The downside to having successfully kicked my music rating and downloading habits and RYM addiction is that now I have nowhere to discuss music other than Facebook, and my non-RYM friends are surely beyond tired of my esoteric music posts. Also, I seem to still be addicted to the internet. Hmm. I would get a tumblr but there are people there I'd rather not run into and the last two tumblrs I had ended... badly. So getting a real live blogger blog seemed an obvious temporary solution: I'll be less likely to post self-lacerating, overly personal shit here than in that other community and can maybe focus more on music and less on melodramatic antics (though I assure you, it's still highly unlikely that there won't be some of those.)
Since I stop rated music I've basically lost any interest in listening to new music - it seems obvious that that points out a fatal flaw in my enjoyment of music: what's the point, I say to myself, of listening to something if I can't catalog it and show that I listened to it to other people? In other words: why listen to new music if it doesn't increase my music nerd e-peen? The realization that my years of obsessively downloading and hoarding music are seemingly over is freeing and frightening, the latter because it makes me have to come to terms with how much time I've straight-up goddamn WASTED on a dick-measuring contest (and I don't even WANT the smallish-yet-still-too-large-just-by-virtue-of-existing cock I already fucking have!) the only meatspace results of which have been failing classes and creating an esoteric, elitist frame of reference and sense of aesthetics that alienates just about everyone I may try to relate to (though I did bond with an older guy at a Bahá'í feast over Rahsaan Roland Kirk and Cecil Taylor) when I should be creating art rather than merely acquiring and passively consuming it. And, on a much less important tip, I've realized that my habit these past four or so years of listening to tens of thousands of albums exactly once has actually backfired and made my taste even more banal and bourgeois and, yes, canon than it should be: since I gave up rating music, I've been craving nothing but comfort music, stuff I've heard a thousand times before, and in far too many cases that means music I listened to compulsively when I was a teenager, sometimes before I even had Soulseek or broadband - and that means white men with guitars far more often than I'd like to admit. Very rarely has music I've only encountered in the past three/four years been able to become comfort listening for me, because I've never given myself enough chances to get truly acquainted with it: thus I have a very small pool of albums I listen to when I need cheering up or empowerment or just something soothing: over the past week the selection of music on my Walkman (ugh I need a WalkLADY, thank you very much) has gotten progressively less eclectic and exciting and increasingly... Pitchfork. I had had tons of modern death metal and Cajun music and Tresor v/a comps and deep house EPs and Arabic jazz and Huayno music and free improv, y'know, typical hipster shit, as I always joke, and now half of that has been replaced with... twee pop, Charming Hostess, the Magnetic Fields, more twee pop, the Velvets, Team Dresch, Simon Bookish, still more twee pop, Josephine Foster, Kimya Dawson, Gentle Giant, Hunx and his Punx, even motherfucking Doolittle. Honest-to-goodness typical hipster shit. I probably really need the first two Belle & Sebastian albums too but I don't wanna complete the Diablo Cody poseur hipster trifecta. All the stuff I listened to at 18, with dashes of what I listened to at 14. And as I write this I suddenly realize how incredibly pointless it is to beat myself up for having, at my core, less dorkily eclectic and global-minded and anti-rockist taste than I like to show to the world. Seriously, it doesn't matter. How many people in Columbus, GA even know who Charming Hostess or Free Loan Investments are? And even if my Walkman was filled with (recent) Lil Wayne and Montgomery Gentry, it'd still be okay, and probably better, because people who listen to THAT don't build this grand elitist narrative about their superiority to the Normals based on something as utterly meaningless as taste in the arts. Hey ho wait - didn't I say this blog wouldn't turn self-lacerating and overly personal? I guess I just needed to recognize that just because I don't go to RYM anymore, that doesn't mean all of the weird negative personality quirks (and not like fricking adorable awkward "indie" movie manic pixie dream girl quirks - and even those don't look good on a hairy morbidly obese tranny) that came with basing my entire life around consuming music have disappeared. And if my mp3 player is filled with twee pop instead of extreme metal and EAI, then, hell, maybe that makes it slightly easier to find someone (maybe someone queer and cute!) to actually relate to, at least musically. Hey, an indie pop girl can dream, right?
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