To start, I have to prepare to be savaged by Afistaface, Andey DeLesDernier, because my mixtapes long ago ceased to be rendered on actual cassettes. She is the only person I know who is more of a purist than I am.
Mixtapes are a very important subject to me. I’ve been thinking about them for as long as I can remember, even though I was never quite the savant that some of my friends were when they were younger. In fact, I don’t think I ever made a proper mix until recordable CDs were on the scene; I made a few tapes to play in my car or give as gifts, but I didn’t really use them properly back in their heyday, and it’s definitely a case now where “mixtape” is more the preferred nomenclature than any representation of the physical product.
As I tend to do in my life, I have over time evolved a set of rather draconian rules about what a mixtape is for me. Of course, as with most of my self-imposed rules, they apply only to me; I think someone else using them might even defeat the purpose.
(This gets into a whole other issue of why I give myself strict limitations for work on which I have historically failed entirely to follow through. But I think that might be an entirely different subject.)
When I first started making mixes on CD, roundabout 2000 or so, I generally slopped songs on until I filled up the time, then arranged them in a pleasing order. My crowning achievement of this method was a mix I made for a girlfriend around then; clocking in at 79:59.80, I came as close to perfection as anyone I’ve ever known. Unfortunately, this was all undone by the fact that the version of Guns N’ Roses’ “Sweet Child O’ Mine” that I’d put on the mix was incomplete by a couple of minutes; when I listened back over the CD and the song cut off in the middle, I learned a valuable lesson.
My insane rules for structuring mixes had their genesis not long after. I picked up Nick Hornby‘s High Fidelity at work one day. I was vaguely interested because I’d heard the movie was good; in fact (shamefully), my copy of the book is the movie tie-in version. In the book, the narrator mentions a few rules that I adopted for myself; a couple years later, when I first started trying to codify my rules, I came back to that passage and realized that he’d not put in nearly as many as I’d remembered. Nevertheless, it was a critical moment for me.
I refined my rules over time, starting with “Never allow two songs by the same artist on a single mix”, still my number one most important rule. I became better at making mixes. I learned the pleasure of a well-sequenced mix from a tape that a friend brought over one night to listen to while playing video games. I picked up the need for context on a tape when I was pulled over for speeding while listening to a particularly high-energy tape after a rough night at work; I stopped listening to fast, angry music if I was already angry.
The next turning point for me came just a few years ago, with the release of Rob Sheffield‘s Love is a Mix Tape. It is, ostensibly, the story of his life with his late wife Renee, but one of their main methods of communication was the mixtape. Every chapter is headed by the track list of a mix that one or the other of them made, or someone made for them. They capture moments in time, documents from people who were in tune with the music of their lives.
I don’t make that kind of tape.
It was instructive to learn from the way they made their creations. At several points, Sheffield writes about the 20 or 30 songs that fit on a 90-minute cassette, which made me think of the early mixes I made on CD. What hit home, however, was a critique of precisely that medium: CDs are 80 minutes, but they’re uninterrupted. Tapes are 45 minutes per side, so each is, as a listening experience, 2 mixes (barring an automatic flip cassette player, of course).
This opened my eyes. Just because there were 80 minutes to fill on a CD didn’t, and doesn’t, mean that every one needs to be filled. I further restricted my own mixes. Initially, I was planning to cap length at an hour, but I changed my mind, instead deciding to put exactly 13 songs on every mix I made from then on. This has been so ever since.
I make many types of mix; if it’s all pop songs, 13 songs might come in at 40 minutes or so. Sometimes I’ll mix it up and make a 20-minute Godspeed You! Black Emperor track one of the 13; those tapes tend to run a little longer. But in addition to the restriction of how many songs there will be comes my ultimate, end-all be-all rule, that the transitions must work. I listen to my tapes slavishly, not least to avoid repeating the mistake I made with “Sweet Child O’ Mine” all those years ago, but mostly to assure that every track flows from one to the other, telling the story I want it to tell.
This is ultimately what mixtapes are to me: using other people’s words and music to tell my stories. And I like it that way.
In addition to writing thousands upon thousands of words that I can hardly imagine anyone cares about, I also dabble in design and have been trying with varying degrees of effort, but always the same degree of success (which is to say, failure), to shoot a movie.
