Cracked Rear View
when musing on the past opens up future vistas
In the Morgan Wallen album review post from earlier this month, we examined and demonstrated how the nature of streaming shifted and how the intent of the new generation of musicians, songwriters and production teams are wholly aligned with the incentive structures of streaming. Streaming has been, in some ways, the greatest blessing for the musical consumer. The advantages are obvious. Easily accessible music at your fingertips is a dream that, up until just a handful of years ago, wasn't even conceivable—it was impossible.
For someone like myself, an individual who desires to discover above all else, who rarely listens to a record more than a handful of times unless it's truly exceptional, the ability to stretch my wings and investigate different subgenres and artists at no cost beyond the monthly fee has been a game changer. A blog like this, where a hundred records a year may be listened to, could not exist otherwise. (For what it's worth, I know the backlog has been slow this year. I did not have a piece in May, but I do have 15 to 30 albums that I have listened to already that are simply waiting for me to sit down and actually pen reviews. So you should expect at least one more backlog post before the end of June, perhaps two if I'm feeling enthusiastic about the prospect of marking down my thoughts on these various records.)
My role, both as a music enthusiast and as someone who tries to curate for other audiences, could not exist in the previous era. I would have had to spend upwards of $1,000, if not more, in the iTunes age to be able to do this.
However, there is a downside, obviously. Every technological shift creates winners and losers, benefits and costs. While streaming's advantages are so substantial that they can overshadow any drawbacks, it's worth examining what has been lost in this transformation and if it is possible or worthwhile to try and resuscitate it, at least in some form.
To demonstrate this loss, let's examine a song I've written about before, but from a different angle. The song is “Chesney” by Steve Moakler from 2018. It's not a particularly well-known song. It’s unfortunate that the record did not gain tremendous traction. Moakler is probably better known in the songwriting world, though that feels like an oversight to my ears.
To set the tone, I’ll quote my description of the song,
“It brilliantly connects to the ethos of Chesney's discography through the lens of a nostalgic reflection on a long faded summer romance. Notably, it focuses on the general nostalgic connection to Kenny's music instead of a specific song. Conceptually, the song aims to link a summer fling to the unnamed Kenny Chesney CD that the girl gifted him. As the song progresses and the lines between Chesney's music and the romance are blurred, Chesney's name is repeatedly used as a mantra style reminder of what once was.
An effective songwriting mechanism, bolstered by warm and atmospheric textures that conjure up images of hazy summer evenings.”
Giving a close look to the lyrics, we see the genius in the lyrical setup. A phrase is said by Moakler that did not appear particularly remarkable at the time, but has been sticking with me ever since. It is the key to realizing why the song’s concept is effectively executed. While discussing a common framework of a long-past summer romance, he says: "You are a long July / Best one of my life / That cracked CD you gave me / Chesney, Chesney."
What Moakler is doing here, to great effect, is tying together three specific things: the memory of a girl from a summer past, their relationship to a particular musical artist, and a physical totem that represents that connection. If that story were written today, the cracked CD portion, which is that physical totem bringing a tangible reminder to the fingertips and to the brain, would not be part of the story. It would instead be something like "when I hit shuffle on some Chesney, it reminds me of that summer."
But consider the power of that original image. Focus on that powerful notion that an entire nostalgic spiral could be induced by simply seeing a cracked CD on the floor of your car or shoved deep in the glove compartment. The way that picking up and physically holding this piece of media could cause memories to flow back. This has become nearly anachronistic at this point, hasn't it?
There's extensive scientific research demonstrating the power of smell and how particular scents can induce memory through the olfactory system. The smell of frying onions might bring back crystal clear memories of long forgotten childhood dinners that your mother prepared. Studies dating back to Dr. Donald Laird’s original 1935 research paper on the topic show that scent-triggered memories are often more vivid, emotionally intense, and extend further back in one's life than those triggered by other senses. (The style of writing from back then is positively delightful.)
“…Take the simple matter, for instance, of unexpected notions or recollections popping into our thoughts. What stimulated these recalls! Even a good introspecter is unable to trace some of them to the stimulus that precipitated the rush of long dormant scenes and actions…. It is now shown that these memories of the past that have a peculiarly haunting, emotional grip over us are often aroused by some fleeting odor…. The memories these passing odors evoked were remarkably intense, emotional, and deep-seated — more than just “casual will-o’-the-wisps in our mental fabric,”
Laird’s team interviewed many subjects for the study. Here are selected quotes from one of the most indicative recollections.
…..“The smell of fresh sawdust invariably takes me back to the sawmill where my father worked when I was a small boy. If I try to reconstruct these memories of the sawmill by conscious mental effort, I can locate this object and that, this person and that, in the seene, but the memory thus constructed lacks life and is hazy…. No memory stimulus breaks my train of thought so abruptly and completely, transports me through the past so rapidly to some remote scene, as a proper quality of odor.”
(Excerpts taken from “What Can You Do With Your Nose?” By Dr. Donald A. Laird, Colgate Psychological Department, 1935)
This is not limited to smell alone. Taste can provide a similarly dramatic experience. For this, let’s read an evocative and revealing passage from the French novelist Marcel Proust.
“She sent out for one of those short, plump little cakes called 'petites madeleines,' which look as though they had been moulded in the fluted scallop of a pilgrim's shell. And soon, mechanically, weary after a dull day with the prospect of a depressing morrow, I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake. No sooner had the warm liquid, and the crumbs with it, touched my palate, a shudder ran through my whole body, and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary changes that were taking place. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, but individual, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory--this new sensation having had on me the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me, it was myself. I had ceased now to feel mediocre, accidental, mortal. Whence could it have come to me, this all-powerful joy? I was conscious that it was connected with the taste of tea and cake, but that it infinitely transcended those savours, could not, indeed, be of the same nature as theirs. Whence did it come? What did it signify? How could I seize upon and define it?”
- Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way, vol. 1, Remembrance of Things Past (1913)
This scientific and literary exploration reveal something profound about how we interface with the world through our multiple senses. Just as smell and taste create an irreplaceable emotional and memory pathway that cannot be replicated by simply seeing a picture of fresh bread or reading the word "lavender," touch provides an additional dimension to music that cannot be captured by swiping at pixels on a screen. We humans exist with five senses all deeply entangled with our brain and consciousness. When we reduce our interaction with music to just the two senses of sight and sound, we are not simply making a slight adjustment to an unimportant part of the experience. No, we are handicapping the full experience and paring it down to a shadow of what it could have been.
The world of physical media enabled an additional sense to be triggered in our relationship with music. Instead of merely using our eyes and ears, there was also the sense of touch. Nowadays, we have our eyes to see small pixelated album covers and our ears to hear the music, but that sense of touch is gone. Our neurological pathways that get triggered by music to form memories are operating in more limited forms.
Perhaps an argument could be made that the digital forms of media consumption have their own tactile sense to them. Maybe the stabbing finger pushing on the play/pause indicator or the swiping of one's thumb necessary to create a playlist would qualify. Somehow, I doubt it. There are distinct memories connected to the acquisition of a CD. The frustration of getting your fingernails to unearth the corner of the plastic wrap, the enthusiastic peeling off of the plastic wrap, balling it up with its crinkly sound tickling your ears, and impatiently tossing it into a wastebasket— or more likely, onto the floor. Prying open the jewel case and examining the wondrous patterns reflecting off the underside of the disc. Eagerly flipping through the liner notes, absorbing every last detail about each band member and song. No sterile tapping and swiping, fundamentally indistinguishable from any other engineered application can replicate that sheer physicality of buying a CD. The same was true with cassettes and records. Heck, even wax cylinders left a distinctive and particular mark back in the ol’ Thomas Edison days. No, something was different, and by golly, it may have been better. At least in that one way.
The rapid shifts of the digital world have made us sometimes not realize just how much we've lost, but sometimes the potential for a form of reversal is nonetheless viable. As G.K. Chesterton observed,
"There is one metaphor of which the moderns are very fond; they are always saying, 'You can't put the clock back.' The simple and obvious answer is 'You can.' A clock, being a piece of human construction, can be restored by the human finger to any figure or hour."
While this is obviously only true to a degree, in regards to our personal tech infrastructure and how we choose to interface with the world, there is certainly room for adjustment. We need not be prisoners of technological momentum. We can choose which innovations to embrace and which older practices to maintain or revive.
In spite of the utter digitalization of nearly everything, the boutique notebook and stationary scene has surprisingly been on an incline commercially and is now worth well into the hundreds of billions yearly. Moleskine has been a leader in the industry by capitalizing on people‘s desire for a premier luxurious writing experience. They realized that although everyone does not need paper the way they once did, many still desire to use paper as they once did.
The promise of the digital era was that you would simply carry your laptop or personal device and use it for everything, and yet, people have found that for their brain chemistry, writing things down often just works better.
“To me, the digital world triggered the need for people to connect with themselves – the need to slow down, to reflect, to express,” said current Moleskine CEO Christophe Archaimbault. Products like Moleskine have re-created a normative culture of someone lounging in a cafe, with a notebook and pen, just now it is paired with a laptop on the side. What was once potentially dying resurrected itself.
The path forward in music seems to be a trade off of streaming quantity defined experience swapped in place of an individual quality defined experience. However, similar to handwriting, does it have to be this way? For many, it seems as though it must. Except, of course, for the vinyl enthusiast.
The maintenance and/or restoration of the physical touch based element of music is why vinyl enthusiasts are so passionate about their collecting. Yes, they will tell you stories about the audio fidelity and warm tones vinyl creates, but the real appeal is simply being able to physically interface and interact with music, thereby adding a whole new layer of depth—or rather, an old layer of depth that has since been lost.
I can say it no better than David Sax in his "The Revenge of Analog."
“Analog experiences can provide us with the kind of real-world pleasures and rewards digital ones cannot. Sometimes analog simply outperforms digital as the best solution." The resurgence or surprising stability of analog mediums, from vinyl to notebooks to board games, is indicative of this trend. The above is my best explanation for why this phenomenon continues to exist.
I don't have any grand solutions for reclaiming this lost dimension of musical experience for myself. After all, as stated at the beginning of this piece, I am deeply thankful for the world of streaming and cannot imagine returning to the old system. If I had remained in that system, my entire approach to music would be radically different. I am not cut out to be a vinyl kind of guy. I listen to most of my music on the go and I’m not much of a collector type.
But I can acknowledge that something was lost, and perhaps that acknowledgment itself has value. Maybe the answer isn't choosing between the old and new, but consciously integrating both. Perhaps I should consider taking my few favorite records from a particular year—the ones that really stuck with me—and acquiring physical copies. Not necessarily to use them for primary listening, but to have them present. I wish to once again tear open CD or record and read through the liner notes, to engage with them through that sense of touch that has otherwise vanished from my musical life.
The cracked CD in the glove compartment may be gone. It will be missed by many. It will be lovingly preserved by some.
Hope you enjoyed reading!
Thanks,
Joe