This is a such a thoughtful, incisive post, in particular for a 1980's kid who would call radio stations and ask for songs to be played.
What it gets at is the idea from cognitive science that pleasure is primarily found in the 'anticipation' of something rather than in the acquisition of that thing, and it's f'd up and counter-intuitive (could we live in a permanent-state of almost-having something?). But your mention of the sort of euphoric journey you went on to find the Riley song speaks to that directly: it was, as the old chestnut goes, the journey and not the destination that was so meaningful. I once got back from a trip to Jamaica in 1999, and after hearing so many of the same bangers over and over, came back and drove 30 minutes to a local record store, where I went through a print catalog and found the CD that had the Wayne Wonder song, and then I placed an order with the record store and the CD didn't arrive for 6 weeks. For one song. The anticipation was incredible.
Thank you so much for this post! We need more music fans thinking about the ways they consume music because Spotify is ruining both the music making and the music listening ecosystems. (check out UMAW & their campaign “Make Streaming Pay” for more on this)
For anyone who wants to stream stuff in a more ethical & joyful way, I would recommend Qobuz for the following reasons:
- pays musicians ~10x Spotify rates
- higher audio quality
- nice clean UI
- doesn’t constantly try to foist new “features” and “updates” that keep you eternally engaging with the app
- doesn’t show play counts, very bare bones algorithm, & has a great blog/magazine.
This paradigm encourages you to educate yourself, ask for recc’s from your friends, seek out newsletters like BBSP, and generally be more proactive in your musical life.
If there’s more demand for real people to recommend good music instead of pay-for-play algorithms, more people will write cool newsletters like this one. I’d love to get back to an internet landscape with more of the 00’s / 10’s music blog energy.
Another beautiful, heart-stirring piece. Been thinking a lot about the hollowing out of middle class artists, who are able to make a living plying their craft, and provide their communities with soulful sustenance through their work, but never "blow up." The Bay used to be full of these folks, it was when I was a kid. And agree it's not idle nostalgia to want to build an economy that sustains the people who make the art we love and need. (Especially as traditional media's reach continues to recede, which for all its faults, did a good job of getting out the word about great art to lots of people, so that artists didn't have to spend hours hyping ourselves on the socials).
As someone who makes live theater for a living that moves and opens up people in person and is impossible to capture in (the omnipotent god of our culture that is) short video clips, I appreciate this hugely. Also, my old radio dub cassettes from the '90s have been delighting my 8 year old lately. Thank you for continuing to inspire folks to experience the world and art with wonder, curiosity, and joy.
Love how you tied streaming malaise into discovering a Bruce Conner work at an art museum. Coming across video art in a gallery and trying to find it on the internet later can be such an eye-opener when it comes to experiencing streaming's limitations. You have to hope that someone was as profoundly affected by the work as you were (at least!) to go through the trouble of making it available online. It's a strange form of community bonding that feels reminiscent of "Old Internet," in the same way that browsing niche hobby forums can be.
I quit my Spotify subscription a few months ago because it was no longer worth it to pay for subpar audio quality, subpar recommendations, and terrible labor practices towards the artists I was enjoying. I still have Apple Music but these days I mostly listen to radio shows on my phone—it's just a better, more fulfilling experience for discovering new music. (And since you mentioned the Clairo interview, her NTS show really is great, especially if you're into classic soul and '70s singer-songwriter stuff.)
support your local public library!! aka government subsidized dvds free for you to checkout. berkeley public library has a solid collection. come to north branch and say hello. we also have vinyl and cd.... did i mention interlibrary loans???? access to physical media from most public libraries in the state of california
also - just copped a blue ray dvd player at the goodwill in richmond
Really felt this one. We are all mourning those days. I see a future where a slow and disconnected life will be something to attain with lots of hard work and practice, like with meditation.
