Mrazamataz
Since I wrote about my bout of swine flu, I read an article about how swine flu’s coming back, which I think we can agree is the last thing anyone needs. I absolutely do not want to accidentally summon anything else from 2011 so will tread more carefully.
In 2011 three things of significance to my life happened. 1, I got married, 2, I started in earnest having to spend a lot of my time going to doctors, consultants and hospitals, having investigations and scans and procedures and prescriptions, having repeated unrewarding discussions about the semantic and practical differences between “life-altering pain” and “possible discomfort” and 3, a process that had begun in 2010, I almost completely stopped listening to new music.
By that point I’d already lost all touch with whatever was in the charts – there’s a huge gap where information about massively popular music from the early- to mid-00s should be. A little while ago I found out that despite knowing everything else about Jason Mraz – I once wrote a cease and desist from the South West London branch of the Jason Mraz Ultras for someone I liked, because he had a hat that was a bit like one of Jason Mraz’s hats (if I were you, I wouldn’t rely on me for flirting advice) – I had never, not once, heard one of his songs. I told my boyfriend this, who looked puzzled and said, “Do you mean apart from ‘I’m Yours’?”. Shrug. “What are you talking about? It was the biggest song in the world, for weeks. You couldn’t get away from it.”
He found it and pressed play. I’d never heard this song. He got my best friend involved, who was equally baffled, and asked if I was doing a bit. Both of them, separately, played me ‘I’m Yours’ again. Not only did I not recognise it, but I forgot it as soon as I heard it, so the only possible conclusion is that there is a peculiarity to my brain chemistry that makes me unable to to retain Jason Mraz songs. This has happened with other songs and bands too, but not to the same degree.
But in 2011, I got married, which I shouldn’t have done. He shouldn’t have done it either! We both made a serious miscalculation. Instead of thinking “Isn’t it incredible, how many ways there are to go about being alive, and how different people’s approaches to life, morality etc can be! Isn’t it fascinating and precious, how different this person is from me”, we both thought something along the lines of “I hate how different this person is from me, but not to worry, that can be changed, totally if need be”, and then later “They haven’t changed at all, even though I told them to several times. This is a disaster”. The year before, while still engaged, we had had the M11 Incident. I think I’ve written about it before; I called the John Denver album we’d been listening to on repeat KKK music, I asked to be allowed to play something else, he reluctantly agreed, I put on an Anticon compilation I’d made (Sage Francis, 13 & God, Dosh, Alias & Ehren, Subtle and so on), which he tolerated for one or two tracks before firmly shutting it off. He said, “You know I hate gangster rap”. I should have laughed – I didn’t. I called both his intellectual and listening capacities into question instead. John Denver went back on. Bit by bit, without someone to have boring conversations with about “what we were listening to”, and “if it was better or worse than their last one” and “what it sounded like”, “what it ripped off” and “what wouldn’t even exist without it” etc, I lost the desire to find new things and to add to the limited but still extensive musical encyclopedia I carried in my head. I had friends to talk to about it, but they, like me, were all stuck in the recent past. I made new friends too, mainly online, often through little else other than both loving Cold House by Hood (still, in my view, one of the best records ever made). Over the next decade I always kept up with what The Decemberists, Blonde Redhead, Mogwai and Los Campesinos! were putting out, and every so often heard something out and about that I then listened to properly. This was a girlie era – I listened to Lana (of course), Beach House, Julie Byrne, Frank Ocean, Justin Bieber, Taylor Swift, Carly Rae Jepsen, Tall Ships and Nicki Minaj – but in the main just let what had once been a giant part of my life slide.
There was also a more practical dimension to it, beyond not being allowed to play my gangster rap in the house, which was that the mechanisms that I’d used to find and consume music were disappearing. I’d been a fairly devoted reader of AllMusic, a gigantic, minutely categorised music database founded by an astrologer and folk artist, and populated by a small group of people who had cut their teeth working on zines and other sites of detailed obsession; one of the many valued functions of AllMusic was that you could type in the name of an artist you liked, and it would give you a little list of their influences, similar acts, who they in turn had influenced. It was a self-directed non-algorithmic recommendation method and it rarely failed me. In 2007, it was sold to a corporation and while it still exists, it has never been the same (as few sites that shift from a public service model to a profit-seeking one are). Also, in the mid- to late-00s, one by one the torrenting and file sharing sites got banned or expunged, which more or less scuffed things. My technique had been fairly simple: I torrented everything I heard of, everything that came up on those little AllMusic lists, anything a friend suggested, anything I read about in the still just-about-healthy music press, anything that the lad I was friendly with in my favourite record shop recommended, and anything that the lad I hated from the same shop mentioned too (for spite). If I liked what I heard, then I bought it, always a physical copy, and I carted that giant CD collection through at least fifteen different places I’ve lived. I still have it too, and you can make fun of me if you want but I’m never getting rid of it. As torrenting became harder and good record shops harder to find, buying on spec wasn’t affordable. My technique wasn’t perfect, of course, but my reasoning was that I was still buying an awful lot of it, and I’d argue that it was probably better than how I consume music now. I still buy things but much less frequently – streaming is bad for artists and bad for music across the board, and I have no excuses for using streaming services beyond just having accepted the bribe of convenience. The Apple music library I still have from that time, is, to be honest, suggestive of a mind not operating as it should.
Fast forward though, to the start of 2021. London was still locked down and frozen. The sky was thick gun-metal grey, the air was lightless, there were no shadows on the ground. I started thinking of it as “the bad year, 2021”, before it had even started. I was sick of watching TV, and sick of re-reading old books, but had developed a phobia of reading anything new. What if I didn’t like it, or found it hard to get into? What then? No, I can’t just “not finish it”, because of a complicated fear about books having ghosts, and also because I have only ever abandoned two books and still am not that happy about it. Also there was nothing much to do but walk around, a charming novelty in 2020 and prescribed zoo enclosure enrichment in a zoo described only as “controversial” in 2021, so I decided to set myself a challenge of listening to a new album each day. I didn’t set many parameters except it had to be a new release from that year (but could be by someone I was already familiar with), and there was no point trying anything from the broad Metal umbrella because I know I don’t like it. I asked for recommendations (there I probably should have set at least some parameters, because for whatever reason I seem to come across as someone who might enjoy a band called something like Disembowel Your Uncle, and got a number of suggestions in that vein), and, for the first time in years started reading reviews again. My initial fear that I would get overwhelmed by how much there was, and the sense that the To Listen pile would never, by its nature, get any smaller, proved baseless. I still feel like that with other media – I never watch TV shows when they’re current, because I think that once you start you’ve signed yourself up for potentially a huge percentage of your life trying to form a view about another show about how it sucks to work in a kitchen. I prefer reading and watching things less when they’re out of print and more when they’re out of Discourse – I will, for example, at some point finish The Sopranos, but not yet. I feel the opposite about music. I once read something about how memorising the map of all of London’s routes makes the hippocampi of London taxi drivers grow bigger – the more music I listen to, the more I enjoy it. The limitlessness of it feels nourishing rather than overwhelming, and now, in the third year of daily albums it feels totally routine to do it, and I haven’t skipped a day. This year has been a particularly good year I think – more of that soon.