The Nine-Month Band
By: J.P. Melkus
Tags: Economics, Criticism, Music, Culture, Essay

As a fourteen year old in 1991, had I had enough money (I didn’t) or access to a library or permissive record store (I sometimes did) I could have devoted my time to listening to the canon of rock music as it stood in 1991. And if I spent some solid hours each week devoted to the task, I could have probably finished in a summer.

If a fourteen year old today, how long would that task take? A year? Could it ever be completed? As “rock” branched out, would you have to listen to the corresponding sub-canons of ever harder and faster metal? Alt country? Dad rock? [gag] Nu-metal? Ska? Whatever Sublime was doing? Who’s even doing rock any more? Arctic Monkeys?

And what if you don’t want to be limited to rock? What if you wanted to listen to all the “must listens” of all popular music? Well, in 1991, I think you could still have done that over the course of a high school career and gone into college having heard most of what you “needed to hear.” Today, I’m not sure it’s possible.

Of course, those hypotheticals are based on a fourteen year old — someone with TIME. Someone who can come home after school and listen to records all night long. Someone who can spend weekends at a record store or on Spotify listening and listening and listening.

As us young music fans age and get jobs, spouses, children, in-laws, forced kids’-friends’-parents friends, and all the rest of it, our time to listen to music is drastically curtailed. And yet more and more music is commercially produced. And almost infinitely more amateur music is produced.

For instance, one of my favorite bands (naturally, as a middle-aged, upper-middle-class white guy) is Wilco. Once, while I was busy working as an attorney, a friend asked me if I’d heard the new Wilco record. I said no. When I got home, I found out that Wilco had put out three records since I’d last listened to one. (In fairness, only half of each once was good.) Yet in those years that had flown by while I was working away I had not even heard about them. That speaks to how busy I was, how atomized media has become, how little money the music industry now has to spend on advertising, and how much music is put out each year.

And I have it easy. My tastes are established and the music I mostly like is now a very small niche in the overall music market today (though I try to stay somewhat current in a few other niches). Yet I still can’t keep up. If I we younger and trying to listen to all the new hip-hop and EDM coming out, it would be a full time job. And for a lot of young people today, facing the gig economy, not to mention all the aspiring DJs, it might just be.

Keeping up with new releases of bands I already know and like it hard enough. It takes real work to discover new music by new artists in the genres I try to keep up with. I won’t find that out in major media, and “my” music is itself now an aging, niche market, so I have to spend extra time to find media that covers the music I like to learn what is new right now. A lot of that time is spent looking at what “Users Also Liked” sections on various streaming services when I am listening to something I already know and like — that is a feature that streaming media truly excels at even while it does so much externalized damage to the music industry as a whole — even though I question whether those recommendations come at a price.

Staying current with the artists I already know and discovering new artists in the genres I like takes too much time for me, even though I am now a stay-at-home dad. So I have to cut corners. I just have to accept that new stuff is going to come out — by artists I already like and artists I would like if I knew them — that I will miss. Maybe I’ll catch it later. Maybe not.

That’s bad enough. It’s hard enough. But I and my generational cohorts and descendants will face a problem that our progenitors never faced: On top of staying current with new music, it would be nice to occasionally listen to the music you used to listen to, the music you grew up with. But if you’re trying to keep up with new music and live a busy life in the age of a music avalanche, it becomes just about impossible to revisit the music that (to paraphrase Gotye) you used to know.

If you’re trying to keep up with new music and live a busy life in the age of a music avalanche, it becomes just about impossible to revisit the music that (to paraphrase Gotye) you used to know.

Trying to maintain currency with new stuff from the artists you already follow, new artists and new songs in the genres you follow, and new artists and new songs in genres you are interested in but don’t follow closely, and new artists and songs that are “big” and/or “important” now, regardless of genre, and also reminisce with your old faves creates an intractable dilemma. It is exhausting and temporally impossible. It makes your head hurt like trying to imagine “eternity” in Heaven did when you were ten.

The problem is compounded by the fact that you don’t listen to the radio any more. Yes, there are “channels” and “stations” and “play lists” on streaming services, but a lot of the time you open up Google Play Music or Amazon Prime Music or whatever and you want to type in something into the search bar. So you have to think of something to listen to. So you have to start recalling every song or band that you’ve ever listened too, decide among them, and put that in next to the magnifying-glass icon and start listening. Every time. Decision fatigue is real. Memory is faulty. You start to forget songs and bands. Or they just don’t come to mind in the few seconds before you think of something more recent and decide to listen to that instead.

Later, you think of something you should listen to but you forget when the time comes. This frustrates you. You think of all the music you’re missing and get despondent. You realize it’s been fifteen years since you listened to Pearl Jam’s Ten. Where did they time go? You think. You wonder what you’ve done with your life. You get happy at some stuff, regretful at others. You block it out and move on.

Eventually, you come to a realization: You are going to listen to X hours of music between now and when you die. The best you can hope for is to make the most of that time. If you never listen to something again, so be it. If you miss something great in the future, life will go on.