The Spring 2021 issue of The Hedgehog Review contains “‘Peace’ and the Organization Kid,” my longish personal essay on my generation’s effect on the way we listen to music. The full article is only available to subscribers, but you can read a little bit of it online before you hit the paywall. [3/26 update: it's unpaywalled now!] As I try to suggest in the piece, the changes that have taken place in our music-listening habits reflect the larger changes that have taken place in the way we understand ourselves. Or, as the issue title puts it, in the form of a question, “Who do we think we are”? I look forward to reading the entire issue.
I was born in 1983, so I’m right around the same age as Marc Zuckerberg, Sean Parker, and the rest of the Organization Kids, the ambitious data crunchers whom David Brooks profiled in his Atlantic essay in 2001. To be honest, I never really spent much time thinking about myself as part of any generation, but looking back on it, I see elements of the Organization-Kid mindset in myself—restlessness, an inclination to think categorically, the tendency to see free time as opportunity wasted. No doubt this is why I am fairly critical of it. More on this in a bit.
The essay was a long time in germinating. The idea first came to me five or six years ago, and it gripped me with an intensity that few others ideas have. I knew I had to write about it, for my own sake. I worked on it on and off, and in the Spring of 2017 I finished a draft and sent it out to various journals and magazines, most way out of my league. At that point I hadn’t published much, and the rejections started coming in by the dozens. I held onto it for a few years, revising it from time to time, and decided to send it out again last year. I’m grateful for the editors at the Hedgehog Review for taking a chance on it, and for making it a much better piece than it was. Barbara McClay was especially helpful in cutting the fat from some of the sections, and sharpening the edges of the piece. I have very little experience in writing personal essays of this kind, and only after her edits did I realize how badly the tree needed to be pruned. It’s hard to see those dead branches and broken limbs when you are up close to them, writing about your own experience.
Our music-listening experience has changed rapidly in recent years, including in the 6 years or so that have passed since I first started writing this essay. In 2015 I didn’t have a smartphone, and though things like CD players in cars were already going extinct, the notion of an entirely streaming music library still seemed like a new thing, tantalizing but also vertigo-inducing for folks with hard-copy music collections. Fast-forward to 2021, and things have grown more entrenched. Tangible audio has made a comeback, though vinyl, cassettes, and CDs are never going to come close to the market shares they once had. Even those who appreciate a hi-fi vinyl set-up still stream most of their music. Spotify is king.
Because of the lag between when I started the essay and when it was published, the piece seems like it traffics in a nostalgia that I didn’t factor when I first wrote it. Perhaps way back in 2015 a little bit of nostalgia was there, tapping me on the shoulder, but I certainly wasn’t thinking in those terms. What I meant to say is that I don’t think this is a piece I would have sat down and started writing in 2021 (though I’m glad to have it published in 2021!). And perhaps that’s not a bad thing—to access a particular story, to notice a constellation and have the wherewithal to flesh it out into a recognizable shape, you need to be in a certain place at a certain time. And being an Organization Kid witnessing the rise of technocracy in the late Obama years was that setting for me.
To update one part of the piece: at one point I mention some jazz records I inherited, and how playing them (on an old turntable cabinet I bought cheap from an estate sale), helped me make music physical again. I am sure some vinyl aficionados cringe when I describe dusting off the records with my shirt sleeve before dropping them onto the platter. Fear not—in the intervening years I have become something of a vinyl addict myself. My collection has slowly expanded, and now includes a good deal of classical records as well as some rock and jazz. And I no longer rely on my sleeve to clean the records—I am methodically going through each one, cleaning it properly with a little solution (a drop of dish soap, rubbing alcohol, and distilled water) before entering it into an Excel spreadsheet, checking online to see if it’s worth anything, and returning it to the rotation. It’s all quite Organization-Kid of me, actually. And I suppose it’s only fitting. In any case, I can live with that.
Hope you enjoy reading! In between what I have on the back burner, germinating, and already submitted, I hope to have several pieces published in the near future. Stay tuned!
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