Arguing in Real Life is Better Than Arguing Online
I don’t listen to podcasts. They’re basically talk radio, which I don’t listen to either. This is partially because I can’t listen to people talking while I work, unlike music, but also I listen to a lot of music. There’s also the matter of not having a commute, so there’s really no space in my media consumption schedule to listen.
So when a friend suggested I listen to a Radiohead podcast, knowing that I don’t have the time or patience for them, he said “ready to nerd out? This season’s Dissect is just what I always wanted in a podcast.” The season is 12 hours long, going song by song through Radiohead’s In Rainbows, which I said was “about 11 hours too much,” but I listened to the first episode, after I figured out I could multitask while playing video games, and I was hooked.
The reason I was hooked, besides the fact that I love Radiohead, was because this podcast is exactly like the kinds of post-bar conversations me and my friends had in college and post-college, when I was working at record stores. We would inevitably put a CD on and whoever picked it had a reason — either to provoke an argument, expose someone to a new band, or because it was 3am and you wanted people to leave.
We’d do lyrical dissection, fumble our best through music theory, connect the dots to other bands, proclaim that some band wasn’t as good as another, repeat portions of songs to point out the goodness or the badness, and inevitably do it all again the next time we were together. When I worked at a record store in Cincinnati, these conversations would happen every day, almost all day long.
We weren’t in Gertrud Stein’s Salon in Paris in the 1920’s; we were in tiny college housing debating the merits of John Mellencamp’s lyrics, the Afghan Whigs slide/wah guitar combination, or the symphonic grandiosity of Jeff Buckley. We were passionate, sort of well- informed, mostly musicians, and definitely knew better than anybody else.
That’s not to say things were better — I have more access to more music than I could ever listen to. And when friends make recommendations, I take them seriously. I’m listening to one recent recommendation, Bar Italia as I type this. But having text exchanges about Daniel Lanois, Nathaniel Rateliff, the production technique of Dave Colb, or John Prine videos on YouTube doesn’t come close to the feeling of sitting on a cigarette-burned couch at 2:30am, trying to make the case the Bob Mould was better in Sugar but Grant Hart’s Hüsker Dü songs were superior in that band.
I am happy that my friends still want to share music and ideas, but we’ve lost a bit of the discovery element. There are very few legacy artists that we haven’t discovered or have at least heard of, though it does maybe mean the new acts that blow me away have a higher bar than Jane’s Addiction did. But for now, I’ll nerd out hearing someone else go through In Rainbows’ songs’ rhythmic structure, chord changes, and the number of times the number 13 has appeared in song lyrics.
And I’ll text my friends that they should listen to Spacemoth.