I don’t know if this is something specific to people who fancy themselves writers, or if it applies generally to all creative folk, but I typically hate the things I make. I gave up a while ago on needing validation from others about the things that I make and do. Despite the fact that other people’s negative criticism is still bound to sting (and, for that matter, the positive criticism to inflate my sense of self-worth) and may affect what I do in the future, the fact is that if I’ve seen something to completion, I did it for me, and that can’t be changed.
(The problem is that in doing things for me, I can’t logically expect to ever be financially successful in any sort of creative endeavor. I’ve come to terms with that, and am willing to work a job that doesn’t bring me any joy if that’s what I must do. But I digress.)
Unfortunately, even in creating for an audience of me, I typically despise the end product. I can pick it apart forever, marking this sentence or that line or whatever down as flawed in my mind. Whether I can correct said flaw or not isn’t important; it is in fact entirely beside the point.
The point being, I guess, that I’m crazy.
I’ve never written anything longer form than a feature length screenplay, and even as we speak I’m working out how to fix the ones I’ve “finished” on their next rewrite. I actually got physically ill rereading the first one I wrote in advance of beginning to rewrite it. (To be fair, I think it might have been the combination of lack of sleep and overcaffeination that caused the nausea moreso than the script, but they’re still linked in my mind.)
I’ve designed a few websites beyond my own. Visiting them now, even the one that I finished most recently, I can’t help but see every amateurish mistake I made and where I’ll have to tweak the code.
George Lucas once said, “Movies are never finished, only abandoned.” In his case, maybe some of the movies should have been abandoned a little sooner, like before they started production, but the spirit of what he said is entirely accurate across all creative projects, at least from my perspective. I’ve never looked at anything I’ve done and thought, “Ah, perfect!” It just does not apply to me, I guess.
I had a conversation with a friend who’s offered to help me with an upcoming project about my tendency to self loathing when it comes to the things I’ve made. She does not appear to have this problem, and I did a bad job of explaining it to her; she took it to mean that I assumed everything I did would fail. To her credit, I did say the words “I’ve never not failed” in the course of the conversation, but what I meant to say and how the words sounded were quite different.
This is a problem I have a lot.
This conversation turned into a argument, and I got pretty substantially taken down. I had to concede in the end, because my argument such as it was had no basis in anything other than my head.
I don’t really know how to cope with this tendency; it’s entirely instinctual, and I can’t remember ever feeling any differently. Nevertheless, it surely can’t be helpful; even if I don’t have a negative attitude about what I’m doing as I’m doing it (and I sometimes do, which is a whole other issue), denigrating it after the fact isn’t going to win me any supporters, either.
There’s probably some deep seated psychological or emotional reason for the way I view my own work. Surely someone out there enjoys their own output, someone who sells themselves relentlessly and wants the spotlight enough to take it when necessary.
I’m not that kind of narcissist.
I like to think I have a pretty good handle on my attributes, that my self judgment is both fair and accurate. But maybe it’s not, at least not about everything. Maybe I am, in fact, underselling myself on the quality of my work. Although I’m unlikely to be convinced of that.
Still, isn’t that better than the alternative? Do the people like someone who’s humble to the point of self-abasement over someone who’s braggadocios to the point of obnoxiousness?
So, I successfully completed all 30 Days of Music. In a row, and on time. It was kind of weird.
What did I learn? I learned that the music that has stuck with me has a tendency to not be very diverse. If someone were to judge my probable music collection based on the songs mentioned on my list, they probably would not guess that I have much non-rock music, which I do, and they’d assume that I skew towards guitar bands from the ’90s and the first decade of the 21st century, which I also do.
The apparent lack of diversity? That’s a problem, one that apparently most people run into as they grow older. Their tastes tend to sort of solidify and they stop searching out the new.
When I was a teenager, and into my early 20s, I was very active in seeking out new music. As I’ve grown older, I’ve gotten a lot worse about it, even as the effort involved has decreased to almost nothing thanks to the internet.
