Keeping Up With Music

lol I'm pretty sure I still haven't heard WAP but honestly haven't particularly connected to anything I've heard from Cardi B. *or* Megan Thee Stallion yet. Haven't even given the new Dylan the time and attention it deserves!

I consciously decided at the beginning of the year that I wasn't going to actively try keeping up with new music this year.

What that really meant was that I wasn't going to put in all the work that I usually do for the sake of creating a long best-of-the-year playlist: scanning Album of the Year for new albums every week, dragging them into an "new albums" playlist, listening to them repeatedly until I have a favorite track (or else I've decided the album isn't for me), scanning unperson's monthly jazz column to see if there are any albums I've missed, occasionally scanning The Singles Jukebox for songs with high scores and maintaining a playlist of those songs, aggregating songs that show up on major publications' year-end lists into yet another playlist and finding more favorites, etc. etc.

I've still heard a bit of new music this year, when I've happened to notice that an artist I like has put something out. But I haven't been systematic about it at all, so a lot has slipped through the cracks.

To be honest, it's been kind of relaxing. I've ended up just listening to a lot of old stuff. At one point I worked on a 1999 playlist. But as the best-of-2020 lists have been coming out, I've found myself wanting to...get a handle on all of it. So I'm not sure yet whether this year is a permanent break from Keeping Up or just a temporary one.

xp The first time I heard WAP was the other day, when I listened to Pitchfork's top songs of 2020 list!

lack of commute has killed my primary listening mode - has been tough to replace it tbh. podcasts have suffered this year too for me.

around the house i put on stuff i already know - too distracting to listen 'actively'

This is absolutely the first year I can remember where not only did I struggle to keep up with music, but I totally forgot about albums I liked from bands that I love. For example, I totally forgot that X released a good record this year. Or, the Dua/Jessie/Roisin glossy nu-disco trio, for example, all albums I really enjoyed and enjoy listening to yet keep forgetting to play. Or Fiona Apple and Kathleen Edwards, two artists I love that released great new comebacks that I love that I just keep forgetting to play. Looking over year-end lists, there is just so much I haven't heard or even heard of, and of the stuff I have heard it's just downright impossible for me to keep straight in my brain, let alone fore of mind. So much music!

Weirdly, I wonder if this has been inadvertently pandemic related. My family is around all the time, but I'm a speaker guy, not a headphone guy, and just haven't been free to blast stuff on the stereo when the mood strikes. Hmm ...

― Josh in Chicago, Tuesday, 15 December 2020 21:59 (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

I feel this post. I was reminded yesterday of the existence of the Eddie Chacon album, which I loved when I first heard it and then promptly forgot about. Dylan too!

I think this year I have listened to as much new music as ever, but in the same way that I struggle a bit to keep track of what happened in which month this year (like, all the jokes that currently it's the 247th of March or whatever), almost all experiences of music have felt more transient, and less amenable to ordering and recollection.

one of the reasons i think tiktok has struck such a nerve and created so many big hits this year is that it helps people create those associations with songs that they aren't having in IRL

Right!

Including that we can't dance to these songs at a club but we can perform/watch tiktok dances.

Dancing at bars, albeit in small numbers, is starting to be allowed again in Australia for the first time since mid-March, and it's amusing to see teh-gays in particular express this sense of pent-up release at finally being able to dance in public to the broadly-recognised gay anthems of 2020 ("Physical", "Rain on Me", "WAP"), almost as if the very existence of these songs and their impact was somehow quasi-spectral until it could be properly acknowledged in that way.

my real name rhymes with and has the exact same number of syllables as "a savage" and the fact I haven't been able to do a karaoke performance of Megan & Beyoncè with my personal spin on it is killing me

xp great post, Tim

this year, probably more than any other, i've listened to the same 10-12 new or new-to-me albums hundreds of times. they were all very good at giving me what i needed in particular moments, and i kept coming back to them. i just didn't feel the need to adopt more, though i did scan through a few new releases here and there. my music listening experience is more and more becoming this reader response thing where every time i listen to the same thing my experience is a little different but no less rich. but the thing has to have sort of passed a few tests for it to get there, lol.

