Music Amplifies the Obscurity of Feeling
To escape characterising and curating your tastes online, listen to the world around you in new and unfamiliar places that you didn’t know you could love
“Send me something that I’d like.”
There is probably only one joy greater than listening to good music and that is sharing it with the people you love. Well, the people you really really like, like could love and want to be loved back and that is a lot to say up front so perhaps this handful of melody and lyrics may just say everything a little bit easier, a little bit sweeter — with some bass, a good bridge, an unexpected lick.
I have shared songs, playlists, albums and even been in a 97% match Spotify blend with a lot of crushes and eventually lovers, hoping each would deliver a glimpse into my appreciation of them. I have said I love you 100 different delicate ways through song. Sometimes, yes, following each other on Spotify is a body.
Take a good love song and transcend misunderstanding, over-explanation and nonchalance. How wonderful it is to not have to explain, or rather how wonderful it is to have libraries of music with hundreds of thousands of ways to describe a love like this.
And the track lists continue to get longer. The diversity of thought and the variety of music that we are exposed to in the world is a testament of globalisation, human creativity and yes The Internet. Despite there being greater musical variety and mobile platforms for music exposure, it is apparent that we live within a society (Fsociety) that incentivises majority rules and the subtle bias weights of artificial neural networks that use your listening habits to present back to you more commercially lucrative short-form song versions of your existing listening habits. In short, the algorithm is hungry. The homogeneity is so cheap.
The greatest benefit of having access to everything in your music library in this day and age is specificity, curation, but what was happened to organic discovery? Did you find something or did commercial data analytics present it to you in a quirky way?
Most people don’t know what you want until you give it to them, and in a similarly the hyper news attention cycle of the internet means that artists in need of streaming exposure now know exactly what will make us listen in the first 30 seconds of their songs, but is that what we want to hear?
Unlike days of old when artists would go to CD stores to see if their latest projects were selling out—these days both up-and-comers and seasoned musicians alike get to access real time listener data and can literally see which of their songs get added to obscure and deeply personal playlists. Some artists these days create and then pitch their original songs for the ears of curators to get more widely featured on streaming services. There’s a commercial incentive to fitting into both what the algorithm and playlist aficionados weight and esteem as Valentine’s Day Love or Lo-fi Love Valentines 2024 or V Day Classics.
Yes, it’s easier to say I love you in song but how do you stumble across the right songs? Maybe not right, but how does one find different songs? Not to lean on the somewhat dismissive phrase “touch grass” I would suggest that stepping into new listening environments like a record shop (shout out to my favourite place Underground Vinyl & Bookshop Chiswick) that is tactile and sensory, guiding your taste through the provocative sight and colours of LP covers.
Obviously not every neighbourhood has a store, so other ways I’d suggest for stepping into new listening environments could include following the musician friends of musicians or producers you already like (I have a playlist called ‘All the friends of’ for artists I like showcasing who they like and who their work is in conversation with). We could join reddit communities, endless forums, bandcamp, last fm or rateyourmusic or follow critical music journalist reviews.
In nature, we can encounter variety in so many generative ways but perhaps, despite modern music being so different and voluminous, bias within art is inescapable?
Perhaps to answer the question how do you find new love songs, I have to ask is love assisting your listening experiences? Overloading your tastebuds with what an algorithm knows you already like is safe but is it as exciting as tasting a song that someone you love has prepared for you? I would like to suggest that in the act of preparing songs for some you love in a compilation that your tastes are also enriched! In a time of zine reemergence, vinyl records and y2k resurgence , gift someone compilation mix CD?
And here is a guide to how:
There is a pattern to making a mix CD that depends on the why first or more importantly to whom is this compilation in service to? Do they like to dance, are they contemplative and stoic, did they ask for this? Think about the lyrics or titles of songs that will resonate with the why and that have a somatic association with words like ‘yearning’, ‘together’ or ‘beautiful’.
Next you want to think about order. What song leads the march and what song follows? To spice up your order think about
Fade outs songs that leave good room for cross fades (if you have that setting switched on) vs songs that have dramatic shifts in tempo as the needle drops or in the initial hook
If you’re maintaining a similar tempo or beat, where is the twist of difference between the two songs?
