The Tyranny of Familiarity

When I was growing up I adored year-end recaps, countdowns, and the like. I held publishers of best of lists in rarified air - these were timeless artifacts, I thought, that would serve as gateways to the past, sometimes to be cherished as much as the subjects themselves, assembled only by those most qualified to create such things. From time to time a foreign list would cross my path bearing dispatches from alternate realities. I transcribed them by hand and tried to commit them to memory. Year-end lists were an event, but so were the recommended discographies I'd find browsing listening guides and omnibus publications at the book store. I soaked in as much of it as I could along the way. All of these outlets provided what I was missing: Information about what might exist, out there, somewhere beyond what I was aware of.

I couldn't tell you if it was a matter of resistance or ignorance (both?), but this is the first year I've taken to lapping up music criticism in podcast form. In symphony with doing so, I'm finding something of a renewed sense of adventure to exploring year-end and best of lists. And the more I've been browsing through this stuff, the more I go to thinking about it - what might be so different about this year? How did things change from when I was young, and when? When did I lose that hunger for exploring the unknown?

As I inched my way out of my teenage years, the impact of the scribes I once held in such high regard softened, soon to be replaced by online publications and blogs. The democratization of publishing opened the door for all to share ideas with whoever was willing to read to them. Everyone who wanted to now had a say in the arena; myself included. Funny enough, I suspect the moment my impression of best of lists began to change was probably when I first published my own through my school's newspaper. I started blogging around that time, too, and within a few years was putting out all sorts of lists, hoping to curry favor as much with search engines as any potential reader. I wrote plenty along the way, sometimes seeking an odd brand of nuance in the format by compiling such absurd lists as "The Top 10 Musical Performances on Late Night TV of 2007." I suppose that as I grew tired of participating in the year-end tradition, so too did I seem to tire of paying much attention to others' lists as well.

In attempting to ride along in the passenger seat while others shared their own favorites from the year, I began projecting outward some of the issues that bothered me about my own process. The sausage of best of lists is typically an amalgamation of incomplete components. How many new albums does even the most culturally travelled, broadly exposed music critic listen to with dedicated focus in a given year? How many times must one listen to them before running these pieces of music through an ever-changing litmus test of personal taste to declare their relative superiority or inferiority to one another? How many works can anyone speak about with expert-level insight in any given year? And what's to be made of the result? What gives them - me - any of us "he right to call something "the best"?! This is the kind of shit that goes on in between my ears sometimes.

Screenshots from Spotify's "2024 Wrapped"

An understandable extension of this is one that's come through the broad adoption of listening primarily by way of app. With the medium comes access to data, and from data certain narratives can be drawn. A few years back Spotify started its year-end Wrapped recaps, highlighting individual listening patterns by way of data funnel. "While it's not a competition," one screen on this year's installment reads, "There is a leaderboard." This sort of thing emphasizes a part of the streaming economy that many rightly take offense to: honoring metrics (metrics, I'll add, which are entirely opaque) as a prime indicator of merit. The more dazzling the statistic, the greater its implication. While the point might be to highlight listening behavior, in practice Wrapped has become something of a surrogate best of list for most, emphasizing play count as an indicator of endorsement. The result is something of a fragmented collage, referencing bits and pieces of moments that tend to paint an incomplete picture. Or at least that's true for me.

Take, for example, my "top artists" this year. Rancid is fourth on my Wrapped list, which most certainly stems from having them on in the background while working around the house one day, inspired to check out some of their later-stage recordings after hearing a Bandsplain episode about the band. There is a specific period of time where I was a huge Rancid fan. I got to see them on the Warped Tour when I was in high school and they contributed greatly to the soundtrack of my youth. But would I say Rancid was my fourth most "top artist" of 2024? No shade, but absolutely not. And in truth, I don’t even think Rancid is actually even my fourth most played band of the year.

This past summer I cancelled my premium subscription to Spotify. I was a paying subscriber since sometime in 2013, but hit a wall with some of the company's rhetoric and decided to try something else. I'm in no position to claim ethical righteousness or anything like that, as I merely jumped rails over to YouTube (but if you're at all curious about what it's been like - the user experience of YouTube Music is a complete mess and I cannot stress enough that if ad-free video content wasn't part of YouTube Premium's overall package, there's no way I would still be a subscriber to its music product). Not surprisingly, YouTube Music also has its own year-end-round-up-thing, and not surprisingly it's equally as silly as Spotify's. Over on that side of the divide, Type O Negative and Nick Cave were, by YouTube's calculation, my most played artists of 2024 (or at least since I left Spotify). Those probably make a little more sense, to be honest.