That said, the real decline in my effort had a direct cause, as far as I can tell. Shortly after I moved to New York, I started tutoring a couple of teenagers, a sister and brother. Mostly, we’d sit and whichever one I was with would talk to me about her friends, her school, her life, and I’d do my best to teach her whatever it was she needed to learn. I mostly failed.
I got the job because I commented on the Strokes button hanging on the older sister’s bag. She decided I was cool enough to be seen with in public, and she hired me for $20 per hour. Before long I stopped having to look for music at all, because she’d make me mixes with whatever she was into that week and I’d weed out the good stuff from the crap.
When I started tutoring her brother as well, he did her one better. He’d give me CDs full of a few hundred mp3s, bands’ entire discographies for me to try and absorb.
Of course, it’s kind of fucking impossible to learn new music that way. I didn’t even try to listen to most of what he gave me, honestly. It was easy to ignore it, although I’m the first to admit that I missed out on some good stuff by not listening. For example, he’s the one that first put me on to the National, an excellent band that I only just this past week listened to for the first time, this despite owning their previous record since 2007.
I can only imagine there’s plenty of other good stuff that they showed me that I never gave the time of day, and that’s just the barest edge of all the good stuff that I either haven’t heard or haven’t paid enough attention. I stopped putting in the effort because I stopped having to, and then when I needed to start again, I couldn’t get it together to do so.
Ultimately, I think that’s the sad takeaway from my 30 Days of Music: I’ve stagnated in my consumption of the new, the different, and the exciting, at least as far as music is concerned.
Like a lot of people, I first heard Phoenix in that party scene from Lost In Translation, the one that’s burned in my memory, the cinematic party I may as well have been a part of, so strongly do I remember it from dozens upon dozens of viewings.
I always smiled when I heard “Too Young”, on the soundtrack, on shuffle, in life. I didn’t explore further, though; their CD was $18 and I couldn’t find much for, um, inexpensive download.
A couple years later, out of the blue, my brother sent me a random track over instant message, as he is wont to do. I listened, and I loved, and it was “If I Ever Feel Better”.
The $18 suddenly didn’t seem like such a great expense.
I got to know Unitedvery, very well. It’s like an old friend at this point, always around. I know their second and third records less well, but I’ve always been aware, always kept tabs. So it stands to reason that I was pretty pumped when everyone started saying their name in advance of the release of Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix.
They played Saturday Night Live, and went on tour. When I saw they were coming to New York, I jumped at the chance to buy tickets. As with such things, the tickets got clipped to the refrigerator like a good report card when they showed up in the mail.
A few weeks later, we threw a party. At this party was the boyfriend of the friend of a friend. I’d never met him before. I’ve never met him since. I’m not especially sad about that.
He asked if he could put some music on, and we acquiesced. He pushed play and came over, solid and sure in his rock and roll credibility.
“You’ve probably never heard of these guys.”
“This is Phoenix, right?”
A beat of silence, superiority punctured. “You’ve heard of them?”
I pointed a thumb over my shoulder, at the concert tickets hanging on the metal door. It went rather exactly as I would have written it, were I writing it as a scene.
I think awkward silences are hilarious.
So, “1901″. I was obviously predisposed to like it, and in many ways that’s half the battle when it comes to most people’s musical taste. Then again, the fact that it is really, really super great doesn’t hurt anything.
It’s not just my favorite song of this time last year; it’s my favorite song of 2009 period, the song that made me think to myself as I walked down the street, “Phoenix, you are putting on a great audition to be the soundtrack of my life.”
I was born when my mother was 21. My brother followed a couple days after her 24th birthday. She spent her entire 20s taking care of at least one child, when she was the age that’s turned out to be (apparently) the prime time of my life.
I don’t envy her that.
Nevertheless, she had lots of friends in those days, a remarkably healthy social life for a single mother of two in her mid- to late 20s.
Her friends were, as far as I can recall them, good people. David and Marty, who were brothers; my mom’s best friend Rhodi (given name Arnita; I never got the story of where her nickname came from); Jerome, whom I called Jome because I couldn’t pronounce the rest of his name for some reason. Others, too, but those are the ones I remember.
Like I said, good people. They never just tolerated my brother and I, they appeared to enjoy having us around, even though from what I know of children, that can’t possibly have always been the case. My mom trusted them with us, and us with them, and she was right to do so.
