A life of outtakes
In recent years I've found that I have to give myself projects in order to remember to listen to music. It's as if the idea of simply enjoying it no longer has any momentum. I used to want a soundtrack for everything in my life; now I only need music when I go running. If I didn't make some kind of effort, I wouldn't even realize that music was more or less gone from my life.
I used to want to blame this — if it is in fact something lamentable for which blame should be assigned — on technology, and on mp3s making music suddenly too easy to access and thus superfluous. I felt steered toward acquiring more music rather than listening to it, and none of it felt "earned" in the way I was used to from childhood, where you might read about some album and then have to wait years to hear it or you might enter into friendships solely for access to their record collection. Once everything was suddenly available, the bottleneck in music consumption seemed to become one's own imagination, which is to say, the purpose of music consumption seemed to become always listen to something new, because you can.
Accordingly, for a long time, my project was to try to listen to every unplayed file in my iTunes. But then I started to leave the "unplayed" list playing to an empty apartment while I went to work. Listening became an impediment to efficiently processing the data and getting the numbers down.
I'm less concerned now about there being too much accessible music for our own good. I worry more about simply being old. I find that as I get older, it takes a more deliberate and concerted effort to assert aspects of my personality that I used to take for granted. That is, the longer I live, the harder it is to just be myself. This defies the self-help rhetoric about how one learns who one is over time, that life is a process of self-discovery. But as I get older, I feel like I am becoming more and more generic. It may be that accumulating experience doesn't deepen the self but wears it away through a steady process of erosion. Or rather, I have learned how to be many different people over the course of life, and none of these seem primary.
My waning interest in music feels like a reflection of this, a growing indifference to my own identity. Having grown up with the sense that subcultural belonging depended on music, I'm now living out the flip side of it: I don't know what music means to people anymore, so I have less of a sense of who I am. So now my listening projects have changed: I choose an artist that I used to like and go through every album they put out in sequence, working in as many of their side projects, b-sides, and assorted extras as I can access, with the goal of making a master playlist for future reference. This is less out of a fetish for comprehensiveness than a desire to see continuity in what they are doing and to consume that continuity as a commodity, one that offers hope that there is ultimately some continuity to myself as long as I keep coming up with similar projects.
This is basically a super-simple algorithm for deciding what I should play next, while saving me from giving in to the sort of algorithms that power YouTube or Pandora. If what I want to listen to has anything to do with my identity, then surrendering to those platform algorithms would be conceding that they know me better than I do. Sometimes this is comforting (I always have an identity no matter what, because the algorithm always "works" — I'm never left in silence) or interesting (it's neat to be able to consume my identity as songs in addition to the songs themselves). But often it feels like being programmed.
My projects are hopelessly nostalgic for self-programming, with limited means: cumbersomely dealing with old music through an outdated set of technological interfaces. Who is ever going to use these iTunes playlists? Why don't I just sign up for Spotify? When I ask myself these sorts of questions, the bottomless pit of pointlessness reopens beneath me: What if "what music I like" has never really mattered all along? Rather than discourage me, though, this makes the playlist-making more urgent, a race against time. I need to get through all these albums before I admit to myself that I don't even care anymore.
Right now, for instance, I am working through the catalog of Robyn Hitchcock, who began his career as a member of the Soft Boys in the late 1970s. I first got into his music after reading a interview with him in one of the early issues of Spin, the one with Big Audio Dynamite on the cover in 1986. (It's actually pretty embarrassing for me now to scroll through the Spin magazine archive and see just how many of my interests and opinions I lifted from it when I was in high school.) It wasn't arranged as a Q&A; instead they took statements he made out of context and placed them under subheadings drawn from his song titles. I thought that meant that those were his best songs, which still influences me. I've spent a long time trying to convince myself to like "The Man Who Invented Himself."
Also in the introduction to the interview, the writer made an offhand comment about having the Soft Boys' Underwater Moonlight "glued to his turntable," which left a deep impression on me, as if I couldn't quite believe it was a metaphor. It would be years before I would actually hear that album, and while I was fruitlessly trying to track it down, I kept thinking it was because all the copies were already glued somewhere.
When the Soft Boys albums were finally reissued on CD in 1992, I pretty much stopped keeping up with Hitchcock and just listened to those. But it turns out that he has released lots and lots of albums in the decades since. Many of them are collections of outtakes — he has more outtakes albums, it seems, than proper albums, which calls into question that whole distinction.
Releasing all the outtakes give the impression that the artist has reneged on quality control and has decided to present themselves as a fount of undifferentiated genius. Maybe they need to regard their own talent as fundamentally mysterious and beyond evaluation in order to continue to be productive — a vein of ore within themselves that they can exhume but can't refine, because if they refined it, they might find it was all slag and no metal. It's up to the audience to operate the smelter.