Play count is one thing, but one aspect these summaries can never capture is the impact of a work. For example, one album completely absent from either wrap-up is the Cure's Songs of a Lost World, which I'd unquestionably rank among my favorite albums of the year. It isn't something I can see myself returning to casually, nor is it something I've listened to in whole more than a few times through, but when I did it impacted me as much as any other piece of music might have in 2024. It's an unsettling realization, all of this. I keep plenty of music on repeat throughout the year, but more and more I'm finding that what I tend to return to most often typically fails to be what moves, inspires, or challenges me most.

Screenshots from YouTube Music's "2024 Recap"

The other day I saw an enthusiastic post about an album I'd never heard of, listened to it, and was sort of baffled by the internal response which followed. It was a creative and clearly skillful work, but not something that falls remotely in line with what I tend to listen to. My tolerance for remaining attentive to it, however, just wasn't there. Or at least it wasn't there in the way I think it used to be. I feel like I used to be more open to work that doesn't immediately agree with my pre-existing preferences. A big part of my reaction showed up in the form of self-judgement for how pedestrian my sense of exploration has become. Here are others, I thought, existing in a world full of meaning and wonder that I don't quite understand, while my own year-end listening receipts depict someone plagued by the tyranny of familiarity.

This week's playlist update features a mix of songs which were all featured predominantly near the top of my most-played round-ups for the year. You won't find any Rancid, but - for good or bad - you will hear plenty of representation from genres that have historically been in heavy rotation for me for the better part of my life. There's nothing wrong with that, at all, but if this recent practice has awakened anything in particular within me, I think it's a desire to reach further beyond what I'm used to in the coming year. A new goal has presented itself, which is to listen to more music I don't understand and wouldn't otherwise listen to if I weren't making myself do it. I'm going to take a few weeks away from this space to close out 2024, but look forward to seeing how the mission statement continues to expand whenever things get going again.

Listen to Razz Dazz Weekly on Spotify or YouTube

1. Simple Minds "Theme For Great Cities"
2. Fred again.. feat. Baby Keem "leavemealone"
3. Mason & Princess Superstar "Perfect (Exceeder) (1991 Remix)
4. Yeat & Lil Wayne "Lyfestylë"
5. Glass Beams "Mahal"
6. L'Orange & Namir Blade "Nihilism"
7. Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds "Frogs"
8. deadmau5 feat. Skylar Grey "My Heart Has Teeth"
9. Four Tet "Daydream Repeat"
10. Chase & Status feat. Clementine Douglas "Say The Word"
11. UNKLE "If We Don't Make It (DJ Nature Remix)"
12. Lil Simz "SOS"
13. Kendrick Lamar "Not Like Us"
14. Hail Mary Mallon "Dollywood"
15. Hot Chocolate "Every 1's a Winner"

All They Had to Give

File this one under: Things that an editor would probably encourage me to workshop a bit more before printing. What would a good blog post be without at least a little navel-gazing though? For the better part of a year I've been ruminating on something I wrote about "local" music because it didn't quite feel right once I put it out there. I think I meant it the way I wrote it, but sometimes the things you mean in the moment don't turn out to be honest representations of a message you're trying to communicate. In these kind of situations, the spirit of the words might come across, but the message itself comes out a little sideways. At least that was the case with me when I wrote, "The health and vibrancy of a city or state’s music scene is directly influenced by those it relies upon to champion and support it. To not care for local creative work is to communicate that it’s better off existing elsewhere."

One of a couple issues I have with this is: what exactly is the word "care" supposed to mean there?

I'm not sure I even really had a sense at the time I wrote it. To rely on the spirit of the message, I think what I was hoping to do was signal the value in celebrating local artists, but... actually, there I go again. "Signal the value in celebrating local artists"? This is getting a little dicey. Let me try to get to my point from a different angle.

