My listening habit

Part of me wants to be the one who not only has 20,000 songs on mp3 or on CD or in any format and knows where all of it is but also listens to all of it. Or has an active desire to listen to all of it. Part of me really wants to be that High Fidelity guy with the shelves and shelves of records and a complete encyclopedic knowledge of the situations that led me to purchase or particularly treasure those records.

And I do treasure all of my music on some level, primarily a subconscious one. I have it all dutifully stored and backed up in a hard drive floating around our cluttered office somewhere. But I am under no illusions on this point: despite previous posts about very real imprints and times in my life where particular selections of music were incredibly relevant to me and left permanent scars, a full catalog of why I own everything in my collection doesn’t exist. Much has been stored away for quite some time to the point where I’m not 100% sure what’s there.

This is far different from when I first began purchasing music myself. Though I waited until the CD days to develop an alphabetical and then chronological catalog system for my music, I treated the shoebox collection of cassettes with more reverence than I ever treated CDs. Every new cassette was an event, something that needed to be listened to the minute I got home. That was about scarcity of income; every cassette had to be treasured because who knew when I was going to get the next one. Probably a birthday or Christmas.

Given that those only happened twice a year total, I made the most out of every single purchase, treating the listen like its own juried contest, an event that had to happen as soon as reasonably practicable. The minute I got home (because my parents weren’t going to put up with my rock music leanings on the ride home), I popped it into the Walkman or the boombox – always with headphones, even in the boombox days – and it was my assignment, my literal assignment, to get all the way through it and determine whether or not I liked it. Always nice when I did, and rarely had I ever purchased anything that was flat out disappointing at that stage. The research and the hemming and hawing I did in the record store itself usually meant a well-considered and well-received decision.

I now understand that poor young Josh to be under the influence of certain false notions about what music meant to him. Music was meant to be an utter addiction, with little regard for the notion of variety (I do listen to a variety of music types but would not likely ever say “I listen to anything”) or pure let-yourself-go-and-dance-like-you’re-at-a-rave joy. Don’t get me wrong: little makes me as happy as music. But to call it joyful happiness might be an overstatement. It makes me happy because I so desperately need it, which is not necessarily happiness but a habit, a demanding habit, perhaps, instead.

As that’s the case, the way I “enjoy” music – I truly do enjoy it, but let’s stick with the addiction model for a bit – is perhaps different from what you might expect as well. Three primary characteristics of my listening habit stand out for.

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1. My significantly preferred method of listening at this stage – and at every important or unimportant stage of my life – is through headphones. It is not through a stereo or a car radio. It is not out huge speakers or small speakers. It goes best directly the hell into my ear and straight to my abused and bleeding eardrums. I have really tried other methods and just been embarrassed about them and concerned about what other people think of my music. As someone who constantly seeks approval, I’ve found the easiest way to happiness or at least peace in terms of music is to subject myself to it and no one else.

It’s led to awkwardness about how much of a music fan I truly am. Because I don’t take much of an opportunity to welcome others from my broader world into my musical world. It can seem that I’m not a music fan at all for all the stereo usage that has gone on in my household over the years. But the listening that occurs at a closer distance, that I know is meant for just me, is where it hits me best. No distractions, no intermediaries, no judgments. Like stealing a cigarette break behind the apartment on Branard St. back in the day. Except all the time and indoors and with full knowledge of all household members and fully sanctioned.

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2. Full volume all the time. All the time. This applies to headphone listening as well as the occasional car listens I still get (though those are fewer and further between since the iPhone 3G S doesn’t even work vaguely with the plug-in adapter, as the iPhone 2G did). Even the soft songs. Everything at full volume. So it is that I get around, in my bizarre way, the inability to share music through headphone – I just turn ‘em up.

True story: busy Wednesday morning this week at Bard Coffee in downtown Portland, people everywhere, I found one of the very few available seats right before it got rough in there. Typical mix of music playing, half good, half crap, and fairly loud on top of all the people arriving, leaving, some staying – in any case, it wasn’t really working for me, so I threw in the headphones and turned them up as loudly as I possibly could. Never mind the fact that they were not cancelling out the noise from the rest of the shop – they were apparently loud enough that they were bothering the person next to me. So he asked me to turn them down. Which I did. Reluctantly.