Sometimes, though, a little kid just wants his mom.
When I was little, four or five, she threw a party in our house. If I had to guess, I’d say it was on a weekend, but honestly, at that point, such a designation didn’t matter for me. I wasn’t in school yet, so I only remember knowing the different days of the week on a sort of conceptual level. Still, there were people, so let’s assume weekend.
My mom listened to a lot of hair metal and other rock and roll in the ’80s. It shouldn’t be surprising; that was, after all, the music of her people, her own aspect of phonomancy. Consequently, it is my own first aspect, as I wrote in Phonogram vs. the Fans.
Her favorite band was, and still probably is, Guns N’ Roses. They were the first band I picked back up after I left all of my parents’ music behind and struck out to find my own music as magic god. I love them, both historically and currently.
But I’ll still never forget that party.
I was a little kid, and for some reason, I was afraid. My mom was gone, off on some errand, trusting me in the charge of her closest friends. I was safe, but I didn’t feel that way.
The way our living room was set up, there was a little alcove behind the front door when it was open. If you opened it as far as it would go, it would touch the side wall, leaving a little triangle of space that a small person could fit into.
That’s where I went. I didn’t want anyone else. I wasn’t crying, I wasn’t acting afraid, I didn’t ask for my mommy.
Nevertheless, anyone who would have looked behind that door would have found a small, scared little kid who wanted his mommy, and in the meantime was going to sit there by himself, listening to Appetite for Destruction, until she came back.
She did come back. I’m the one who left and never returned.
This song made me cry over someone else once, someone who was lying right beside me when it happened.
That was over within a year. But it was still years before I could listen to the song without hurting.
Now I can. Sometimes, I feel bad about it.
What happens when you love a song more than you respect the memory of what it stood for? It was ours, but I had to make it not ours after a while. There had been other “us”s by then, and presumably other songs, but that one had always stayed where it belonged.
I never made a decision to take it back for myself, to use it for my own selfish gains, to listen to it again without feeling all the hard things that it had made me feel.
That doesn’t change the fact that sometimes I listen to it and feel like I stole something from someone, that I took something that doesn’t belong to me.
I don’t think that I will ever feel completely free of guilt.
I’ve known of Pavement a lot longer than I’ve known Pavement.
When I was growing up, even when I started exploring my own musical taste, I really only had the radio on which to rely. The best friend I had whose musical taste I knew was a huge Metallica fan; while I do legitimately love them, metal isn’t really my forte. My other friends either had terrible taste, or taste I didn’t know. That meant that Z104.5 The Edge was leading me along.
That, consequently, meant I didn’t hear any Pavement. And I missed out for that.
If you catch me on the right day, in the right mood, I might argue that Pavement are the greatest band in the world. Their contentious history, curious musical decisions, and all around weird behavior may, under whatever self-imposed circumstances I devise, define them as the most “rock and roll” band of the ’90s. And since everything about my musical taste is defined by that decade, that means something to me.
It’s a bit odd, then, that once I finally made it to them in my musical education, it took me some time to see what all the fuss was about. Sure, they may have been writing great songs; hell, they may even have been technically talented somewhere in there.
But they were fucking terrible. Couldn’t play for shit.
It took me a long time to get past that.
Eventually, I did, and I understood. I came to see all the things mentioned above, how much the fact of how they play doesn’t mean anything compared to what they play, and why. The reason I didn’t get them at first was because they were making music for the person I would eventually be, not the person I was at 12, or at 17.
They were making music for the alleged grown up version of me.
So why do I wish I could play their music? Because they are certainly all better musicians than me; you don’t write and play songs as good as their best work without being better than someone who can’t play at all. But I could absolutely pick up a given instrument and learn a fairly significant portion of their songbook.
I would hate it, though.
The way they play would never work with my personality. There’s only the most superficial structure. The way it sounds to me, if anyone has any ideas, they are free to go off and explore for a bit without the rest of the band getting on their case. The playing is sloppy, allowing mistakes to become part of the music, rather than something that needs to be smoothed out.
In short, Pavement run against my obsessive-compulsive tendencies, and I love them for it. I wish to anything that I could let myself go, let my art lead me, rather than trying to lead my art.
