In 2009, Ian Svenonius' short-lived group Felt Letters put out a single called "600,000 Bands"—a goofy, vampy song that skewered the then-ubiquitous idea of blog buzz and the many indie-rock doppelgangers trying to stand out in an increasingly crowded scene ("600,000 bands, yeah/ 50,000 sound like Can"). As the unhurried track slinks past the four-minute mark, it becomes its own kind of sly protest against the frenzied pace of the digital world. "Everybody wants you to listen to their [band]," Svenonius deadpans, slyly holding your attention hostage, "but you can't right now 'cause you're listening to this."Jokey as it is, I find myself thinking about this lyric a lot, so perfectly does it capture the mindset of the modern listener. In the words of the infamous Twitter account Horse ebooks—and leave it to a human disguised as a bot to coin the phrase that best sums up the strange fatigue of digital life—everything happens so much.
When I first started regularly buying music in the mid 1990s, not quite so much was happening. In fact, almost all of my formative listening experiences were defined by scarcity, limitations, and a daunting obstacle course of potential barriers. If I wanted a new CD in 1996, I would first need to save up enough allowance, then convince a parent to drive me to the mall, and finally—perhaps most perilously—make it to the register without my mom raising an eyebrow at the cover or lyrical content of what I'd picked out (as she did one day when I selected a double-album that featured a song called "Fuck You (Ode to No One)"). Napster, which arrived when I was 13, was liberating, but only in comparison to what had come before. My family still had dial-up at the time, so I'd usually download singles rather than entire albums, given how often someone in the house would accidentally pick up the landline. Back then, if I'd known what the not-so-distant future had in store—high-speed wireless internet, pristine audio and video streaming, the ability for more than one person to be on the internet in the same house at the same time—I would have started working on my time machine right then.
Now that we're living in the age of instant access, though, why does it all feel… a little less satisfying than we thought it would? I really started wondering this late last year, after reading Alexis C. Madrigal's thought-provoking piece for The Atlantic, arguing that 2013 was "the year 'the stream' crested.""[N]ow the Internet's media landscape is like a never-ending store, where everything is free," he wrote. "No matter how hard you sprint for the horizon, it keeps receding. There is always something more." At first (2009 was the year that many platforms started presenting instantly-refreshing online content reverse-chronologically), this sense of infinity was thrilling. But by last year Madrigal (and anyone who’d been diagnosed with a case of FOMO) noticed a certain exhaustion, and even a kind of sadness, setting in. "Who can keep up?" he wondered. "There is a melancholy to the infinite scroll."
I know exactly what he's talking about. These days, my daily internet behavior is depressingly predictable: Every morning I'll click on more articles than I'd ever have time to read, clutter my browser with tab after tab after tab, and then at some moment every afternoon I'll finally admit my own mortality and close all the things I didn't get to. My listening habits follow a similar pattern, flitting restlessly between iTunes, Spotify, and SoundCloud—and there's that tab containing a YouTube video for a song a friend sent an hour ago, expectantly demanding some sort of reply. I'm sort of ashamed to admit that I have occasionally caught myself thinking, "I wish I could listen to more than one thing at the same time," but I know I'm not alone. Last week, I was talking to a colleague who had sent me some music by the mash-up artist Caddybay, and we discussed how his music feels like a response to the overwhelming “everythingness” of the internet. His full-length mixes edit together albums of two different artists—Gucci Mane vs. Boards of Canada, Puffy and Ma$e vs. Thievery Corporation—and the effect is the closest I've come to satisfying that 21st-century desire of listening to everything open in my browser at once.
Music used to be a commodity, but now—in a moment where the term "attention economy" often gets thrown around—that status is reserved for our focus and our time. Everyone wants you to listen to their band/side project/SoundCloud remix but you can't right now because you're reading this.
This past May, I spent some time in Berlin. For me, there's something about traveling to another country that also taps into that sense of everythingness, but in a way that inspires wonder and possibility instead of fatigue. When you travel, you commune with all the people you might have become, if circumstances were slightly different, if you lived someplace else. I stayed in Kreuzberg with a friend of a friend, a very kind American ex-pat who decided to grow a mustache shortly after moving to Germany. This mustache had never been documented on Facebook, he told us proudly, so when he came back to New York people sometimes did not recognize him. This sounded nice, I thought, not just to slip beneath the digital world's radar but also to transcend the need for your identity to be linear and cohesive and whole, just like this lovely, complicated, cracked-in-half city.
