Mane power.
What gives men more power (more privilege, higher status, higher salaries) than women? Obviously that isn’t the case everywhere, all the time. There are plenty of situations, microcommunities, and interactions where women have and yield more power than men. But generally, walking around in most countries, men are safer, richer, and more free than women. Why?
Every time our seven-year-old daughter has a playdate with a new friend, Kia asks a simple question.
“Do you have any guns in the house?”
She gets nervous about asking, but so far nobody has been offended by the question. Her own father keeps a gun in the house. So do several of our friends. But it’s something we want to know about. If the answer is yes, the follow-up question is:
“What’s your gun safety plan?”
The general reaction to the question is “I should be asking the same question.” Accidental injury and death is a real threat to children in the United States. A few sobering bullet points:
TheĀ real numbers are even higher. Many accidental gun deaths are reported as homicides. The same article gets into details re: what ages children are most at risk. Three-year-olds, who are old enough to manipulate objects but don’t understand the dangers guns pose, are particularly vulnerable.
This is not a screed against personal gun ownership. It’s a just a reminder. Kids are curious. Kids will explore every nook and cranny of your house. Kids do things without considering or understanding the consequences. Kids and loaded, unsecured guns are a potentially lethal combination.
Don’t leave your damn guns lying around. If there is even a small chance of a child setting foot in your house, store them locked and unloaded.
And ask that awkward question.
[twitter_follow screen_name=”johndavidmoyer” show_count=False size=Large]
No half measures.
I deleted my Reddit and Facebook accounts back in July and August respectively. I quit Reddit because they don’t do enough to fight blatant racism and misogyny. Also I was wasting too much time on the site. Thirdly, I found that the anonymity often encouraged mean or disparaging comments (though, to be fair, there were just as many clever, helpful, and/or friendly comments).
I quit Facebook because 1) I was seeing too many posts from random people I didn’t know, 2) my time on the site wasn’t strengthening or enhancing the relationships I cared about most, and 3) I wasn’t enjoying time on the site. Also because of various privacy violations.
So I went cold turkey. Nuke option in both cases, account deleted, no going back (unless, of course, I decided to go back and start from zero karma and zero friends, respectively).
Back in May Marc Kate (a good friend and host of the Why We Listen podcast) emailed me with some thoughts about current music and his own relationship to music:
Iām finding that the trap of Retromania, the ubiquity of nostalgia, the lazy, daily choices we increasingly make in our playlists are contributing to musicās stagnation.
I mostly feel like some of the most exciting music Iāve ever heard is happening right now, but I also canāt rightly defend any of it as particularly new. Iāve always prioritized music that is cutting edge, but I canāt say Iāve really heard any in decades.
He followed this up with a proposed experiment and invitation:
So, I want to see what happens, what I learn if I eschew music that is even slightly old. Even if it means Iām actually just listening to wholly historically derivative music that was made last month.
Instantly I was in. Even though I disagreed that music was stagnating in any way, and I’d been finding plenty of new music I loved, I wanted to take the new new music experience to the extreme. For the month of June, Marc and I agreed we would ONLY listen to music released no more than one year ago (and this could not include re-releases or new releases of old music). There would be exceptions only for listening experiences out of our control (like music piped into grocery stores, public spaces, etc.).
Listen to the JD Moyer episode of Why We Listen.
Music Search
The first problem I confronted: how would I find this new music? Some I could find by browsing sales charts on sites like Beatport, which have a high turnover rate and rarely include music more than a few months old. But this would only lead me to new electronic music, and part of the idea of the experiment was to expand my musical taste (or at least exposure) into genres I might not otherwise consider.
I hit upon a solution about a week in. While preparing a giant playlist for my birthday party (with a new music theme), I hit up friends and acquaintances on Twitter for their favorite album of the year. I got a 100% response rate — it turns out people love to recommend music. I love to discover and recommend music as well (it’s one reason I co-founded Loƶq Records) … it may be a near-universal desire to want to share music that has touched and inspired us.
There are three main ways you can discover new music in this internet age:
Option 1 is the laziest. Option 2 requires time and dedication, and also listening to lots of bad music in order to find the good stuff (not being in love with this process was one reason I gave up DJing). Option 3 is probably still dominant among the <30 crowd, but in my circles and at my age (forty-six) there are more conversations about kids and schools than there are about new tracks and music videos. But I found it wasn’t hard to steer the conversation back in that direction. With a little prompting I received a flood of recommendations — more than I had time to listen to.
