Like Kottke, I can’t entirely tell if this W magazine piece on time-conserving tactics for “squillionaires” is a joke, but I’ve decided that it doesn’t matter; it’s darkly funny regardless. The piece starts from the premise that free time is more precious than money (the attention economy and all that) and then presents some ways for the rich to be conspicuously efficient. Here are two examples:

Employees have emotions and think everyone else wants to hear about them. No, no, no. Take a cue from the Victorian grandees, who kept their minions below stairs and under the thumb of a highly paid head butler. Hire an in-house shrink to listen to your staffers’ complaints and an aide to sort out their schedules....
Don’t Divorce. When will people learn? A divorce is the surest way to waste time, emotion and money. Instead of trading in your spouse for a new model, just stay married and have affairs. Jimmy Goldsmith had it right when, during his third marriage, to Annabel Birley, he said that marrying a mistress just creates a vacancy.

This cuts to the heart of all aspirational-oriented service journalism. The sort of folks attracted to wealth porn of the sort that this magazine serves up ultimately want to fantasize about not having to give a shit about anyone else, about having money purchase the right to be indifferent. This is merely an extension of the ideology behind all conveniences, which are usually defined in terms of the degree to which they eliminate the need to deal with other people or accommodate others’ needs. You don’t free up time to spend it with others; you free it up from other people’s claims. At the the level of wealth being dealt with here, other people are only the sum of their claims on you; true reciprocity is impossible when you are megawealthy.

The ideological principle behind consumerism is that needs are satisfied instrumentally through goods and not through participation in some sort of mutual social process. And wealth, in a consumer society, is predominantly a way of forcing objectification onto others, making them tools at your disposal, with goods as a mere proxy for this highest of all accomplishments. (From this perspective, what’s appealing about labor-saving devices is the idea of eliminating the need for having to deal with the person who once did this work for you. Sometimes that person is yourself, suggesting that the ultimate goal of convenience may be complete self-alienation.) As the W article notes ruefully, “Anyone with household help knows that, unfortunately, staff are people too.” Wealth, if it’s any good, eradicates that nuisance.

—Rob Horning

For a long time, I have wanted to read Grace Metalious’s Peyton Place, a notoriously lascivious book about the seamy secrets of a small town in New England. This grand ambition of mine was fueled not only by my academic interest in “commercial novels” (i.e., novels interesting primarily for their commercial success) and my fascination with Twin Peaks, which seems deeply influenced by Peyton Place‘s core idea, but by the line on the cover of the edition I bought at an Astoria junk store: “The best-selling paperback novel of all time.” Surely something so popular would yield some sort of insight into the American reading public and the nature of the mass market of the Eisenhower era. A 2006 Vanity Fair article about Metalious’s own sordid life offered this about the novel:

Fifty years ago, Peyton Place helped create the contemporary notion of “buzz,” indicted 1950s morality, and recast the concept of the soap opera, all in one big, purple-prosed book. It would spawn a sequel, a smash film nominated for nine Academy Awards, and television’s first prime-time serial. A week before it hit bookstores, on September 24, 1956, it was already on the best-seller list, where it would remain for half a year. In its first month, it sold more than 100,000 copies, at a time when the average first novel sold 3,000, total. It would go on to sell 12 million more, becoming one of the most widely read novels ever published. During its heyday, it was estimated that one in 29 Americans had bought it—legions of them hiding it in drawers and closets due to its salacious content.

Clearly it was widely bought, but whether it was widely read can’t really be known. Having just slogged through it, I figure most readers skimmed it, looking for plot points and dirty parts.

