#171

Post number one hundred and seventy-one! Such a cool number. It's Album Week 2019, so I won't blather on, but the foremost thing is that the number one hundred and seventy-one is an anagram of the number one hundred and seventeen. They are not anagram numbers, which is its own thing. Just anagrams of each other.

*

Being into a particular album with all of your friends at once is a special thing, kind of a social supersigil. Like you're all flying the same invisible flag, and wearing the same invisible patch over your hearts. It may happen a great deal that a few of your friends are into the same album, that maybe three of you have a special thing about the same album, that you and one other person in the group are having a freakout over the same album, that people have acquaintances and friends and family members outside of the group with whom albums are being shared and subsequently disseminated throughout the group. Standard activity. Fragments clashing, accepted by some and rejected by others. Codes inscribing themselves into a mainframe or failing to penetrate firewalls.

Standard thereby is that a whole group of friends may be into a set of the same songs, a blanket woven from the preferences and suggestions of several souls, drawn from a wide range of different sources, and used to cover a whole web of interrelation. A floating playlist whose notes swirl around a connected pack of human beings and pierce their hearts in turn to get a thread through, to bind them. Magic is that simple, and that irrevocable.

For a whole album to nail a whole group in the head all at once is a rarer thing, provided you have in mind a group of friends whose tastes, preferences, and ideas cover a disparate range. I've never hung out with a bunch of people who are just like me and like everything I like and dislike everything I dislike, so I can only think of perhaps only one album that has taken everyone I am close to at the moment into its belly.

Don't remember which album it was. Something embarrassing I'm protecting myself from, probably; must be bad, because I'm not very sorry about liking the stuff I like. Whatever it was, I remember how it felt to be a teenager and ride around town listening to it. It is difficult to be a teenager, you're fucking feral, helpless not to broadcast everything you're feeling which is literally everything so no one thing is correct, and the tendency of existence to radically amplify renders you constantly vulnerable to ever-more complicated and acute forms of despair.

So when a bunch of teenagers are all in a good mood, even blissing out, at the same time, it's one of those legitimate miracles. Albums can do that, they have that power of suspension, that ability to gather together and lift up.

*

Yo, I didn't moisturize my hands yesterday! What an ultramaroon.


--JL