But not too late because curfew. Suggested talking points, none of which we actually want to write about here, include:
the idea of going somewhere differently for growth and then returning to the place you were in before, but different now
songs you associate with listening to while driving a car when you actually have very few experiences listening to songs in a car because you live in one of the only walkable cities in america
rehearsing coming out speeches
living in a different suburb, the wide gap between driving to escape and driving to go home, under the umbrella of driving whilst being alive
living with a Stigmatized Mental Illness™️
the time between thanksgiving and christmas
songs becoming inextricably tied by memory to particular times, whether that be stage of life or a season of year. are these inherently nighttime songs? is the suggestion of a collection of songs being nighttime songs conveyable or inextricable from the personal experience realm?
changing so much and learning so much about yourself, and the idea of bringing that to a group of people that only know the Carefully Constructed Identity built to not invite too many questions, which is confusing, difficult
the chicagoland area
what even is a fulfilling life
changing the soundtrack between the drive somewhere and the drive back
Hell yeah, it’s a goddamn emo teen sad breakup thirsty horny dance party. If you don’t hear it and think “i am 16 again”, what’s the point? We’d have failed. Dance out your teenage longing.
It’s the promise of the frontier. That feeling of excitement when you see the wide world spread out around you, that desire to escape into it, to live in a space of expansiveness and freedom: this is a desire for the frontier. And the desire to live on the frontier goes hand in hand with a desire to seize a piece of it for yourself—to better your condition (as our nation once “bettered” its own condition) through territorial expansion. Open world games almost always take place in frontier spaces of one kind or another …
In the Western, writes Jane Tompkins, “the desert flatters the human figure by making it seem dominant and unique, dark against light, vertical against horizontal, solid against plane, detail against blankness.” …
The frontier is a potent dream. That’s why we keep dreaming it: in video games, in movies, in political rhetoric, in the collective unconscious of the American mind. … All progression is stasis. All expansion erodes the soul. You can ride out to the edge of the world, but to reach it is to realize that you’re trapped
I barely remember why I highlighted this excerpt from a book I read about a game I’ve never played that so stuck with me that I curated a playlist around a quote from it that, as it turns out, I pulled together from different parts of it. Maybe it’s because I read this book during the early days of the pandemic, in an apartment I had just moved into and instantly could not leave, feeling a variety of displacements and thus drawn towards a disassembling of a fantasy, of the world, of cultural construction, of agency, particularly to a fantasy about going somewhere.
Revisiting my highlights on my Kindle now, I am drawn to 1) what a poorly designed device this thing is, speaking about the stasis of progress, this ubiquitously dominant eReader that I keep hitting the button to bookmark a page instead of the button to pull up my highlights, and 2) another quote that seems somewhat plausibly why “a desire for a frontier space” stuck in my head as a mystery explained but not untangled, that “what makes [the cowboy] desirable is also that he doesn’t seem to desire anything—and seems, in fact, to be actively pursuing pain and discomfort … Yet he doesn’t seem encumbered by it all; just the opposite, he seems purified by it … he seems to have achieved contentment in the conditions of terminal, unending discontent.” I can imagine that, with the fallibility of memory, I conflated this quote with the first, the latter as something of a response to the former’s call.
In this stoicism that appears demanded of a frontier space, there’s something of (brace yourself) Camus’s (I’m sorry) theory of the absurd (hear me out), described in The Myth of Sisyphus (just like two more sentences I’m sorry) by observing that “The world in itself is not reasonable, that is all that can be said. But what is absurd is the confrontation of this irrational and the wild longing for clarity whose call echoes in the human heart.” Timed rather ironically just prior to the pandemic, there was a bit of Western revival culturally that others have unpacked similarly, albeit also without evoking Camus, at least by name:
But “yeehaw” as it’s used was never meant to translate to the real world, or signal anything beyond absurdity. “Yeehaw” exists in a liminal space, bound to and beyond the divisions imagined between blue and red states. Even as cultural and social forces alternately champion plugging all the way into our AI futures or unplugging and going back to a rarefied, more “honest” way of life, most people will never have the means to actually change any aspect of their living situation. Maybe I’ll get that cat cowboy hat; maybe I won’t. But my American dream has borders, and for everyone except a select demographic in America, it always has.