We are conditioned to avoid unpleasant experiences and seek pleasant experiences, but even a lifetime of concatenated pleasant experiences does not add up to happiness anymore than a life of suffering through the muck. The “convenience” of streaming really highlights the truth of this. What is all this digital mediation really “saving” us from 🤔
Which is to say, making it easier to get exactly what you want anytime doesn’t actually satisfy anything, it just shortens the cycle of endless craving to enable more of it
But doesn't that in turn diminish the effects of, like, idle curiosity? I went on a Prince bender a few months ago because I had really only listened to his first three albums, and was curious about his post-Revolution output. It would have been a LOT harder to do this without Spotify (or Youtube), and I don't know that my patience would have been up to the task of waiting. In that situation, there wouldn't have been the delectable anticipation that Jonah talks about; it just would have petered out, because it wasn't something I was necessarily driven to do. It was a fancy that ended up becoming something more than idle curiosity but less than passionate interest. I'm glad I didn't shell out the ducats to buy his whole catalog because I think he's got far more misses than hits in his latter half
I think the real issue that Jonah has is a lack of curiosity among the wider populace about things that aren't humongous hits. From sports (where "count the rings" has become the deciding metric) to music (where you're only "really" successful if you can release ten variations of the same album and capture the top ten rankings) to jobs (where the grindset has replaced meaningful life experience), we've been conditioned to only focus on success for the sake of success. Passing fancies, and/or work for the sake of trying something (parallels to Sunday's Concorde!) seem to be both deprioritized and implicitly scorned if you're not trying to make money off it in some way
Idk could be that I'm just particularly feeling the heat from life this week, but that's my reading of the whole situation
I feel this. In the past you may have been able to borrow a cd from a friend who was a fan or listen in a record store before buying. It’s cool for everyone to have access but it’s coming at a cost to the artists, to the point where many artists can’t even afford to continue making music (I understand not really the case for Prince). We need some balance there.
Related to big hits. I was talking to a fan of an artist who released slightly different album versions to stay at #1 and they asked if that was legitimate. When I said that was lame and didn’t matter they were confused. As if the point of making music is to be #1 and the artist might be lessor for losing the top spot. It made me wonder how much of the fandom is just about being associated with a “winner”.
How are we valuing "idle" in this scenario? Your description of what happened sounds like this was a thing you did because it was easy to do so — and you ended up feeling no particular way about it. To be honest, this doesn't sound like a very meaningful experience of art for you or anyone. And, well, Prince is dead so it doesn't really make a difference to him, but I think this pretty clearly illustrates the point made above about music being devalued.
If you were truly curious about it, then the 1-2 days you waited for the CDs to ship from Am*zon or week from Discogs would have only heightened your anticipation and subsequent experience of the work. You might have felt compelled to share your thoughts on the matter having invested so heavily in it. Or been inspired to create something in response.
I feel like there's a great deal of value to the ability to explore flights of fancy based on "idle" curiosity. I think removing obstacles to exploring new genres/media/artists/albums has a deep intrinsic value all on its own. The experience of listening to roughly 40 hours of Prince didn't change my life, but . . . what if it had? My feeling no particular way about it wasn't enhanced or diminished by the easy accessibility of the music. If anything, it allowed me to form an opinion of the music without being biased by spending a grip on a product that maybe I wouldn't like as much. And tbqh, NOT having spent a grip has probably enhanced my appreciation of the experience; I own DVD box sets that I never own because I ended up being EXTREMELY disappointed in the overall effect, compounded by the large amounts I spent to acquire them.
