Metadata, Alienation, and Music Ownership

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Let’s talk about metadata. That’s right, metadata; the least-sexy part of cultivating your offline media library, even for a geek-ass music nerd like myself. 

For those unfamiliar, metadata is “data that provides information about other data,” which, yes, I pushed my glasses up the bridge of my nose as I wrote that. How could you tell? Within the context of your local music library, this includes things like song titles, album names, track numbers, artwork, and everything in between. 

See, I first started cultivating my music library when I got an iPod Mini sometime around 2006. Gradually, my iTunes collection blossomed from a handful of Matchbox 20 singles and Weird Al albums into the sprawling 60k-file monstrosity that it is today. Over time, this library has been corrupted, lost, recovered, converted, moved between computers, backed up, digitized, and, most importantly, edited. 

It’s the closest thing I have to a documented musical history. Sure, I have last.fm, but that just shows what I listen to and when. This collection of MP3 and ACC files sitting in my iTunes feels representative of my entire musical taste and, by extension, who I am as a person. I have music from every phase of my life: Bandcamp rarities from DIY bands, Myspace-era metalcore demos long since lost to time, a one-for-one replication of my childhood CD collection, and screen recordings of Tiny Desk performances that I’ve painstakingly spliced up into individual songs. It’s a labor of love, there’s no other way to put it. 

Aside from the act of obtaining and listening to this music, a seldom-discussed aspect of curating an offline music library is how much work goes into actually organizing it. Not just the structured nest of Artist > Album > Song folders buried deep in my computer’s hard drive, but also the way that iTunes interprets, arranges, and displays these files.

Despite using Spotify almost every day, I’m still hyper-critical of the platform and streaming giants at large. First, there’s the issue of just paying the artists, which, any rational person will agree, is one of the most imbalanced systems in the entire music industry today. There’s also the far more amorphous topic of how streaming has adjusted the way we value and consume music, making it more disposable in the process. It’s also robbed us of things like hidden tracks and any sense of physicality related to our music. This perceived loss is one of the big reasons why vinyl, cassettes, and CDs have all regained popularity in recent years.

Another negative aspect of streaming that I’d like to talk about today is the idea of ownership. The music on your Spotify app is not yours, full stop. That company could go bankrupt, destroy your account, or go down tomorrow, and all would result in the same thing; you losing everything attached to it. All your saved albums, hearted songs, and carefully constructed playlists; gone in an instant. 

That’s standard operating procedure for any digital-based company in 2022. You buy a game on Steam? Sure, you “own” it, but if Steam ever goes away, that shit’s gone for good. This is why companies like GOG and Bandcamp have gained extra momentum over the last decade because they offer the consumer a digital purchase without any DRM (digital rights management). That means when you buy a game or an album from those platforms, you can download it, play it, share it with a friend, back it up to a USB, and generally do anything you want with it short of going off to sell it again yourself. Those files are yours, and you are in control. 

So how does this apply to Spotify and streaming?

Well, one of the recent downsides I’ve been grappling with in regards to streaming is how out of my control my library feels. God knows I’ve spent dozens, if not hundreds, of hours just making playlists on Spotify. For the most part, these playlists only exist on that one platform, and that scares me. By contrast, the playlists in my iTunes library are based on actual files saved directly to my machine, which means they’re in my control. Hell, I can burn those playlists to a CD or export them to Unicode, XML, M3U, or even good ol’ plain text if I wanted to. If you don’t know what all that means, it’s okay. Essentially, even if my computer gets fried and my backups fail, I still have the playlists. This freedom is a massive benefit to cultivating an offline music collection.

This applies to everything outside of playlists too. I can import a CD, download my Bandcamp purchases, or rip a song off Youtube and then craft those files in my image. I can add the album art, adjust the song titles, change the album name, or give the songs track numbers, and all of that is my decision. If this seems overwhelming or doesn’t sound like something you’d do, that’s totally understandable. But when you’ve spent the better part of your life carefully curating and adding on to this collection of files, this freedom means the world. 

If I like the physical cover of an album more than the digital one? I can change that. If I want to add a one-off B-side to the end of an album in order to keep the entire release in one place, I can. If I have a remastered version of an album where all the song titles end in “(Remastered),” then I can take that word out of every track and keep the song titles in their original form. Why would I care about this? First off, it looks nice. I’m a control freak, and it feels good to keep these files as clean as possible. Another very simple answer is last.fm.

See, in a way, my last.fm goes hand-in-hand with my iTunes library. My last.fm account might not be as longstanding as my music collection, but it still goes all the way back to 2010. That platform has recorded over a decade of listening history and statistics that I view as priceless. It’s cool to look back and see what I was listening to on a random Thursday in college, or what my listening habits were like over the summer of 2016. There’s value to be had in that kind of information, especially for a music nerd like me.

This leads to genuine anguish when I look at my music history on last.fm and see that I’ve listened to Nevermind by Nirvana a certain number of times, but those play counts are allocated to two different versions of the album; one simply titled Nevermind and a second one titled Nevermind (Remastered). This is aside from the other versions that exist on Spotify like Nevermind (Deluxe Edition), Nevermind (Super Deluxe Edition), and Nevermind (30th Anniversary Super Deluxe). Guys, what are we even doing? At a certain point, this is just bad stewardship of your own musical catalog, and for what? A twelfth demo version of “Something In The Way” to catch runoff streams? No thank you. 

