I've got no good music for gray days. Maybe this is the product of some idiosyncrasy in my tastes; maybe there's some combination of timbre and tempo that would suit these sorts of afternoons, which seem to be continuously gathering themselves up to fall on our heads and never quite getting it done -- but I've got no idea what would work.
There's too much music these days, or at least there's too much music on days like these. Choosing a song is no longer easy. It used to go like this: When you wanted to play something, you'd either turn on the radio or flip through your records, so either a guy at the station would pick something for you, or you'd have already done so yourself. But now, with every song in the world at your disposal, the choice rests squarely on your shoulders.
Even choosing not to take the choice, to turn on the radio or find some catered YouTube playlist, is a greater choice than our parents had. If you haven't lashed yourself to the capsizing vessel of focus group pop music trend-surfing, no one cares what you listen to. They just want you to listen to something, just often enough to pay for a subscription.
Nobody wants to go back to the old way of doing things, or, at least, nobody that isn't obtuse and contrarian. But it's hard not to occasionally miss the reassurance which came from submitting myself to the public opinion machinery that drove capitalist media. I find myself wondering, on this gray day, whether anyone knows what I should do any better than I do.
According to Alexis de Tocqueville, American society is about submitting to the rule of the many, but never of the few. Turning on the radio, our grandparents trusted that the memo-passing machinery of the music business would tell them exactly what was worth listening to, and they consented to this because there was no musical czar situated over the whole affair, no hubristic taste-maker setting their voice above everyone else's. Music was market-tested, so music was democratic.
That America is dead now and has been for quite some time. Society has been split into chunks, and those chunks are getting smaller. Where, then, should we find authority now? Who will tell us what songs to play on gray in-between days, days that lack a clear direction?
Honestly, I'm starting to think that we're on the cusp of musical feudalism. When the radio has no idea what to play and the advertisers are implanting their messages with jackhammers, people turn to individuals to tell them what they should listen to. In time, those individuals coalesce into communities, which coalesce into cultures, which coalesce into classes, which coalesce into a society before collapsing again -- but for today, at least, "lo-fi hiphop - beats to relax/study to" is run by one guy, and his guess is as good as anyone's. So I'll listen to that.
The Starving Aesthete: Music for gray days
