Looking Around – March 8th 2022
Ok bear with this one, because today I’m inspired by Yung Lean.
The utter desperation of Lean’s music is beyond anything I’ve ever really heard before. Every melody feels like it’s been pulled from a near death experience or been hallucinated beautifully after spending a week freezing in the Siberian wilderness. When, as a listener, you can sit behind his lyrics and be cradled by the reverb of the dampened synths, it truly feels like people are picking a sheet up from under you and floating away with your sack of a soul.
It's hilarious to watch how over the course of two weeks my daily music taste has been entirely engulfed by Young Lean’s discography. I think something about violent changes in weather, from 80 degrees and humid to 40 and cloudy in two days, has really had me craving the lulling synths and screamed bars. At one moment I’m elated, the birds are out, and my heaters turned off, the next I’m physically unable to get out of my bed it’s so cold in my room. In a way Young Lean’s music has let me know, that’s life.
It's made me think again (unfortunately) about why exactly I like the music I like, and where those ideas really come from. If for example, music tastes were purely a symptom of all the sensory experiences that one had in life (I heard these noises when I was happy, Some person I hated showed me these noises, these noises remind me of these experiences) then hypothetically a sufficient bio-surveillance system with a “brain” could emulate your music taste if it followed you around since your birth. But as I type that out, I doubt it. There are some crazy synesthetic things that happen when I hear a song – I envision old experiences and feel them in a different way, which would then affect my perception of that song again.
I’m writing this out because every time I get high, I have this thought – “damn Spotify is winning,” as in they have the most data, they must be creating really powerful personized AI. By that I mean they have the potential to create AI that is extremely attuned to who you are. The assumption here is that music can tell us something more about ourselves than our search history - that maybe a there’s not a direct map between sad songs and sadness, but there’s some nonlinear map between a song and an emotion, or a song and a state of being that we’re not aware of. On the odd chance that that’s true, I bet that pattern will only become more obvious the more that music genres metastasize, and people delve into weirder niches. Simultaneously, statistical machines will be increasingly relied upon to help people find those niches – so we are both building the machine and letting the machine build us. Not a new thought… just a cringey one.
Matter of fact all of this is cringey. FuCk IT, post it.
Comments