This on its own is frustrating, but where Spotify gets even more cheesy in this metadata conversation is how little autonomy you have in what you want to listen to. To continue the grunge examples, let’s say that you want to listen to Gish by Smashing Pumpkins. Well, I hope you don’t mind listening to the two-disc 2011 Deluxe Edition with 28 tracks because that’s all that exists on Spotify!

In my mind, this destroys the sanctity of the core album experience as originally envisioned by the artist. Sure, you can still listen to tracks 1 through 10 on Gish and experience the album as initially released, but that’s not what Spotify wants. Most importantly, they don’t even give you the choice. Gish as it originally existed in its 1991 form with its ten tracks and non-codeine-colored album art does not exist on Spotify. 

To keep using this one album as an example, this problem gets even funnier if you want to listen to those bonus tracks like the killer 8-minute version of “Drown” that ends with an alternate guitar solo, which is inexplicably not playable right now for some unknown licensing reason. You can listen to all the other 27 tracks of Gish (Deluxe Edition), but the last song is just… unplayable. 

 
 

Sometimes, this even results in instances where an objectively worse remaster of an album (like Soundgarden’s Superunknown) will be the only version available on your streaming service of choice. Want to listen to the songs as they existed in their original form? Well, you can’t! Examples like this are few and far between but still highlight how little choice we have in the music that’s readily available to listen to on these services. 

This is a horrible way to interact with music. It hurts the “vision” of the original album and poses more problems than it does conveniences. Sure, for the average music listener, these details are negligible, but when you’ve spent your whole life caring about shit like this, it’s hard not to notice. 

At the risk of sounding like a doofus equating music listening with genuine human suffering, I’d like to relate this to Marx’s theory of alienation. For Marx, this theory essentially posits that the further workers are from the end product, the less satisfaction they will find in their work. It’s obviously a lot deeper than that, but that’s the best I got for a one-sentence summary. 

If you’re a cog in a machine sitting on a computer all day and you never interact with the thing you’re actually making (or theoretically contributing towards making), what are you actually doing? More importantly, what do you have to draw satisfaction from in your work? Sure, you’re making money so that you can live, but you’re also making more money for someone further above you who’s even more removed from the process. You lose connection to your autonomy, so you become increasingly alienated from the goods and services produced by your labor, eventually estranging you from your own humanity. 

Now, look at your streaming library through this lens. Your library is not yours. These files exist to play when called upon, but the entire thing could go away tomorrow, and you’d be left with nothing. Owning these files and having them on a hard drive I can hold in my hands is a satisfying feeling. Knowing that I can change these files, edit their data, and load them onto any device I please is a relief. Sure, there are lots of other things that could go wrong that would lead me to lose this data, but it’s my data to lose, not some mega-corporation.

The same day that I wrote the majority of this 2,000-word rant, the awesome Endless Scroll Podcast uploaded an episode talking about Spotify Canvas, album visualizers, and things of the like. One of the most poignant conclusions made about 33 minutes into the episode by host Miranda Reinert was, “Spotify doesn’t want you to have a library; Spotify wants you to use Spotify and perceive Spotify as music.” And therein lies the problem. It felt serendipitous to hear this the same day that I spent hours articulating my own feelings on the topic.

I write this, riddled with caffeine, not to shame anyone for using Spotify but to get you to think about your music collection. If you care about it, you might want to re-analyze what’s actually yours. When music is as integral to your identity as it is for me, it’s easy to spend hours thinking about this type of stuff. I’ve also spent countless hours doomsday prepping for a world without streaming. It’s a world that seems further away with each passing day, but one I’m willing to hold onto just in case.  

Spotify is a bad company for many reasons, and it’s okay to ask for more. I still use Spotify almost every day… that said, if the service went belly-up tomorrow, I wouldn’t lose that much. Would you?

​​BURSTING THE BUBBLE: AN INVESTIGATION INTO BUBBLEGRUNGE

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Wednesday December 1st was a Big Day For Annoying People. If you’re reading this, I can assume that you’re already aware of its significance, but on the off chance that you’re not, it was Spotify Wrapped, the day that good little Spotify users everywhere woke up to find their yearly listening history compiled into a brightly-colored slideshow of stats. Along with some new features (Have you ever wondered which song would play over the opening credits in a movie of your life, or what color your “audio aura” is?) and some cringey, shoehorned-in buzzwords du jour (“While everyone else was trying to figure out what an NFT is, you were slaying 2021 with your main character vibes!”), were the traditional Spotify Wrapped presents we’ve come to expect-- a playlist of your 100 most-played songs of the year, as well as a ranking of your top 5 artists and genres. The latter category is what I want to focus on here. My own Spotify Wrapped raised a notable question-- no, not “did I really listen to 11 episodes of True Anon in one day?” although I did ask myself that. I, like many other Spotify users, took a look at my top 5 genres laid out in that disgusting “graphic design is my passion” font and asked, “What in the goddamn hell is ‘bubblegrunge?’”

My first encounter with the term ‘bubblegrunge’ was about a week before Spotify Wrapped on the application Stats For Spotify. I assumed it was one of those seemingly algorithm-generated music genres like ‘escape room’-- a similarly puzzling item on my top genres list from last year. On the day that Spotify Wrapped came out, it seemed like everyone on my Twitter feed was both trying to pin down a definition of the genre and ripping it to shreds. A quick glance at the tweets from music fans with bubblegrunge in their top 5 genres and those from artists who’d had the bubblegrunge label thrust upon them initially led me (and others) to believe that it was corporate streaming platform-speak for “pop-punk sung by a woman,” but I decided to investigate further.