I saw a social media post yesterday; a version of which I've seen no fewer than dozens of times over the years. You might recognize it. It goes, "Following someone = $0. Liking a post = 1 second. Replying to a post = 10 seconds. Supporting doesn't have to cost anything." Yes, there is no financial cost to commenting on someone's social media post, though I might add a "Yeah, but..." So here it is: "Yeah, but even a small army of individuals dedicated to following, liking, and replying isn't going to pay someone's bills." I'm not dismissing the value that can come from the compounded impact of small public gestures, but in terms of creative work being shared online: if the end of the transaction between someone creating work and someone consuming and enjoying that work is a only ever a follow, like, or comment, that's creating an imbalance. This is one of the reasons curmudgeon musicians aren't wrong when they gripe on about how the digital economy has stripped artists of their means to earn an income: Because posts like this, no matter their earnestness, fail to value the cost of creative work. They don't "care" in the "right" way.

When I was growing up, my dad helped run a non-profit, working with transitioning homeless youth off the street. I gained plenty of life lessons with all the different worlds I was exposed to through that project, but one stands out now that has nothing to do with the work itself. For whatever reason, I was in the office one night and mail was being opened. I think it was around the holidays and I remember watching as letters were being sliced open, including some with checks from donors. I couldn't tell you what exactly led up to the moment, but I remember seeing one that was for a modest amount of money. My memory says it was $2, which even back then wasn't a hell of a lot. Ever the smart-ass, I made a comment like "That's it?!" I couldn't tell you who it was, maybe it was my dad or maybe someone else who was working there, but they looked at me and said, "Maybe that's all they had to give."

"Care" doesn't mean the same thing to different people, nor does it mean the same thing to the same person at all times. There have been times of my life when I've paid to see local musicians play live, and bought merch, dinner, parking, and tipped the waitstaff, while there have also been times where all I had in me was a passing like on Instagram. One of the things I want to make space for, as this store idea continues to develop, is a sense of care for local music in a way that genuinely makes a difference. I know I want to add actual value to local artists beyond any token gesture of adding songs to playlists very few people will ever see, let alone hear, and I want it to be something more than a bin in the back of the store with a stack of forgotten albums. But what form that needs to take isn't quite clear to me yet. I have a few other gripes with the particular piece of writing that inspired this thought, but what I'm grateful for is that it helped me ask questions about what level of support I'm capable of delivering when it comes to something I purport to care about. How can I show up in a meaningful way?

This week's playlist is littered with "local" music. "Local" to me, probably doesn't quite mean quite what it means to you, however. Over the past two years I ran through a self-imposed crash course in the Iowa music scene (and I have the playlists to prove it), and this week's mix includes recent tracks from a small selection who stood out to me along the way. A wide spectrum of tastes are represented here, ranging from rap and hip-hop with B.Well to Big Teo The Trap Man and NickWit2Ks to Bo Ramsey's grizzled twang to Early Girl's spicy garage fuzz to the electronic post-punk of Mr. Softheart. For over a quarter of my life though, I lived down in Tennessee, and for this week's update I figured I'd share some (relatively) recent releases from "local" Nashville artists, as well, including music from Starlito, Gee Slab, Super Duper, and JOTA ESE. (For anyone looking to explore those further I, once again, have some playlists to help you on your way.) The mix also includes a swell of psych in the form of "The Glory I" by Moline's Condor and Jaybird, taken from the band's 2020 album The Glory. If the latter toots your horn and you'd like to get your hands on a copy of The Glory for yourself, I have a few copies of it up over on Discogs.

Listen to Razz Dazz Weekly on Spotify or YouTube

1. Gee Slab feat. AndreWolfe & Namir Blade "TALK TO ME NICE"
2. Denzel Curry feat. TiaCorine & A$AP Ferg "HOT ONE"
3. Starlito feat. Tha Landlord, Don Trip & Propain "Ultimate Team/Road to Glory"
4. B.Well "Darling"
5. Underworld "Techno Shinansen"
6. Super Duper feat. Daniella Mason "Silver Lining"
7. Salt Fox "STARS"
8. Big Teo The Trap Man & NickWit2Ks "Sacrifices"
9. Bo Ramsey "Down To Bastrop"
10. Mr. Softheart "It Happened Like This"
11. Early Girl "STR8"
12. Condor & Jaybird "The Glory I"
13. RIFF & The HEIST "Lost Souls"
14. JOTA ESE "Your Love Makes Me A Wiener"
15. Flying Lotus "Ingo Swann"