One of the surprising things about the digital age is that so much experience is mediated by text. In the mid-1990s, there was a new platform called VRML, which stood for "virtual reality modeling language." At the time, when HTML was new, VRML was being posited as a possible image-based future for the online world. VRML was designed to create immersive three-dimensional web experiences, where you moved through "rooms" instead of static web pages; maybe our entire lives would move online and we'd exist in our electronic cocoons with hardware strapped to our bodies. But while the internet has enveloped our lives in ways that are arguably even more profound than those imagined in 1995, it hasn't needed virtual reality to make it happen. Instead of tricking our senses into thinking that we exist in a virtual space, we've simply outsourced activities that our minds used to handle. Our consciousness and memory are moving into the ether, so the need for our senses is diminished. And the interface for this transformation turned out to be text.

And now we use text to think about and talk about music. Go back 20 years to 1992 and picture a world where the only people writing about music were those who had some kind of relationship with a newspaper, magazine, or zine. Back then, the total amount of space for written thought on music was quite small, which worked out fine because the number of people who even considered writing about music instead of just listening to it was also very small. It just wasn't something that occurred to most people; some were still writing letters, but beyond that, sharing thoughts and ideas about culture through writing was strictly for pros or enthused and motivated hobbyists.

The number of words written about music in a single day last week may well dwarf the total number written before the internet.

That's changed. Between Twitter, Facebook, email, message boards, SMS, instant messaging, blogging, and comment sections, the space for sharing thoughts via the written word has become infinite. Knowing how to get ideas across while in front of a keyboard is increasingly becoming an essential skill for survival, and being able to communicate effectively through writing is arguably more important than it's ever been. For some, the written word is replacing the human voice as the primary mode of communication. The number of words written about music in a single day last week may well dwarf the total number written before the internet. Even so, there's still a sharp divide between those who just want to hear music and those who want to write about it. There's music that sounds good when it's playing, and then there's music that sounds good and also comes with a raft of context.

Sometimes that context is so broad and far-reaching it can be more interesting than the music itself. In the online circles in which I travel, there have been three big waves of music writing this year-- one about Grimes, one about Fiona Apple, and one about Nicki Minaj. With Minaj's new album, Pink Friday: Roman Reloaded, it felt like everyone had to have an opinion, and my favorite music writers were all elbowing each other to get to the front of the line with their review or thinkpiece. And while I'm impressed by a handful of songs from Roman Reloaded and will return to at least two ("Beez in the Trap" and "Come on a Cone") regularly, if I'm honest, I've enjoyed reading about the record much more than listening to it. Minaj is an artist who feels very now, mixing ideas about pop vs. underground, technical skill vs. pop image, not to mention sexuality, femininity, and the changing landscape of the hip-hop and wider pop worlds. And since I write about music for a living, it makes sense that I would be drawn to records like Roman Reloaded, which ultimately become meeting spaces for communal experiences and the exchange of ideas.

If I'm honest, I've enjoyed reading about Nicki Minaj's

Roman Reloaded much more than listening to it.

While I've enjoyed reading articles written by people who "miss the monoculture," I don't really miss it or even remember it very well. I've always felt a bit off in my own world, which sometimes is a point of pride and other times feels like a kind of social failure. These days, for me, the greatest tension when writing about music is trying to bridge the gap between music as a private or a public experience. So part of me envied those who could join the conversation about Nicki Minaj and connect her music to the broader culture, because so much of the music I love and have interesting ideas about means almost nothing to the world as a whole.

*



There are times when the context surrounding an attraction to a specific piece of music is so personal and private that it becomes almost impossible to share. A couple of months ago, I reviewed Unemployed, an album by Alog, the Norwegian experimental music project. Alog has been important to me, and I'd even go so far as to say that they've had a significant impact on how I think about and conceptualize sound. They make a playful and perennially strange kind of musical dada-- unusual structures that mix voice, acoustic instruments, and electronics in nonsensical and unpredictable ways. And I love listening to them and thinking about them and writing about them, trying to see if any of the ideas that bubble up when I put them on will make sense to anyone else.