Dancing at bars, albeit in small numbers, is starting to be allowed again in Australia for the first time since mid-March, and it's amusing to see teh-gays in particular express this sense of pent-up release at finally being able to dance in public to the broadly-recognised gay anthems of 2020 ("Physical", "Rain on Me", "WAP"), almost as if the very existence of these songs and their impact was somehow quasi-spectral until it could be properly acknowledged in that way.

very jealous, i miss hearing music in a room with friends. some music just needs to be embodied and shared in social, physical space.

one of the reasons i think tiktok has struck such a nerve and created so many big hits this year is that it helps people create those associations with songs that they aren't having in IRL

Possibly the first thing I've read that's helped me understand tik tok!

there IS too much music out there, it's too readily accessible, and as a consequence it is devalued. I find that to ring true for me personally, one of the ILX champions of crate digging, Google, Soulseek, Discogs, whatever

― the absence of bikes (f. hazel), Thursday, 11 July 2024 16:05 (eight minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

discuss

(i strongly disagree)

when was our crate digging championship exactly?

lil message for all you bedroom pop wannabes: don't release that ep you've been piecing together all these months. you'll merely be devaluing the real musicians

i just don’t have time to keep up. i literally missed almost every Bandcamp Friday earlier this year because I was just too busy ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Maybe this is just me being an old man but I strongly feel that the social context around producing and consuming music has gotten very stale and shitty, partially through the technological changes in music production which mean that most music can be done on headphones by yourself, something that of course accelerated during lockdown, and partially because the styles of music that this sort of production has resulted in don't really lend themselves to live performance very well, so the modes of consumption are very individual and isolated, which of course COVID also accelerated, so in both cases you just don't get very much of the serendipitous clanging together of personalities and styles and informal moments in which great things flourish that you might otherwise get if three different bands are all sharing the same backstage after a show, impromptu jams, shared confidences. I absolutely love Charli XCX but the revelation that she actually can't sing in the way most of us think of singing eg hitting notes kind of drove that home for me recently. Her way of making music only works when somebody is twiddling a knob to get her on pitch. Which is fine of course but could she ever 'jam' with someone else? It would be hard. When I think about the studios at Radio 1, and the musicians who come through, is there ever a moment of chilling out or just fizzing off each other, in the interstices between the interviews and the next press thing? No there is not. I think music needs to get looser, more collaborative, more live. But then again I'm an old man - the next great direction music takes will probably be quite different from what worked in the past!

I just listen to what boxedjoy and one or two other ilxors tell me is good, system works for me

Lol this is true

COVID = not going to the gym = stopped listening to metal/pop/rap and when I started going back I found I just didn't want that music as much anymore. I listened to almost all vinyl during the pandemic and jazz became a much larger percentage of my listening. I also started smoking more pot and wanting music with an indefinable grove.

I am slowly delving back in to metal at the gym, but mostly classics instead of new stuff.

The ILX EOY polls used to be my main source of connecting to new music. Every year I would get at least 3-5 albums and a handful of tracks that would stick with me and become evergreen gym favorites. I have found the last few polls just haven't stuck with me for more than a month or so.

I still love to discover things I haven't heard before, but in most cases these are old things, not new things.

I also turned 50 during the pandemic although I am sure this had nothing to do with this, haha.

grove = groove

Am I even listening to anything anymore? Hearing has almost completely annexed my experience of music.
― pomenitul, Wednesday, July 1, 2020 5:41 PM (four years ago) bookmarkflaglink

Resonates strongly with me, although I feel like I've resolved that by being absolutely ruthless with things that don't immediately excite me and generally letting things rise up to the surface. Even so, I still do not come back to everything I put in my top at the end of the year.
Anything else is like dipping your toe in a meaningless flux - there's no keeping up, only drowning.