Tracking “bubblegrunge” as a search term on Google Trends revealed a sharp uptick in google searches on December 1st, peaking at around 11:00 am (presumably shortly after most Spotify users checked their Spotify Wrapped). When I googled the term a few hours after its peak popularity, I found the following Urban Dictionary definition from 2013:

I assumed that this definition was somewhat obsolete by 2021’s standards. I’ve listened to almost no radio-friendly 90s/early 00s grunge-pop of this sort recently, so if this were the definition that Spotify was working with, it wouldn’t make much sense data-wise for the genre to show up on my year-end list. Most of the artists I’d been seeing in the lists of people with bubblegrunge as one of their top genres were bands that blended modern pop-punk with elements of 90s garage rock nostalgia-- think Kississippi, Charly Bliss, and Diet Cig. I wondered if, in this context, bubblegrunge might refer to what illuminati hotties frontwoman Sarah Tudzin has coined “tenderpunk,” defined by its irreverent yet affectionate infusion of DIY punk. “There’s a sweeter vulnerability to it, and then there’s a tongue-in-cheek, give-no-fucks attitude,” Tudzin explained in a 2019 interview with SF Weekly. 

I searched “bubblegrunge” on Spotify. The first result was Spotify’s official Sound of Bubblegrunge playlist. Among the related playlists linked in its description were ones dedicated to Indie Pop, Midwest Emo, 5th Wave Emo, Philly Indie, and a playlist exclusively dedicated to female-fronted bands in the bubblegrunge genre. This did little to disprove my initial write-off of bubblegrunge as just another attempt from the music streaming industrial complex to push “female-fronted” as its own musical genre. 

Returning to the Sounds of Bubblegrunge playlist, I saw that many of the artists featured on it were ones that I’d expected based on previous context clues. Each of the aforementioned artists had at least one song on the playlist, and other artists with overlapping fanbases were featured prominently as well. Generally, it seemed like a convergence of bedroom pop (Cherry Glazerr, Adult Mom, Sir Babygirl), emo (Slaughter Beach Dog, Radiator Hospital, Home Is Where), pop-punk (Pinkshift, Oceanator, Antarctigo Vespucci), and some folk-infused alt-pop (Lucy Dacus, Waxahatchee, Samia). There was also some straightforward guitar rock like Snail Mail, some more experimental cuts from artists like Spirit of the Beehive, and even a few ska tracks from bands like Bomb The Music Industry and We Are The Union. For the most part, all of the songs included seemed to be from the 2010s or early 2020s. Other than that, and the tendency toward the broad umbrella category of “indie,” I saw little cohesion that would warrant grouping these songs into a defined genre or subgenre. A similar algorithmically-generated playlist titled Intro to Bubblegrunge had a link to Sounds of Bubblegrunge in its description and seemed to offer a smaller sample of bubblegrunge highlights, though its content seemed somewhat indistinguishable from one of the algorithm’s standard indie rock playlists.

I decided that if I was going to do a deep dive into the genre, I had to also look into the users’ interpretations of the ‘bubblegrunge’ label. One of the first user-curated playlists to come up was one that mainly consisted of what I might jokingly refer to as “tiktokcore”-- I’d use the term not as a genre descriptor, so much as a means of categorizing music associated with a certain platform, grouping together artists like beabadoobee and girl in red. Much of the playlist also included big-name contemporary pop artists like Solange and Lorde, as well as some 90s shoegaze icons like Cocteau Twins and Mazzy Star. Once again, I saw very little cohesion within the genre label; the main commonality tying together all the music I was encountering was that most of it would be at home on a playlist called something like “songs for pretending that you’re the main character.” The bubblegrunge for beginners playlist was a bit more streamlined-- partly by virtue of its brevity, at least compared to the other bubblegrunge playlists that clocked in at 10+ hours with tracklists in the triple digits --and had a focus on late-2010s/early 2020s pop-punk and emo. This playlist, which called bubblegrunge “the best genre!” had a similar blend of emo, indie rock, and tiktok-adjacent alt-pop, with a focus on female vocals. Had there been more inclusion of earlier acts— ones that have influenced the sound of contemporary bubblegrunge —the case could be made for artists like Letters to Cleo, Veruca Salt, and Juliana Hatfield to be called bubblegrunge pioneers.

Though a decent number of non-female fronted acts were featured on bubblegrunge playlists, I was feeling a certain frustration with the “genre,” not unlike the frustration I feel towards the “sad girl indie” movement in music (many of the recommended playlists in featured below the bubblegrunge playlists I checked out were ones along the lines of Spotify’s sad girl starter pack). Much has already been written about the subtle sexism of the “sad girl” label and how it casts a limiting, two-dimensional view of female musicians and their work. Several of the so-called “sad girls” of indie music have publicly criticized the label. In a 2017 interview, Mitski confronted the perception of her as a “fevered priestess,” calling out the ways in which public discussion of female musicians often implicitly strips them of their ownership over their work and disregards their intentionality and technical skill. In a tweet from earlier this year, Lucy Dacus expressed her qualms with “sad girl indie”-- how it often exploits female pain, flattens complex emotional expression by slapping on the vague label of “sadness,” and pushes a harmful narrative that equates womanhood with suffering.