Thoughts on Streaming
First digital downloads replaced physical media, and now streaming is replacing a large percentage of downloads. Each wave cut music industry revenues by half or more. Piracy has of course played a role, but the replication/sharing revolution is the main factor.
Nimble players, like my own label, can survive by cutting costs. Vinyl production and shipping were huge expenses, and when we dropped vinyl our profits-per-release shot up. Even though revenue is low, we can keep releasing music we love and make a little money in the process. But I do miss vinyl …
What about the consumer side? Previous to this experiment, my preferred mode of listening to music was still removing a slab of vinyl from its cardboard sleeve, placing it on the Technics 1200, and dropping the needle on the record. Music just sounds best this way. But none of my favorite albums (like Tycho – Awake) had been released in the past year. So I signed up for a 3-month free Spotify trial and jumped into the world of consumer streaming.
It’s amazing what you get for the price of an internet connection and a few cups of coffee. I was able to find 100% of the music recommended to me. It was easy to set up as many playlists as I wanted. Obviously Spotify isn’t the only streaming service but they have a great interface and a huge library. While they may not pay artists as generously as they claim, Spotify is a great deal for the music consumer.
Effects of Only New Music
I listened to so much new music in June that is was overwhelming. I didn’t get to know any of it very well. Of the many recommendations I received, only a few stuck. It’s good that there’s a huge, highly diverse universe of new music, because tastes diverge just as much.
A few albums that will stay in my playlists:
(The last one is a Loƶq Records release, but it earned its place on the short list.)
How does this compare to the amount of new music I usually add to my active playlists (not just my library)? At the most I really fall in love with no more than one new album a month, so it was a big increase. I’m still getting to know the albums above, but they’re all keepers.
Since there wasn’t any discomfort involved in listening to only new music, the month went by quickly. Marc had a similar experience. One month might have been too short of a time for this experiment to feel the full effects.
Overall the experiment was a good kick-in-the-pants to expand my listening horizons.
Enter Marc Kate …
As I mentioned above Marc is the host and producer of the Why We Listen podcast. While the typical format is Marc asking the guest to choose three songs ā any three songs, for any reason they like ā to share and discuss with him, our episode featured a broader discussion about music centering around the June listening experiment. You can listen to our discussion here, or as soon as it posts on iTunes.
Here’s Marc’s take on New Music June:
We live in a world that is changing rapidly, and music isnāt keeping up. It seems to be content with aping the Beach Boys or combining Afro-Beat with post-punk, or looping Italo-Disco album cuts, or discovering faux genres (Yacht Rock) or any other strategy that has been mined for decades. If Iām sounding cynical, itās because I am. Iām deeply excited about a lot of music Iām hearing, but deeply disappointed in how conservative it all sounds. Complaining that all new music sounds the same is a tired position to take, but it it has never been truer in my lifetime as it is now. If you disagree, I challenge you to point me to five minutes of music that wasnāt possible or is indistinguishable from music that we could have heard 15 or more years ago.
I was raised believing what Jacques Attali said: that āMusic is prophecy.ā Music is the weather vane, the barometer and the compass. Through it we can know where we are and where we are going. However, for the past few decades, it seems that music mostly reminds us of where weāve been.
I started my podcast Why We Listen as an excuse to meet with interesting people to learn about their listening habits and learn how music functions for them relative to how I understand music to function for me.
What I discovered, as I spent so much time immersed in this kind of research, is that music really has stagnated. And Iāve been complicit. My listening habits had stagnated too. Iād become lazy and undemanding, settling for middlebrow delights and not asking to be challenged. Technology has made it easy for us to be collectively conservative. Weāre surrounded by the music of our grandparents. Public space is more likely to play music that is 30 years old than anything contemporary, and contemporary music is more likely to sound like music that is 30 years old.
This doesnāt sound like prophecy. It sounds like a history lesson, like weāre trying to describe this chaotic new world with dead languages.
So, inspired by JD Moyerās ālifestyle experimentsā as I think of them, I thought to detoxify for a month. I wanted to do my best to purge vintage sounds from my personal soundtrack and see what that would do to my attitude.
