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a review of apple music (9/20/24)
I was sixteen, and I was fucked. Drunk out of my mind and blacking out. It had become typical. I was sixteen, and I was probably the biggest Car Seat Headrest fan you would ever meet. So it was that I was engaging with both at the same time, drinking myself into a stupor as the
Twin Fantasy demos played from my cell phone speakers, anything to stop from confronting the realities of my life at the time. It was a two-pronged strategy, really, the shows I had seen on TV prescribed drinking as the traditional remedy for ailing people, and the lingering doom in my heart advised I listen to music. At an indeterminate hour I woke up, still half-drunk, the album still looping from my phone, now lost somewhere in my childhood bedroom. Disoriented and without light, all I could do was let my thoughts grasp around at things while the final thirty seconds of Times To Die/Open-Mouthed Dog played me into complete ether. In that moment, the soul won. I remember it. I knew I was gay.
Times To Die/Open-Mouthed Dog would be reworked into the third track on the album
Monomania, incorporating parts of an earlier song "Fuck Merge Records", then altered further still into a re-recording on the album
Teens of Style. My revelation that night would be reworked too, associating it with an older crisis of the self from when my cousin came out as trans, all the frequent times I drank and insisted to people that I "wanted to be a girl," and I would eventually come to the final conclusion that I was a woman in the following year. The songs still remained, though. Even now when all the prior strife is just a memory, I can return to the songs. It meant a lot to me, being as intensely self-obsessed as I am, that I could return to their associated memories demanding constant appraisal, forever. It was why I signed up for Last.fm. It was why, afterwards, I bought a Spotify subscription.
But things change. Four years go by, and Spotify decides to raise their prices just a bit too high. I become just a bit too concerned with nonsense like "codecs" and "mixing." I finally make the reasonable push, the one all my friends had been urging me to make, and moved on to Apple Music. I was expecting much the same, just better audio quality (and I use wireless earbuds mostly, anyway) and namely a price that was one dollar cheaper. While it agonizingly does not have the Hang Onto Your Ego recording of I Know There's An Answer, much of my music library remained untouched. The Last.fm integration, or lack of proper, left something to be desired, though remembering to press the "scan" button every day or so in the app was little hassle. Though, I did very quickly realize something -- Spotify had changed how I interacted with music, and for the worse.
In an era of on-demand streaming and constant information, we are a bit spoiled. And to little good end, too. Nations (in both the Westphalian and Leninist senses) are leveled for the American's maw, gaping as it is, and it is done all in the service of a new plastic box to watch Netflix Original Content on. Blood-money cell phones to watch Saturday Night Live on. Of course, I'm not the first to take issue so impotently with this. But I did not realize my complicity in an on-demand economy had reached so deeply as my perusal of art. I was still there, though, answering to the Spotify algorithm's auto-generated "mixes" which dictated much of the music I discovered. Taking songs as they came, piecemeal. Removed from context.
When I primarily took my music from YouTube and my parents' old CD collection, I understood it, the nature of the album. Why artists choose to make cohesive, identifiable albums as opposed to only singles and unbound compilations of songs. It wasn't a concept that was ever explained to me, I simply knew it on instinct. Much like one knows to read a book, when given an album, it is generally best to listen to it all the way through. I gradually lost that unspecified knowledge, though, with the constant stream of music I would become bombarded by on Spotify. Without the guidance of the medium, I fell through. Sure, the songs given to me were adequately related to one another, could adequately approximate what I might want to hear when in any certain mood. Yet times would come when I would hear two songs back to back, ones which were meant to be heard in that manner either as part of a medley or just a pairing, and I would get a quick glimpse at what I was missing as I listened to music in this way.
Apple Music is different. In a phenomenon which makes a lot of sense given the company's history with iTunes, it is arguably far more centered around the album than the individual song, far more skeuomorphic to the actual experience of owning an album. From its inclusion of standard and deluxe editions, various mixes and re-recordings, to its very design layout. When you open the app, you are dropped into a "home" page, which, unavoidably in our age, contains a few mixes of different tracks. Then, avert your eyes down, and you are met with your own recently played albums, then a slew of further album recommendations. Beneath that still there are also approximations of radio stations, though my slavish devotion to my Last.fm statistics constrains me to not using them. Instead, I listen to music solely in my library, which isn't an intended feature of the app but rather out of my own peculiarity. When I find new albums, either from the homepage or from my friends recommendations, I add them to my library. At first, when I was transitioning my heavy rotation over from Spotify to Apple Music, I only added individual songs -- though I quickly realized that this was taking up a lot of screen real estate. I can only fit about six album covers at a time on my phone screen, and it was becoming very unhelpful to have only one or two songs behind each of them. So, my hand was forced.