I know that on the surface, it may seem hypocritical of me to point to the inclusion of “sad girl indie” artists like Soccer Mommy and Indigo De Souza on bubblegrunge playlists as my reason for finding the two genre labels similarly frustrating. In doing so, aren’t I feeding into the “women-as-genre” propaganda? Not to mention the various non-female voices included on the bubblegrunge playlists I’ve come across in my investigation. Still, between the cutesy genre name and the algorithmic emphasis on female vocalists, it’s hard not to be skeptical. The other commonalities that make the argument for bubblegrunge to be considered a “real” genre of music paint with a broad brush at best (“post-2010 indie guitar-led pop-rock” is pretty vague criteria). 

This is not to entirely disregard newer music genres as illegitimate-- if someone said the word “hyperpop” to you three years ago, would you have any idea what they were talking about? New genres arise all the time as music evolves-- my issue isn’t with the newness, but with the attempt to put a name to a category that does not exist. What “bubblegrunge” really reveals is how detached corporate streaming platforms are from the artists that they’re featuring (and grossly underpaying). I’m not the first to point out that Spotify Wrapped is essentially a brand’s approximation of personal connection-- they made you a personalized mixtape; look how well they know their artists and users! When they try to put a name to a genre that isn’t really a genre at all, it’s nothing more than a lame attempt to homogenize and generalize a vast variety of artists, disregarding their creative and sonic diversity. Bottom line: corporations don’t define music, musicians do. 

Grace Robins-Somerville is a writer from Brooklyn, New York. You can find her on Instagram @grace_roso and on Twitter @grace_roso.

My Favorite Type of Song

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I just found out that one of my all-time favorite songs is about jerking off. 

Ever since I first heard the twangy guitar plucks of “My Name is Jonas” pouring out of Guitar Hero III as a teenager, I’ve been enamored with Weezer’s eponymous blue album. Over the course of the intervening decade, the band has been a constant source of edgy adolescent tunes, ironic memes, questionable artistic decisions, and unexpected comebacks. It’s not like I’d never heard of Weezer by 2007 (I’d heard “Beverly Hills” on the radio and “Island In The Sun” in a movie or two), it’s just that I didn’t know the band was actually, well, you know, good. 

Once I gave The Blue Album a listen in full, I “got” Weezer almost immediately. The ever-shifting mixture of Cars-esque power pop, feel-good surf tunes, and pop culture geekery were beguiling to my teenage brain. I got to become familiar with iconic singles like “Say It Ain’t So,” “Buddy Holly,” and “The Sweater Song,” all only my own, devoid of hype, expectations, or over-exposure via radio play. With lyrics that referenced X-Men and idolized (arguably) the least-cool member of KISS, I could tell this was an album tailor-made for a teenaged Taylor. More importantly, I could tell it was better and far more artistic than songs like “Beverly Hills” had led me to believe. 

For me, the cherry on top of The Blue Album came in the form of its final track. After nine songs of catchy hook-filled power pop, the group wraps the record up with the absolutely epic eight-minute closer “Only In Dreams.” This song blew me away the first time I heard it, and it continues to blow me away every subsequent time I listen to it. 

“Only In Dreams”  begins with a solitary bassline and light cymbal taps. An acoustic guitar joins in, then a snare. An electric guitar starts plucking away, and suddenly the entire band has taken up the melody without you even realizing it. After about a minute, a remorseful Rivers Cuomo enters the track and quickly establishes the stakes: “You can't resist her, she's in your bones / She is your marrow and your ride home.” He soon continues, further illustrating how omnipresent this figure is, singing,  “You can't avoid her, she's in the air (in the air) / In between molecules of oxygen and carbon dioxide.” Suddenly a whir of distortion kicks up, and the entire group bottoms out into a swaying, distorted borderline-shoegaze riff. 

Over the course of a verse and another couple of choruses, the lyrics paint a picture of romance, dancing, and adolescent clumsiness. Cuomo sings the title seven times, then lets the riff do the rest of the talking. The lyrics wrap up about four minutes into the song, and the back half of the track contains a beautiful, cresting instrumental that rises and falls with the power of a post-rock song. It’s a commanding display of emotion, musicianship, and artistry… Then I found out it was about nutting. 

That’s right, the song itself is meant to depict a dream where our hero is meeting this unnamed woman, dancing with her, then, you know, getting it on. This means the back half of the track; the build-up, the rises and falls, the constantly-beating drum, are all meant to be an auditory depiction of the narrator achieving climax. Hmm.

See, I’ve always liked this song for its format more than anything. It spends the perfect amount of time telling a compelling (if not a little vague) emotional story. Then, the band begins this instrumental jam that flows so seamlessly from the narrative. You don’t even realize how long this instrumental passage is until the song finally comes to a close, and you look down to see that eight minutes have passed. The song is segmented into these two beautiful acts that tell a story and then allow you, the listener, to fill in the rest. It’s about as creative and interactive as music ever gets. 

