Why you're not out of touch with music

This week's newsletter is a meditation on losing your edge during album of the year listing season, and a few tips to find your new favourite album from the deluge of recommendations.

"Am I out of touch?" pondered Principal Skinner in the now infamous Simpsons scene turned meme, and after a pregnant pause he proclaims, "no, it's the children who are wrong!"

This denialism is something I have felt whenever I see someone scream into the internet abyss around this time of year. I sense it in every passive aggressive "who?" Facebook reply, every "the best album of the year isn't even in your top 100 list" comment, and in various discussions I have seen play out over the last two decades in response to Drowned in Sound's fifty favourite albums of the year lists.

This feeling of being far from the heart of what was going on in music this year is something I was surprised to read in one of my group chats this 'listing season', not least because I was the one writing it. A befuddled reaction after reading a few big ol' lists of albums was not something I thought would ever happen to me, and then after a few seconds of "many people are typing..." I was relieved to discover everyone else in the chat felt the same. Phew!

Is a feeling of disconnection a rare thing that unites us?

Is there even an "us" any more? Are we just bees flitting from flower to flower, not even that bothered which hive we return to? Are we tribes latching onto leaders for a day to find some nourishment before joining the next conga line that passes by?

These are just a few of the questions swirling around my brain when reading album of the year lists and it's oddly reminiscent to the political discourse and about how campaigns can no longer reach a mass of people or deliver a message through legacy media. It's almost as if Joe Rogan is a rare land mass to cling onto in a fast flowing ocean. The only problem is, he's often stood atop an island of poop.

Wut?!

'Never heard of them, mate' was the point when I made the editorial decision to make Does It Look Like I'm Here? by Emeralds album of the year in 2010. It is an exceptional, mind-easing record. It also met the moment, in terms of what people wanted when they opened an album of the year list: something new to fall in love with, from a publication they trusted (hopefully!).

In many ways, naming Emeralds album of the year helped define DiS as a place for discovery amidst what felt like critical consensus. It felt a long way from the lists where the most popular records in polls were also the most heavily marketed. Knowing people in the core teams at publications, the lists often didn't reflect any of their personal favourites.

Lists got so predictable in the early 2010s that Vice could have some fun satirising them.

By making an ambient-drone record AotY, it felt like DiS was doing something to add a little bit different, rather than following the crowd - not quite a Durutti Column album made of sandpaper to scratch those around it, but not far off.

Looking back, it's probably not 'the best' album of the year, but that's why I intentionally used the word "favourite". Perhaps more surprising was seeing The National so high...

Does It Look Like I’m Here? (Expanded Remaster), by Emeralds

19 track album

Emeraldstowercard

"But I'm losing my edge to better-looking people with better ideas and more talent.
And they're actually really, really nice."
- LCD Soundsystem

Am I losing my edge?

For the first time, I feel like I have become one of these 'eh?' people, looking at lists of albums and realising that despite spending a tonne of time every week listening to music and following the critical discourse across our forums, the media and social platforms, as well as having various algorithmic robot butler made playlists, I haven't heard "of" some of these records.

Ooh ok, okay, ok, alright... I confess, it's not just some, it's quite a lot of these records I haven't heard of. Their names feel alien, as if everyone suddenly switched to speaking a foreign language.

I keep promising myself that I will catch up, if such a thing is even possible. Especially when my list of albums I need to cue up is now nearing 100, and I am pretty sure I have listened to over 300 albums this year and 1000s more songs.

Flicking through the year-end lists, which this week arrived like a flash flood deluge, I have spotted a few of my favourite acts and their side projects, who I hadn't even noticed released new music.

I dunno about you but I am facepalming when I read some of these lists. Not because they're "wrong" (music is wonderfully subjective, obvs) (The Cure should be number 1 on every list IMHO!) but because I am seeing the names of artists with albums getting a lot of praise, that feature songs I loved, but I never got around to listening to the album.

Looking at multiple lists, consensus seems to have evaporated. This is great for media brands carving out their own space and audience, but it’s surprising not to see much overlap. I would imagine for people playing catch up, not seeing patterns in the lists makes it a little harder to know which records to spend time with but for anyone who already knows and loves a publication, they're a feast of releases to devour for the first time or revisit with a renewed energy.

You'd have to stop the world just to stop the feeling

This sensation of disconnect reminded me of Lester Bangs' closing lines to his Elvis obituary:

If love truly is going out of fashion forever, which I do not believe, then along with our nurtured indifference to each other will be an even more contemptuous indifference to each others’ objects of reverence. I thought it was Iggy Stooge, you thought it was Joni Mitchell or whoever else seemed to speak for your own private, entirely circumscribed situation’s many pains and few ecstasies. We will continue to fragment in this manner, because solipsism holds all the cards at present; it is a king whose domain engulfs even Elvis’s. But I can guarantee you one thing: we will never again agree on anything as we agreed on Elvis. So I won’t bother saying good-bye to his corpse. I will say good-bye to you.

Bangs may have been a bit premature saying this in 1977 but he was onto something.

