On A Subject That No-one Else Has Written About, Not Even Once (Part one)
(it's about music)
In 2010, I almost completely stopped listening to new music. This was an abrupt event rather than a gradual process, but paradoxically one that I wasn’t aware of until I found myself bragging some years later at a party that not only did I love discovering new things to listen to despite my advanced age, but that I had won a bet with a friend by guessing correctly every one of Pitchfork’s top 10 Albums of the Year, putting the first Fleet Foxes album at the top. There was a pause from the person I was boring with this information, who then said ‘won’t this have been in, like, 2008.’ There is a lesson here: at a certain time in a person’s life, a year ceases to be a large block-like unit, and instead something that joins up with other years, gaining momentum and falling away under you. After this point the passing of time resists true comprehension, and resolves itself instead in nostalgia and horror. The second lesson is you should never take amphetamines with strangers.
There were lots of reasons for the sudden falling off of my interest in new music, some dull and prosaic, some interesting if you have a prurient interest in the things that go wrong in other people’s lives. I do, which is why I like to read collections of personal essays and then complain about them in private. If you would like to know a selection of some of these reasons, please go to paragraph 3! If you don’t care, then it’s time to skip to paragraph 5, where I will be talking some more about music. If you don’t like personal essays written in Jenny Offill-like fragments, that really is a shame, because I do.
It was also in 2010 that I began the tedious process of trying to work out why my previously perfect health had deteriorated to the point that I was spending days in bed in the kind of pain that makes you both unable to move very far and the kind of bored that isn’t sated or even soothed by things that once brought joy. I couldn’t read, or listen to music or watch good TV shows or films, certainly not anything I hadn’t seen or heard hundreds of times before. I lay in bed and wondered what I had done to my body to cause it to betray me like this. Deep down, I knew the answer and pretended I didn’t. I watched teatime quiz shows and prodded at my phone. It took up all my time, all my mental energy and all my self pity. The second reason was that it suddenly seemed an impossible task to keep on top of new music - in the past this was something I’d actively enjoyed but no longer. There just seemed to be so much of it! Too much! Knowing and caring about it was incompatible with my lifestyle (watching The Chase, and then Pointless, and Eggheads, moving my legs slightly when they got pins and needles, gritting my teeth against the pain dragging its claws up and down my abdomen). This happens with age, people said. That’s fine, I said, but I’m only in my twenties. Am I culturally out to pasture now, will I spend the rest of my life listening to things I listened to as a child and teenager and calling products by their old names? Was I now a Marathon bar of a cultural consumer? The third reason was that my partner at the time and I had wildly different tastes. After two nasty rows, one about his (awful) reaction to the death of MCA and the other after a long car ride listening to John Denver and Donovan on rotation where I threw a tantrum and called it KKK music, I elected to decide that he just had part of his emotional interface missing, and for that matter his hearing too. Did he know what music was? Couldn’t say! There was no proof either way. Then as now I thought of music as the truly collaborative art, part of a project of understanding that required detaching yourself from introspective impulses and looking outwards. Music is collaborative, whether it’s sharing new things you’ve found, bonding over things you love, making it, huddling (possibly) with your friend at an afters listening to Golden Skans (possibly!!!) on repeat, agreeing that it is a misunderstood genre classic, forgetting you’ve said so and saying it again five minutes later. If you’re trying to listen and discover alone, then a paradox takes hold. It is lonelier than anything else, even mysterious chronic pain and the investigations, surgeries and guinea pig-style medications that follow.
The only thing less interesting than hearing about other people’s pain is hearing about other people’s dreams, and even this doesn’t hold because I don’t mind hearing about those. Pain defies good description, and chronic pain has no respect for social convention. Any kind of liberation or political work around it by necessity has to centre social care and access to a combination of treatments and services that make it possible for disabled and chronically ill people to lead dignified and rich lives; it is detailed, necessary and tedious work, and doesn’t lend itself well to the limited capacities and internal norms of social media. It is hard to write a marketing document for, especially in an environment where permanent novelty and extremity is how attention is paid for. Uninteresting things, or things that you believe you have seen said before that are nevertheless true and urgent have little to no purchase, which is something worth remembering the next time you see some peculiar claim about the nature of ableism and how that structures the lives of the people it affects. So it is as it often has been; the people at the sharpest ends are crowded out by self absorption, and the people whose needs are the least urgent are the most able to drag the spotlight onto themselves. Once upon a time we might have called this hysteria. Maybe hysteria could have a comeback.
Back to music! The first album I ever bought was Garbage by Garbage, and the first single was I Wouldn’t Normally Do This Kind of Thing by the Pet Shop Boys. When I was at school, the independent radio station XFM (which had only recently become a legal and regular broadcast) was acquired by Capital Radio, and radically changed its output. In response, my friend A and I held a funeral for it (hysteria! It’s back and it’s beautiful!) at the back of our classroom on one rainy lunchtime. After saying a few words for the station that had introduced us to among others Mogwai, Arab Strap, Belle & Sebastian, Boards of Canada, Missy Elliott, Slint, Jurassic 5, Squarepusher, Aphex Twin, Elliott Smith, Godspeed You! Black Emperor and so on, we burned an XFM sticker that I’d peeled off my homework diary on one of the desks. It didn’t blaze up in the Viking glory we’d hoped for, and instead curled into plastic-scented embers and grey ash. It didn’t set off the smoke alarms, which perhaps should have been more of a worry than it was. When our form tutor returned after lunch, he shook his head at us and told us to clear it up.
Before then I’d mainly listened to guitar music. A’s father and mine took turns taking us to gigs and standing at the back waiting to bring us home again. I taped the Top 40 off the radio, and kept a library of curated VHS tapes with clips of music videos and live performances recorded off TV. I kept a blank tape in my stereo at all times, ready to hit record at any time. I made little card cases covered in drawings for all these tapes, and gave them to friends and later to boys as presents, with mixed reactions. One of them has a fragment of a live Mogwai set; another has the only chart appearance of ‘Flagpole Sitta’, my favourite song when I was thirteen and now incredibly well known as the Peep Show theme song.
Over the years I instituted a LinkedIn rule and diversified my genre portfolio. At university I made friends with the guy who ran the tiny union record shop, who stocked it entirely to his own esoteric tastes in post rock, alt hip hop, shoegaze, post folk and electro and once had a public row with a first year who had been coming in daily asking if he was ever going to get in the Killers album. He yelled at this kid that the Killers were a flash in the pan and no-one would be listening to them in five years. I think of that guy from time to time, and about how he used to email me when they got in a new Warp or Anticon selection and I hope that every time he hears a karaoke rendition of ‘Mr Brightside’ he starts the same row.
Post rock and post folk? ‘Alt hip hop’? Am I a genre bore, the worst kind of person to get hold of the speaker at a party? Will she hunch protectively over the phone barking ‘be QUIET, the drop is only in 4 minutes’? Maybe. However; here are three of my most treasured musical memories:
i. Listening to Jeff Buckley’s ‘Hallelujah’ with my university flatmates in the last week of my first term, the lights off so the fairy lights burned, watching the snow outside.
ii. Dancing to ‘Take A Look Around’ by Limp Bizkit at my friend Billy’s wedding.
iii. At Carly Rae Jepsen with my boyfriend and a selection of The Girls (gender neutral) this summer just gone, waiting for the best bit of ‘Cut to the Feeling’, squeezing my eyes shut and flinging my head back like a wolf howling at the moon, everyone, everyone, clenched fists in the air: ah-ah-AHHHH.That is the end of Part 1.