I don't know how old you are, but I still have a folder of ~150 CDs that I picked up over the course of my life from elementary school (~1992) to about four years after I graduated college (~2009). I picked them up at various Sams Goody, Virgin Records, basement punk shows, all ages clubs, etc. I feel nostalgia for maybe 20% of them, and still listen to maybe 5-10 of those CDs (or listen to that music on Spotify). The friction that I went through to acquire those CDs hasn't enhanced their essential experience or appeal to me; my tastes evolved. Spotify is an atrocious company that I generally try to avoid using, but I can't deny that its ability to potentially open people's eyes to brand new musical styles can be incredibly important
since moving out of my parents theres been many times that I have tried to find songs online that I remember hearing from my dads vinyl collection, only to call my dad (who is a human version of Shazam for any rock song recorded from 1960-1980) and he can remember the artist, album, track listing and year it came out. I can barely remember the name of most of the songs that I really like because I just hear them on Spotify while I'm driving. I think physical copies really force you to pay attention to what you are listening to and make the experience more meaningful overall
The surfing analogy is so on point. And yo, the infinite waves hypothetical is almost real…artificial wave pools are here! There are several in the US (Kelly Slater has one in Leemore, CA and there’s one in Waco, TX), and the number is growing worldwide. But it is a pay-to-play situation: you can buy individual sessions, reserve a time on a web portal etc, or, you guessed it, purchase a monthly membership.
With wave pools, it’s kinda like we went from radio straight to Spotify. Natural waves are a fully-gratis no-strings-attached gift from Gaia, but in wave pools you can assign a price to each one: if there are 20 sets for you in the hour, each shredder gets 1 wave per set, and it costs $160/surfer for that hour, you bailing on the takeoff burned up 8 bucks.
Now, surf trips (long-process-type experiences) are all the more special. Imagine camping out on a remote beach with your crew, having timed the trip just right to line up with a swell hitting at the perfect south-south west angle. Then you paddle out during ideal mid-tide, soft wind conditions. You, your friends, and the local surfers at the spot absolutely score!
That beach’s natural reef is something no cement pool and proprietary wave tech could replicate. We gotta protect it. Kinda like how we need to support the galleries that would show “Crossroads” and nurture the minds who will drop the next generation of mind-expanding art, ephemera or not.
great post! For further reading on the topic—the music journalist Liz Pelly has written a bunch of sick and incisive pieces on Spotify and our brains/tastes for the Baffler and has a book I am eagerly awaiting called “Mood Machine” coming out soon that will cover a lot of this terrain too! https://thebaffler.com/authors/liz-pelly
I'm quite surprised the "Crossroads" soundtrack isn't on ubuweb, but check out "You're No Good" while you're over there https://ubu.com/sound/riley_nogood.html
Damn. In 08 living in NYC a friend invited me to MOMA to see Michael Snow's "Wavelength," a film I'd seen in Annandale that I didn't quite "get" at the time. Not only did it click for me this time, but it was paired with another movie I'd never heard of. And sure enough, bomb explodes on the screen, and the movie was "Crossroads"! Like you I'd never heard of it, knew nothing about it, and it completely blew me away. My friend and I walked out completely stunned and couldn't even talk about it that night, had to pick up the convo the next day to discuss it. And like you I tried to track down the Terry Riley music and couldn't place it. Eventually by chance I did listen to the Riley album Les Yeux Fermes back when you could rip albums via Megafire links and when "Journey From the Death of a Friend" came on, I assumed that was the music until now. But you're saying that actually he composed a score exclusively for "Crossroads"?! Incredible. To this day I've only seen it that one time at MOMA, and in a way I almost don't want to see it again to treasure that experience, a top five moviegoing moment for me. And now you've added a new wrinkle to it. Thank you!
I set up my own home server which feels like a decent middle ground between awful streaming services and physical media. It's not that hard to set up all things considered and works like a regular streaming service except it's your own media stored on your own server, all you really need is an old computer and a couple hard drives. Still not the same but it definitely feels better streaming a rip of a cd I bought than from Spotify.
This is a such a thoughtful, incisive post, in particular for a 1980's kid who would call radio stations and ask for songs to be played.