On the whole, the book is shoddily constructed, veering from one “shocking” event to another with apparently only a sense of how outraged people would be guiding Metalious as she proceeded. This leads her to be radically frank for her era about the reality of familial sexual abuse, but it also leads her to create such ludicrous scenes as the one where a minor character loses an arm in a carnival-ride catastrophe. Though it seems now to be populated with Main Street caricatures, Peyton Place was heralded at the time as an expose of small-town hypocrisy and breakthrough for freedom of expression about the kinds of problems that were probably pretty endemic in town life, and probably still are. And some scholars regard it as a feminist work, probably for its handling of female sexuality (though like most romances, the only woman who has a positive sexual experience has to basically be forced into it, have her animal nature awakened by a brute show of force by her mate) and its efforts to call into question domestic pieties. Mostly, though, the book seems animated by the spiteful sullenness that marks the main character, wanna-be writer Allison McKenzie, who, interestingly enough, in the novel mines small town life for material for her own frank stories. It’s like the novel depicts its own creation within itself, so maybe it’s a self-mythologizing postmodern classic. It is certainly chaotic enough to be postmodern, shifting registers and genres and eschewing careful development of characters in favor of lurching from mini-plot to mini-plot haphazardly like the soap operas that would come in its wake. No effort is made to explain events; they happen simply because of an evil destiny settling on the land. Unlike Twin Peaks, which with its Lodges and feints at mysticism, tried to cook up a cosmogony to explain why events unfolded and where the submerged small town evil came from, Peyton Place revels in the unexplained evil, takes superstitions as given, and offers by way of spiritual subplots an unintegrated story about a Congregationalist minister who decides to become a Catholic basically because he is Irish.

If anything unifies the hodge-podge of the novel’s incidents other than their calculated potential to outrage, offend, and titillate, it’s the development of Allison as writer, with her ethical quandaries worked out by the novel’s form as it unfolds: basically the novel’s structure seems to be in dialogue with Allison, showing her that the way to get a novel written is simply build every chapter around some secret someone wouldn’t want told, whether it’s secret drinking parties, oral sex, or a mother’s getting off on enemas and breast feeding. Secrecy becomes the essence of what makes for plot, all other possibilities for development are foreclosed—so there is no bildungsroman organized around Allison, or Selena Cross, the working-class girl “from the shacks.” Instead, the novel just jumps in forward in time at arbitrary intervals and makes no effort to develop themes linking the two characters’ development at any but the superficial ways their lives intersect. We can do the work on the novel’s behalf and come up with ingenious comparisions, but that is not what was expected of the original audience for this book. That audience, as the marketing campaign detailed in the Vanity Fair article suggests, was meant to be salaciously enticed and afforded a delicious chance to wax righteously indignant while thrilling at the sexual perversity.

So the whole novel feels very cynical, mainly because it is prurient but also because none of the characters are very sympathetic from a contemporary perspective. When they are not mouthing some hypocritical idea about not wanting to be talked about, they seem like puppets contrived to act out preconceived sensationalistic tidbits. Because Metalious seems to have decided from the outset that readers would only be interested in juicy scenes full of the seemingly unsayable, she makes little attempt to supply anything else, aside from the odd awkward poetic passage.

The book pretends to reveal the secrets of small-town life as if these reflect some core truth, as if these would dispel hypocrisy, but instead it partakes of that same hypocritical spirit, the refusal to grant people their private lives, and it comes across as a gossip dump, with the effect of making the story feel unverified and exaggerated despite purporting to be fiction (and despite the fact that much of it was drawn from Metalious’s life and her home town of Gilmanton, New Hampshire, apparently). And though the characters are obsessed with being talked about, as if this were their worst fear, it reads more as though its what give them an identity—the fear of being watched seems more like a secret wish to be noticed. The idea that you become an indvidual when you are noticed, hailed by your society in the way it has settled on offering recognition—à la Althusser’s argument in the “Ideological State Apparatuses” essay: “Ideology ‘acts’ or ‘functions’ in such a way that it ‘recruits’ subjects among the individuals (it recruits them all), or ‘transforms’ the individuals into subjects (it transforms them all) by that very precise operation which I have called interpellation or hailing, and which can be imagined along the lines of the most commonplace everyday police (or other) hailing: ‘Hey, you there!’ “) It’s not the police who do the interpellating in Peyton Place, it’s the town’s network of gossip, occasionally dramatized by the chattering in the diner or on the street by various yokel characters, or by Metalious simply attributing certain views to the town, as if it were a character itself. It’s out there, giving each person it notices some internal coherence in its eyes.

