Hi there,
I’m writing from a rainy morning at my desk, a refreshing reminder after high temperatures that it is still only spring. For me, spring means feeling equal parts stress and peace about my garden—last night I dreamt I was throwing rabbits one by one away from the lettuces that volunteered over winter and are just about ready to harvest—and getting ready for at least one Zine Fest.
This year, I’m working on a project that I’ve been thinking about for at least a couple of years, a zine based on a tweet that I’ve long since misplaced that said, roughly, I might seem like I’m fine, but deep down…I miss Hastings.
And if you’re a millenial/gen x-er from the Mountain West (or, I learned in my research, Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas or Kansas—hey guys!) you know what that’s about. If you’re not, in short, Hastings was a place and a state of mind. A store with books, movie rentals, music, video games, posters, and Happy Bunny t-shirts. But, as I hope some of you will help me describe, it was so much more.
If you see the above photo and feel something, I hope you’ll take a minute to respond to the survey at the bottom of this post. If you don’t, I hope you’ll enjoy this half-baked excerpt from the zine. It’s about nostalgia, algorithms, surveillance, art, and chance encounters. This portion reflects on my belated exit from Spotify earlier this year.
The best thing about my current job is that I get to read when it’s slow, and this time of year, it’s slow. I chugged through Liz Pelly’s Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist over the course of a few days, marking pages with ripped-off pieces of Post-Its.
She wrote:
“If the streaming economy has contributed to any major cultural shift in recent history, it might be that it has helped champion this dynamic of passivity…what the interface nudges is more of a reactive mode: its model listener would just simply hit play or skip. Often, conversations about the streaming era center the way music has been financially devalues, but there is a broader, harder-to-pin-down cultural devaluation that comes with streaming: the relegation of music to something passable, just filling the air to drown out the office worker’s inner thoughts as spreadsheets get finalized and emails get circled up on. To what degree does this constitute listening?”
It felt especially haunting to mark this page as I sat in my new, quasi-office job (part of the reason you haven’t heard from me here in a while), listening to the same few dozen 90’s country and alternative songs that my coworker’s various Spotify “radio” delivers, and also listening to her grumble and skip songs in frustration when the algorithm failed, serving up a track too repetitive, too morose, or from an artist it ought to know better than to include. Here I was, spending over eight hours a day half-listening to (mostly) “passable” music that I was grateful to be able to ignore during the downtime I spend reading on the clock. I realized as I read the extent to which this platform had shaped my own listening behavior left me with a dulled curiosity about music.
Sometimes, though, even among the repetition of these playlists, a song will jump out and surprise us at work. The co-worker who DJs (I use the term with the full knowledge that play/skip is not the work of a DJ) and I seem to have shared a lot in our early lives—we grew up in the same part of the same city’s suburban fringe, in a similar social class, and we’re only a few years apart in age. Today, we have much less in common on the surface, and our lived experiences have diverged to an extent where we would likely find much to disagree about, if we were to talk about serious things at work. But certain songs will make us seek each other out and ask “Remember this? Wow, I loved this band and forgot all about them! My friend had this CD in her car!” One of those moments inspired me to ask her about my current side project.
“Did you go to Hastings?” Of COURSE she went to Hastings…what else was there to do? I realized as we talked that Hastings was the only place (besides at a Joe Job decades later) where the two of us had, with 100% certainty, existed at the same time and place and shared in crucial, foundational rites of passage.
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