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The Retrographer, Issue 97 (1 0 0 2 0 2 2)

The Retrographer, Issue 97 (1 0 0 2 0 2 2)

December 31, 2022

My top 100 songs of 2022, favorite songs, albums, cool/weird videos, and more!

The Retrographer 97 (1 0 0 2 0 2 2)

LISTEN TO THIS PLAYLIST ON SPOTIFY OR YOUTUBE

Thank you for reading this newsletter. I started it in 2015 as a way to keep my chops after I stepped away from writing full-time. One of my weaknesses as a writer is pitches; I don’t come up with original angles as easily as someone making their living doing it should. So having a set premise – ten short Consumer Guide-style song blurbs followed by one longform essay on an album that sits outside the canon – helped me keep going.

Back then, I remember reading portensions of demographic trends in music: As we age, do we discover less? Do we idealize the past and stop exploring the present? Do we care less? Even then I remember my friends noting, with blithe resignation, that they weren’t really listening to new music anymore. Maybe this newsletter, which presented new music from a familiar voice, could help counteract the trend.

This year I will send my hundredth issue of The Retrographer. It’s sometimes been late, often needed an editor, and occasionally embraced concepts that now make me cringe. But it has never missed a month. It served every purpose I hoped. I’ve written more than I otherwise would; Friends have found new music through it; I’ve chronicled my listening for the better part of a decade in a way that’s easy to return to. It’s contextualized my listening in a way I continue to benefit from.

So how did that warning of the future – that our interest in music would erode with age – fare into my 30s? In some ways it did transpire, for obvious reasons. Time leads us further from the settings which contribute to its meaning. Not everyone I know can find a reason to actively identify with music when so much else of significance is happening in their lives.

But the truth is more alloyed than that. Over the life of this newsletter, the world decisively switched to streaming platforms and social media discovery. Broad popular culture as it once was no longer exists. As kids, we suffered through commercial-ridden radio blocks that looped the pop hits of the day and replayed the same music videos on TRL for months at a time. Thanks to personalization algorithms and social/interest graphs, we now live in hermetic fiefdoms where we may never encounter the music that defines the listening of millions of others. Meanwhile, old songs live longer lives and elbows out the new; The #1 and #3 songs on Billboard’s year-end chart didn’t even come out this year. Music is a different thing now than it was then.

In my own life, this change away from a unified popular culture has made my relationship to music much more local and personal. I care more about music made by people I know than by an increasingly fragmented idea of social relevance. Not that music doesn’t move culture, but rather it no longer seems to move it en masse. We no longer live in a time when a Beyoncé album “breaks” the internet. Bad Bunny’s power is ubiquitous to some and absent to others. Taylor Swift’s historic domination of the Billboard Top 10 back in October showed the strength of her cohort, but it’s easier than ever to meet people utterly untouched by it.

And quietly this year I fell further into music than I ever have. I released an EP, Heavy Light, in April; I recorded two new albums, one in March and one in December; I played my first solo full band show; Office Culture released our third album, Big Time Things, in September. It made Pitchfork’s Best Rock Albums list and we toured, going all the way out to Chicago. I played bass on some of Sam Sodomsky’s wonderful album My Life In Hollywood and tracked for Andrew Daly Frank’s forthcoming album. I added hundreds of songs to this playlist before cutting it down to 100.

I’ve long felt that the key to a successful relationship isn’t compatibility per se, or hard work, opposites attracting or common interests, but rather the capacity for change. Change, it is said, becomes us, and we all change in ways which are inevitable and often unexpected. Any relationship can survive so long as both parties decide it should, which means continuously accepting the forms each party realizes over time. If we love music, we must let it become something new; love it for what it was, is, and will be.