Is This It?

Physical Media, Technology, and Relating

I got this tape in the mail a while ago:

It’s The Strokes’ debut album, Is This It. I bought it from someone selling tapes in Indonesia on Discogs. I’ve listened to Is This It many times over my decade or two as a fan of The Strokes, but there’s something different about this physical tape from the version I’ve listened to many times. This is the first international release of the album which means the third to last song off the album isn’t When It Started. It’s instead a song called New York City Cops. Why were these releases different?

Julian Casablancas and crew wrote New York City Cops in reaction to plainclothes police officers in New York killing Amadou Diallo in 1999. Is This It was released first in Australia in July of 2001, but the U.S. release of the album was delayed from September to October, with the song New York City Cops not appearing on the tracklist. The song is naturally critical of New York City cops, but considering 23 cops died responding to the 9/11 attacks, it’s no surprise that the song was taken off the tracklist—it would have made for bad publicity¹. (This caused people to think of the band as apolitical despite the singer Julian Casablancas’ political leanings, and this took him a while to recover from.)

I love that I can have this bit of music history with me. In digital media, history doesn’t matter. If the same thing were to happen today, the album would be quickly taken down and re-uploaded with the offending song removed or substituted. That data would then be unreachable for regular people; history manipulated, controlled because it’s easy to do so. It is harder to erase the history held within physical things.

This isn’t to say that physical media is perfect, but that history is preserved locally with physical things. No matter how much someone might want to change the tracklist to Is This It now, I will always be able to experience the album as it is on my tape. Looking at the state of affairs in my national politics, where sites that are supposed to be matters of public record are taken down at will, I’m finding this capacity for physical media to preserve history interesting².

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It’s hard for me to imagine my life without music in it. Music making and listening have been vital for shaping my identity. Yet, I only recently realized that I’ve become much less deliberate in how I listen to music. Spotify and YouTube, while giving me access to the newest albums and songs whenever I want, have also shaped me into a a passive consumer what I was supposed to love. This is why I’ve been switching some of my music listening to cassettes, CDs and vinyl. I’m aware of the pretension when I say this—the quasi-superior stance that this can be motivated from—but I assure you that’s not my argument. I’m not interested in the quality debate between these media. I don’t listen to them because I think they sound better, in fact, some of my tapes sound rough. I listen to them because it’s the only way I’ve found to have the relationship I want with music again.

When I’m on the internet, or adjacent to a device that is always connected to the internet, I have a miserable time staying on task. My focus lasts maybe a minute or two before it gets hijacked. Even when writing this essay, I’ve spent maybe a minute or two writing but then got sucked into something irrelevant like emails or LinkedIn. I’m prone to distraction just by nature, and if you add on top of this the infinite distractions of the internet and it’s lucky that I get any writing done.

In the same vein, music for me has become just a part of a milieu of distraction. When I listen to music, it sits in the background while I try to write, while I check email, while I respond to that one message that’s been sitting in my inbox. But music used to play a significant role in my life. I used to listen for no other reason than to enjoy a song or an album.

In my early twenties, I was more deliberate about listening to music. I used dedicate time solely to listening to music. I’d pick up a vinyl, place it in the player, and let the music fill my dorm room as I sat there focusing on the music. I enjoyed these times thoroughly and there are many albums from this era that I’m still fond of. I distinctly remember sharing the Daft Punk album Random Access Memories with my then-girlfriend-now-wife. We just listened to the album, sitting up against the bed in my little dorm room. We are now amassing a collection of physical music between CDs, vinyl, and cassettes, a testament to both of our love of music and the bond that we share with it.

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This immediately brings to mind how important it is to share music with others. Daniel Hulter, a good friend, colleague, and one of my main creative collaborators, recommended I listen to an album called Dancing While Falling by the artist Quantic. I spent a week listening to that album, and I coupled my listening with a video essay about the roots of disco and electronic dance music. I don’t want to exaggerate, but that experience fundamentally altered what I think my place is in making music. My point is, however, that sharing music, or any kind of art, is deeply personal and heartfelt. The recommender is offering up a slice of something meaningful to themselves so that you might share in that.

