There’s that guy in the original Matrix movie who wishes he could get plugged back in and forget about the real world. Cypher. He gives all his reasons for wanting to return, in his villain-explaining-to-main-character-his-evil-plan type speech.
His list of reasons is mostly negative; that is, he wants to get away from the “stink” of the real world and the synthesized food they have to eat, to go back to ignorance and a life of false meaning. He doesn’t say, “I miss walking the streets, I miss hugging, I miss watching tv, I miss going to bookstores,” though he does, at least, seem to miss eating steak.
All this to say, as I’ve unplugged myself from Spotify, my reaction has been a little different. I do not feel hatred for the real world of music. I do not want to return to Spotify. But I find myself missing a million records at once.
I went to target while Christmas shopping and got a Starbucks americano to drink while walking around. These things together are how I play dress-up as a thirty year old. It’s fun for an afternoon, to see how it feels. I can drink endless coffee, but for some reason, after I had left the store, I began to sweat and feel a rush. I got on my motorcycle to go home and the wind made it better. When I’d hit a red light, the feeling of stopping was unbearable. I needed to move! Overheating, caffeine buzzing, sweat collecting under the impermeable plastic wind-breaker, balancing a hot bike under me, trying not to step in the puddles of oil that collect at red lights you never notice when you are in a car. A rush to action inside, an impasse out.
I can easily roil myself into musical fever dreams, once I get started on albums I don’t have access to anymore. If I consider the time and money it will take to recover every album by Prince or David Bowie - artists I had only gotten into through Spotify - it is enough to set me on fire. I can’t help but picture every era, every album, every collaborator and their individual albums, every bit of gear they used and every record subsequently made using that gear. I need to be air cooled. I need to move but I am stuck at the light.
So unlike Cypher, I miss this whole colorful world, I miss a million things from that world. Somehow knowing I could get it all back very quickly if I needed to, for just $9.99 a month, makes it worse. Makes this feel entirely pointless. Why must I be so difficult?
I have dabbled a bit in other streaming-type services since giving up Spotify. “Accidental meandering,” I tell myself. It is an addiction and I am trying to micro-convince myself it’s not as bad. I already pay for Amazon Prime for the two day shipping. So what if it comes with a bunch of streamable music, too? I’m technically not paying for the music, it’s just there. I’ll just try a little.
Well, it’s even worse than Spotify. It’s music thrown in with a bunch of meat in the trap. That’s an easy one. So I also cancelled my Prime membership.
Then there’s Qobuz, which I did not even know about until trying to buy WAV downloads of albums and realizing they are really the only option with a wide selection. You can get a pretty huge discount on purchases if you also subscribe to their lossless streaming plan. So that’s like $15/month but then you make that back if you buy two lossless albums in a month. This is trickier. I mean, it’s way easier for me to walk away from this service I’ve only known about for two weeks, compared to a huge thing like Amazon. But I sense that I will be out in the wild trying to track stuff down, rooting through used CD bins, until finally resigning myself to dumbly typing out “qobuz.com” and buying the album at last. It makes me nervous because I don’t want to in any way fund a streaming platform.
This leads better than I though it would into the last big option I have, which is CD buying. A CD is like a paper plate at a family barbeque. Utterly disposable once you have feasted the information off of it. I crave these stupid discs now. And the good ones are mostly available through sifting and getting lucky. Most stores around me that carry CDs do not organize them well. It feels usually like people try not to go over to that section of the store. They are permanently fixed in time, all Back Street Boys and Gavin DeGraw and Dave Matthews. These can’t be the last artists to have released music on CDs, nor can they be the main artists that current-day-CD-buyers are most into.
So today, mainly: overheating, feelings of loss, and questions. Chiefly, what the fuck is going on?
[Note to myself:
After writing this quickly and reading it back, I think I am more like Cypher than I am arguing. I think I could rewrite this to be more honest. That’s okay. Instagram pictures don’t look completely like me, either. I’m just gonna leave it. Uh bye.]