According to last year’s Spotify Wrapped, I listened to 114,010 minutes of music. That’s 1,900 hours or an average of 5 hours a day. If I’m not talking to someone, chances are that I have headphones in and am listening to music. It’s been like this since I was a kid. It used to be an MP3 player, then an MP4 Walkman, the iPod Nano, and then a smartphone. I constantly had to buy new headphones, because I would always fall asleep listening to music, and the cable would break when I inevitably rolled over onto it.
You would think that all these years of music listening mean that I have a lot to talk about when the question of “what do you listen to” comes up, but it couldn’t be further from the truth. I always freeze up and say something along the lines of “mostly rap, the popular stuff like Drake and Future”. This answer is so generic that it usually ends the conversation. Why is that my answer? Part of it is the way I consume music. I dump songs I like into playlists and listen to a handful of the latest tracks. I probably couldn’t name the album that most of my favourite songs came from. A good chunk of songs I don’t even know the full title of. My brain just does some short-circuit thing where it matches the length of the title plus the cover art colour to get me what I want to hear. It’s pretty common for me to have to Google the lyrics that popped into my head because I have no idea what the song is called. This makes it difficult to talk about music from a purely practical aspect, but it’s not the main problem.
I have always been guarded about telling people what I listen to. The thought of listening to music through speakers and having people potentially hear what I’m listening to still terrifies me. If I’m in a good mood, I am mostly listening to rap music. The past couple of weeks, it’s been Cocaine Nose, Drug Dealers Anonymous, and P.O.V. But saying that makes me feel like Michael Bolton from Office Space. And if I’m not in a good mood, it’s even worse. I feel like I’m going to be thrown in a psych ward if I tell people that I’ve been listening to Miss Misery, I Bet on Losing Dogs, and All I Need. To a large extent, the songs I’m listening to are a reflection of how I’m feeling. Sometimes I’ll tell myself that it’s enough moping around and I need to turn the sad songs off, but it’s no use. Everything else sounds terrible in the moment. The reverse is also true; if things are going well, then Radiohead suddenly sounds terrible. Perhaps I’m overthinking it, but when someone asks “what are you listening to?”, I assume they’re expecting something like “the new Chainsmokers album”, but then here I am wanting to say “this song by a mentally ill alcoholic who killed himself has been speaking to me lately”.
My current answer sucks, and I need to change it. The options I’ve come up with are “I don’t listen to music” or “you asked, so here it is”. The former is just lame and goes against my efforts to “be myself,” so I will go with the latter. To help with the practical issue of me not remembering song names, I will build a little web UI to keep track of my top played songs at kostin.life/music. Next time someone asks, I will be pulling out my phone and saying whatever the truth is.