how absurd it all seems

I’m alive! It kind of took me by surprise.

In early October I hit what I’ve seen referenced by some as “the COVID wall,” or the spontaneous, towering, pandemic-induced psychological barrier to any semblance of productivity and inner peace. To call it spontaneous is a bit misleading — inevitable is probably more like it — but what I mean is that it threw itself up without warning. There were no signs, no obvious precipitating circumstances, no conclusive event I can point to and blame for its appearance. One day, it was just there. I struck it at what must have been considerable speed. I’m still reeling from the collision.

I’m not trying to force a recovery, since friends of mine with relevant knowledge and experience pre-dating COVID have advised me to be gentle with myself. Depressive episodes (I suppose that’s what this is!) are to be eased slowly and incrementally, in bite-size pieces.

I’ve set my sights accordingly, on manageable goals, like the bare essentials of eating and showering and earning a paycheck. Sleep is a concept I struggle with, but reading and writing require less effort as the days press on. I suspect I might be over the hump already, but I’m not about to get comfortable. Premature plans and lack of follow-through are the deadliest weapons in my formidable self-flagellating arsenal, and I’m not keen on prolonging my misery.

Consequently, I have no appraisals or tidy insights to offer, no “Best of 2020” recommendations for a year that was objectively the Worst in every possible dimension. Some great music was released, on which, hypothetically, I might have some corresponding opinions. I have taken a surprising and reassuring amount of comfort in a lot of it, way more than I ever expected.

Unfortunately, I’m still reckoning with the general learning curve. I have some powerful open-back studio headphones, hand-me-downs from my husband, plugged into an AMP/DAC that I bought in March. As I type this, I am streaming 16-bit audio files from Qobuz, a service I pay something like $25 a month for, into my ears.

Fucked up, right? This is not the kind of person I am. This is not how I was engineered to listen to music. Front and center is, like, the diametric opposite of “high fidelity.” $25 is a ticket and a vodka rocks at Bowery Electric. I should be draped over a barricade with a bassline buzzing in my chest, my fist in the air with tens to hundreds to thousands of other fists. 2020 has not just demanded every ounce of my hope and patience in reserve, but a from-the-ground-up recalibration of my experience of music. At the risk of sounding like a pretentious brat, I am attempting to hotwire the internal circuitry of my own soul. And I will keep trying until something clicks.

I’m confident that it eventually will. For all my rhapsodizing about its indispensable spiritual function, and for all my agonizing over the loss, my descent into concert-going madness was not an overnight transformation, or even the result of a singular, profound realization. When my dad took me to the Rolling Stones at age six, or Bruce Springsteen at thirteen, I did not emerge fully formed from some kind of Meadowlands chrysalis. I did not charge straight for the doors of Bowery Ballroom the moment I turned 21, Do Not Pass Go, Do Not Collect $200. My live music epiphany was a much more gradual unfurling: an aggregate of small, magical moments, inexorably intertwined with personal history and all its lucky accidents, that awakened me to a wider realm of possible fulfillments. I learned that bliss. I have an advantage in that I am (probably, almost certainly) chemically and genetically predisposed to feeling sparks fly in front of a stage, but you don’t get to a blazing inferno without blowing on some flames first.

I don’t think a sparkling studio recording will ever sound as good to me as the deafening stereo mix that is a PA in front and a crowd in back, and that’s all right. But I am rummaging for the magical moments. Purposeful discovery is a teeming reservoir of them, as it turns out, and a vein we’ve forgotten how to tap in the age of nostalgia and algorithms. Remember how great it felt to dig deep, all the way down into the sediment of forums and private trackers and peer-to-peer search engine bars? The risk, the wait of a creeping progress bar, and the occasional reward? Before you could just tell Spotify or Pandora or Apple Music to hit me, baby, one more time, with whatever it has decided to serve you next in the queue. Man, I had almost forgotten it myself.

I’m picking people’s brains on Discord, people who have spent decades more than I have flipping through alphabetized racks and bargain bins, who remember things I just might like and are generous enough to recommend them. (Eternal and obligatory thanks to the founders and patrons of the Dig Me Out podcast.) I’m scrolling through blogs and newsletters and Rate Your Music lists compiled by the specific type of music fan who still bothers to actually keep a blog (cough), the dude with 100,000 FLAC files and his own Plex server and a YouTube channel for rarities, whose precious combination of passion and archival compulsion will one day go extinct. I live in conscious fear of that day, as I lived in ignorant fear of Sunday, March 22, 2020. The keystone to live music will always be the person standing by your side with his or her fist in the air next to yours, and the most bountiful treasure maps remain the exclusive purview of human cartographers. It’s both poetic consolation to me and a source of deep concern.

So I’m making discovery my top priority, and the activity of listening as invested, engaged, and social as it can be, short of an evening downtown. I’m hunting for new artists, whether they’re new new or just new to me, whose revelations used to appear in the context of an opening set on a chance Thursday night. I eagerly look forward to the day I gain that pathway back.

And, yes, fine, I’m making a lot of themed mixes on Spotify, too (as I do my best to compensate for its villainy — Bandcamp Fridays are being extended into May of 2021, by the way). There’s something about the goal-oriented, curatorial process I can’t resist. It requires my participation and conscious thought, in digestible and COVID-wall-accommodating Goldilocks quantities. I have to work — not too little, not too much — for a result I can kick back and enjoy.

On that note, I guess I’ll leave you with this one. Originally, I started this playlist to prove a point to a friend (i.e., what it says on the tin), but the next thing I knew I had spent the better part of a week compiling 12+ hours of contemporary rock and rock ‘n’ roll. The result is an exhaustive showcase of talent and style spanning the past 20 years, from local obscurities to household names, from [power] poppy to [post-]punky to psychedelic and everything in between. I wanted to get a sense of where we are, where we have been, and where we might be headed. Because we are headed somewhere. There’s a future for rock music, as surefire as the rebirth of live entertainment. I refuse to consider the alternative. There isn’t one.

Tracks have been ordered to flow as seamlessly as possible between each other and their respective stylistic segments, so if you want to marathon over the course of a few weekday afternoons while you work or study, it’s organized for precisely that purpose. Seeking out a particular vibe? Skip around by section.

I genuinely believe there’s something in there for everybody. My hope is that you’ll discover somebody brand new to fall in love with, or at the very least appreciate. You could say that I’ve done my best to sketch out a map.

Ta-ta for now, and so long, 2020. I can’t say I’ll miss it. I’m not sure if 2021 will be a good year, but I think it will be better — especially if we ring it in together.

Cheers,

Bux