a happy slap in the face

a private type of vanity

It’s that time of year where everyone is sharing their Spotify playlists of their most played artists or songs or albums or whatever of 2020 and it’s cool to see what my friends have been listening to.

Back in my Myspace days, 2004-2008, I used last.fm to toggle my itunes plays so that I could keep track of how many times I played a particular song and to see what artists I mostly listened to. It was a trip to see how much of that one Girl Talk album I listened to, or how my two most played artists were consistently Wu-Tang Clan and Elliott Smith. I liked seeing it all laid out in front of me. My play counts were a kind of extension of my identity, but it was only for my own amusement. I wasn’t blasting my top 10 artists on social media, but the fact that my last.fm page held the true stats of what music I loved most meant something to me. It was a pride taken in my own consumption, a private type of vanity.

I don’t use Spotify, but I downloaded it earlier this year to support my artist friend, playing his playlist “Baynes and Friends” to boost his play count and his paycheck. That’s what friends are for. I got a push notification to my phone from Spotify today asking me to check what my top artists were for 2020. Out of curiosity I clicked the notification to check and my top songs were all tracks from that playlist :)

When I first got a smartphone in 2014, I just used whatever music app was built into my phone, which at that time was Google Play Music. I started building up my music library and just stuck with the app, so whenever I left my house and listened to music on my headphones I was using Google Play. I even used it at home. I made playlists for me to write to (pop punk and trap), to fall asleep to (Bright Eyes), and I used the radio feature to find music similar to music I already liked and the new releases playlist to hear stuff that I might not have checked out otherwise like that song “Reservoir” by Metronomy. Unrelated, but Google Play Music became Youtube Music this summer, forcing users to migrate over by December of this year. I think the interface is so ugly, and you can no longer see how many times you’ve listened to a particular track. I really wish they hadn’t changed it.

I’m a fan of college radio, and have been since the 9th grade when I realized WKDU, Drexel University’s station, played the punk rock and emo music I was missing from corporate radio. Last year I bought a stereo for home use, a shelf stereo made from a recycled Volkswagen car stereo, just to have real speakers and to make radio listening easier. Before quarantine I would listen to the radio on my stereo any time I was at home, and I would listen to dowloaded albums on my phone any time I was out. When the great quarantine of 2020 began, however, I completely stopped listening to music on my phone and on my computer in favor of listening to the radio full time, which makes sense as I was no longer commuting on the bus and was no longer sharing a workspace with other people. These days I pretty much only listen to KALX, UC Berkeley’s freeform music station.

I wake up every morning and the first thing I do is turn on the radio. The beauty of it is that I can never predict what they’re going to play next, and the playlist can jump from James Brown to Burial to Spice Girls to Bollywood. I started keeping track of the songs that I heard and liked on my own playlist so that I can go back and listen to them whenever I like. You can check out my lil playlist here.

I was inspired to make the playlist when I heard “Can’t You See” by Hank Williams Jr. It was before quarantine, and I was getting dinner ready at home or something. The KALX DJ was playing a mix of Hank Williams and Hank Williams Jr. songs and “Can’t You See” came on. I feel like I know this song, I said out loud. I feel like I was just humming this to myself a few days ago. I turned the volume up. It was exciting in that way that feeling connected to the music can be. Since then, any time I hear a song that I like, either one that I know or one that is unfamiliar to me, I add it to the playlist. If I don’t know the song title, I check the KALX playlist twitter page.

During KALX fundraising season, one of the DJs shared a story about asking a friend to dub Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures from vinyl onto a cassette tape. It was the 80s, so downloading was not an option, and the DJ was just a kid with no money who wanted to be able to listen to the album at home at his leisure. His friend made the cassette for him, and used the last 4 minutes of the tape on the second side to record Little Richard’s “Tutti Frutti.”

So after 40 minutes of depressing post punk the DJ got a happy slap in the face courtesy of “a wop bob a doo wop a wop bam boom,” and he was grateful for it. I guess his friend knew that he might need a little pickmeup after listening to Unknown Pleasures in full. The DJ compared that experience with the difference between curated music streaming and the freeform nature of KALX: with curated music you can get stuck in your own hole, there’s just more opportunity to keep listening to the same types of music, whereas on KALX you’re never going to listen to the same type of thing for too long (like me in ‘07 alternating between Wu-Tang Forever and From A Basement on a Hill). It was an appropriate pitch during fundraising season, and even made me want to drop a few bucks in support.

What have you been listening to this year? What new music did you get turned on to?