Turns out the answer is pretty much no. I can safely say that very few people in the world hear Alog like I do, and as I sit here now, I more or less feel like they are a band that exists only for me. Almost every conversation I've ever had about them has been a monologue rather than an exchange, because the person on the other end has never heard of them. Or, if he or she has heard them, the music made little impression. I thought maybe Alog would turn into another Fennesz or Oneohtrix Point Never-- abstract music that people who don't really like abstract music will make time for-- but it never happened and probably never will. And in the larger scheme of things, Alog don't matter. At all. Unlike Nicki Minaj, if their music didn't exist, the world would be virtually no different. So when writing about Alog, I have no choice but to write about how this music might work for a single person (me), and how these abstract sounds might enrich a single life (mine). That's where the meaning is found.

I've been spending time with World, You Need a Change of Mind, an album by the UK singer-songwriter Adam Bainbridge, who performs as Kindness. The album is all over the place. Some songs are firmly entrenched in the reverb-heavy, hazy-pop-gem sphere, others incorporate production elements borrowed from dance music stretching across several different eras. "That's Alright" even goes so far as to resurrect the bombastic gated-snare of late-80s dance pop, bringing to mind the signature sound of Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis. Bainbridge is clearly skilled at bringing all of these familiar sounds to life, whatever you think of his songwriting. And since it all goes down so easy, Kindness strikes me as music that is meant to be "shared" and not really listened to or thought about. Discussion of what the music is, how it works, and what it might mean to someone listening to it is far less important than the act of passing it along to others.

Highly personal responses to music are irrelevant when sharing--

as opposed to listening to or thinking about-- is the primary goal.

For music like this, context, whether broad or narrow, takes a backseat. And to allow for such smooth passage through the social media sphere, the music needs lubrication. There needs to be something inside of it that is clearly recognizable, so the music itself becomes a kind of language based on common aesthetics and collective understanding. So when two people have the exact same ideas about song or artist, "sharing" can happen without friction. Pausing to consider what something means and how it works and figuring out your own responses are all impediments to this process. Ideally, sharing can happen without explanation. You learn to recognize your own tastes in the tastes of others, so you start to develop an idea of what you might like (or what you might like other people to think you like) purely by virtue of who you see listening to it. Idiosyncratic and highly personal responses to music are irrelevant when sharing is the primary goal (which is not to say that these things aren't present; they're just not an essential part of this process).

Here is some copy from the web page for This Is My Jam, a new service built on the idea of sharing music through social media:

Choose one song. That song that's been stuck on repeat, that one you love. Personalize it to make it yours, then share it with the world. [...] Follow people if you like their music; and only if you like their music. Then play all their jams with one click. Listen to an evolving radio station of the best music, handpicked every day by your friends.

I am absolutely saturated with new music every day, and finding new things I like is not just easy, it's inevitable. So when I ask someone, "What have you been listening to?" I'm trying to learn something about them. The one-line "This is my jam" approach is useless to me, because your relationship to the song in question-- beyond the fact that you like it and want to share it-- is completely unknown. The fact that someone would find music interesting purely by virtue of the fact that I am listening to it is foreign to me. What I listen to does not seem notable; why I listen to it might be. I need context.

A couple of months ago I went to an event where dance and performance art works-in-progress were shown. Afterward, a discussion was held to give the artists feedback. There was an interesting movement piece for four dancers set to the music of Scott Walker. It used three or four different Walker pieces from across his career, some conventional, some more experimental (one of these was "The Electrician" from the Walker Brothers album Nite Flights).

During the discussion, I shared with the choreographer, a woman I had not known before this evening, my thoughts on the piece and the music. I tried to explain my relationship to the music of Scott Walker, how his work strikes me as both deeply emotional and expressionist but also theatrical to the point of abstraction, which, in my opinion, was a combination that served her piece very well. I also find Walker's music to be vaguely menacing, sometimes even scary-- there is a strangeness at its core that somehow suggests danger.

My wife Julie, who was there with me that night, also likes Scott Walker but has a very different take on him. To her, the theatrically goes so far over the top that it takes on a dark humor, and she read this dance piece as funny, like the music was offering a slightly ironic commentary on the absurdity of performance itself. Neither of us was wrong, and we learned some things about each other that night.