Content Nausea No. 12: Instant Disassembly
Mamacita, catch me now as I sink...
Welcome to the 12th edition of Content Nausea. Two weeks ago, I attempted to write about the 10-year anniversary of my first New York weekend. It was supposed to be poignant, but I ran out of steam. If you are here and don’t know why, here is the welcome post.
The weather that day was probably pretty similar to what it was 10 years later. It’s August in the Mid-Atlantic, so it’s hot and sticky and miserable. No one should be outside. I probably went for a run that morning on Aug. 22, 2009. There was no motivation to put myself into the sun on Aug. 22, 2019.
But in the late afternoon — I think I was invited to go swimming at somebody’s house but was waffling on it and ultimately didn’t go because I wanted to reorganize the music on my new external hard drive — Anna was in her room listening to records, and she put on Post-Nothing by Japandroids. It is safe to say that by the time she got to “Sovereignty,” the penultimate song on the album, my interest was, uh, piqued.
Just check out my Facebook statuses that day and in the days after:
For a 17-year-old, the raw emotion present on Post-Nothing — not to mention the emotion on Celebration Rock for a 20-year-old — cut right to my core. These were the songs that I wish I could have written. These were the songs that I wish I could played. These were the songs that I felt described me right at that moment.
I wanted to be far from home tonight. I didn’t want to worry about dying and just wanted to worry about the sunshine girls. “Wet Hair” wanted to make me run through a wall, even if the lyrics on SongMeanings.net were consistently wrong. I wanted to be crazy/forever. All of the songs about being drunk and on the ground and beaten down by the world? Sure! I’d never had a real sip of alcohol at that point, but I thought that’s what it would feel like (and it has, at certain points).
It is so hard to feel discovery like that anymore. The vessel — an older sibling with better taste — is a bit of a cliche, but the organic nature of hearing something, liking it, finding out what it was and then becoming obsessed with it is something that’s so hard to experience anymore. I saw Hoops at Shaky Knees in 2017, and that was a discovery that spurred an obsession.
The Japandroids obsession continued into summer 2010 (you can read about that below!) and then into 2011 and then 2012 and then on and on eternally. Near to the Wild Heart of Life didn’t quite hit as hard as Post-Nothing or Celebration Rock, but honestly, what could?
[Excuse to post the video for “The House That Heaven Built” featuring a cameo from Anastassia.]
Those two albums — Post-Nothing, especially — are the sounds of hearts being ripped open and spilled out. It’s an unsustainable way to be or live. But for a 17-year-old hearing “Sovereignty” through a wall at the end of summer before his final year of youth? It cuts through the noise.
The relationship between streaming and music is fraught in general from a financial perspective, but it’s also rather fraught personally. When I dive back into my last.fm charts — a great Friday night activity, if you were wondering — I can see how my listening habits have changed over the past few years.
When I look at monthly charts from back in the early 2010s, there are plenty of songs from one album clustered together at the top. Around 2015, it shifts to being a mix of songs. That’s when I pretty much stopped using iTunes and shifted the bulk of my listening to Spotify.
I feel like I’ve become a more impulsive listener. My No. 2 artist in 2018, according to the Spotify year-end report, was The Wonder Years, who I have no memory of really listening to prior to last year because I looked down upon pop punk and emo revival and whatever else you want to call it. I listened to Suburbia I’ve Given You All and Now I’m Nothing almost exclusively on my drives to work last fall. I figured out how to time it up to hit the songs I wanted to hear to psych myself up for another day of toiling in late capitalism. I finally felt stability in Philadelphia and wanted to hammer away at an album where I could learn the contours of the references and embrace them when I walked around Center City. That’s another essay for another time during football season.
I blame Spotify for the ease of just hammering away at a playlist or an album. Last week, I fell into basking in the glow by Oso Oso off the recommendation of a colleague, and it hit hard. It’s been hard to stop listening to it. “the view” and “a morning song” made it onto the 082k19 playlist, and others will probably pop up in the coming months. It gives me a slight bit of anxiety to be so thoroughly entranced by an album at this point in my life. I know there is so much more out there that I haven’t listened to yet and that I want to listen to and that I think I need to listen to. It’s a dumb internal pressure.
I thought about basking in the glow in the shower on Friday morning before a day of interminable driving, and I projected the number of times I would listen to the album at around 4 (though I had plenty of podcasts to catch up on). And it led me to interrogate whether I was being unfair to Spotify. I probably am.
I opened up my last.fm charts once I dried off and got dressed — there were more important things to do, but here we are — and filtered out June 2010. It’s a month I regard as a golden age of sorts because of the seemingly infinite vastness of the internet and the availability of music and just the feeling of discovery. It thrilled me. And here is what the chart looks like:
(Nice.)
The only thing that seems pretty clear is that I was listening to the aforementioned Post-Nothing a bunch — which tracks because I had just seen Japandroids for the first time at Sasquatch at the end of May — but the top two tracks caught my attention. And yeah, it made me realize I’ve always been like this when it comes to listening to music. Spotify hasn’t really changed that much for me.