It's a sobering and even terrifying feeling to look back at your AOTY lists from just a few years ago and read the names of albums and even artists you don't even recognize

Maybe this is just me being an old man but I strongly feel that the social context around producing and consuming music has gotten very stale and shitty, partially through the technological changes in music production which mean that most music can be done on headphones by yourself, something that of course accelerated during lockdown, and partially because the styles of music that this sort of production has resulted in don't really lend themselves to live performance very well, so the modes of consumption are very individual and isolated, which of course COVID also accelerated, so in both cases you just don't get very much of the serendipitous clanging together of personalities and styles and informal moments in which great things flourish that you might otherwise get if three different bands are all sharing the same backstage after a show, impromptu jams, shared confidences. I absolutely love Charli XCX but the revelation that she actually can't sing in the way most of us think of singing eg hitting notes kind of drove that home for me recently. Her way of making music only works when somebody is twiddling a knob to get her on pitch. Which is fine of course but could she ever 'jam' with someone else? It would be hard. When I think about the studios at Radio 1, and the musicians who come through, is there ever a moment of chilling out or just fizzing off each other, in the interstices between the interviews and the next press thing? No there is not. I think music needs to get looser, more collaborative, more live. But then again I'm an old man - the next great direction music takes will probably be quite different from what worked in the past!

It strikes me that the situation you describe is just the culmination of the way music has been headed since at least the 80's?

I know obv you're not a "it's not REAL instruments" rockist but it feels to me like as soon as you get into the electronic music era things like jam sessions and live concerts (as opposed to club settings) become less important.

Yeah i think you're right. I don't just mean jamming though.. I'm thinking about a kind of informal creative serendipity that the industry structures of earlier eras could facilitate - recording studios, rehearsal spaces, and radio studios as crossroads and nexuses of different sounds and talents who would end up liking each other, having sex with each other, doing drugs together, maybe even making music together. But there are others on this board who can speak accurately about what it's like in this spaces now, and what the opportunities are for this sort of thing these days, and I may be off base.

all of that still very much exists and is actually quite active, it's just not popular music anymore

all of that still very much exists and is actually quite active, it's just not popular music anymore

once more, with feeling

thinking locally, labels like international anthem and drag city have stables of artists that they support on their own releases and also pair/group together to record and then they release the recordings. it's not like stadium music or anything but it is definitely happening and, some might say, popping.

Yeah I was going to mention the London jazz scene as well as a place where young artists often collaborate.

I agree there do seem to be a ton of scenes like that it's just really hard to hear about them

I also object to the inclusion of sex/drugs into the formula. There’s hopefully more professionalism these days??!!!

Forms of popular music gradually becoming folkified in the sense of being local, outside of business models, played for (self) entertainment by friends

Basically my ideal music culture is the union camp jam session in Matewan

Not a lot of sex and drugs on offer there, probably for the best

I guess you haven't seen the director's cut

For me the important distinction isn’t electronic instruments vs acoustic instruments, it’s whether music is performed by a group of people together in real time or if it is assembled after the fact by layering asynchronous tracks. After the fact layering can be done with acoustic recordings and real time collaboration can be done with electronic instruments.

Humanitarian Pause (Tracer Hand) at 8:35 17 Jul 24

Yeah i think you're right. I don't just mean jamming though.. I'm thinking about a kind of informal creative serendipity that the industry structures of earlier eras could facilitate - recording studios, rehearsal spaces, and radio studios as crossroads and nexuses of different sounds and talents who would end up liking each other, having sex with each other, doing drugs together, maybe even making music together. But there are others on this board who can speak accurately about what it's like in this spaces now, and what the opportunities are for this sort of thing these days, and I may be off base.

yeah I still participate and feel generally a part of a scene like this, they evolve and change over time but honestly I've been sustained musically on a local level since I joined my first "real" band in 1999

like here's something that happened this weekend, big benefit for a woman who sadly has ALS

https://www.instagram.com/p/C9aE5zzJJVX/?igsh=MTh3bm51dXExMDU1aA==

Very cool!

lil message for all you bedroom pop wannabes: don't release that ep you've been piecing together all these months. you'll merely be devaluing the real musicians

― imago

lj what you or anybody else on ilx says doesn't influence my creative process

i don't make music, i write, but in fact i don't write personally, because, well, i don't have an audience. if you want to know why i write novels here, it's because i don't write at length anywhere else. does it _benefit me_ to write the words to a sermon that no-one will hear? yeah, absolutely. am i inclined to put in all that fucking work? no, i'm not. creating things is hard. i'd rather just listen to the sound of the rain.

which is to say that i don't read f. hazel's statement as prescriptive, but descriptive. i mean i've mostly stopped listening to music. i'm too busy. i have too much else going on. i certainly don't have time to keep up with it all. on top of that, i don't even use spotify, so, like, the main source the people i know find music from is something i deliberately don't participate in.