One can construct noble reasons for Peyton Place to have existed and become popular after the fact; one can argue for a liberating effect it may have had on its female readership and so on, but that requires a blinkered reading of the text. In the novel itself, the most palpable motive for what it exposes about small-town life is that it will boost the book’s sales, the lesson Allison seems to learn in the book and a lesson proven by the novel’s marketing campaign and its subsequent success across several media platforms. For though Peyton Place seems like a critique of small-town gossip’s regulatory function of enforcing a moral and traditional code of conduct—and it certainly indulges the juvenile fantasy of being the herald who broadcasts all the secrets that structure the repressive code and thus brings down the walls of Jericho—the novel is just that gossip served up for consumption by strangers with nothing invested in the code. It doesn’t destroy the code’s power, it just amplifies the code so it has power on a bigger stage, transforming it at the same time so that its prohibitions become provocations. On the small town level, gossip is like a confession carried out by townsfolk that serves to solidify the individuality of its subjects, but on the level that Peyton Place as media phenomenon promises, being talked about just makes one famous and interesting, to those who have no reason to want to see you disciplined according to the local mores.

Thus the novel supports an ideological framework that has become omnipresent now: that you want to be gossiped about, as that is what makes you exist in a way that transcends friends and family. Being the subject of gossip is the pathway to fame, and media creations like Peyton Place will spread your notoriety. The novel can be seen as a guide to what sorts of behavior counts as exciting scandal, thus updating for the mid-20th century the information supplied by scandal novels since the invention of the genre. Peyton Place is a bourgeois version of Delarivière Manley’s romans à clef from the early 18th century that tracked and popularized aristocratic scandals of the time, helping forge the very definition of what was to be considered scandalous. (Incidentally, her books—The New Atalantis is the most notable—are as unreadable as Metalious’s.) Being talked about no longer individuates one simply to impose disciplinary control, instead it calls one into being for a mass audience, on a level where personality traits are irrelevant compared with the sensations one can transmit vicariously for captivated observers. In other words, one goes from being a shameful internal exile in a small town to becoming a celebrity who is beyond moral judgment.

The lesson of Peyton Place as a phenomenon is that on the level of mass popularity, being interesting trumps being moral. And a new set of values is born that applies not to communities (and is unenforceable by communities) but instead applied to individuals participating in a mass culture that isolates them from community with a promise of larger-than-life notoriety. Thus “being a slut” is bad when it is restricted to the eyes of your neighbors; on The Real World though, it is awesome. What makes you scandalous locally makes you fabulous nationally. Hence the impulse to disclose all sorts of embarrassing personal incidents are on TV that one would other wise keep private. And when they are disclosed, they are shared in the manner that Peyton Place exposes them, with a ruthless bluntness that presumes that secrets are always best exposed, for everyone’s sake—that anything less than full disclosure an exposure is some form of prudish hypocrisy. The shallowness of the novel’s characters is now the shallowness we aspire to, for it seems to promise the most widespread recognition we can hope for. We can spread ourselves thin across all the media available for us to disseminate our image and maybe if we are lucky disappear into a sublime ubiquity.

—Rob Horning

Larval Subjects, an academic blog, makes the case that difficult theoretical writing—think Deleuze, or to cite the worst I can think of, Laclau and Mouffe—is a “form of intellectual terrorism.”

I have increasingly found myself suspicious of the “difficult work”. On the one hand, I read texts in the sciences that express extremely complex ideas in very basic prose. Somehow I’m just unwilling to concede that what Hegel is trying to talk about is any more difficult or complex than what the biologist, complexity theory, economic social theorist, ecologist, or quantum physicist is attempting to articulate. This leads to my concern. I wonder if terribly dense styles such as we find in figures like Deleuze, Lacan, Hegel, Derrida, etc., etc., etc., aren’t a form of intellectual terrorism. Please do not misunderstand me. I am not referring to the quality of their concepts or arguments. What I am referring to is a general writing strategy that demands so much work on the part of the reader in the art of interpretation, that by the time you’ve managed to make heads or tails of what Lacan is arguing or Hegel is seeking to articulate or Deleuze is seeking to theorize, you have so much invested that you simply cannot think critically about that figure.