It took me until very recently to realize that many of my favorite songs share this exact same format. Perhaps two of the most famous examples would be “I Want You (She’s So Heavy)” by The Beatles and “Transatlanticism” by Death Cab For Cutie. Both of these songs begin with simplistic instrumentals followed by a relatively straightforward bout of lyrics. Most importantly, both pieces are capped off with an instrumental back half that repeats the same measure over and over again to an almost hypnotic effect. In the case of The Beatles, “I Want You” is practically the template for Stoner Rock as we know it today. The song features a sludgy, slow-moving, and distorted riff that could perfectly accompany the slow-paced head bobbing of any given doom metal show. Meanwhile, “Transatlanticism” is a piano-led ode to long-distance relationships that begins with a remorseful delivery and dream-like logic. The song gradually builds underneath a repetition of “I need you so much closer…” before erupting into an instrumental that repeats the riff for four minutes straight because it’s that damn good. 

My point is, this is a style of song that’s more pervasive than we probably realize. It’s not just songs that are “long,” it’s songs that are long and winding and intentionally leave this vast wordless space for the listener to project their own feelings, thoughts, and experiences onto. 

Sometimes they are conceptual like “Maggot Brain,” where an environmentalist spoken-word intro leads to a soul-rending two-part guitar solo. Sometimes they are skillful shows of musicianship like Jimi Hendrix’s “Machine Gun,” where rapid bursts of guitar feedback emulate the sounds of guns, helicopters, dropping bombs, and other Vietnam imagery. 

Sometimes an artist sneaks it into the album in a way that’s subtle yet impactful, like Angel Olsen’s “Sister” or Soccer Mommy’s “Yellow is the Color of Her Eyes.” Sometimes the artist intentionally draws attention to this style of song by having it open an album as Japanese Breakfast does with “Diving Woman.” Other times, the artist will choose to close the record with this brand of winding instrumental stretch like the aforementioned Weezer, or even something like Jimmy Eat World’s “Goodbye Sky Harbor,” where the song’s lengthy 13-minute coda is either loved or immediately skipped over depending on who’s listening. 

Bands like The Antlers seem to craft these kinds of songs effortlessly. Songs like “Rolled Together” and “Endless Ladder” aren’t even that long but still have enough room to properly unfurl. Across the board, the examples are truly countless. There’s “Black Oak” by Slaughter Beach Dog, “Runaway” by Kanye West, “Drown” by Smashing Pumpkins, “Phone Went West” by My Morning Jacket, and hundreds more. These songs are all incredible and often my favorites of their respective bands. I’ve spent the better part of the last two years compiling these types of songs into one long, genre-free playlist on Spotify that I sometimes throw on when I can’t decide what else I want to listen to. This is just a format of song that clicks with my brain, and I really wish there was a term for it. 

One of my first instincts is to call these types of songs “jams,” but that evokes so many images of hairy hippies, tye-dye t-shirts, nitrous tanks, and ganja goo balls that the title becomes unappealing. Bands like Phish and even My Morning Jacket indeed go out of their way to transform their songs into “experiences” when played live, but given the types of songs that I’m talking about, the word “jam” feels almost dirty. I like the idea of following the twists and turns of a live performance; that can be an extraordinarily rewarding and powerful experience, I just don’t like what the word “jam” evokes for me (and I assume) most other people. 

I wouldn’t call “Transatlanticism” a jam song, but it undeniably bears many of the same qualities. Truth be told, what I’m discussing here is some mix of jam band tendencies, post-rock builds, and stoner rock song structures. I know the concept of “jamming” isn’t relegated to any one genre, band, or scene, but hearing it done well on-record is so rare. I can be listening to a random album like At Home With Owen and suddenly, halfway through, get hit with a seven-minute slow-burn like “A Bird In Hand” and be swept off my feet. 

This format is striking because they intentionally stray away from the three-to-five-minute verse/chorus/verse structure that many songs default to. A song like Pedro The Lion’s “Second Best” would never get played on the radio, regardless of what year it came out or how popular the band already was. Similarly, a cut like “13 Months in 6 Minutes” by The Wrens is pretty unlikely to be someone’s favorite track on the album. These songs are simply too long and too unwieldy for standard radio play, streaming binges, or music videos. They don’t lend themselves well to any of those formats because they’re meant to be experienced and taken in with a subconscious part of your mind working to fill in the blanks and flesh out the edges. 

That is what’s so great about these songs. They’re hypnotic. They invite you in and give you time to breathe, listen, think, and feel. They’re also ever-changing. Depending on where you’re at in life, you could take something totally different away from the instrumental as another listener. Hell, give it time, and the way you interpret any one of these songs will change based on what phase you’re at in your own life. It’s a Rorschach Test in musical form. 

Two of my favorite songs of all-time use this exact same format. First, there’s “Like A River” by Sharks Keep Moving (which I’ve written about in detail before), then there’s “Oh God, Where Are You Now?” by Sufjan Stevens (which I’ve also written about in loving detail over here). Shortly behind those two is “Only In Dreams” by Weezer.

You can see why I was so shocked to find out that “Only In Dreams” is about something as bodily and objectively-hilarious as ejaculation. I mean, the band doesn’t exactly play it for laughs, but I feel like that explanation kinda takes some of the mysticism away. Until you hear that exact commentary from the band, “Only In Dreams” could be literal, it could be metaphorical, it could just be weird poetry, but as soon as you know it’s about Rivers Cuomo pounding off, you’re just like “...oh.”

