to music writing after over a decade has been a challenge. One factor in that challenge that I wasn’t expecting is that I’m not exposed to as much new music as I used to be. There’s three reasons for that. One is structural. Recommendation engines (aka The Algorithm) tend to suggest things you might like, and if you tend to listen to music from a certain era, it’s likely to keep feeding you other material from that era. This is because those algorithms, like most machine learning, are based on the patterns of other users. The nostalgia of other people becomes infectious and, if you’re not careful, can take over your recommendations.

A second reason is cultural and aesthetic. “New” music is less new than it used to be. The genre shifts from 1975 to 2000 are orders of magnitude larger than the genre shifts of 2000 to the present. This is primarily because much of the genre innovation in the 20th century was driven by technological advances. In the realm of music performance and production, those slowed after the turn of the 21st century. The Internet also killed off the Local Scene. Geographic scenes were Petri dishes that fostered musical evolution like isolated volcanic islands create speciation in flora and fauna. The isolation of geography stopped mattering as much and so genre evolution slowed, having been starved of the tiny little weird subcultures that helped foster it. (One of these days I’ll write a longer essay about this, centered around while there will never be a Grunge revival.)

The final reason is personal. While actively searching for new music has gotten easier, it’s still an active pursuit that one has to be in the habit of. 15 years is a long time for a habit to grow rusty. I’m getting back to it, but I’m finding myself wanting to “catch up”. There’s a lot of great music that I’ve missed because I became complacent. (Though, to be fair to myself, even when I was actively seeking out new music I missed a lot of good stuff. There’s too much great music and art to ever experience all of it, which is one of the cosmic injustices of life.)

So while I shake the dust off, there will probably be less new music reflected in this column than I’d like. I also want to get back into the rhythm of doing more in-depth writing about significant artists or albums. After reflecting on it, I think I’ll actually shy away from “reviews” as they’re traditionally imagined. Album reviews in the era of streaming services seem less vital than they did two decades ago. It’s not really clear to me what the point of them is when the marginal cost of accessing most music has dropped so close to zero. I suppose it might encourage me to be more critical in the reviews, to try to point out interesting elements or context that a listener might have missed, but I think it’s actually more interesting and productive to engage in criticism in other formats.

However I end up expanding my music writing here, I’m grateful for those of you who take the time to read it, and I appreciate your patience as I continue to shake the dust off.