Are social theorists so vain as to believe that their insights are so idiosyncratic that they must invent their own impenetrable and uneditable style to convey them? That was the sort of excuse I used to make for their unreadable prose when I was suffering from that compensatory overinvestment in what I read, what Adam Kotsko has called academic Stockholm syndrome. Then, I’d argue that the tedious hair-splitting and neologisms and abuse of erudite, Latinate vocabulary captures nuances otherwise inexpressible, rather than serving merely to scare away the skeptical. Clarity was, as far as I was concerned, a bourgeois comfort promoting intellectual laziness and capable only of expressing received wisdom and status-quo-preserving “truths.” Even now I am tempted to argue that difficult books slow our rate of consumption and thereby serve as a de facto blow to consumerism, which is predicated on perpetually accelerating it, and leaving us in ever more need of further efficiencies. As the Larval Subjects blogger says at the end of the post, “We live, we work, we must integrate superhuman bodies of information. Perhaps a little consideration is in order.” But why must we? Difficult texts that we must read at a page-per-5-minutes rate force us to consider that, at the very least in deciding whether to keep crawling along or instead switch to something faster—like blogs on an RSS feed, where I initially read the LS post.

But in retrospect, I now think that I learned to love my critical-theory tormentors after being shut in with them for too long, and came to believe on faith the truth of their assertions to the degree that I tortured myself in trying to understand them. It was an sure way to resolve the cognitive dissonance that came from spending so much time trying to assimilate what in the end were some pretty basic concepts. “Truth is relative.” “Concepts are often defined in terms of their opposites.” “Needs can be as arbitrary as wants.” “Education is a system of social control.” Etc.

Chances are theorists are merely too lazy to find clearer ways to express themselves (or they have cowed all potential editors), especially when opacity also serves a beneficial end casting the aura of difficulty over their works to make it seem more profound, and the scholars that pursue it to comprehension more ascetic. With that in mind, it’s worth remembering what Nietzsche said about asceticism in The Genealogy of Morals: “For a very long time the ascetic ideal serves the philosopher as the sole phenomenal guise under which he could exist qua philosopher.” Writing difficult prose is a will to power in the face of impotence, futility, death, indifference. This can prompt a grandiloquent egotism: “Whoever, at any time, has undertaken to build a new heaven has found the strength for it in his own hell.” Difficult prose may be just as difficult for the writer as it is for the reader, but necessarily so, because the ideas must seem tortuous to feel true. I am really a philosopher if I use words like noumenon and being-for-itself and velleity. “What, then, does the ascetic ideal betoken in a philosopher? … Asceticism provides him with the condition most favorable to the exercise of his intelligence. Far from denying ‘existence’ he affirms his existence, and his alone, perhaps even to the point of hubris.”

And those following the “ascetic priest” are, as far as Nietzsche is concerned, a “vast flock of defeated, disgruntled sufferers and self-tormentors.” Yes, that sounds familiar—a lot like my graduate seminar in Critical Theory.

(Update: Carl Dyke touches on some of cultish and ascetic aspects of theory—in a far more theoretical way—here.)

—Rob Horning

According to the logic by which the fiscal stimulus package was passed in February, Americans are supposed to go out and immediately spend the $600 or so we are due to receive over the next few weeks. That way we’ll be stimulating demand for American-made goods and services, helping keep the country out of recession. Do your part and shop!

I, for one, will be doing no such thing personally; faulty withholding left me owing that money (and then some) in taxes. And judging by this Bloomberg article (via Yves Smith), I won’t be the only one defying the logic.

Consumers are being hit by a triple whammy: rising prices, increasing unemployment and shrinking wealth. Companies have cut payrolls for five straight months, by a total of 326,000 workers.
House prices in 20 metropolitan areas fell 12.7 percent in February from a year earlier, the biggest drop since S&P/Case- Shiller began tracking the data seven years ago.
``We’ve had a very significant deterioration in the financial position of households in the past year,’’ Sinai says. ``Consumers can’t tap their housing equity any more.’’
Household debt has risen more than 85 percent since the middle of 2001—the last time the government handed out tax rebates in a bid to spur the economy. That has prompted some on Wall Street, including David Rosenberg, Merrill Lynch’s North American economist in New York, to conclude that consumers will spend less this time, paying down debt instead.