It’s like if you were in the middle of interpreting a deep meaning from an abstract piece of art from someone like Rothko or Pollock, and then the artist themselves came up behind you mid-thought and whispered, ‘this one’s about the time I shit my pants in a Taco Bell parking lot.’ You have no choice but to have reality come crashing down around you upon hearing that. The illusion is shattered, and all you’re left thinking about is low-grade meat, cold tortillas, and diablo hot sauce. While you were once finding some sense of existential peace in the art, now your mind is consumed by thoughts of your own body and its disgusting functions. 

An artist’s intent should not completely override your personal interpretation of the work, but finding out that the song’s creator had such an opposing message in mind is a little conflicting, to say the least. 

“Orange, Red, Yellow” by Mark Rothko (1961)

The doubly-funny part of this is that I know this type of song is not for everyone. If you’ve made it this far, I assume you probably enjoy this type of structure or, at the very least, are interested in where this is all going. See, I know these tracks are just tiring and overindulgent to some people, but what some might call long-winded, I call searching. What others see as boring musical repetition, I see as an empty canvas. What others interpret as masturbatory, I interpret as cosmically-affirming. 

At times, this format feels like the musical equivalent of a long take in film. André Bazin is a famous French film critic who has focused a great deal of his career writing about the realism of the “long take.” The long take is a filmmaking technique in which an individual shot has a much longer duration than the conventional editing pace either of the film itself or of movies in general. Bazin argues that directors use this technique out of a “respect for the continuity of dramatic space and its duration.” He argues that long takes are closer to how we as an audience perceive reality (i.e., unfolding in real-time) and, therefore, more impactful. It gives the viewer a personal choice of what to focus on, and it introduces ambiguity into the structure of the film. All of these concepts apply to music as well. 

Songs with this structure also have a strong sense of continuity. It feels as if we are being swept into the scenery along with the artist. As the listener, we have the choice to focus on the song as much or as little as we like. We can listen to individual instruments, pick apart the time signature, figure out how this melody flows from the lyrics, or just let our mind wander with the band as our guide. That’s powerful.

Ironically, much like the song format I’m attempting to write about, I don’t have much of a defined ending for this piece. Instead, I’ll opt to do something I never do and close this article out with a quote. I know that’s a bit of a cop-out, but it’s too relevant to this discussion for me not to include. In their recently-unearthed Oregon City Sessions, there’s a section where Portugal. The Man lead singer John Gourley discusses the band’s creative process circa 2008 and how they re-interpret their own creations in a live setting. In it, he simply explains,

“I’ve always really liked that droney… I mean, calling it ‘background music’ is not the best way to talk about it, but I love things like that. I’d love to do a record eventually where we can just go for ten minutes and do what a song needs to do as opposed to culling those points as far as the song structure goes. I think we should be a little bit more loose.”

Maybe Our Nostalgia is Wrong

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The cool thing about having Last.fm is that you get to see your music listening habits form in real-time. What’s even more remarkable is the longer you have Last.fm, the more history you build about yourself. I’m not even talking about “history” in some platitudinal sense; I’m talking deep lore. 

For those unfamiliar, Last.fm is a music-based social media platform that allows its users to record what songs they’re listening to as they’re listening to them. This results in lots of stats like how many times you’ve listened to specific artists, albums, or songs over the course of your account’s history. It also keeps track of what songs you listen to when. And things get specific. I’m talking down to the week specific. I’m talking see-what-you-were-listening-to-at-precise-times-on-certain-days specific. 

This means that, through Last.fm, you can see every regrettable phase, every questionable album, and every unfortunate musical decision you’ve ever made. It’s less a social media site and more of a personal catalog. It’s a place to see your listening habits laid bare. In my specific case, that means I have data on basically every song I’ve listened to since my senior year of high school. That means I can look back and see my metalcore phase, my indie rock phase, my hip-hop phase, my emo phase, and even that time I tried to “get into” Bach, all of which are mapped out and available for anyone to dig through. I’m not naming names, but I’m not going to pretend all of that was pure gold. 

Thanks to Last.fm, I can flip back in time and see what albums soundtracked my last high school summer. I have the ability to drill down and see exactly what I listened to on my birthday in 2014. I can find out exactly what song I was listening to at 2:15 pm on February 19th, 2018, an unremarkable Monday (it was “Brown Paper Bag” by Migos, in case you were wondering). Last.fm is that specific. 

What I don’t need Last.fm for, however, is to help me remember those phases. As detailed above, I’ve spent the last decade-plus listening to everything from A.G. Cook to ZZ Top. I don’t regret any of my musical phases, but I’m not going to pretend all of the music was objectively great. I don’t need a website to tell me I had a metalcore phase, but, luckily(?) it’s all detailed, timestamped, and dated out from April 19th of 2010 onward. 

I don’t need Last.fm to know I had a metalcore phase because I remember it quite well all on my own. I also don’t need a website to tell me I listened to copious amounts of shitty screaming white dudes in high school because I have playlists, merch, and articles on this very site that will all tell you the same thing. 

I’ll still go to bat for many of the heavily-tatted, swoopy-haired, v-neck-clad music of my youth, but it’s near impossible to separate my nostalgia for that period from the music itself. I’m not going to sit here and tell you that Blessthefall is a great band, but what I will say is that “Black Rose Dying” still goes hard as fuck when I listen to it in 2021. Does it go hard because it’s a well-made song, or does it go hard because it takes me back to a pleasant time in my life? That’s impossible for me to say. 