What it gets at is the idea from cognitive science that pleasure is primarily found in the 'anticipation' of something rather than in the acquisition of that thing, and it's f'd up and counter-intuitive (could we live in a permanent-state of almost-having something?). But your mention of the sort of euphoric journey you went on to find the Riley song speaks to that directly: it was, as the old chestnut goes, the journey and not the destination that was so meaningful. I once got back from a trip to Jamaica in 1999, and after hearing so many of the same bangers over and over, came back and drove 30 minutes to a local record store, where I went through a print catalog and found the CD that had the Wayne Wonder song, and then I placed an order with the record store and the CD didn't arrive for 6 weeks. For one song. The anticipation was incredible.
So appreciate your writing Jonah.
that's a great tale -- thanks AJ
Thank you so much for this post! We need more music fans thinking about the ways they consume music because Spotify is ruining both the music making and the music listening ecosystems. (check out UMAW & their campaign “Make Streaming Pay” for more on this)
For anyone who wants to stream stuff in a more ethical & joyful way, I would recommend Qobuz for the following reasons:
- pays musicians ~10x Spotify rates
- higher audio quality
- nice clean UI
- doesn’t constantly try to foist new “features” and “updates” that keep you eternally engaging with the app
- doesn’t show play counts, very bare bones algorithm, & has a great blog/magazine.
This paradigm encourages you to educate yourself, ask for recc’s from your friends, seek out newsletters like BBSP, and generally be more proactive in your musical life.
If there’s more demand for real people to recommend good music instead of pay-for-play algorithms, more people will write cool newsletters like this one. I’d love to get back to an internet landscape with more of the 00’s / 10’s music blog energy.
Thank you! Re UMAW it actually comes up in that Diiv interview, Cole was one of the founding members
Oh nice! Will check that out, thanks
Another beautiful, heart-stirring piece. Been thinking a lot about the hollowing out of middle class artists, who are able to make a living plying their craft, and provide their communities with soulful sustenance through their work, but never "blow up." The Bay used to be full of these folks, it was when I was a kid. And agree it's not idle nostalgia to want to build an economy that sustains the people who make the art we love and need. (Especially as traditional media's reach continues to recede, which for all its faults, did a good job of getting out the word about great art to lots of people, so that artists didn't have to spend hours hyping ourselves on the socials).
As someone who makes live theater for a living that moves and opens up people in person and is impossible to capture in (the omnipotent god of our culture that is) short video clips, I appreciate this hugely. Also, my old radio dub cassettes from the '90s have been delighting my 8 year old lately. Thank you for continuing to inspire folks to experience the world and art with wonder, curiosity, and joy.
well put -- and so cool that you held on to the tapes so that you can share them with (inflict them on?? haha) your kid
Love how you tied streaming malaise into discovering a Bruce Conner work at an art museum. Coming across video art in a gallery and trying to find it on the internet later can be such an eye-opener when it comes to experiencing streaming's limitations. You have to hope that someone was as profoundly affected by the work as you were (at least!) to go through the trouble of making it available online. It's a strange form of community bonding that feels reminiscent of "Old Internet," in the same way that browsing niche hobby forums can be.
I quit my Spotify subscription a few months ago because it was no longer worth it to pay for subpar audio quality, subpar recommendations, and terrible labor practices towards the artists I was enjoying. I still have Apple Music but these days I mostly listen to radio shows on my phone—it's just a better, more fulfilling experience for discovering new music. (And since you mentioned the Clairo interview, her NTS show really is great, especially if you're into classic soul and '70s singer-songwriter stuff.)
Her nts show is really good !
support your local public library!! aka government subsidized dvds free for you to checkout. berkeley public library has a solid collection. come to north branch and say hello. we also have vinyl and cd.... did i mention interlibrary loans???? access to physical media from most public libraries in the state of california
also - just copped a blue ray dvd player at the goodwill in richmond
The Oakland Public library dvd holdings have gotten me out of a tough spot more than once, good call 🫡
Really felt this one. We are all mourning those days. I see a future where a slow and disconnected life will be something to attain with lots of hard work and practice, like with meditation.
