The Perfect Playlist is either 14 or 100 Songs Long And Makes You Feel Something
boy if you wanted some words about music i've sure got some
Welcome back to the Alchemists of Memory, a (as of now) monthly-ish newsletter about whatever I want it to be about. This was going to be out five to eight weeks ago but then I was all over the place over the back half of October and the front half of November and that didn’t happen. I wrote this newsletter in at least three discrete portions and I’ll provide a special Alchemists of Memory gold star to whoever most correctly identifies where I stopped and started writing them.
Anyways, let’s talk about playlists.
I would be lying if I said that I remembered the first playlist I ever made. Its tracklist has been lost to memory, embedded in the since abandoned hard drive of a clunky mid-2000s laptop.1I know its shape, though: 12-16 songs mustered in iTunes and then burned onto the finest CDs 2009 could offer. The late 2000s were a strange borderland2 in the historical landscape of music consumption, split between the waning CD market tumbling down from a Y2K era peak and a nascent digital world just before streaming became omnipresent.
This divided landscape played out in my tweenage music fandom as well. CDs still felt like the canonical way to consume music. My core memories of experiencing music circa 2008-2011 largely begin with the physical experience of loitering in a music store — most often the local mall’s Barnes & Noble, but more distinctly at special occasion visits to Amoeba Records or other Los Angeles shops. Yet I rarely listened to the CDs themselves. They represented the music without ever being used for listening to the music; I could have given them away as soon as I had ripped them to my computer (an instant ritual that I still pine for at times). I didn’t, of course: their material presence had me under some sort of thrall. Perhaps it was their small-scale imitation of the form of vinyl records, or perhaps it was simply a hoarder’s archival instinct.
My downloaded music collection was bound up in the opposite feeling. By 2010, digital downloads were the main way I was actually acquiring music — if not by financial volume (for obvious reasons) by actual listening amount. Yet I distinctly remember myself regarding my downloaded collection as somehow less real than the ripped cds section of my music library, two otherwise identical collections of MP3s with different reputations associated with them.
The way that my 12 year old brain squared this circle was through the art of the playlist. By organizing songs into new, album-like forms, I could create my own versions of the physical artifacts of musical refinement that I otherwise would have to spend $7.99-$12.99 on at the mall.3 More practically, they were the only way to play music of one’s own choice on a car drive unless you had one of those ungodly tools that turned your iPod into a very short range FM station.4 For one drive up from Southern California to the Bay, I put together 6 CDs of 14 songs each, which pretty much covered it.
Even when I jumped on Spotify (and Grooveshark[???] beforehand) circa 2011, I still mostly hewed to formats that could fit on a cd or two. For a whole year and a half (2015-2016) I made a series of extremely silly themed playlists on Spotify.
AN INTERLUDE: Some examples:
A playlist of increasing amounts of time (from “FourFiveSeconds” to “16 Years”)
Songs with false endings (peep the John Mulaney reference which at the time was very hip)
Songs with a bunch of references to other musicians
A few dozen playlists after I ran out of good ideas for that series, I started making monthly playlists in 2017, based both retrospectively on what I was listening to the month prior and prospectively on what I wanted to listen to in the coming month. Each of those was as close to an hour as you can get; after years of operating in that mode, it felt natural.
But natural feeling and old habit alone do not explain my affection for the one hour playlist form. It’s just long enough to explore the conceptual space of a theme or mood, pushing out to the corners without wearing out a welcome. It’s long enough to fall deep into a particular mood, if it’s cultivated well-- it’ll make you feel something in a way that’s harder (but still possible!) to do in 15 or 30 minute bursts. You can fit all sorts of song lengths on there; 15 four minute indie rock songs, 30 new jersey club tracks, 1 Arca song. It’s handy for a variety of actual human events-- a drive of middling length, a subway trip across the city, a walk in the park. Perhaps most importantly it’s a length that other people will listen to all the way through without being pissed off at you.
Anyways, I now mostly make 7 hour long playlists.
Objectively speaking this is Too Long. That’s a workday. That’s the Beatles’ entire discography studio album discography except for the White Album. That’s long enough that if your flight got delayed for the length of one of these playlists you’d be entitled to compensation from certain airlines twice over. If you time it correctly and you don’t take too many breaks that will last you the drive between Oakland and San Diego. If you hit bad traffic it will at very least get you to the valley.
Why do I do this?
I’m not really sure! It started with Summer Jam mixes, playlists long enough to put on at a house party or a barbecue and not fuss about with while you’re trying to do something fun. Eventually I started making them for other seasons too, both for parties and for my own contemplative use. It’s a playlist long enough that it never loses its capacity for revelation. This is by design. I format them now such that every song sounds alike to its neighbors but the playlist as a whole moves around genres drastically, like a ring species that loops back in on itself.5
An example: my Autumn playlist (OUT NOW WOW) begins with 1960s-era African and African diaspora jazz-pop, loops into jazz fusion and blues rock before stumbling into a long passage of R&B and pop history roughly chronologically from 1970 to 1989 and then moving into a variety of dance tracks from different eras and continents. From there, we venture into various Latin American forms-- bachata and classic-era Rock en Español mostly-- before entering into a proggy emo-revival bout that resolves into slightly avant-garde contemporary dance pop. This movement slides right into a section of modern rap that then steps back into a walk down into 90s R&B, which then further marches onto older and older riffs on dub and reggae, finally landing back in with Miriam Makeba. If you start at any song and listen for 7 hours you’ll get back to your territory.