You know that moment towards the end of a great vacation when you vow that everything will be completely different when you come back? As the week neared its end, my travel companion and I recited a list of all the things we were going to change about our lives when we got back to the States. We would make ginger tea from scratch like they do in that one cafe. We would go to more museums and go out dancing twice a week and only drink espresso—never coffee and especially not Americanos—and experiment with making our own popsicles and drink Club-Mate instead of sleeping and grow our own digitally undocumented mustaches and listen to every piece of German music ever recorded.
There is also a moment after the end of a great vacation when that sense of possibility evaporates, and the souvenirs only serve as taunting reminders of that brief time you thought you could become something greater than human. It has been eight weeks since I got back from my trip. From my desk right now I can see two large, unused pieces of ginger and a German-language copy of Kraftwerk's Trans Europa Express on my turntable.
Before this summer, I'd never listened to a Kraftwerk album in my life. Before this summer, I might have also been terrified to admit this publicly; I figured it was the kind of statement, especially coming from a music critic, that prompts somebody to knock at your door, flash an important-looking badge, and step aside to reveal a crew of movers who've come to cart away all of your records, because you are no longer deemed worthy of owning them.
We all have our blind spots—yes, even critics—but before The Dawn of the Age of Everything it felt easier to justify them: Maybe that album was too expensive, or impossible to find on Kazaa, or out of print. But in a world where I can type "trans europe express full album HQ" into a YouTube search bar, what excuse do I have for never having listened to Kraftwerk? It's not like the jury's out on whether or not these guys are any good. Did I—a synth lover and longtime Daft Punk fan who writes a column about the uncanny relationship between technology and identity in music—seriously expect to check Kraftwerk out and think, Nah, not for me?
Shouldn't unfettered access to music mean we all have impeccable taste and an intimate familiarity with all records previously deemed Classic and/or Important? Maybe, but I have to admit that in the past few years I've noticed that the stream has had a counterintuitive effect on my listening habits. For some reason, it's made me jaded about greatness and even a little less likely to seek out Important Records—having all of them splayed out before me has reduced them to inherited experiences, foregone conclusions, boxes to tick off on a checklist. Too often I feel paralyzed and overwhelmed by history, by all that I don't know. Everything happened so much.
Or at least I felt that way until this summer. When I got back from my trip and once again settled into my daily routine, I became single-mindedly obsessed with seeking out music that reminded me of Germany. It started with the sublime Autobahn, then onto Radio-Activity, then back to the Ralf und Florian stuff before moving to Cluster & Eno, followed by a long detour listening to Bowie's Berlin Trilogy (I'd always been more of an early-'70s Bowie person, or at least I thought so) and reading about the trouble he and Iggy Pop got themselves into there. Somewhere along the way, I realized that this is the way I used to listen to music—burrowing into a band or a scene or a moment, noticing unexpected connections ("From station to station back to Dusseldorf City/ Meet Iggy Pop and David Bowie"), following some kind of story that reflected back something about my own lived experience.
In Madrigal's piece about the melancholy of the infinite scroll, he refers to a phenomenon he (pretty hilariously) dubs "narrative porn"—digital culture's recent fetishizing of anything with a beginning, middle, and end. Narratives "provide closure," Madrigal writes. "They are rocks that you can stand on in the stream, just to catch your breath." Maybe I'm just indulging in some narrative porn here myself, but there's been something refreshing, even comforting, about the summer I spent semi-monogamously loving Germany. I might not have believed this when I was a little younger, but I don't think I would have been a better music critic if I'd come to Trans-Europe Express a decade earlier, out of some sterile sense of duty. Something about the experience of finding it later, and loving it that much more personally, has made me more comfortable with the vast amount of things I don't know, and all the great albums I haven't heard yet. Some of them will eventually find me, and I’m also OK with the fact that some of them won’t. Life is long, but it’s not timeless. And thank god.
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Read all of Lindsay Zoladz's previous Ordinary Machines columns here. Reported by Pitchfork 1 hour ago.