I’m not going to sit here and tell you that Broadway’s Kingdoms is a genre-defying classic. I’m not going to tell you that Someday Came Suddenly is an innovative, ground-breaking work of high art. I’m definitely not going to say that As If Everything Was Held In Place will be getting a wealth of brand new listeners in 2021. Those albums all have redeeming qualities, but I recognize almost nobody hears those albums as I hear them… and that’s completely understandable. 

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The other night I was reflecting on my workday while watching an episode of Gilmore Girls and enjoying a cup of sleepytime tea. Over the course of months, this has become a time-honored tradition in my apartment, and I’d say it’s one of the few things keeping me grounded in 2021. As can often happen, someone said or did something in the show that made me think of a song. This phenomenon is liable to happen at any time in my day-to-day, but in this case, it happened to be someone in Gilmore Girls saying the word “Breathless.” That’s a pretty nondescript word, yet, for some reason, hearing it sent a pang shooting to some distant corner of my brain, which unearthed a memory of the song “Breathless” by Asking Alexandria. 

See, Last.fm is cool because it can tell me that I’ve listened to “Breathless” by Asking Alexandria precisely 29 times in my life. That song first released on an EP called Life Gone Wild on December 21st of 2010, and I created my Last.fm account eight months earlier in April of the same year. In other words, I have recorded data on every single time I’ve listened to “Breathless,” in this case, all 29 instances. That song is exactly four-minutes and nine seconds long. I’ll save you the math and tell you that 4:09 times 29 is 120 minutes and 35 seconds. One hundred and twenty minutes and thirty-five seconds. That means I’ve spent two hours of my life listening to “Breathless” by Asking Alexandria. Holy shit. 

 
 

As I threw the song on in 2021, years removed from its context or listening to this kind of music every day, I was struck by just how bland it was. The guitars were punchy, the screams were serviceable, and the breakdowns… existed, but as a 27-year-old, I could not bring myself even close to enjoying it on the same level as I did one decade ago. It’s a fine metalcore song, but I was surprised by how much mediocrity I had allowed my younger self to put up with. More specifically, I was surprised that I’d willingly sought out this mediocrity for over two collective hours of my life. 

This two-hour stat on its own is shocking, but what surprised me most in re-listening to the song was just how by-the-numbers blah it was. As the outro played a guttural repetition of “Forget my name / Forget my face,” all I could think to myself was ‘why?’ Why did I do this to myself? Why did I spend so much time with this song and this EP? Why did I not see this as substanceless garbage at the time?

I don’t know what it is about that line in particular that stood out to me, but it just felt so bland and uninspired that it led me to re-evaluate my entire high school metalcore phase. I’ve never been a big “lyrics guy,” and now I can see why. I listened to music like this for braindead caveman riffs, crazy high notes, and Crabcore-inspiring absurdity. I do not listen to metalcore songs for the message. Maybe I’ve tricked myself into thinking that not considering lyrics is the ideal way to listen to music because I always knew the writing was dogshit. 

“Breathless” isn’t tied to anything specific. It’s not a song worth mentioning, worth writing about, or even really worth listening to in 2021. It’s a fine metalcore song, but I just don’t have much nostalgia for it. That made me realize that a good majority of my favorite records from 2010s-era Rise Records bands are probably just as lifeless. They’re bolstered almost entirely by nostalgia and nothing more. I think that’s something I knew subconsciously but only recently came to recognize on my own. 

Listening to “Breathless” helped me realize how sometimes our nostalgia can be wrong. Memory is a powerful drug, and the haze of far-off happy memories is thick. Not only are those memories are obscured by the distance of time, but they’re also rarely as happy as we make them out to be in our heads. I don’t regret the two hours I’ve spent listening to “Breathless,” I just sometimes wish that time was spent on something better. In another ten years, I’m likely going to look back on what I’m listening to now and find myself again asking, “Why?” but for now, I’ll just try to enjoy the music before the nostalgia solidifies. 

Music, Life, and Tigers Jaw: How We Remember Music

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As I write this, I’m listening to “Hesitation,” a single off the Tigers Jaw’s upcoming album I Won't Care How You Remember Me. My history with Tigers Jaw is long and winding, but the tl;dr version is that I (like many other people) have a soft spot for their self-titled album. While I have come to adore Charmer and think spin has some undeniable bangers, nothing the band has ever made since 2008 has quite reached the peak of that landmark emo album… but why? 

As I listened to the first few seconds of “Hesitation,” I was able to suspend my disbelief and, just for a moment, hear an emo riff that would have sounded perfectly at-home on that pizza-adorned favorite of mine. “Hesitation” itself is great, but hearing such an evocative piece of guitarwork made me realize that even if we get a better Tigers Jaw album than the self-titled record, we’ll never get another Tigers Jaw album that hits quite the same. 

Tigers Jaw is an immensely personal album to me, and I know I’m not alone in that. The band’s top songs on Spotify pull largely from their 2008 release. For some fans, it evokes long-lost decade-old memories of high school nights spent with friends or the sweat-and-beer smell of DIY shows. For me, the band’s self-titled record is forever tied to a very specific and formative spring term in college. I think the songs are great, obviously, but I only recently realized how much those subjective feelings inform my love for the album. 