That makes you wonder if this money wouldn’t have been better spent on programs meant to reduce mortgage debt; that $125 billion or so could have been used as money to take the sting off government-mandated cramdowns.  That way, foreclosures might be forestalled, and the housing market—the source of much of the economy’s problems—would have a chance to find its bottom. Instead, perhaps out of some notion of fairness, everyone is getting the free money. The ones likely to spend it on consumption are probably those who least need the cash or the items they will buy. That doesn’t particularly seem any more fair when you think about it. People like me shouldn’t be given flat-screen TVs by the government.

As the article notes, retailers are trying hard to get their piece of the checks: It cites a Sears incentive of offering a 10 percent premium on checks converted entirely into Sears gift cards, and an unspecified plan of Wal-Mart’s to lure shoppers. By the logic of the stimulus package, they are doing their patriotic part, trying to encourage citizens to do what they are supposed to with the checks instead of saving them, which would be horribly detrimental to the purpose of the checks. (Maybe the government should have purchased goods and services directly—start building roads and such, WPA style. Then we could really get deep into the Depression-era nostalgia.)

It all seems insane. When you remove the macroeconomic blinders, it’s hard to see the problem with the U.S. economy as being that people don’t spend enough. Nonetheless, in order to get debt-ridden consumers to spend even more, the government has handed out money to these overspent people, which has had the effect of ramping up the marketing schemes of some of the largest retailers to get them to continue to ignore underlying economic realities. Wasn’t the problem that people spent more than they had, and they went into debt they had no hope of repaying to be able to spend even more? If anything, aren’t Americans virtually addicted to shopping, and unable to conceive of any other course of actions to satisfy their needs, which are all supposed to be solved with the act of buying some product? Are we trying to protect the economy or the ideological superstructure of the consumer society, that enshrines such spending as the most essential civic and self-fashioning act? Is the stimulus package an admission that we can’t even pretend to separate the economy from the consumerist value system any longer?

—Rob Horning

Responsible-eating advocate Michael Pollan asks a pertinient question in the recent NYT Magazine issue devoted to reducing readers carbon footprint: Why bother?

Let’s say I do bother, big time. I turn my life upside-down, start biking to work, plant a big garden, turn down the thermostat so low I need the Jimmy Carter signature cardigan, forsake the clothes dryer for a laundry line across the yard, trade in the station wagon for a hybrid, get off the beef, go completely local. I could theoretically do all that, but what would be the point when I know full well that halfway around the world there lives my evil twin, some carbon-footprint doppelgänger in Shanghai or Chongqing who has just bought his first car (Chinese car ownership is where ours was back in 1918), is eager to swallow every bite of meat I forswear and who’s positively itching to replace every last pound of CO2 I’m struggling no longer to emit. So what exactly would I have to show for all my trouble?

His answer:

If you do bother, you will set an example for other people. If enough other people bother, each one influencing yet another in a chain reaction of behavioral change, markets for all manner of green products and alternative technologies will prosper and expand. (Just look at the market for hybrid cars.) Consciousness will be raised, perhaps even changed: new moral imperatives and new taboos might take root in the culture. Driving an S.U.V. or eating a 24-ounce steak or illuminating your McMansion like an airport runway at night might come to be regarded as outrages to human conscience. Not having things might become cooler than having them. And those who did change the way they live would acquire the moral standing to demand changes in behavior from others — from other people, other corporations, even other countries.

I give Pollan a lot of credit for trying hard not to come across as a scold in this essay, and he is certainly one of the most persuasive writers about environmental topics for those not already convinced. But it’s hard not to notice how inconvenient and, in the case of getting a hybrid, pricey it is to “bother big-time” and maintain the standard of living Americans have come to take for granted and people around the world, judging by their consumer behavior, want to emulate. Pollan’s not particularly novel answer to the question doesn’t seem to take that into account, and that’s one of the reasons it seems so inadequate. It costs time, money and energy to avoid what our economy has made superlatively easy—a wasteful approach to life made exceedingly comfortable. Pollan blames cheap energy and specialization for fomenting this lifestyle, but what sort of energy would foment the shift to where people suddenly are trying to set a virtuous example? A sudden surge in righteous arrogance? Not having things is never going to be cool—it’s poor people who don’t have things. The rich have elaborately expensive ways of not seeing to have things, and the striving middle just needs to consume in every direction, burning carbon all the way, trying to cover all the bases. The “cheap-energy mind” that Pollan sees as the problem is equivalent to bourgeois consciousness, and it won’t be surrendered. It would be akin to surrendering the class status one has worked hard to achieve. Could planting a garden compensate for that loss, as Pollan urges us to believe at the end of his essay? It seems more likely to do so if adopted as a hobby and urged as a kind of spectacular leisure, not as an ascetic sacrifice for the good of humanity. People probably don’t want the fate of humanity hanging over their heads while they try to learn to garden.