I went to orientation at Maryland in early June — during Senior Week, of course — and both “Younger Us” and “Post-Acid” had dropped in the days or week before. I somehow ended up in a single in Cumberland Hall, while everyone else had roommates, and being the incredibly social butterfly that I am, I spent a significant portion of the evening listening to those two songs back-to-back on a lime green iPod Nano while texting friends who were in Ocean City. That’s what I did on the first night I ever spent in College Park.
So not much has changed. A month ago, I made and quickly deleted a playlist that featured “Supercut” by Lorde and “We Could Die Like This” by The Wonder Years and nothing else, and I listened to it on repeat for 15 minutes or so (before realizing the folly of the exercise) in the shower. In July, I went through the mix CDs in my car and transferred them to Spotify playlists. Most were from Summer 2010, and it made me realize my listening has always been more playlist-oriented than I’ve been willing to give it credit for. So yeah, Spotify is bad and Apple Music is bad and lots of other things are bad, too, but there might be another area I can direct my blame — which should probably be reframed as “energy” — when it comes to unpacking my relationship with how I listen to music.
Some things I wrote this week
The Eagles react to Andrew Luck’s sudden retirement
Zach Ertz reflects on the abrupt end of his friend’s career
Lots of Penn State in this post
Some other things I read or listened to or watched or thought about
Emily gets a special birthday shoutout after a good weekend in New York. Here’s a list of all the songs I attempted to do during karaoke. Some went well, others didn’t, and s/o to Emily, Carolina, Bryce, etc. for saving me:
“Memory” by Sugarcult
“Ocean Avenue” by Yellowcard
“State of Grace” by Taylor Swift
“Cut Your Hair” by Pavement
“Stay Useless” by Cloud Nothings (lol)
“Wasted Days” by Cloud Nothings (LOL)
I also did an awful job of jumping on “Debaser” by the Pixies, too!
OK, back to your regularly scheduled links.
Why people are booing the Phillies in South Philly this year; the people who bind baseball summers.
The 082k19 playlist is shaping up to be good, and it will be done next week.
Some heavy rotation in recent weeks:
Lover by Taylor Swift
So Much Fun by Young Thug
Dookie by Green Day
Patience by Mannequin Pussy
It’s a solid end to summer.
Andrew Luck doesn’t owe us anything in his retirement by Brian Phillips; Joe Posnanski on watching Priest Holmes sacrifice everything; Drew Magary on what Luck means.
They want you to enlist. They want you to serve your team for God and country. That is the blueprint. The NFL has always been in love with its war metaphors. So it’s fitting that the league now finds itself existentially lost when trying to deal with the consequences of REAL human wreckage—of players discovering that this sport will kill them, and it will kill them faster the longer they play it. The NFL doesn’t want players like that. They want something beyond mere passion. They want players too obsessed to see the danger, or to feel the pain. They want you, pardon the expression, brain damaged. Andrew Luck knew better than to give his entire life to this league. He won’t be the last. In some critical ways, he is merely the first.
I went to see Oso Oso on Sunday night, and it was as advertised:
I severely underestimated the sing-a-long factor here, and there are plenty of true fans. Still need to make a playlist with the setlist from the night, though.
Drinking White Claw is pretty fun!
All these groups have lived much of their adult life under the aesthetic tyranny of Instagram-determined good taste. After craft cocktails, funky IPAs, and attempts to acquire an affinity for whiskey neat, maybe nothing tastes better than giving up.
Digital media in 2019: Not great!
Hanif Abdurraqib absolutely destroys.
I don’t know how to best articulate that, so I’m hoping that you have perhaps felt it. I am hoping that you are not feeling it now, but have felt it before.
Dynamics in sports and the legacy of slavery.
Gorilla vs. Bear’s DEEP SUMMER 2019 mix.
Jenny Odell on swimming holes.
A unique approach to baseball; an Orioles draft bust that I attempted to profile in 2013, but this is better.
Perhaps the most gutting read of 2019 by Kent Babb in The Washington Post.
I finished Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino this week. There were so many passages on so many topics that stuck with me, but I jotted this one down because it feels relevant right now:
The internet is still so young that it's easy to retain some subconscious hope that it all might still add up to something. We remember that at one point this all felt like butterflies and puddles and blossoms, and we sit patiently in our festering inferno, waiting for the internet to turn around and surprise us and get good again. but it won't. The internet is governed by incentives that make it impossible to be a full person while interacting with it. In the future, we will inevitably be cheapened.
OK, wait, I’m going to share this one, too:
And one of the most soul-crushing things about the Trump era reveals itself: to get through it with any psychological stability—to get through it without routinely descending into an emotional abyss—a person's best strategy is to think mostly of himself, herself. As wealth continues to flow upward, as Americans are increasingly shutout of their own democracy, as political action is constrained into online spectacle, I have felt so many times that the choice of this era is to be destroyed or to morally compromise ourselves in order to be functional—to be wrecked, or to be functional for reasons that contribute to the wreck.
Putting your union affiliation in your Tinder bio.
Thank you for reading the 12th edition of Content Nausea. Please tell me if there are any typos or what you liked about this. It will get better. I am trying to make it better.
Mamacita, into pieces I fall
Oh, you did your heart no favors
Darling, when you taught me to crawl
Don’t beseech me for the answers you seek
Oh, I kept explaining that I was too tired
To continue to speak
—D.G.