When a self-proclaimed music snob lands in a rut
I used to be a music snob. I’ll never deny it, but I’ll also never equate myself to the likes of the “Tame Impala is indie” snobs. I also won’t take full blame for it. My snobbery was something that was put into motion way before I was born.
My dad graduated high school in 1975. His formative years were spent absorbing many of the albums that are known today as “The Classics.” Except they didn’t have the same reverence attached to them as they do now. They were just really good albums that you kind of had to figure out were good on your own. Sometimes I can’t think about the amount of music my dad was naturally exposed to without my head spinning. I know this isn’t unique to just my dad, and most of our parents were growing up as a lot of these albums were being released, but I have an older dad. This was special because he was in the prime age of being old enough to appreciate the sounds of foundational rock and roll, but not too old to chalk it up to just noise. From What’s Going On (Marvin Gaye, 1971) to Eat a Peach (The Allman Brothers Band, 1972), my dad and his friends grew up in what is arguably the peak of music as we know it. I mean, they were at Grateful Dead’s first-ever show at Nassau Coliseum in 1973, and he and his friends still wish they were a couple of years older so they could’ve gone to Woodstock in ’69. Imagine that!
I’ll reel it back in before I go on an unstoppable tangent of jealousy. Although I wish I could’ve lived it for myself, my dad was able to expose me to all of this music at a very young age. I essentially came out of the womb knowing all the words to Midnight Rider (Allman Bros, ’70), and Oh! Darling (The Beatles, ’69). While the music my dad was presenting my toddler-self with was in fact very very good, what was more important to my childhood was just the fact that music was being valued at all. My initial exposure sparked several independent interests: from playing the flute and the piano to appreciating and carefully crafting a music taste of my own.
Now, I definitely went through some phases. We can look to my middle school top-40 Ke$ha obsession for reference, or even more recently to my early-high-school sadgirl-Tumblr black hole. While I can’t say I listen to The xx or Cage the Elephant as much as I once did, I definitely don’t regret the many dedicated hours I spent on YouTube to MP3 converter uploading full teen-alt discographies to my iTunes. This was a period of experimentation, of finding myself, of using my own personal resources of what was coming out at the time I was growing up. It was only natural! I couldn’t be stuck in the 70s forever!
Or could I?
The advent of Spotify was one of the best and worst things that could’ve happened to my music taste. The immediacy with which I had access to practically every song ever written allowed me to dive into the archives and listen to my dad’s favorites without having to parse through his CDs. I remember the day the full Beatles discography finally landed on Spotify. Christmas Eve 2015. It felt like a personal Christmas present from George Harrison himself. This immediately threw me into a deep dive of all the old tunes I would listen to in my childhood, and then lead me to discover my own personal favorites from those same artists that I’d never heard before.
Through countless playlists over the years (and by countless I mean over 100) (I am thorough), I eventually grew into what I thought was my peak music taste last summer into last fall, and what also could arguably be my peak-snob state. Deep dive after deep dive into oldie artists, with the occasional present-day discovery, I had never felt more on top of my listening. I was never at a loss for what to listen to, had artists and albums for every mood and situation, and felt like I was constantly refining and discovering new things.
Until one day. I wasn’t.
It was a gloomy day in mid-February. After a pretty consistent run of making at least one new playlist a month for the last year or so, I suddenly felt like I was running out of steam. I didn’t want to listen to anything I’d made, but anything new was too tiring for me.
I’d entered a rut.
Suddenly, the snob had nothing to be snobby about.
For the first time, I felt like I’d exhausted all of my blast-from-the-past options. It was then that I learned the biggest lesson from my nostalgia-centered music taste: a lot of the artists you’re listening to will never make music again. There are only so many albums Spotify can produce before you turn to internet archive live show recordings, and even then there are only so many live shows you can listen to before you’re sick of listening to the same setlist over and over again.
For a bit, I felt genuinely lost. Playlist making had become a major coping mechanism, so much so that you can tell by my Spotify when I was really going through it, because that was when I was churning out a new one every one or two weeks. I’d developed a system, and it worked. I received praise from friends, from my dad, from my friends' dads, from my dad's friends. I felt like it was my thing. And then one day poof! No more thing! I felt painfully average, turning to podcasts on my morning walks for coffee because thinking of something to put on caused too much anxiety.
Eventually, I got over myself, but even three or four months later I can’t confidently say I’m fully out of my rut. I haven’t made a playlist I feel to be brag-worthy since that doomed February day, and I still find myself breaking a sweat every time my boyfriend suggests I pick the music when we’re driving to the store.
So what can I make of this rut? Is it even over? I still haven’t really reflected on it as much as I would like to. All I can come up with is that this may be signaling a shift in my music taste, but to what I do not yet know. That being said, feel free to leave some recs to anything you’ve been bopping to recently. We all know I could use it.