Following Wendell Berry, Pollan notes “the climate-change crisis is at its very bottom a crisis of lifestyle — of character, even,” But I don’t think it’s exactly a character issue in the sense that people are too lazy to choose to live better—it’s not reasonable to expect every person in a culture to anchor their character in rejecting the way of life that is embedded in every aspect of society, that is rooted in the assumptions that make it virtually every institution and every code of conduct we’ve absorbed since childhood. Consumerism is the crucible in which our character is formed, and it hinges on the pursuit of convenience and the amassing a swell collection of identity-building goods. It’s not easy to choose to reject the only life that seems feasible, even when it’s made clear how destructive and unsustainable that way of life is. It is easy to understand the logic of the environmentalists’ case and be convinced, it’s easy to feel convinced to try to bother, but then confronted with the monolith of culture not designed for such good intentions, it’s much easier to fall back into the mind-set that is in harmony with the material culture we must in the end make our lives out of. Rejecting that, all we know, seems like to much of a sacrifice in the small quotidian moments where the important decisions about how one really lives day-to-day are made.

—Rob Horning

Over the past few years I have amassed a mountain of songs that I’ve never listened to, and lately I’ve begun the quixotic project of trying to listen to it all and sort out which songs I actually like so I can find them more easily. Consequently, I feel like I never listen to music for sheer pleasure or distraction anymore; it’s systematic, Sisyphean work, as I keep adding more unheard music to the pile. Not that it has deterred me, but I quickly realized that this is no way to decide whether I actually like these songs. In fact, most songs, if they have managed to make it to my hard drive, are pretty okay. The often snap decision about whether they will make it into the “good” playlist is typically an arbitrary one, based on whim and giving me the gratification of decisiveness for its own sake—the joy in this procedure doesn’t come from hearing the music itself. (This is a clue to why record reviews are so often irrelevant.)

And even then, when allegedly deciding I like a song, it’s not that I really like it in that moment exactly. It’s more that I have made a promise to myself to like it later, that at some point down the road it will be in rotation on my iPod and I will grow to truly appreciate it then. This realization leads me to believe that the value of any song has little to do with its intrinsic qualities and more to do with what I have managed to invest in them; the songs are repositories for my emotional energy, the energy I’ve spent consuming and remembering them, linking them in various ways to the story I tell myself about my life.

It may be that certain qualities in songs lend themselves to this kind of emotional investment. It helps if they are a relatively blank slate. If they are too specific, they will crowd out the feeling I need to be able to pour into them to like them. If the songs have timely political messages of their own or are specific gripes about how being a professional musician sucks, they will rarely attract any emotional energy investment. Generic songs about having feelings—falling in love, going to a party, leaving home, etc. These seem to work the best. Also, context contributes to whether or not a song can attract emotional investment. If it is in the right genre, or was in a movie, or was referenced by friends or something along those lines, it gives one a reason to pay extra attention to a song, and once you have singled a song out to actually pay attention to it, you are 99 percent of the way to liking it. (Not to belabor the obvious, but liking a song is no more than a willingness to really pay attention to it when it is playing.)

As part of my project, I was listening to an album called She & Him and I was thinking it was mediocre and was going to delete it. Then I remembered why I acquired it in the first place—because M. Ward (whose other albums I have already decided to like) was part of the band. That simple piece of knowledge changed the whole way I perceived the music; it focused my attention and shifted my attitude away from looking for reasons to reject it toward listening carefully for things to like. The songs are occasions for bringing to bear pieces of information like that, to connecting memories and data about what brought pleasure before. If a song can fit into a larger structure—a musican’s oeuvre, an approved genre, memories of having heard it at the bar or whatever—it becomes more listenable, likable for that reason. But they are too insubstantial in isolation to be fairly judged on their own merits. The criteria can’t emerge from some ideal notion of what a song should be; the criteria in practice emerge from the richness of the situation, which paradoxically enough, is a product of the limitations it imposes on what you can consume.