Hearing the opening notes to “The Sun” instantly takes me back into a time of my life where everything seemed to be turning around, and it made me realize nobody else has those memories. Nobody else listens to Tigers Jaw and feels the exact way I feel. We may hear the same choruses and see the same sentiments captured in the songs, but nobody feels the exact weird mix of emotions I experienced that spring term. Nobody hears “Plane vs. Tank vs. Submarine” and thinks about studying beat poetry for their English class. No Tigers Jaw fan hears “Never Saw It Coming” and can conjure to mind the strange melancholy I felt on that one weird train ride home after a bad day. Not a single soul associates “Meals On Wheels” with the optimistic feeling of basking in the sun after a long, cold, rainy Oregon winter and feeling a sense of self-assuredness for the first time in years. Those are all me. Those are all Tigers Jaw.

My point is I love Tigers Jaw not just because it’s a great album but because it is synonymous with a very important time in my life. No other Tigers Jaw album, no matter how good, will ever broach that strange mix of musical excellence and nostalgia. Tigers Jaw is encased in amber. It’s trapped in time. It’s something that can never be reclaimed, recreated, or bested. 

I’m incredibly excited about the new Tigers Jaw album. I’m happy they’re still around, and I’m glad they’re still putting out incredible music after a decade and a half together as a band. It’s just odd to hear something like that opening riff on “Hesitation,” which sounds like a familiar memory yet is completely new. It’s a strange sense of musical and emotional deja vu. It made me realize that I Won't Care How You Remember Me will eventually be someone’s Tigers Jaw. Somebody will listen to these songs, fall in love with them, and forever associate them with a specific and important time in their life. 

That power of association is an extraordinary aspect of music that can make things unfair at times. As an artist, it’s unfair that you can never recreate something that appeals to a fan in the exact same way, just in a different way. The songs on I Won't Care How You Remember Me might grow associations that I look back on as fondly as the songs on Tigers Jaw, but I won’t know until I look back on them with an equivalent amount of time. Right now, it just feels like “New Tigers Jaw” versus “Old Tigers Jaw,” but it’s important to remember that there’s also a decade-plus worth of memories that comes with the latter one. It’s apples and oranges. 

That phenomenon of musical nostalgia is also unfair as a fan. You can never explain quite why an old album appeals to you. Yes, you can share the songs, break down the lyrics, analyze the instrumentation, and use beautiful flowery language to impart the feeling that it gives you. Still, you will never be able to explain the complex web of associations and sentimentality you feel when listening to it. It’s sad because nobody will ever relate to these songs in the exact same way, yet the cool thing is that you can still find a way to relate.

That’s what makes music writing fun. Reviewing music is just a writer attempting to explain how a song or album makes them feel before those associations set in. Over time, everyone will form their own unique opinions of, feelings on, and relationships with the music that are all unreplicable. It makes this job hard because I can never completely explain what Tigers Jaw means to me, but it fills me with a strange sense of awe and optimism knowing that someone will be experiencing their own version of those feelings with I Won't Care How You Remember Me. It makes me think about the infinite number of feelings and associations people already have with Tigers Jaw. That album has been out 13 years, and I guarantee other people have experiences tied to that album that are just as powerful as mine; they’re just powerful in a different way. 

It makes me look on at music in wonder. It makes concerts astonishing. That we can all stand in the same room, sit in the same theater, or crowd together in the same basement and all experience something together at the same time, all forming a new association with those songs at the same time. It’s encoding something in us in real-time. It’s bonding us forever. 

Music is beautiful because it can bring us together in those moments, if only for an hour or so. Eventually, we’ll all look back on that time we saw Tigers Jaw live and how much fun we had that night. Or how bad it was. Or the weird drunk dude who kept shouting the lyrics at the top of his lungs and spilled beer on the person in front of him. Twice. Associations are infinite. There’s an endless number of feelings, and each person will remember them differently. What’s more, those feelings can never be wholly imparted upon another soul. We can get together physically or digitally and find solace in the same piece of music. We can also listen on our own, live our lives the best way we know, and grow those personal feelings over time. We can talk about music now or find each other years down the line. Music is both collaborative and solitary. It’s communal and custom. The best part is that it’s powerful no matter what. 

That’s why I encourage anyone and everyone to write about music. That’s why I purposely choose to focus this blog on the intersection between music and life. Because you can’t have one without the other, and there’s no “right” way to write about those associations or convey those feelings. It’s why every discography ranking, countdown, and year-end list is inherently flawed. A writer can say the music “rips,” “shreds,” or “slaps” all day long. You can analyze the choruses, examine the guitar solos, and explain the drum pattern, all with perfect terminology, but at the end of the day, that’s just describing the music. If you’re writing about an old album, and if it’s an album that’s truly dear to you, then try to capture the layer just beyond. Try to explain your feelings, your truth, your life that lies just beyond the music. Try to explain your musical associations and lay out your experiences. Attempt to capture that beautiful and unique essence that you bring to the music. That’s the art of music writing, that’s where the beauty lies. That’s the intersection between music and life.

This all makes the name of Tigers Jaw’s new album feel particularly apt; I Won't Care How You Remember Me. I haven’t heard the album yet, so I don’t know the context in which that sentiment is delivered, but it makes me think about my own history with the band. It makes me think about all of our separate histories with the band. Tigers Jaw don’t care if you love this album or hate it. They don’t care if you view it as better or worse than their self-titled. None of that matters to them. They don’t care how you remember them. All that matters is that you remember them.