Daniel has also been writing about been writing lately about the ways we relate to one another (LINK, and if you don’t already follow him on Substack, you should). His work reminded me that recommendation algorithms have largely replaced the function recommending people things at all. These recommendation algorithms are so pervasive that it’s likely the most recent song you’ve listened to, or the most recent video you’ve watch, was mediated through an algorithm. This has lead to a fundamental change in how we relate to each other. While I can appreciate the music I’ve found because of these algorithms, I also mourn for the increasing inability for us to relate to each other through sharing.

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I started this movement toward less distracting media not impelled by a sense of nostalgia for the technology. I wanted to not be so distracted, and that quickly changed to wanting to have a relationship with music again. But the nostalgia has crept in anyways. It’s not for the technology per se, but nostalgia for the ways I used to relate with people. This nostalgia keeps me anchored to something positive: technology can still mediate heartfelt encounters between people, even through there are increasingly few examples.

Another memory. I was maybe sixteen or seventeen and my dad and I were driving someplace. On the way to grab groceries or something. And he turns on some Motown. My dad’s a big fan of Motown, and I, in turn, became a fan of Motown. During this drive, we weren’t just passively listening to the song though. He was asking me to notice something. The guitar? No. The background vocalist? No. It was something that the bass player was doing within that arrangement, and he wanted me to notice it like he was. He wanted to share with me his musical experiences by helping me notice something that he had. He invited me to participate in his listening process. I’ve had similar experiences since with friends, but that singular experience of my dad inviting me to deeper listening still sits with me today.

I’m nostalgic for these moments and they’re happening less and less frequently as music becomes more disposable. Music now isn’t something that is deliberately listened to, it’s something in service of other things like working or studying. As someone who also makes music, it makes me question why I even make music in the first place.

With music as disposable as it is societally, and now with AI generated music, we’ve reached a point where it feels like it doesn’t matter if I can make my own. And this is a shame because I think we’ve forgotten the important part. Effort allows us to make art and therefore to connect with others through the creation and appreciation of art. It reminds me of Derek Muller’s—the science communicator who runs the YouTube channel Veritasium—recent talk on YouTube on AI and learning. In the video Muller makes the argument that effort is what makes for quality learning, something which AI can disincentivize. Extending this argument, what makes quality experiences are the effort we put into them, and with AI removing the need for effort in more and more things there is a sincere risk that we lose out on many quality experience because we yielded them to AI.

So it’s not commercial success that I’m after in making music, and it’s not for being a lauded musical intellectual that I listen to it deeply and deliberately. I don’t create for prospects of fame. I make music to relate to others. I write so that others maybe will see some aspect of themselves, or at least see an aspect of myself. And that insight might spark a conversation, a discussion, deeper relation.

Technology has given me access to some of the coolest music I would ever be able to listen to. I have the entire world of music at my finger tips, but that comes with its downsides which are also enabled by technology. I’m willing to devolve my music listening tech in order to have a relationship with music that I want to have. But that process is deliberate and measured and based on the understanding that music is a high priority for me.

I’ve been on many sides of this equation, listener and producer of music. I think about the AI music that’s Spotify is starting to hock and how impersonal that feels and I lose spirit. It feels like we’ve missed the plot in a lot of our technological making and I’m left exasperated. I try to stay optimistic, knowing that there are a myriad possibilities still unfolding which give us access to more positive experiences. But still, if I’m to assume that everyone is doing the best they can in the technology we make, I’m left with a simple question: is this it?

1. The cassette and CD releases were affected by this change, but the US Vinyl still had the original tracklist since it was released on September 11th)

2. That being said there are initiatives like The Wayback Machine that absolutely need our support, as well as much of the work that the Internet Archive does

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