David Lynch has famously, correctly
expressed his chagrin with people viewing films on cell phone screens, and I think a similar principle applies here. Singles do exist, and with reason, of course. It is perfectly fine to listen to a track isolated, and it has been a thing long before technology caught up with individualist social rot. But to never listen to a full album is cheating yourself. How could I experience the sweeping medley of the B-side of
Abbey Road, without ever knowing it had a B-side? How could
Twin Fantasy have resonated with a sixteen year old me so much as it did had I only experienced parts of it in Spotify mixes? I would've been missing out on an artistic work which calls back to itself, which builds into a whole. You can, in fact, take excerpts from a book. But to never read the whole thing is to read nothing at all. To rob yourself of the whole. An album, all art in fact, demands you sit down and receive something as it is given to you, not as you take it. It becomes rarer and rarer, though.
If you have a premium subscription, Spotify does not force you to listen to its mixes. You can, if you know well enough, decide to listen to complete albums. But nothing of the app's gimmick-laden homepage or its library interface encourage that, on the contrary, they discourage it, burying them behind user-curated playlists and auto-generated mixtapes and even podcasts and audiobooks. I am glad I finally had the clarity to make the switch, but I am nervous inertia has already swung too hard the other way. I am nervous that some day, the album, with all its emotional and artistic weight, might die.
showcase
summer post-mortem (9/5/24)
Last fall, a friend-turned enemy-turned friend in Worcester told me that adulthood was when the homeless ask you for cigarettes. This happens to her all the time, outside train stations and dollar-themed stores, yet even now it has never happened to me -- despite my frequenting of the same places, despite my own habitual carrying of cigarettes. I am left unsatisfied with her answer. And even more so back then, when I first heard it, as I bided my time out in Southern Virginia, when I couldn't stand to hear something that would ask me to leave my room and be in a city that I'd already forsaken. Didn't they know I was meant to be in Boston? Boston, where my love was? Boston, which when I left for, I swore was the end of The Hard Part? Boston, where I would never be asked for cigarettes (but I did not know that back then)? Boston, where I am now?
She would turn enemy soon after she told me the bit about cigarettes, actually. Fate, or my sort-of-girlfriend, would dictate as much. And so too was it fate, or my sort-of-girlfriend, that would drag me up here, to Boston. That's how it felt. I had been entirely sold on the narrative of magic that is so stapled to trans 4 trans styled love, alongside the polyamorous angle which I would later be caught off-guard by, but still choose to accept. I was just that in love. Why not at least try it? I decided as much when I visited my sort-of-girlfriend, then turned girlfriend, in Worcester. I would hitch my proverbial wagon to her. Finally, a reason to save my money for, instead of burning it on whiskey and amarettos bought on my behalf by my coworker. I was becoming tired of messaging him under his Discord screenname of "Mommy's Little Femboy", anyway. I was nineteen and ready to give over my life to this girl I met online. Or, I said I was. And there must've been some truth to it, too, because I was already charting a course for moving in with her as soon as that winter, after her Housing Situation began to fall through in record time.
When you're just starting out in your transition, especially when you are reeling from a broken home, you haven't yet lost the stars in your eyes about The Community. In my case, I hadn't seen a functioning Community to speak of, not even the small-scale sharehousing that is the nuclear family, no, that all imploded a long time ago. Human beings are social creatures! We haven't had our hearts ripped out by capital, we couldn't! Or, at least not us, not us on the fringes of society. We know better by necessity. It happens back when the internet is a tool for organizing and not mass alienation, when the girl calling herself an angel is doing so with all the earnest of a real poet. You hear murmurs of these stories about exploded queer homes and other high dysfunction and tell yourself that they are edge cases, that you will learn and do things differently. Again, I was nineteen then.
And I am twenty now. In the very same Raising Cane's as the one I went to with my now ex-girlfriend after I first moved into what was our slapshod basement apartment in Roslindale, I would celebrate with my friends my moving in to a new apartment (namely one without her in it). Only six months later. Which, perhaps to my own credit, is longer than she lasted with her then girlfriend and friends at their place in Worcester. We would all reach back out to each other in the wake of my breakup, rebuild burnt bridges and thank God for that. Because now the facts of the matter are cleared in my own mind, and private. I am not here to re-air grievances, as much as I think that'd be cathartic. Instead, only to corner myself: how did I make this mistake? How did I fall for her? In the months after, during my interim exile in Waltham, I would find out a crucial detail that only confounded me further. It is not that she is so special, so alluring that I dropped all my knowing-better for her sake. No, the sort of person she is, is in fact very common in The Community. And I fell all the same. How?