That’s how loud they have to be. The iPhone never gets off the very top volume setting. So that when something sounds like it’s scraping the lower right side of my skull, I really feel and hear it. So that when there is a wall of instruments competing for space in the mix, there truly is a wall, with no room for anything else. It cannot be short of the most physical experience I can get through my ears – otherwise, it’s just not the same.

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3. I throw certain things on repeat, and by things I mean songs. Single tracks sit on repeat for entire afternoons. That’s happened recently with some of the examples below. I will try to narrow down somewhat the reasons for those repeats. They will be somewhat analytical. But understand them also as a function of addiction.

The guitar sounds overall, the way they drench the song, make me crave the full-volume skull-pounding headphone listening experience. I’m also addicted to the stutter-step entrance of the rhythm section at 0:14; I can’t imagine what this song would sound like if the bass and drums actually came in together and stayed in line with Bell himself and his vocals. I often hit the back button three or four times so I can hear it in its full glory.

The bass moving up to the B at the 1:23 mark – that’s utterly addicting. Why stay on the root when you can hit the fifth? Why indeed? The constant repeated descending guitar harmonies – also completely addictive. They first hit at exactly the 0:30 mark, and that’s where I usually hit the back button again just so I can have an extra round of those harmonies.

I lay in wait for each of these individual spots in the song, and each is like a drag or hit.

Overall, this song contains little addictive, not even volume-wise – the track doesn’t fill up my full-volume headphones like Bell does. But this one is unusual in that it’s a vocal that gives me the addictive boost. Yorke reaches a new sense of urgency after a couple of verses and a couple of choruses, at the 1:44 mark. I find that “hey hey, hey hey” to be as attention-grabbing in its subtle but noticeable way as any massive dynamic shift. I scrub past it frequently and find myself hitting the one-track repeat almost immediately after hearing it.

There’s a predatory feel to this entire song, the way the band moves in concert, stealthily yet forcefully, around the vocals and manages to menace without stealing the show from Neko’s voice. It’s primarily the choruses, where the guitars and bass stomp downwards along with the drummer’s steady time, that makes you feel a primal and addictive heat about this one and what it means.

This song took a while to sink in for me. I wasn’t entirely crazy about the blipping bass line, and I didn’t notice at first the sublime moment when it releases hold of the song at the 1:17 mark I go back to that mark all the time, now repeatedly even within repeated listens to the song. I want to feel the song float across the canyon almost entirely without a rhythm section to speak of, like the Coyote chasing the Roadrunner off the cliff but, this time, floating across the chasm with no ill effects and galloping along the other side when he reaches it.

What’s also addictive here is the burbling synth intro, which I have until just recently been completely unable to match up with where I think the drums will enter. This is a puzzle I have yet to solve 100% but I am getting better at prediction. It’s exactly that kind of puzzle that I keep to myself and don’t let my family participate in completing. It’s why they like me so much. Or more accurately think of me as an addict. They’re not wrong.

This is where Rufus’s penchant for Beatles whimsy actually seeped into his theatrical Broadway delivery. It makes me happy to know that this whimsy is out there for Rufus; it’s an unbelievable tour de force.

Whatever the reasons, these are five songs I’ve found myself resetting to the beginning repeatedly in recent months. They will come and go, these songs, and be replaced with others, but rest assured they will all be abused. And I won’t simply let them play from beginning to end; they’ll get started and then have to turn around and repeat. And do that a couple more times until I’m satisfied I’ve sucked every last good morsel out of that track. Until the next time I play it, which will be right after this time I play it.

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When you see me huddled with headphones on in the corner of the coffeehouse or walking the streets or even driving the car (yes, I frequently drive with headphones on these days), I am certainly enjoying the music. But more importantly, I’m taking part in what is an exceedingly loud yet private addiction ritual that I probably couldn’t live without and from which I have no intention of distancing myself. If you need something, tap my shoulder lightly; I’ll try not to flip out.