Such as songs that include a cover,remix or live rendition for the original sample of a song you played before(or just include a cover of a song you know they like) having two tracks within the playlist that are twin flames e.g. Angie Stone- Makings of You and Kanye - The Joy
In your order, as well as having two songs that maintain the same tempo or sample, perhaps you could have two songs that maintain the same guitar riff
The style of vocal delivery
Perhaps something to think about for digital playlists is does the art accompaniment between songs look good, the same way some people may order their playlist by song title
Don’t forget about adding interlude transitions into your song orders – maybe think about including recording your own voice and uploading that into the tracklist
Shake up the order with strange bells/alarm sounds/static frequency sounds/cassette closing sounds(Frank Ocean knows what I’m talking about) at the end of a song to lead into a new one
3. How many songs from one artist will you include (like damn she really loves Solange huh)? Doubling up an artist is high risk but also high reward if they like that artist too, or if it’s a Stevie Wonder themed playlist titled I called to say I love you OR Us and Them; In Any Colour You’d Like – a psychedelic rock Pink Floyd exploration of your tenderness
4. Similarly, how many songs of one genre will you include?
5. Track one sets the tone and is the space to create a thread of intrigue that feels welcoming but it doesn’t have to say everything you want to say all at once! The last track however could say it all, especially if this is the sort of playlist that you intend to actually send to someone, not as a way of working through your feelings about them. Both the first and the last song matter in equal weight. The last song is the one that lasts in their mind, it’s the song that delivers the message that they’ve been waiting for
6. Don’t forget the principles of each song if you’re getting a little overwhelmed on how to add variety
The instruments included
Song Length
Song Structure
Melodic chords and notes
Lyrics
Tempo/Beat
7. But if the last song track 25 or 50? I would say having limits is helpful, not just because traditionally CDs have a memory limit to what they can store, but limits help to refine which songs are essential and that align with your reason for making the playlist in the first place. A good playlist has 12 to 20 songs, but go back to point 1– what is the why, who is this for and what will they appreciate, what do they have the attention band with for and how will they probably be listening to the mix?
8. Before the last song, I would recommend climaxing the emotion of the playlist — this could be by adding in a song with a high BPM or which has a particular message and demand of your attention.
9. Listen to it from their perspective.
When it comes to listening to music, I have lived through a once in a generation loophole between vinyl records, cassettes (rewound with yellow pencil) CDs and The Internet. Its 2024 and the unlimited library of content distributed via streaming services on-demand makes it easier to consume content in a way that was unimaginable in 2004. I would wait on cold school mornings for my friends to get on the bus to Bluetooth me the song that they’d burned for me the night before that I couldn’t get on my family computer, that sweet sweet Youtube-to-MP3 electronic malaise distorting the song’s quality. I am no longer sifting through the limited but somehow enormous family CD Album sleeves of live gospel concerts, R&B, Reggae, Tuku Music (and 2000s popular movie DVDs) because I now have millions and millions of songs to choose from on my phone. We have so much and it would serve our tastes better to remember that sometimes we only have each other to express ourselves to, and to share music with.
You don’t have to listen to every song on earth or be an audio fetishist to diversify your music taste, when taking it upon ourselves to share our own internal databases of what we like with the people in our lives.
The moment before you press send — link copied and embedded into the digital green share button — the static moment before you click their contact image, has been replicated time and time again. In a time before music streaming services were part and parcel of our cellular phones, before peer-to-peer Bluetooth sharing, when Limewire and Napster track streaming were a record label’s biggest enemy; songs were burned into plastic compact discs. We made mixes: CDs labelled in permanent marker, with licensed music slightly pitched down to by-pass copyright infringement or perhaps with a DJ yelled moniker over the introductory bars. Piracy aside, we found a way to gift exactly how you felt about someone in a 12-song tracklist that they could hold.
In comparison, being able to listen to anything you want immediately is groundbreaking but right now if someone I like, really really like, sends me a song with a heart emoji I’m reminded that right now I only want to listen to you, telling me what you don’t know how to say in a text.