We are conditioned to avoid unpleasant experiences and seek pleasant experiences, but even a lifetime of concatenated pleasant experiences does not add up to happiness anymore than a life of suffering through the muck. The “convenience” of streaming really highlights the truth of this. What is all this digital mediation really “saving” us from 🤔
Which is to say, making it easier to get exactly what you want anytime doesn’t actually satisfy anything, it just shortens the cycle of endless craving to enable more of it
But doesn't that in turn diminish the effects of, like, idle curiosity? I went on a Prince bender a few months ago because I had really only listened to his first three albums, and was curious about his post-Revolution output. It would have been a LOT harder to do this without Spotify (or Youtube), and I don't know that my patience would have been up to the task of waiting. In that situation, there wouldn't have been the delectable anticipation that Jonah talks about; it just would have petered out, because it wasn't something I was necessarily driven to do. It was a fancy that ended up becoming something more than idle curiosity but less than passionate interest. I'm glad I didn't shell out the ducats to buy his whole catalog because I think he's got far more misses than hits in his latter half
I think the real issue that Jonah has is a lack of curiosity among the wider populace about things that aren't humongous hits. From sports (where "count the rings" has become the deciding metric) to music (where you're only "really" successful if you can release ten variations of the same album and capture the top ten rankings) to jobs (where the grindset has replaced meaningful life experience), we've been conditioned to only focus on success for the sake of success. Passing fancies, and/or work for the sake of trying something (parallels to Sunday's Concorde!) seem to be both deprioritized and implicitly scorned if you're not trying to make money off it in some way
Idk could be that I'm just particularly feeling the heat from life this week, but that's my reading of the whole situation
I feel this. In the past you may have been able to borrow a cd from a friend who was a fan or listen in a record store before buying. It’s cool for everyone to have access but it’s coming at a cost to the artists, to the point where many artists can’t even afford to continue making music (I understand not really the case for Prince). We need some balance there.
Related to big hits. I was talking to a fan of an artist who released slightly different album versions to stay at #1 and they asked if that was legitimate. When I said that was lame and didn’t matter they were confused. As if the point of making music is to be #1 and the artist might be lessor for losing the top spot. It made me wonder how much of the fandom is just about being associated with a “winner”.
How are we valuing "idle" in this scenario? Your description of what happened sounds like this was a thing you did because it was easy to do so — and you ended up feeling no particular way about it. To be honest, this doesn't sound like a very meaningful experience of art for you or anyone. And, well, Prince is dead so it doesn't really make a difference to him, but I think this pretty clearly illustrates the point made above about music being devalued.
If you were truly curious about it, then the 1-2 days you waited for the CDs to ship from Am*zon or week from Discogs would have only heightened your anticipation and subsequent experience of the work. You might have felt compelled to share your thoughts on the matter having invested so heavily in it. Or been inspired to create something in response.
I feel like there's a great deal of value to the ability to explore flights of fancy based on "idle" curiosity. I think removing obstacles to exploring new genres/media/artists/albums has a deep intrinsic value all on its own. The experience of listening to roughly 40 hours of Prince didn't change my life, but . . . what if it had? My feeling no particular way about it wasn't enhanced or diminished by the easy accessibility of the music. If anything, it allowed me to form an opinion of the music without being biased by spending a grip on a product that maybe I wouldn't like as much. And tbqh, NOT having spent a grip has probably enhanced my appreciation of the experience; I own DVD box sets that I never own because I ended up being EXTREMELY disappointed in the overall effect, compounded by the large amounts I spent to acquire them.
