THE GOBLIN NEWSLETTER 88

My tribalism around music has almost evaporated. This is probably due to the tribes disappearing or being so different that there is no reason to try for cohesion. It could also be that I’m almost 50 & haven’t felt positive about that tribalism for thirty years. I spent decades collecting records which I then started DJing around, eventually having a few nights a week at various bars in Portland. I grew up listening to the radio & taping songs off of it. I developed a keen ability to identify a hit, can identify what makes a hit & those skills live next to my actual musical tastes which tend towards the weirder, darker & more novel songs. That combination of what I like & what the audience responds to has been the formula for basically everything I’ve done. I have a hard time discerning the two. That said, some music just bugs me. Culture has definitely shifted to this weird hybrid of total pervasiveness with totally insular isolation, where the public idea of music has been all but eliminated with the radio waves being all but dead & people listening to their AI developed mixes in their little isolated worlds of earbuds. The most popular music has that late 70s blandness & sterility to it, though the lyrics are frequently filthy or delivered by yell rapping or sexual cooing. The shit makes me feel my age. There’s plenty of good new stuff coming out, really good stuff, it just doesn’t get traction & it also doesn’t have a public square to differentiate itself in. That’s the primary thing. The social aspect of music has been profoundly altered along with the social aspect of everything. People don’t know what to do, how to act, what to listen to. I think things like radio stations, newspapers, brick & mortar stores & the like will come back, probably better than before but not as pervasive or taken for granted & not until people are bored of the infinite entertainment boxes in their pockets.