I do this both for prosaic and more arcane reasons. On the practical level, the stylistic similarity between adjacent songs allows for discrete sections of the playlist to be listened to as coherent wholes; if you slice a 100 song playlist into 7 parts you get just about 7 1 hour playlists.6 But there’s something deeper to creating a mix of that length. The goal is to create something almost hypnotic.
The Jazz critic Ted Gioia (big fan, Ted!!) recently wrote about how the three minute pop song form, a side effect of material history and the storage capacity of early 20th century information technology, might be bad for music as an art. His argument draws on both psychology and history – based on both contemporary and ancient knowledge, he says we know that musical performances (or perhaps our experiences of them) take on some deeper, emergent properties at lengths greater than the three minute bounds of the 45 RPM/AM radio/high modernist commercial musicform. This is (partially in all cases) why Deadheads are so annoying, why Berlin clubs go all night, why stans sit in their bedrooms and stream and restream their faves’ new releases right as they are released.
I obviously cannot create anything as sublime as a 45-minute “Dark Star,” a 3 hour techno climax, or the last.fm log of a devoted Swiftie. But by attempting to link together these atomized musical baubles into some unified whole, where every song has its place and there is a place for each song, I am at very least glancing at the trancelike effect they fully achieve.
Of course, even in the world of playlists I am not alone in the goal of making very big mixes. In fact, I am a rather small player in the scene on both the level of the length of my individual playlists and the rate in which I put them out. My friends (and Singles Jukebox comrades) Ryo and Brad make these incredible mixes of the music of particular years and eras – Brad also wrote a truly astounding essay about his own process you should read it.
This is all to say that if you have seven hours (or even some smaller fraction of seven hours!) to spare over the next few weeks, perhaps due to traveling across the country to see relatives or friends for whatever reason, it would cool of you to listen to my Autumn Playlist. I hope you enjoy it.
OTHER THINGS:
Since the last time we talked I’ve been writing a lot! Mostly for the Blog of the Long Now Foundation, which is my employer (but obviously does not determine my thoughts or writing outside of company time):
I wrote a love letter to the Internet Archive, on account of it being 25 years old!
I wrote about Dune & Foundation and how people just go nuts for stories that talk about history at the scale of grand arcs of centuries and millennia!
I wrote about the word Metaverse!
I, as always, did my blurbs at The Singles Jukebox. Favorite song of this period was the new Yaeji.
I also read a lot of things! Here’s the best of it:
I read Dune Messiah, which you should obviously not read unless you’ve read Dune but is a fascinating book in ways that are very hard to describe unless you just read it.
I read Becky Chambers’ A Long Way To A Small, Angry Planet which is one of the most hyped books in the much heralded hope-punk movement. While I have my own personal quibbles with the way that whole sector of Sci-fi is discussed in the broader discourse of my fellow dweebs and nerds, I found Chambers’ writing and plotting to be just excellent – it’s a world-building-heavy book that doesn’t ever feel burdened by its ideas, and a character-driven story that nevertheless goes places narratively and, despite the hope-punk rep, does not shy away from harshness.
I am currently reading (and still developing my thoughts on) James C. Scott’s Seeing Like A State, which I think may be one of the best histories covering the modern era (that is, the era defined by modernism as its chief philosophical frame, or roughly 1850-1970.) It’s not a perfect book and it certainly does not stand on its own without a broader reading list, but it’s impossible to ignore. More on this later.
I saw 2 whole movies in theaters! They were Dune and The House of Gucci and both were messy probably overly long kind of incoherent richly appointed dramas about family expectations and gender roles and the flow of luxury goods. I highly recommend both but am only sure that the former is good.
I also listened to a lot of music!
Most of it is on the playlist above
were you even, like, paying attention to this whole thing?
Look
nevermind
BYE!
Likely the HP Pavilion dv6875se Special Ceramic White Edition. It weighed like 10 pounds and I uploaded every cd my family owned onto it in the summer after third grade.
You could say liminal space, but I wouldn’t!
10-15 dollars at current prices! Wild!
AFAIK this does not exist biologically, but would be sick as all hell if it did!
For the Autumn mix I’d break before “Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft,” “She’s Gone,” “Give,” “Welcome Home,” “Essence,” and “F.U.N,” giving you 14, 14, 13, 13, 14, 18, and 14 song long playlists of roughly an hour each. I could probably make a cleaner set but I Do Not Care.
Going to listen to your big ol' playlist while in the airport all day tomorrow!! The playlist that I'm most proud of was one I made only about butts freshman year of high school
I'm the student of my mom's "listen to albums full-through and on repeat for 8 hours," my own tendency to just hit shuffle on my liked songs list, and the rocky history of 8track fandom mixes. I don't think I intentionally put together a playlist (except for catharsis playlists) until I played Ribbon Drive this year. It asks everyone to bring a mix-tape (playing it with Discord bots rather than the intended cassette tapes/CDs was an experience).
That's a lot of words to kind of say, "I like long playlists!" I'm looking forward to listening to yours! I was just on the 6 odd something hour ride from Sac to Los Angeles w/ my mom -- and we occupied 5 hours with her music and 1 hour with mine. Maybe I should curate something for her...
I enjoyed reading this newsletter! And I now have several tabs open to read...