What I discovered is what I already knew:
That there is a lot of really fun new music being made with very traditional goals.
That there are some people out there pushing at the edges of whatās possible. Just little nudges. Nothing revolutionary, but promising gestures of discovery.
That there doesnāt seem to be much evidence that some sort of sonic revolt is waiting around the corner.But Iām patient. And Iām listening.
ā
I’m more optimistic about the current state of music production than Marc, and we have some good back-and-forth in the podcast (as of writing this I haven’t yet heard it, but Marc promised he’d edit out the bits where I sounded like a complete idiot). If they made the cut, I also shared some of my own experiences and frustrations writing and releasing music that inspires me, but isn’t necessarily targeted at any particular audience or market segment. How does your music find its people? And what if those people don’t exist? Should you change your style, chasing what’s popular? Or just do your own weird thing and hope a few other people will like it? Twenty years writing music music and running a record label and I still can’t give you a good answer to this question. I guess it depends on what your goals are, as an artist.
Marc Kate’s most recent album, mentioned on the podcoast, is File: #08, now available from Computer Tapes. His forthcoming album Failing Forms will be released in November.
Approximately two weeks ago I deleted my Facebook account. It wasn’t something I thought about a great deal. I suddenly realized “I’m done with Facebook,” and a day later I deleted my account.
There have been red flags regardingĀ Facebook’s data-mining and privacy policies.Ā But this isn’t why I deleted my account. I don’t know if I even fully understand why I wanted to stop using Facebook, but here are some of the reasons I’ve considered:
Facebook was starting to feel like a low-quality tabloid newspaper instead of a way to connect with family and friends.
One reason I stayed on Facebook for so long was that I felt it helped me keep up with acquaintances. I recently had an experience that made me rethink this supposition. I ran into someone from the dance music scene that I hadn’t seen in years. I’d seen that person’s posts on Facebook so I had a vague idea that I knew what was going on with him. But after a brief conversation on BART (our local transit system) I realized that I’d had no idea what was really going on in his life. I had been reading his posts without context, and didn’t understand that his life had been turned upside-down by a series of events, and that he was having to rebuild his life essentially from scratch. I learned more in a five minute conversation than I would have from reading a thousand of his Facebook posts.
Events and Invitations
A few friends would use Facebook to invite me to events. It was often difficult to find these real invites among the dozens of spam-invites to paid events that would also show up in my Facebook events list. I suppose some friends will have to switch to email (or snail mail) to invite me to things, but I actually check those formats on a regular basis. It’s nice to have one fewer inbox.
Focus, Active Curation
Since quitting both Facebook and Reddit, it’s much harder to waste time on my computer. I check my email, the New York Times headlines, and that’s about it. Sometimes I’ll look at my Twitter feed and click on a few interesting links. But I no longer fall into a black hole of distraction where I lose an hour or more of my day. I feel more focused.
In the evening, if I’m actively looking for entertainment, I now have to be more active in my search (instead of passively browsing an algorithm-generated feed, or pages of “top voted” content). This is a good thing. I’m reading more fiction (in book format, not on my computer), and finding very narrow content related to my hobbies (like the TerranScapes youtube channel). This is a return to how I sought entertainment during the first thirty-five years of my life, and it’s a more gratifying system. I’m engaging with material that actively interests me in very specific ways, instead of finding the occasional gem amidst a sea of broad content.
Out of the Loop?
I did have some mild anxiety about becoming more socially isolated or being “out of the loop” if I quit Facebook. I quickly identified this as a false fear. My real friends weren’t going to forget about me, and though I might learn things about people’s lives (who got married, who had a kid, etc.) later than most, I might enjoy the information more receiving it in person.
Quitting Facebook did inspire me to be more active in regards to social planning. Life is finite and you don’t have time to do everything with everyone. I’ll save the details for a later post, but I’ve made a few changes to my system for tracking what I/we want to do with our friends and family, and taking the necessary steps to schedule and plan those social engagements.
I actually feel more socially connected since I quit Facebook. I’m no longer looking at events I wasn’t invited to, parties I didn’t attend, and trips I didn’t take. Instead I’m looking at my own calendar to see what I have planned for the week, and with whom. If the calendar is looking empty then I take steps to fill it up.
Powered by WordPress & Theme by Anders Norén