#352

The final installment, as it were, of the current generation of the main Pokémon games has dropped and it has hit me like a bullet that shatters into a hundred perfect rainbow love letters. Each time I have loaded up and played each iteration--the initial drop, the first additional chapter, and now this closer which I am hours and hours into exploring and revealed thereby that it will take hundreds more, that they could stop here and I could play with what we have on the switch for the rest of my life. They won't, and I'll keep going with them into the unlimited potential futures of the Pokémon World--in which we all live, praise be and God bless. 

Surely internet seethes with hatred for everything I love and appreciate about it, but culture war internet is a pimple, where our most putrid selves go to coalesce and collapse together into an ocean of stinking pus. Once you're done with internet thinking--with cultural hatred--you are back in the bloodstream, baby, and can love what you please waging peace like a gangster.

If only I could aid the world, and make that process faster. All one can say is no snobs no masters.

*

Look, I'll say it. I'm not gonna push around some false humility like an extra dick. I am fucking inordinately proud about that rhyme and scansion. Again, I'll say it myself: that was a mic drop. 

*

But I wouldn't drop a microphone really because that is not good for the equipment. Maybe if it was already crapping out pretty bad I could drop it as like a farewell. That would take some planning, and could never be as cool playing out as in my head, where it's already not very cool.

*

2023 is almost over. The year ran at speed, it seems to me. This probably due to the true aging process taking hold of my system, my brain changing tempo, as it were, as my body undergoes its first "weakening" puberty. None of that is the point--do I even mean it? What the fuck. Never mind, speed on--Album Week this year will undergo what might be called a restructuring, in company terms, or reboot, in continuity terms. That's maybe what is called "inside baseball"? I like basketball, and Plato, if we're playing with spheres. There's no company. Not the kind with meetings and tiers and hierarchies would confabulate to create what is compressed into the term "inside baseball". 

Digression over. Welcome to Factually Musical, brought to you by Factually Pointless. This year, the next week's posts--today being Monday, running through Sunday--will appear, if they appear, in the form of paragraphs, perhaps making use of lists or figures, concerning various musical concepts, ragging and raging and even ranging from whatever the fuck I feel like to whatever the fuck ends up happening, period. How do you like that, motherfucker? Do you fucking...do you love it? Good. That is a huge relief. I didn't prepare very well and I was a little nervous. 

Onwards.

*

Because I am talking to more people a bit more regularly than since 2017, music is sometimes discussed. I guess music is like a part of life or something. Replete with emotional connections? Ringing any fucking bells? This is going to be about music. Music is about feelings.

Thing about feelings is that they arise, and exist well before any reasoning process can be applied, even if the arousal is rooted in layers and layers of reasoning process and lived experience. Indeed, this deeper rooting may even intensify and further remove the feeling from reason or the ability to interact with reason, because by the time our brains are even partially developed, most of us think in language so quickly that arousal and the resultant idea/reaction are perceived as simultaneous. This is something we need to try to remember when we think we've personally evolved beyond our emotions and have achieved command control. Please be convinced, without my further elaboration, that this is the mindset which leads to the most fabulously irrational behaviors that humans perpetrate. 

All this is by way of saying that one is never exempt from dealing with one's feelings, and one's feelings simply are what they are and not something to blame oneself for. Processes are processes. You may as well be angry with bedrock for having the percentage of silicates that it does, rather than some optimal figure you pulled out of your ass. Therefore, looking at what a computer program tells you is your most listened-to music and sharing it because someone shared their own computer-program-generated tallies for hours dedicated to particular music will generate feelings, before during, and after, and feelings lead to thoughts. As previously discussed. 

Let me, now that all is preambled to my satisfaction, tell you about some of those thoughts and feelings.

*

The relationship between data and the interpretation of what music is and how it behaves is ancient and fraught. Now we live in the time of Big Data, so we have a lot of grist to chew up in our little mills when it comes to, say, which rapper has the highest word count vs. vocabulary vs. repetition vs. various matrices of the preceding categories and as many as we can think of in addition. Ah, but who has done more with less? And who has turned less into significatly more than even that? And who defied convention in such a way as to skewer this math a third way? What escaped through the holes in the net? What lies deeper than these questions, these numbers, these ciphers?

It doesn't really matter and I don't really care, unless I care more that anything--depends on the question--but the actual thing about the questions is that they change how I feel about things and how I feel as I hunt for the answers and decide how I feel about what I'm able to find--a modifier on my lived experience, on my interpretative and emotional journey through existence. As importantly, I notice things, and that leads me to make connections with the data I have happened to access (which must be taken with a grain of salt in any case), and connections we make ourselves are key emotional warp, weft, and weave. 

That so much quantitative data and mathematical backbone be available, be elemental to something that every organism does and must experience in their own completely unique way--breathtaking! Terrifying? A hilarious joke? I always favor the latter, as you know, but we've only been crawling around the tip of this iceberg, and depths alway carry their risks, may contain subliminal horrors, always more tenebrous and unfamiliar than our beloved surfaces.

*

Yet to attain heights, we must suffer depths. Indeed, we much command both, if we are to advance. 

*

Basically, I felt ruffled that an industrial focus on what we most consume by volume must by its nature undermine the value--at last as perceived and reflected in the sense of the general antechamber of shared culture--because it obscures range. Because ape brain says numbers go higher are better, people with highest numbers are best. Oh, to be the Swiftie with the most hours of Taylor Swift listened to on this planet! POWER SO GREAT THE SIDEWALK SHATTERS IN A LINE TEN FEET BENEATH WHERE THEY FLOAT, WREATHED IN LUMINOUS ENERGIES THAT BLIND THE UNWORTHY!

In reality such a thing is only meaningful if you know the story and depending on how it makes you feel. In reality, an untold fuckton of bots and scripts and sockpuppets listened to 8760 hours of each of Taylor Swift's songs, maybe a few hardcases did something more linear manually, maybe one in a billion needed her in the ear all year no surcease no pause and is the one authentic claim to the figure and then the hundreds of millions of stories beyond, but none of it matters. I mean it's a fucking footnote to a blip, and matters the same amount--to me, precious, en masse and in total, precious, even if I hate the particular details I've chosen to discuss. To others, not. To some, also precious, but their feelings and their emotions will lead them in the direction of different performances, emotions, expressions, ideas, states of mind, further explorations and calculations. Concepts, interpretations, moments, communions, transcendences, all molecules on a great, trackless, unsoundable ocean on which we pass like ships in the night, and we signal one another, oh, we play music, we send up signal flares, we declare, we care, we share.

And so on.

*

Once again, back in reality, probably no one in ten million thinks about that list and its implications for more than a few minutes and certainly most would wish to tell me that I am overthinking, overcarrying, overstretching, and overinterpreting the affair to a degree which strains credulity. 

That is because I have a lot of feelings on the subject, which get away from me as I write although I am so aware of them that I spent all this effort telling you about it, dear reader, in the preamble, as an effort to remind myself, which has been a resounding failure--unless it was my plan all along to demonstrate what I believe is truly beautiful and meaningful about music, about love, about art, about life; which is to be carried away, which is to get ahead of oneself and fall into the sublime.

*

FACTUALLY MUSICAL

2023

HAS BEGUN

--JL