Despite my humblebrag that I’ve read Camus, I don’t have anything smart to say about any of this. This playlist isn’t somehow a deconstruction of the western or the American dream or colonialism. It’s merely a playlist of a specific flavor of alt country/indie folk, not exactly a subgenre of what remains one of the big “I listen to everything but” genres, but some specific sadness with a bit of grunge or blues rock somewhere in its genetics, where a country song is the body and a searing electric guitar the papercut. A desire for a frontier space formed just as much by vaguely being aware that For A Few Dollars More is a spaghetti Western as it is by the rush of rapid fire reflexes and gunshot precision required to see everything on the Valley level from Pokemon Snap (which oddly evokes a lot of moods here at Trash Garbage), the song from which, yeah, I bet a few people my age could plausibly mix up with the theme from The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. What a fun nostalgia combo that is, the nostalgia for a childhood video game with this one specific level whose theme of the desert, of the frontier, has always widely, intrinsically asked “a nostalgia for what?”
There’s a lot of Neko Case in this playlist. There’s early Dire Straits. There are specific selections from the catalogues of Big Thief and The Mountain Goats that belong to this particular soundscape depending on what the guitars are up to. There’s one song by Jessica Lea Mayfield that I distinctly remember listening to in college catching a bus from downtown back to my dorm calling it an early night while the people I was with were on their way to another club, feeling somehow like the world was all ahead of me though this was objectively a melodramatic moment in which to think so, not the least of which because the English city of Norwich is decidedly not a frontier space. That said, a frontier space seems to be more so what we believe it has promised us.
The longer and nerdier version of Dark Alley Jazz. We like short tightly edited things over here at trash garbage, but the room we found for an exception this time was, apparently, what if Detective Pikachu just really leaned into it. (I love Detective Pikachu.)
This is exactly what it looks like. Just shy of five hours of smoldering, dangerous, moody jazz, weaving video game music covers in with “real” jazz from the staples like Miles Davis and the new groundbreakers like Nubya Garcia. Put it on around your extended family and trick them into thinking you’re sophisticated.
In the early 2000s, there was this feeling – which has been well documented by many peoplemuch smarter than me – that the technological changes of the 90s would result in us all rapidly ascending into some sort of world slightly better than our own. (ed. note: hilarious)
This also informed a visual and audio aesthetic that particularly permeated games and tech ads of the time, of which (at the risk of sounding like an Ernest Cline protagonist) I was a voracious consumer. Once you’ve played as much beatmania IIDX as I have, there’s a certain kind of sound that just feels instantly comfy and familiar. Luckily, because it’s 2021, there are plenty of people who’ve grown up in the exact same boat as me, except they’re also musically gifted.
These songs are reminiscent of this time, this feeling, and this pre-rapid ascendance. Enjoy our slightly better world!
sounds like: chill work vibes, a lightly chatty friend you can just put in the corner of your screen and not really pay attention to, a parasocial relationship
my romantic notion of a twitch stream may be more simply just a virtual approximation of a coffee shop (remember those? oh, covid), of working or reading while surrounded by the light conversation and arbitrary behavior of strangers. it doesn’t appear that this is what twitch actually is (since in practice lots of streamers do talk “with” you, reading and reacting to the chat), but this playlist is a musical adaptation of the atmosphere i was hoping for. one of the more literal playlists, the thesis here is slower/chiller work music characterized by the presence of human voices throughout. not vocals (with one or two exceptions), but exploring other ways that voices are used as instruments and woven into music.
pairs well with work that’s going to take a minute, watching someone not totally know where they’re going in dark souls, tuesdays
An hour and a half of Linkin Park is perhaps too much Linkin Park, but hear me out (now): there is joy to be found here. Assuming that you are exactly like me (naive, but a pleasure not afforded to those teenage years where this stuff hit home), there’s stuff in here you remember from your teenage years that holds up pleasantly, stuff in here from after your teenage years that’s fun to discover, and yes I TOLD you the flute song is in here that shit SLAPS
This is objectively the best of Linkin Park unless you have an argument for replacing “Hands Held High”