(against the sight of small lake waves crashing)
Hi. Sorry if it’s been a little bit.
I’ve been down, and I’ve been busy with life stuff. I’m not at the point yet where I’m asking people to pay for my work, so until then you’re getting these posts at my leisure.
On the topic of leisure, however, I want to take a moment on this newsletter allegedly devoted to music to actually refocus on music, and specifically one aspect of music that has sort of defined my life.; the ability to soundtrack your experience, wherever you are.
Sony popularized the concept of “portable music” via their cassette players in the early 1980s, and decades later we live in a world of music as an auxiliary enhancement of daily life. Through LTE, streaming platforms, and active noise cancellation, we now have the capability to blot out the world entirely and supplant it with our own. These technologies have turned music into more of a solitary activity than ever. In our private bubbles, we let Lewis Capaldi’s tortured bleating manifest our indignancy at being heartbroken; we churn out 45 minutes at the gym with nobody but Josh Homme as our motivational speaker; we throw endless nameless loping lo-fi beats into the furnace powering our productivity.
Because thinking leads to despair, and so by extension the entire Internet is misery incarnate (calling Gen Z “doomers” might be one of the most significant instances of projection observable today), I’ve read article upon article by music lovers anxiously lambasting today’s music listening climate. They describe the landscape as a universe, just like the one we reside in - an unfathomable expanse with more distance to cover than is physically possible, scattered with giant entities bearing algorithmically-derived orbits into which we are helplessly drawn, and flattened in its gravity.
I think many of these writers come from an era where your taste in music determined your identity, which was a real sociological phenomenon, I know. I was there at the tail end, watching kids tell Gavin to dance and do Warped Tour things in horribly-uncomfortable Converse All-Stars (d’you know some people believe youth ends when you can’t wear those shoes anymore?) while I sat in Trigonometry rewatching the same Steve Vai performance over and over, the one I had downloaded to my Walkman MP3 player.
Yes, the Walkman MP3 player. Before the iPod Touch and the iPhone, before the crimson-wired Skullcandies and the $150 Bose in-ears that snapped at every opportunity (I bought two pairs), that MP3 player was my first love.
I didn’t have a collection back then, largely because I didn’t know how to torrent and had no interest in learning, because I was a good Christian. I didn’t do songs but I did do free YouTube rips, of firmament-altering doses of sound. There was the TSRTS version of Led Zeppelin doing “Stairway to Heaven” at Madison Square Garden, which was an actual movie rip and not the edited album version played over film footage. There was the show that Guthrie Govan did in Japan with violinist Kanako Ito, and I only knew about this because every day I’d come home from school and put “guthrie govan” into the YouTube search bar and search by “New.” This was during a time when you took what you could get from your heroes because the site was three years old and it wasn’t yet a repository for everything ever.
I took them, and the video game soundtracks I had burned to CDs, and uploaded them to this dinky little duotone player, which also surreptitiously held three (straight!) porn vids because back then three was all I needed. Then I’d walk around school and pretend I was somewhere else. On days off, or during the summer, I’d do cautious little explorations of the roads and rails around me. Dominic Garcia and Takashi Yamaguchi would duke it out in the backstreets. Hayao Miyazaki knew what willows looked like. The private movement kept me level, sane enough to get a high school diploma.
Ever since then, I’ve internalized the simple, transcendent pleasure of picking a direction and walking there, with a pair of headphones, to wherever your feet take you. It is my favorite thing in the world. It’s not the same as driving, biking, skateboarding, or whatever other vehicle delivers you of the purposeful slowness of walking. It’s not just a safety thing. When you walk, your surroundings aren’t just static tableaus rushing by like wall-affixed panoramas in an airport. You internalize them, the sights and smells embedding themselves into your memory. Trees with peculiar curves, the wistful austerity of a gated neighborhood, the grotesque memento mori of maggot-ridden roadkill; external lives and feelings helplessly stick to you, your slowness making you unable to shake them off.
That’s how I remember college: not in its series of lecture halls and laboratories, but in its labyrinths. It was a different kind of learning. The campus sprawled in ways that signaled opportunities for discovery, and every twist and climb felt like a revelation. Friends and group partners lived in parts I had yet to embrace, and new classes meant new buildings to navigate, cartographer-like. When I wasn’t making connections with others, I was plugged in, making connections between the synapses of my brain. I don’t remember what I learned in my Intro to Linguistics class, but I remember the trips inside the beige building backgrounded by Destroyer’s Rubies and Clouds Taste Metallic. When, if ever, I attended Abnormal Psychology, it was to the sound of Bradford’s Cox’s own abnormal psychology made manifest in speakers.
In the same way, I remember my first forays into real adulthood from the paths I walked to get there. When I moved to the state of Washington, I lived in an apartment complex parallel to a hiking trail that led to the center of town. After I picked up a job and a gym membership, I hoofed it thirty minutes every day, toward and back, with a headful of tunes. The only time I kept my headphones off was in the early morning of winter on days I had to open the coffee shop; total darkness meant I had to stay alert for errant knives and guns.
It all continued into Seattle, drowning out the din of street noise with another, more-controllable form of art. For those privileged city-goers among us, manifesting a bubble of isolation sometimes becomes a necessary act of mental self-preservation from the intense stimulation of sidewalk activity. Sure, it’s a selfish, ultimately damaging act to cut yourself off from humanity, but it can also be exactly what you need when humanity is sidling too closely against you, rubbing your brain raw. As the surroundings got crazier, the soundtrack inevitably leaned more placating, countering the energy.
I’ve walked for heartbreak. I’ve walked to break hearts. I’ve walked to the homes of lovers and the houses of hookups. I’ve walked for clarity. I walked to the edge of Grays Beach in the waning hours of daylight and worried about coming out to my parents. A week afterward, I walked down Orchard Hill in the sonorous caverns of Robin Pecknold’s voice, finally myself. I walked a mile to the liquor store in the throes of depression and walked back empty-handed because, in the span of the traipse, I reconsidered. I’ve walked when nothing else felt right, when no words would suffice. I’ve walked to discover, to imbibe, to learn that there is seemingly nothing that cannot be cured in the simple act of walking: the ambulation, my ambulance.
These days, with less structure to lean on, I take countless trips to the waterfront and bask in the hot summer light, aware of its ephemerality. I have a playlist of wordless tunes that replaces one ambiance with another, and the revelation of togglable noise-canceling lets the birdsong and lake waves leak into my trip on command. My favorite is when the sun gets close to setting. The heat reaches an apotheosis that tempers the zephyrs, and the thin golden rays illuminate cracks and contours my eyes would normally pass over. I’ve spent hours doing this, starting south and walking all the way across the Montlake Cut toward the U District, right when twilight brings all the spirits out. I’m doing it right now, on the western shoreline of Lake Washington, against the sight of small waves crashing.
Do you do this? Do you love it as much as I do? It is one of the only things I feel unequivocally positive about in this grim world, and I think it’s because it allows me finally to conquer technology, instead of the other way around. I take pictures, but I don’t share them. My playlists are downloaded. When I do search for music, it happens intentionally, outside of the algorithm’s guiding hand. A vista inspires a song, which in turn inspires a memory. Soon you have a whole album of them, sound and sight and smell. They belong only to you, free of vicarious judgment or hollow encouragement. And then you are free.