They’re an example I’ll always wish I could follow, but probably never will.
When I started hanging around musicians all the time, one would have thought that my intense interest in music as well as whatever potential I’d shown in that direction would have manifested in me, you know, learning a fucking instrument. But I didn’t.
I feinted in that direction a few times, most notably writing some lyrics for a project that I wanted to start with my roommate. No one ever really saw them, and I’ve not pulled them out in about seven years because I fear that they are the epitome of terrible. I was 20, after all, and I can’t think of much good that happened when I was 20.
So, I sat around, a band aide more than anything else. I’d help cart equipment around, give whoever might need it the occasional ride to practice, go to shows, do the whole thing except play an instrument.
I’ll never not wonder what might have happened if I’d pushed it then. We all know by now that I am a shameless, if not talented, singer. Add in some actual working musical ability and maybe I’d have a whole different art that I was pursuing, or at least some other way to express myself, like Marc Fort.
I’ve spent a lot of time with Rock Band. The way I play games is not the way a lot of people play games. I am a serious completist when it comes to such things, wanting to reach every goal set for me and whatever else I only set for myself. This sometimes results in a marathon gaming session marked by a masturbatory intensity so complete that I alienate those around me to the point of anger.
So, yeah, that’s me and video games.
Those tendencies made me, in the end, very good at RB drums. I learned how to play (sort of) more than a few of the more popular songs of all time.
That’s including “Everlong”, one of the greatest songs ever, and one of the toughest to drum. But, sadly, I can only get through it on hard. Those sixteenths give me a hell of a time.
I could probably learn to play real drums, having learned some of the basics through this game. But I probably won’t.
Just another example of wasted potential for me in a lifetime full of them.
So Lovage were a given, so far as my interest was concerned. Throw in Mike Patton‘s involvement, and, you know, yeah, I was pretty much in.
Even then, I didn’t expect what I got.
To say that I love Lovage is, aside from being phonetically horrific, a vast understatement.
Fairly transparently a companion piece to Handsome Boy Modeling School (Mr. the Automator uses the same pseudonym, Nathaniel Merriweather, for bother projects), Music to Make Love to Your Old Lady By is a work of pure carnal energy genius.
It’s not for everyone; it is, frankly speaking, a little bit stupid. In my reckoning, though, stupidity doesn’t preclude art, and when the stupidity comes over on the side of satire, I’m more than willing to forgive it.
“Sex (I’m A)” is a very strange song. It is powerfully seductive, maybe even a little sexy. But it’s also fucking hilarious. I’ve always thought so; the first time my best friend played it for me, I laughed out loud. But it wasn’t until researching this post, though, that I found the reason for its inherent comedic value: it’s a cover. Of an ’80s New Wave synthpop song. By Berlin.
I admit right up front that I stole this particular usage for this song. It wasn’t my idea, but my best friend’s, and all due credit goes to her.
Still, it suits me, and I’ve been joking about it (SO not joking) for as long as I’ve been considering my own mortality enough to recognize that I will, in fact, someday have a funeral.
I have curious ideas about death, mostly stemming from my complete lack of religious belief and my feeling that one of the better uses for a newly dead human is donation to science.
I’m not especially reverent, such as it is, to the ceremony of a funeral. I do understand the need for closure; I am personally largely unable to process death if I don’t go to the funeral.
However, I don’t see a reason for it to be a spectacle. The big room, the casket set up under the glowing lights, the pretty verses read from the book… I get the appeal, if you are that way inclined, but I’m simply not.
For that reason, I’d like my funeral to be a fucking party. I know it would be a tragic event for those closest to me; death is not something the living tend to handle well, in my experience. Still, I am fairly certain an open bar would go a long way in assuaging that grief. Plus it would be a good legacy to leave.
But what’s a party without a good DJ? It wouldn’t take much, I don’t think, to find one with a suitably morbid sensibility to play the party, and I would think, nay, hope, that any DJ worth his salt would play “Another Bites the Dust” in that situation. It would seem to me to go without saying.
I would prefer a celebration of life, such as it is, to be my legacy. I can’t think of a better way to set the mood than with this song.
