my bygone, half-bootlegged music library
The man who gave me Wolfking was Mr. G—, a former teacher who had heard I was into music. He also gave me The Heart of the Congos and a number of other superb records. They were all bootlegs, blank CDs he’d burned and labeled. His taste was impeccable. He kept a Blogspot, where he uploaded .zip files of wide-ranging playlists each week. As with many sites at the time, the files were easily downloadable; the site read “this link will remain active for seven days or 100 downloads, whichever comes first.” A former Phishhead with a tattoo on his calf to prove it, he felt at some point that he was missing out on other music by being so devoted to one band; so he became an audiophile and an evangelist for good music of all kinds.
My interest in music took shape in this spirit. Under-exposed to music as a child, I saw the Internet as an education, and my growing iTunes library as an intermediary between physical and online media, between buying and bootlegging. I amassed a large library from niche blogs like Mr. G—’s, iTunes purchases, and checking out as many CDs as I could from the public library and ripping them onto my computer. I’d also buy and rip new CDs; even vinyl records came with digital download codes. My library was a semi-stolen, meticulously arranged collection of audio files, with a few shelves of LPs and CDs. Physical enough to take a collector’s pride in but digital enough to be truly massive, my library was something between a bookcase of records and the spectral Spotify library that now lives on my phone.
Drew Austin wrote recently of the decline of the “pre-internet cultural elitist,” where once “you distinguished yourself from the masses not by deciding what was good, but by having better access to the sources of taste and then merging them into your own identity, thereby becoming a beacon for others to follow.” This existed during the internet, too, albeit in a diminished form. Mr. G— wasn’t a pre-internet cultural elitist so much as a pre-streaming one. “Better access to the sources of taste” wasn’t just working at a record store or proximity to the right people or enough money to buy LPs, but spending lots of time online, downloading .zip files, charting constellations of blogs and forums and overlooked record labels.
In Mr. G—’s footsteps, I set up my own music Blogspot, which went through various iterations before ceasing altogether. I labeled my CDs the same way, Sharpie-scrawled in paper sleeves, and made mixes for my friends. But as music sites like SoundCloud introduced subscription fees, Spotify and Apple Music ascended, and cars gave up CD players for AUX cords, my hybrid music library made little sense. My blog, with its tagline “Trawling the web for music so you don’t have to,” became obsolete.
When I finally joined Spotify, it was because iTunes’ gradual mutation into Apple Music rendered my library unusable as I’d had it. This problem would persist, in a way, with Spotify. As Kyle Chakya wrote last year, Spotify’s constant updates interfere with our very conception of media libraries: “The way we interact with something — where we store it — also changes the way we consume it, as Spotify’s update made me realize. Where we store something can even outweigh the way we consume it.” Chayka notes how, much like the recently introduced Smart Shuffle feature that I have to keep dismissing each time I want to shuffle a playlist, “The interfaces follow the company’s incentives, pushing its own products first and foremost, or changing familiar patterns to manipulate users into trying a new feature.” With streaming services—with any software subscription, really—the price we pay for ease and surfeit is stability and control.
Despite its profit-hungry proteanism, Spotify has made musical discovery much easier. I can listen to and organize music more conveniently—and more legally—than in my old library. (Though that half-bootlegged library still feels more ethical than a service so hostile to artists; as Damon Krukowski wrote earlier this year, “Spotify’s profit requires that digital music have no value.”) Though Austin is right that unfettered digital access eroded the cultural function of analog music snobs, there are still record labels, audiophiles, and artists who assemble playlists within streaming services: Numero Group, Sam Valenti IV’s Herb Sundays, Four Tet’s mega-playlist, and so on. What’s different is that we all share the same immense library. A playlist doesn’t reintroduce something missing; it just charts a new path. If the old music snobs were gatekeepers, the new ones are wayfinders.
In some ways, this sounds more egalitarian, more open. But what I miss most in the streaming era is that music no longer feels like a gift. Instead of a CD with someone’s name on it, a playlist is just one link among many to click on or not. Receiving a playlist is less like being let in on a secret than being given yet another moodboard to look at. And while I like moodboards, which at their best reveal kinships between seemingly disparate things, they can also have a homogenizing effect, sanding down the difference between things by carefully arranging them together.
Assembling playlists for this newsletter last month, I kept feeling my collector’s sense of pride eclipsed by a consumer’s sense of smallness. Sometimes it feels like I pay Spotify each month, not for music itself so much as the ability to move it around, like paying someone to reorganize their things—things that keep reorganizing themselves even after I’m gone. Or disappearing altogether: by the time someone listens to one of my playlists, some songs might not even be there at all.
Unable to find those eight John Phillips tracks anywhere, I plug in a hard drive that I keep on my desk. It’s my old library, all those years of collecting, labeling, learning. I find John Phillips - The Frenchman.mp3. I haven’t listened to it in years. The record is a breezy beach album, with that cavernous old-vinyl sound and a piano that’s dreamlike, perfect. Yet there’s something foreboding in the lyrics, like the curled edges of an old coastal photograph. “You cannot say you were not warned,” Phillips sings, “His magic cape is stained and torn / The rabbit in his hat is dead and gone / You cannot, cannot say you were not warned.”
ben tapeworm