Content Nausea No. 49: Always Back In Town
Always back in town, always at your door, always marking days off the calendar
Welcome to the 49th edition of Content Nausea. You can read No. 48 right here. Please let me know what you think. Thank you for being here. Here is the welcome blog.
I’m still putting together my year-end post and want some reader feedback on your years. Here’s a quick survey on 2020.
Back in spring 2018, I made a Spotify playlist that never really got off the ground. It was called “new construction type beat,” and the lone song that ever landed on it was “Hypnotized” off Tory Lanez’s 2018 album MEMORIES DON’T DIE. Eventually, I deleted it.
I had spent the previous couple months walking by the construction of these seven units on Frankford Avenue in Fishtown that were among the ugliest buildings I had ever seen. Here’s one that was on the end next to a similarly ugly unit that was built later:
Too many materials, too many textures, too ugly, probably too expensive.
Fishtown, obviously, underwent some extreme gentrification in the past decade, a prime feature of which — besides the expensive rents — is the construction.
You know the type of buildings I’m talking about. I don’t need to describe them in detail. You see what’s above. You’ve probably seen something similar in your neighborhood. When Williamsburg was getting developed in the early 2010s, there was a genre of this building that I liked to refer to as “space condos.” (Full disclosure: I lived in one of these shoddily constructed buildings that shook whenever a large truck drove by for like a year, but it was not that ugly and it had a sick roof, so I am exempt from judgment).
When I heard the instrumentation on “Hypnotized,” it crystalized something I had been thinking about for a couple months while walking through Fishtown and seeing these new constructions buildings.
You probably the sound that I’m talking about: those bouncy synths that sound ripped from “Sorry” by Justin Bieber, the quasi-dubstep drop from the chorus of “Roses” by The Chainsmokers, the pitched up or down vocal sample that is used as an extra instrument.
To me, it’s the musical equivalent of a new construction apartment, and I was going to attempt to collect these songs on the “new construction type beat” playlist. Of course, that did not happen.
But the playlist popped back into my mind a couple weeks ago when I accidentally binged all of “Emily in Paris.” Well, I’m not quite sure if “binged” is the right term because it was on in the background over a couple hours, and I’m honestly not quite sure how many episodes were in the season, but I watched all of them.
Part of the reason it came back was because the soundtrack featured “new construction type beat” tracks — the captions indicated that many of the songs playing were remixes — in a number of scenes, mostly parties and other social happenings where Emily is the most desirable woman in Paris, for some reason.
But the television show seemed like the equivalent of a new construction apartment. There was an attractive sheen to the show — everyone is attractive, the men all look the same, the color palette works, Paris is Paris — but underlying bones were weak. And overall, it just sort of washed over me.
The writer Kyle Chayka compared it to Brian Eno’s music in a recent piece for The New Yorker:
In this and other recent programming, Netflix is pioneering a genre that I’ve come to think of as ambient television. It’s “as ignorable as it is interesting,” as the musician Brian Eno wrote, when he coined the term “ambient music” in the liner notes to his 1978 album “Ambient 1: Music for Airports,” a wash of slow melodic synth compositions. Ambient denotes something that you don’t have to pay attention to in order to enjoy but which is still seductive enough to be compelling if you choose to do so momentarily. Like gentle New Age soundscapes, “Emily in Paris” is soothing, slow, and relatively monotonous, the dramatic moments too predetermined to really be dramatic. Nothing bad ever happens to our heroine for long. The earlier era of prestige TV was predicated on shows with meta-narratives to be puzzled out, and which merited deep analyses read the day after watching. Here, there is nothing to figure out; as prestige passes its peak, we’re moving into the ambient era, which succumbs to, rather than competes with, your phone.
It’s not an incorrect assessment, as I spent the four or so hours I “watched” “Emily in Paris” while staring at my phone and having conversations, occasionally checking back in to the action when it seemed like something was going to happen, as much as anything could happen in such a low-stakes show.
For me, though, the stronger musical analogue for “Emily in Paris” comes from Liz Pelly’s 2018 piece “Streambait Pop” in The Baffler. Pelly dives into a trend on the platform that has only continued to grow in the two years since the article was originally published, with whispery, synth-heavy music mostly with female vocals taking prominent places on playlists and, in some cases, being produced by Spotify itself.