I think I at least scratch at something when I talk about stars in my eyes. Living in a state of depression and a Commonwealth of Virginia, I didn't get the chance to steep myself in the incredibly boutique inner politics of The Community. I wasn't inside something enough to be able to do that, not even with my participation in the internet, because whenever I stepped outside to go to work or bike half-drunk to a Target, I was very much on the outside still. The world I was still a part of spoke louder than any capital-D Discourse or horror story I could hear online, it spoke louder with a voice between the disphit U.S. Navy tranny chasers and their dipshit Trump 2024 flags. I did not recognize the type of person she was. Now I do, and so do the people who ask me to relay my recent life to them. Their eyes light up with recognition as they immediately incorporate her with whatever avatar for this certain type in The Community they were unlucky enough to know. And they tell me: "She accused you of cheating when you decided she shouldn't be the only one to sleep with other people, too? She threatened to kill herself when you left, too? She tried to make a callout post about you afterwards, too?" Even more granular things: "She called herself plural, too? She tried turning your longtime friends on you, too?" But these aren't things I knew at the time, it was not an archetype I could've yet been familiar with even as I was warned of it by her exes. I was ready to engage with her in her world, instead. Because she had one thing that the TV static monotony around me didn't -- a narrative.
But, it's such a plastic way of interacting with the world. Because, like we all learn as we get older, life isn't a story being told with neat plots and defined character traits. Things meander on and we act at the whims of our inscrutable unconscious. In order to convince yourself it is all a part of a plot, you need to cut various events out and invent entirely new ones, write your own fiction and come down with a bedridden case of "Storyline Fever", as David Berman once put it. It was a way of living I wanted to try with her. Because this goes deeper than luring in trans girls from shattered homes and exes they aren't really yet over, this exploits some deep hole with the way we are made to live in twenty twenty four. Absent any Gods or real communities to give ourselves over to, we have to fold back inward, develop some narcissistic cult of ourselves. She had done it so well, so well that she very well might believe it all. But I was too much the skeptic for it to work. I suspect most people would be. She invited me to live with her in a world of shonen-influenced make-believe, and so I came with her to Boston and it instantly began to fail. Like it always would. Quickly, neatly, I would be shunted into antagonist to whatever faux-religious holy war she is convinced her life's story is.
Engaging with it all set back further still whatever maturity I had been cultivating. Maybe even more so than when I plunged into drinking in the latter half of twenty twenty three. I still don't adequately grasp why I ended up making the mistakes I did, and so I cannot trust myself again after it. I'm keeping a close eye on myself as things develop again. The war-weariness of right now might do me some good when it comes to growing up, anyway. Being out of that awful apartment, too. I can do all the things I wanted to, but couldn't, when I was stricken with the guilt she would instill in me for leaving the house to be with people. I can visit friends, I can apply for college, I can even learn to play guitar. But I am afraid I might never be an adult.
Recently, a steady friend in Worcester told me that adulthood is a product of forgiveness. She is, I will say, religious with a conviction that I seldom see despite the consistent ungrounded appropriation of religious decor by so many in The Community. And so it is not only this forgiveness she speaks of, but also of accepting yourself as a part of something greater, as not just a hyper-Individual but a piece of God, who is all around us and is all of us -- I still recall when she, months ago, paraphrased to me physicist John Wheeler speaking of his theory of the Universe: "It's all one electron!" I call on this memory when I want to return to some perspective, or just feel a certain chill down my spine. Though this all scares me worse. Because despite how intuitively it comes to me, I am afraid I cannot, I cannot believe in a God and there is no true community here left to turn to, nowhere but in. In this late era, it is my problem as much as it is every other individual person's, but it is not Our problem, so to speak. In a video log with a name I can no longer recall, Matt Christman spoke of this, how nearly all of us are rendered immature by this alienation in ways that our God-fearing ancestors could never be. I've carried on with a weight on me ever since hearing that. I was seduced by this immaturity by Fate, and my ex-girlfriend, and now I can never be unaware of it again. I might never be an adult.
At the very least, even bereft God or community, I have found people who will help me move, who will give me a floor or a couch on which to sleep and recognize what's coming before I allow myself. I am so deeply thankful for them, and so deeply thankful for the chance now, months later, to finally sit and reflect. It is the only thing I have, maybe, that sets me apart from the people who have nearly ruined my life. The exile has ended, I am back from the suburbs. As long as we do kind things for each other for the sake of each other and nothing more, there will always be a chance to rebound, a place to slowly mature in a world of petulant storytellers. In a world of petulant storytellers, say something true.