***
In Rachel Cusk's most recent novel, Kudos, in one of the many conversations its narrator paraphrases, a newspaper interviewer describes his disappointment at finding out that most writers have no perspective on their own work. He tells the narrator, "Though I accept that an early novel by a great master might lack the depth and complexity of a later work, I don't especially want to feel that by reading an author's oeuvre I am merely watching them stumble blindly through life, only marginally less blindfolded than everyone else."
It seems to me, in my listening projects, that the very process of taking the works in chronological order imposes a kind of narrative of career progress, but that illusion depends on my more or less total ignorance of what the musicians have to say about their work. The interviewer in Kudos reports his disgust at having to deal with artists' disavowals:
When he had alluded to those writers who seemed to have no overarching plan and who claimed not even to know what was going to happen in the book they were currently writing, as though their work were the result not of careful thought or artistic competence or merely hard work, but of divine inspiration or worse, imagination, he was not describing himself. He wouldn't start a piece of writing without knowing precisely where it is going to lead any more than he would leave his house without knowing what his destination was or without his keys and wallet. Such claims were the bane of our culture, he said, because they imputed a kind of feeble-mindedness to the arts, where men and women in other fields were proud of their self-discipline and competence.
I get that, but if I waited to have a destination before I set out writing, I probably wouldn't have ever written anything. If I had that sense of certainty, there would be no point setting out. The whole point is to discover for myself something about what I actually think that is not already immediately apparent to me. But this approach reinforces the idea that the only "true" thoughts I have are the ones I trick out of myself almost by accident.
Sometimes music critics put forward a similar idea, that outtakes reveal an artist's "real self" or "true talents," as if the polished and edited material was a falsification and the remainders were spontaneous outpourings of their essential being. Inevitably, though, this further destabilizes the distinction between finished products and works in progress. Is this a "real" outtake, a genuine "demo"? The criteria cease to make sense once you have to articulate them. "Outtake" becomes like "lo-fi" — a contrived label that detaches from its original meaning and becomes a tactic to inject "authenticity" into something.
This is similar to the tendency to have real and fake Instagram accounts and so on — to have a carefully curated show account and a "real" or more "authentic" account that has the outtakes. This threatens to be endlessly recursive — there are always outtakes from the outtakes, especially given our ability to record just about all of our lives if want to. What makes something an outtake is its relative position to something defined as more polished or more contrived or more deliberate — and there is no base "real" level beyond that relationality. Crystal Abidin captures this dynamic in an essay about influencer culture:
For influencers to convince an audience that they are being authentic, it is not enough for them to merely show themselves without “artifice”: barefaced, with a bedhead, and in pajamas. Instead, they must actively juxtapose this stripped-down version of themselves against the median and normative self-presentations of glamour, to continually create and assign value to new markers — faults and flaws, failures and fiascos — to affirm the veracity of their truth-ness.
In other words, inauthenticity precedes authenticity; authenticity is an outtake from broader efforts to get noticed or perform effectively. If the outtakes are "real," what becomes of the status of the proper albums — the stuff you actually were trying to do and poured unambiguous effort into?
We live with the consequences of the decisions we make. The fantasy of outtake life comforts us with the possibility that these consequences might actually be incidental to who we are. Our true self is in what we didn't consciously choose, what we didn't memorialize at the time, what didn't seem all that significant or consequential. If we go over our memory we can identify the outtakes from the dominant narrative of our life, and treat those as the genuine story, the hidden truth, the best self that has been progressing along side the public self the whole time.
This suggests one might make social media posts and stories precisely so that some things will be overlooked, and then this left-out material can start to signify your real life. If you don't build up a strategic personal brand, how will you know who you "really" are outside of it? Robyn Hitchcock has dozens of songs about identity slipping away, or being transferred, or being trapped inside someone else. Maybe he only made proper albums so that he could release outtakes to reveal his true artistic trajectory.
Lately I've been going over my Twitter feed and deleting as many tweets as I have the patience for: creating ex post facto outtakes. But I am sure they are recorded somewhere. Once I was confident that I had some ineffable personal style that was safe because it was invisible to me; I couldn't consciously access it and thus warp it. This made me think I was free to do anything and it wouldn't have any enduring effect on my "core self." Now it feels like the "core self" is just the process of trying to escape it.
In another conversation paraphrased in Kudos, a fellow attendee at a literary event tells the narrator about a couple he knew that drove to a remote part of Southern Europe for a vacation. "They spent two weeks there, marveling at their own freedom and autonomy and the ease with which they had made this transition." But when it was time for them to leave, their GPS didn't work and they suddenly realized "that they had absolutely no idea where they were." They had to drive around on the remote dirt roads, hoping they would escape the unpopulated wilderness before running out of gas. The narrator reports the end of the story like this: "All that time, he said smiling, when they thought they were free, they were in fact lost without knowing it."