In general, I liked music a lot more when it was scarce. When it was scarce, I was much more likely to look for reasons to include songs in my life rather than reject them. It’s often constraints that make music meaningful to me—for example, I won’t forget the one tape I had in the car when I drove across New Mexico (a compilation of the Music Machine, the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band, and the Gestures); those songs will always have that peculiar resonance. The songs in heavy rotation on the oldies station in Phoenix was partial to in the 1990s—“Woman, Woman” by Gary Puckett and the Union Gap; “Summer Rain” by Johnny Rivers, etc.—will always signify that specific time and place, what I was feeling then, the drives I used to take down I-10 late at night, crossing the Maricopa County Line on the way to Tucson. I was discovering new music in a very measured way, and I felt like it was expanding my mind at a pace at which I could assimilate it, enjoy it.

Now, there’s no danger of my ever running out of music; there is no need for me to be discovering more. (Maybe I’m just old, and that’s why my discovery phase is over. Just about everything I hear sounds like something else I’ve heard already, and if it doesn’t, I get cranky over its newfangledness.) Instead, I am haunted by the fear of running out of attention. So it helps when there are limits imposed on how much music there is to consume, a limitation that was once imposed by radio playlists and the amount of money I was willing to spend on music.

Back in the day, I imagine the infancy of the culture industry also limited things—the number of records that received distribution was much smaller. This morning, I had reached the a compilation of the Shangri-Las greatest hits. After sorting out the obvious keepers—“Walking in the Sand,” etc.—I was left with 20 songs that were all cut from the same cloth, all decent in their own right, but indistinguishable from one another. Being able to hear them all at once, with no expenditure or effort, undermined songs that in isolation might have seemed dramatic, powerful, singular. And they all probably seemed that way when they were singles, and you lived with them on the radio for a finite amount of time and grew to like them or not. The songs weren’t made to withstand being clicked through, rapid-fire, to determine which are good and which aren’t. (No music is made for that.) I ended up grasping for reasons to pick one over the other to put on the keeper list, thinking ashamedly to myself, If this song were to crop up in a commercial or get covered by some other band I heard of, I’d keep it for sure. 

So while I think the subscription-type services that will allow users access to all of recorded music that Reihan Salam describes in this Slate article are inevitable, I don’t think they will do much for people’s enjoyment of music. They may discover a lot more stuff, but only in the collector’s sense of having filed away an awareness of it. It will become much harder to find the time and the discipline to invest emotional energy in a few songs when the temptation will always be there to indulge that antithetical pleasure of judging—in or out? keep or toss from the playlist? The editing will be a never-ending process, and we’ll never get to the point where we have the time to listen to the carefully compiled playlist and start making the effort of investing ourselves in the music, in bringing the songs to life so that they can return the favor later on.

Perhaps that is why muxtape, the site that lets you upload and share online “mixtapes” of 12 or so songs is such an attractive idea—not so much for the consumer but for the uploader. It takes those playlists of chosen songs and gives them an immediate broader context for emotional investment—a community of fellow listeners. It helpfully imposes some parameters, limits that sharpen your focus. It becomes a forum for making your listening habits performative. Which 12 songs will go together? How can I put my tastes to use to impress somebody out there who might be listening? Isn’t that the bottom line in amassing a mammoth knowledge of pop music in the first place—impressing people? But when you are simply listening to music—for yourself, rather than brandishing the extent of your familiarity for others—you are just remembering yourself and what effort you spent in the past to really listen. That energy returns to you, as if the song supplies it. That seems to me to be what it means to like a song. And if we don’t budget the time to make that investment, if we feel too overwhelmed with choices to bother to attach much feeling to the choices we make, we’ll end up amassing all kinds of music, enjoying the pleasures of curating a collection while not really liking any of the music.

—Rob Horning