For the last few days I was trying to work out if my feeling of disconnection was a unifying sensation. It's a feeling I have felt around this time of year the last few years. I didn't even know how to frame the question or where to ask it or how to find out if I am onto something... then realised I would have absolutely no way of knowing if disconnection is a unifying experience, and that's part of the reason I'm writing this.

I think I'm alone now... am I?

Maybe I am out of touch.
No, it's the internet that is wrong!

It's a long time since mass culture shattered into a bajillion sub-cultures and sub-genres of sub-genres. It's been a decade a two since unifying artists - let alone universally known hit songs - were a thing. However, even when the internet ramped up in the 2000s, most music enthusiasts would have a fairly rounded knowledge of what was going on in their favourite scenes and would be clued about the crossover acts in a variety of genres. Most music fans would sort of know the most talked about albums of the year and be able to predict what would be in certain lists.

In the 20th century and for at least the first decade of the 21st century, if the music world was a map, you would be able to point out where the different continents and points of interest were. You'd have a vague idea that Florence + The Machine had made an ok album, perhaps not her best, but due to a few hits from it, it would likely be in the top 20 of various year-end lists.

Now it feels increasingly like crossing over - due to popularity to be part of the mainstream or to grow internationally from one music scene to another - doesn't really happen like it used to. The juggernaut names like Chappell Roan and Charli XCX may be exceptions to this, but the days of a Bright Eyes or Sufjan Stevens popping up with a record that could define a moment in time for millions of people feels like the distant past. And I'm not saying this is a bad thing but it doesn't feel like MJ Lenderman or Waxahatchee are about to become headliners of major festivals after 2024's year end lists have dropped. (Maybe I'm wrong. I hope so.)

You could argue it's all part of the music media death spiral but I feel like something else is happening due to the abundance of music, the hyper-personalization of algorithms, the entrenchment into our personal tastes, and various other 'things' chasing our attention. It makes me wonder whether the glee with which people celebrated the death of the gatekeeper was perhaps a bit premature. At a time when words like 'community' are a core part of our culture, not having reference points or your coolness confirmed, not knowing whether you're 'with it' or not, can be discombobulating to people who used to feel anchored or untethered. Can you even be anti-establishment or into "alternative" music, if you don't even know what the establishment is anymore?

Admittedly, my personal sense of disconnect may be because I spent a large chunk of this year either on the road with The Anchoress (who sung with the Manics on their big outdoor tour with Suede) and dipping out of music altogether to spend a few months working on a tactical voting campaign with the likes of Carol Vorderman to help remove 251 Tories from positions of power.

Rock, Pop & Infinite Scroll

Like most music fans who have busy lives, year end listing season is a great way of finding a pile of records to catch up on and even new publications to bookmark to spend more time reading next year. I love it and loathe it in equal measure, as it reduces music to contest. And I can't escape feeling like this year's listing season says something about the current overwhelm of music where over 120k songs are released every single day on stream.

Yes, that means more music is now released in a single day than in the entirety of the 1989.

Being a music fan - especially a lapsed one or a new one trying to get your footing - feels increasingly like searching for the centre of Los Angeles, a city with so many epicenters but no true core. A place without a town square or focal point where 'everyone' gathers beneath the New Year fireworks has long felt like a metaphor for the internet. As we splinter onto different social platforms or leave them altogether, as people shift from browsing the internet to imbibing AI summaries, it feels like we're drifting further apart - in same cases, that's no bad thing!

As humans living in a time of infinite scroll and an over abundance of creativity (home recording, free music distribution: there are no barriers any more!), we may have to learn to accept that we cannot and will not ever again be able to keep up.

We are King Cnuts and we cannot control the tide. Nor can we do much but surf the gushing stream as it pours into the ocean - as if music was a fast-flowing river racing into the entire history of recorded sound.

Whether you dip or dive into listing season, just be careful not to drown.

1) Don't take lists too seriously. They are often democratically voted by 20-100 members of a team, and this may mean that it took very few votes to top the list, and everything else maybe got an equal amount of votes.

2) Start a note on your phone and list some of the records you're curious to hear over the coming weeks. You could add a few to your calendar at random times next year to prompt yourself to give them a listen. If you have an iPhone just say "Hey Siri, on January 10th at 11:11am remind me to listen to Julia-Sophie, and that it's Sean from Drowned in Sound's birthday."

3) Click play at random. If there's a massive list with loads of text in the descriptions and you only have a few mins, scroll and stop, then click play on the first video or audio embed you see. Give it a go on Crack's top 50.

4) Use AI for recommendations. This might sound cringe af but if you ask a web connected tool like Perplexity quite a specific or descriptive question based on your music taste, you might stumble across a record and also a media outlet you weren't previously familiar with. Here's an example.

5) Pay some streaming reparations. If you've loved an album this year but only streamed it, get yourself to their website or bandcamp, and buy some merch (you can never have enough black t-shirts!) or pick up the physical record from them directly or head to your local record store.

Feel free to leave your tips for getting the most out of year-end lists in the comments.

Further Exploration

• Album of the Year compiles an aggregate list of the AotY lists
• Join the DiS community discussion about this year's lists
• Vote for your 5 favourites of the year in our community poll (my top 5 is in there and everyone's lists are public, so lots of recommendations to explore)