I don't know how old you are, but I still have a folder of ~150 CDs that I picked up over the course of my life from elementary school (~1992) to about four years after I graduated college (~2009). I picked them up at various Sams Goody, Virgin Records, basement punk shows, all ages clubs, etc. I feel nostalgia for maybe 20% of them, and still listen to maybe 5-10 of those CDs (or listen to that music on Spotify). The friction that I went through to acquire those CDs hasn't enhanced their essential experience or appeal to me; my tastes evolved. Spotify is an atrocious company that I generally try to avoid using, but I can't deny that its ability to potentially open people's eyes to brand new musical styles can be incredibly important
Surfing, recording radio songs, and I'll add: watching a meteor shower. ✨ All cosmic waiting.
since moving out of my parents theres been many times that I have tried to find songs online that I remember hearing from my dads vinyl collection, only to call my dad (who is a human version of Shazam for any rock song recorded from 1960-1980) and he can remember the artist, album, track listing and year it came out. I can barely remember the name of most of the songs that I really like because I just hear them on Spotify while I'm driving. I think physical copies really force you to pay attention to what you are listening to and make the experience more meaningful overall
The surfing analogy is so on point. And yo, the infinite waves hypothetical is almost real…artificial wave pools are here! There are several in the US (Kelly Slater has one in Leemore, CA and there’s one in Waco, TX), and the number is growing worldwide. But it is a pay-to-play situation: you can buy individual sessions, reserve a time on a web portal etc, or, you guessed it, purchase a monthly membership.
With wave pools, it’s kinda like we went from radio straight to Spotify. Natural waves are a fully-gratis no-strings-attached gift from Gaia, but in wave pools you can assign a price to each one: if there are 20 sets for you in the hour, each shredder gets 1 wave per set, and it costs $160/surfer for that hour, you bailing on the takeoff burned up 8 bucks.
Now, surf trips (long-process-type experiences) are all the more special. Imagine camping out on a remote beach with your crew, having timed the trip just right to line up with a swell hitting at the perfect south-south west angle. Then you paddle out during ideal mid-tide, soft wind conditions. You, your friends, and the local surfers at the spot absolutely score!
That beach’s natural reef is something no cement pool and proprietary wave tech could replicate. We gotta protect it. Kinda like how we need to support the galleries that would show “Crossroads” and nurture the minds who will drop the next generation of mind-expanding art, ephemera or not.
We’ve been waiting for someone to bring up the Slater pools! Erin read the William Finnegan piece about them but I haven’t
I love this thinking and writing. Thank you!
great post! For further reading on the topic—the music journalist Liz Pelly has written a bunch of sick and incisive pieces on Spotify and our brains/tastes for the Baffler and has a book I am eagerly awaiting called “Mood Machine” coming out soon that will cover a lot of this terrain too! https://thebaffler.com/authors/liz-pelly
I always enjoy reading Liz, thank you
we need to pine more in the modern age. nice read, thanks.
I'm quite surprised the "Crossroads" soundtrack isn't on ubuweb, but check out "You're No Good" while you're over there https://ubu.com/sound/riley_nogood.html
Damn. In 08 living in NYC a friend invited me to MOMA to see Michael Snow's "Wavelength," a film I'd seen in Annandale that I didn't quite "get" at the time. Not only did it click for me this time, but it was paired with another movie I'd never heard of. And sure enough, bomb explodes on the screen, and the movie was "Crossroads"! Like you I'd never heard of it, knew nothing about it, and it completely blew me away. My friend and I walked out completely stunned and couldn't even talk about it that night, had to pick up the convo the next day to discuss it. And like you I tried to track down the Terry Riley music and couldn't place it. Eventually by chance I did listen to the Riley album Les Yeux Fermes back when you could rip albums via Megafire links and when "Journey From the Death of a Friend" came on, I assumed that was the music until now. But you're saying that actually he composed a score exclusively for "Crossroads"?! Incredible. To this day I've only seen it that one time at MOMA, and in a way I almost don't want to see it again to treasure that experience, a top five moviegoing moment for me. And now you've added a new wrinkle to it. Thank you!
I gotta listen to his les yeux fermes score again! And never seen the Snow, hope I do some time
I set up my own home server which feels like a decent middle ground between awful streaming services and physical media. It's not that hard to set up all things considered and works like a regular streaming service except it's your own media stored on your own server, all you really need is an old computer and a couple hard drives. Still not the same but it definitely feels better streaming a rip of a cd I bought than from Spotify.
whoa sounds pretty tight !