2024 year in review: music

According to Spotify I listened to 15000 minutes of music across 534 artists. Not a bad ratio!

I have completed my migration to streaming services. My external hard drive full of high bit-rate songs collects dust in a drawer. Nowadays listening to music mostly means listening on my car speakers when I drive to work, or listening on the speakers at work. I do get some dedicated listening time at home, but not as much as I used to. I'm definitely not an audiophile anymore.

I remain a stubborn album-oriented listener. Singles do nothing for me; playlists are only good if they bring in some thematic or sonic unity. I made a playlist for my Monsterhearts game that succeeds on all counts, if you like angsty music.

Best new (to me) music: a tie between Billie Eilish and Wussy.

I had only heard of Billie Eilish through the song "bad guy", and I thought, ok, she's a half-decent rapper, that's it. But when I put on her album WHEN WE ALL FALL ASLEEP, WHERE DO WE GO? (sic) I found that she can can really sing, and her songwriting is good too. Give it a listen if you've been sleeping on her.

For Wussy, I recommend Attica!. There's plenty to the writing I don't quite get, but I think that the stuff I do get proves that there's depth to the stuff I don't get, even if I don't get it yet. (Contrast with Phoebe Bridgers, best new (to me) music of 2020. I'm still a fan, but there's plenty of places in her writing where she says, essentially, "Fuck you, this is a personal anecdote, you don't know what I'm talking about and you never will", and I dislike that attitude intensely. What on earth could anybody make of a context-free line like "I hopped a fence when I was 17" in "Garden Song"?) The singing is beautiful too. Just give it a listen.

Best new (tout court) music: I guess it's gotta be Chappel Roan, The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess, because she's the only new musician I've listened to this year. She's got a few good, catchy songs, though she sounds an awful lot like a series of remixes: this is her Lana song, this is her Mitski song, this is her Phoebe song, blah blah blah... In 2021 I didn't give out any best new music (tout court) awards, because the only two contestants were Donda (no link, fuck you) and Certified Lover Boy (ditto), simply because I didn't hear anything else. It's very difficult for me to find music these days. There's too much of it, and it's not curated at all.

Best new song: you already know it's Not Like Us! I think of feuds and rivalries as hip-hop bullshit, distractions, but goddamn did we get a good song out of this one.

Best new resource: Robert Christgau's blog and archive. The man can write, holy hell! Even when I sometimes disagree with his reviews or get befuddled by his ultra-compressed prose, I am still compelled by his ideas, judgement, and wit. Fuck me, I think I might even shell out $60/year for his Substack archive. Would help finding new music.

It's hard to believe how deeply this guy sees into music, and how hip he still (!!!!) is.

Current most played genre is probably jazz. Being really into afrobeat lately too. My coworkers hate it, they keep asking for music with words in English.

Anyway, that's it for now. I might write a few more of these updates about gaming and personal relationships. We'll see.

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