I just listen to what boxedjoy and one or two other ilxors tell me is good, system works for me

but I just listen to what ILM tells me is good!

system still works, obv

I did just dl a bunch of stuff from soulseek based on the Quietus' mid-year list and most of it is pretty good, will get to the ILM mid-year list in the coming weeks.

i haven't bothered to "keep up" as such for a whole gang o' years but i mostly manage to hear a few things i never heard before every day (real easy to do these days obv)

(things i never heard before might not = actually new things of course)

I just hit the 7 charity shops within bus distance and buy whatever is newer than 2004 and looks listenable

Ok 2002

i've been struggling with this question for a while. i've developed a listening process that prioritizes discovery. it works, i hear a lot of new stuff and old stuff that's new to me, filing away the best stuff in various playlists. and i do get a thrill from discovering something that's new (to me) and incredible. but i've been having second thoughts about the whole thing--plowing through new releases in an effort to hear as much as possible limits the type of emotional connection to music that i had when i was a kid and i'd play the same album 20 times in a row.

I don't really try to keep up anymore. I mainly just read sites like ILM which put me in a position to be exposed to things, and then trust in chance or whim to pull me in this or that direction. It's enough to find a few things which reward closer listening.

My primary exposure to contemporary pop music for years came from working in a school but I really came to hate the sound of modern pop music, it's default vocal performance styles, the production clichés that make everything sound like the free music you can use to jazz up your YouTube tutorial. I know this is what everyone says when they lose interest so I'm not claiming that this is any sort of insight into the music itself, just that its receded in my interest into ambient irritation to be ignored.

obsessively trying to stay on top of everything felt like being prey to hype after a while

If something doesn't move me in some way on the first listen, I probably won't bother with it again unless I see a few people writing or talking about what moved them about it in a convincing way. Even then, my initial impression rarely budges very much. I laboured through so much average music in my 20s, trying to find something to like about it because smart and cool people said they liked it. I don't really have that time or energy any more.

as long as you're aware of "wap"

can't help feeling there would be a slightly middling to average jizz fest on ilm if say The Necks released an album as brilliant as the criminally neglected Tapscott's The Dark Tree

Maybe this is just me being an old man but I strongly feel that the social context around producing and consuming music has gotten very stale and shitty, partially through the technological changes in music production which mean that most music can be done on headphones by yourself, something that of course accelerated during lockdown, and partially because the styles of music that this sort of production has resulted in don't really lend themselves to live performance very well, so the modes of consumption are very individual and isolated, which of course COVID also accelerated, so in both cases you just don't get very much of the serendipitous clanging together of personalities and styles and informal moments in which great things flourish that you might otherwise get if three different bands are all sharing the same backstage after a show, impromptu jams, shared confidences.

For me the important distinction isn’t electronic instruments vs acoustic instruments, it’s whether music is performed by a group of people together in real time or if it is assembled after the fact by layering asynchronous tracks

great thread

I used to take some pride in keeping up, not just because it helped me build an enormous "collection" of spotify playlists, but also because it seemed a way of staying culturally curious, open, hungry really

since cancelling my spotify subscription I've found it more difficult to keep up, but also less attractive, even if browsing through new releases kept my ears attuned, it was also superficial and not representative of how I want to interact with music

out of old habit, I started browsing the p4k top 2025 songs but with some indifference, and found many of the songs to be sad iterations of genres that have long lost their spark for me, which is a good sign I guess that my ears are no longer open to this kind of browsing

I start thinking about how layered music as opposed to music created in real time maybe just doesn't appeal much to me anymore and remind myself that these days my preferred mode of listening is going to shows, small shows at cheap venues with artists improvising, and that for home listening I'm content with listening to a few select albums over and over

and then I get to the Yaya Bey track at #81 which is everything I don't want to listen to but then it just grabs me and I listen to it over and over and it's a perfect little midi bop and I open Soulseek to add it to my collection

There's just so much. So much this year. So much last year. So much that is the year before. The decade. So many "classics".

So many niches and margins. Sub genres.

I think i may not be an adequately critical listener cos i like so much, or would like to hear one day.

But i do love the enthusiasm / dedication here and look forward to listening to your recommends... Some day