You know what those songs sound like. Some of them are pretty pleasant. I like a decent amount of them. But I cannot tell Charlotte Lawrence from Fletcher from Olivia O’Brien from Sasha Sloan from EXES from Kiiara. It all kind of runs together, and it ends up being an all right way to lose a couple hours of music listening while working or puttering around the apartment or scrolling endlessly though Twitter.
Those artists, though, all rack up the numbers. Before people started doing free advertising for Spotify through #Unwrapped, I hadn’t heard of Fletcher. But she was in two different people’s top artists and had someone’s top songs. I was scrolling through Taylor Swift’s Instagram, and Fletcher was tagged in one of the photos. I guess she knows some people.
And in the end, the numbers are what it is all about. What is the most banal television show that we can get people to watch? How quickly can we get these apartments up before a neighborhood loses its clout? How can we mass produce music that all kind of sounds the same?
At the same time, though, it all tickles a pleasure center in our brains. “Emily in Paris” was fine to look at for four hours. Those apartments have big windows, get lots of natural lot and have good views. That music makes you bob your head. It’s all kind of nice.
But in the end, it all starts to sound and look the same.
Some content I wrote this week
Everyone is doing these year-end threads where they link to all the writing they were ‘proud’ of this year, and I can barely remember what I wrote earlier this week, much less in June. But here’s a story about Eagles cornerback Kevon Seymour, who gave one of the more thoughtful and earnest Zoom interviews that we’ve had this year.
“I was at a low, hit rock bottom,” Seymour said. “But I’m from rock bottom so to hit rock bottom, it was nothing new.”
Some content I listened to this week
Sofia played this song in the JQBX last night (long live the JQBX) & I enjoyed it:
Shoutout to David for posting this good Carolina Polachek remix on his IG story earlier this month:
Got this song through an issue of Last Donut of the Night:
Otherwise, I’m still plowing ahead through albums and songs in an attempt to get some year-end lists rolling next week.
Some content I read this week
An interview from much earlier this year with Matty Healy from The 1975.
I never get sick of those stories, and over the years I’ve made Hendry repeat them every time we cross paths. Maybe because that kind of stuff doesn’t happen at the increasingly corporate, dominated-by-replay MLB level. Maybe because they make me wistful about a summer when I had no idea what I was doing, just learning on the job. One thing I discovered over those three months: Go to a ballpark for one night — any ballpark, at any level — and you never know what you might see.
And now, there are fewer nights to go to fewer ballparks. In some towns, that’s weighty.
That piece from Barry Svrluga in The Washington Post struck me. This summer marked the 10-year anny of my first journalism “job” (I didn’t get paid lol) outside of a school setting where I covered minor league baseball for a summer. I was going to write about it earlier this year, but I did not. Still, I turned over some memories from that summer at Ripken Stadium in Aberdeen, and I saw some wild things (two walk-off grand slams) and had some memorable experiences (getting absolutely big-timed by Mike Gonzalez). The Minor League Baseball situation is painful. I’ll miss the New York-Penn League.
That Texas Monthly story that was going around about wedding photographers’ pandemic horror stories.
The Baltimore Sun’s pictures of the year for 2020.
Internet legend @trillmoregirls on Arby’s & much more for The New York Times Magazine:
In all this time, I’ve yet to encounter a single person who loves Arby’s like I do. I’ve celebrated birthdays at Arby’s — sincerely as a kid, and half-jokingly as an adult. I get the same thing just about every time: plain roast beef with curly fries on the side. When I worked as a cog in the machine of a Midtown office building, I would reward myself with a weekly pilgrimage to the Arby’s near the Port Authority Bus Terminal. It’s the kind of nonplace that gets left out of reminiscences for a pre-quarantine world, but Arby’s is a blank space I find myself missing in these times: somewhere to just exist anonymously for a little bit, certain you’ll never run into anyone you know. The closest I’ve come to an Arby’s since lockdown was watching one burn during the protests in Minneapolis.
Kirsh on gamblers & the election.
My old friend Robert on a harrowing day fighting wildfires in California in September in Esquire.
Taylor Swift Could Use an Editor (h/t Siegs).
An interview with the Sickos cartoonist.
Some other content I saw or thought about this week
Thank you for reading the 49th edition of Content Nausea. It will get better. Please do my survey? Thank you, and see you soon.
Always back in town
Always making amends
Always staying clean
Always on again
Always gone for good
Always "How it's been?"
Always find my room
Just as I left it
Always won't be long
Always never call
Always leaving soon
Always back for more
—D.G.