A funny thing happened on the way to writing Learned this week - I got lost and ended up writing about music instead. I hope you’ll stay with me for this little experiment; there’s a Spotify playlist and everything! I’ll put a longer explanation at the bottom but if you’re wondering how you got this in your inbox it’s because it is technically an issue of Learned. If this doesn’t work for you, you can adjust all your subscription settings here: Unsubscribe. But, if you’re willing to stick around, thank you, here’s Pitchmark.
The only part-time job I ever had in high school meant getting up at 5 am on Sunday mornings so I could drive to the college radio station, power up the antenna, and get my show on the air. I hated getting up that early. I loved everything else.
Aside from a few necessary station breaks and news reads, the program manager let us play anything we wanted from the extensive and eclectic record library. I spent hours during the week making playlists and doing deep dives into obscure records just so I could plan out a show that none of my friends woke up early enough to listen to. For a music-obsessed 16-year-old it looked a lot like Heaven.
These days, the algorithm - YouTube’s, TikTok’s, Spotify’s, someone’s - tends to drive a lot of new music discovery and even re-discovery. For the most part, it works and works well enough. But I miss curated playlists put together by hand and passed around on crappy cassette tapes. I miss making the tapes.
A newsletter is not the same thing as a mixtape. Not even a little. But it’s what I’ve got so, for now, it’ll have to do. With that, here are five songs fed to me by the algorithms recently that I’ve pulled out and put into a curated list for you. Enjoy.
Pitchmark: As the YouTube Algorithm Turns Playlist on Spotify
So We Won't Forget
Khruangbin has a new record coming out soon; they've put out their first video in support and it's freaking fantastic. The track is called “A Love International” and the video is a short movie featuring some pretty adorable kids. And I'm a huge sucker for this kind of video, one where the video tells a story with the song as soundtrack and dialog and the band is nowhere to be seen. Think of LCD Soundsystem's "Oh Baby" or, arguably one of the earliest examples of this, George Michael's "Freedom '90." But this isn't the first time Khruangbin has pulled off this particular trick.
"So We Won't Forget" (shown above) is a beautiful, laid back track from the band's 2020 Mordechai record but the video - the video kills me. I don't want to give anything away but the video is, well, it's a happy ending but it goes through a dark road to get there. File it under "I love it but I hate it" and put the song on repeat.
Missy
Of course, no dive through YouTube's music video channels would be complete without a side trip through live performance land and that's where I came across the Airborne Toxic Event's live performance of Missy, off their first record. Now, somehow, without my realizing it, TATE has made its way into my B-Team's list - bands I keep in rotation on my phone and my CD collection more or less all the time without ever becoming a heavy favorite. Basically bands where I have every record and more than a few favorite songs but that I almost never think to build a playlist around.
But TATE is proving to be a solid pick; their most recent record Hollywood Park has some great songs; I've been going through their back catalog, re-listening and re-evaluating, and that meant that the Algorithm decided I needed to see clips from a concert that the band did in the early 2010s. It's a good concert. I would have liked to have been there. But the highlight comes towards the end when the band turns "Missy" into a full-on barn burner complete with band member intros, dancers, a marching band, and even a children's choir. I need to get out to see live music again soon, I think.
Beautiful People (Stay High)
Speaking of my B-Team and, for that matter, videos that don't feature the artist, The Black Keys have a new album, Ohio Players, coming out soon and they've been all over social media hyping it. In most clips, the band are at a bowling alley, confronted and confounded by a pair of Gen-Z girls whose look and lingo are terrifying new territory for a pair of middle-aged rock stars. The Black Keys have always had a solid sense of humor though, and have a long history of poking fun at themselves.
Which is one reason it's so interesting that the first video from Ohio Players, “Beautiful People (Stay High)” is a funky blues rocker featuring a bunch of "real" people dancing along to the song. The video is bright and fun, put the song is damn near infectious. The groove gets stuck in your head and that's not a bad thing.
Your Love
Of course, middle-aged rock stars are not the only viral music clips out there. On Tik Tok there's been a trend of people "suddenly realizing" that the lyrics to a popular song are problematic. Now, on the one hand, this is nothing new. On the other hand, it's all the more apparent that people don't really listen to the music they're listening to, if that makes sense. Anyway, one of the songs that's getting the eyebrow-raised treatment is the Outfield's 1985 hit "Your Love" mainly for a line in the opening verse, "you know I like my girls a little bit older."
The irony is that the people raising their eyebrows on Tik Tok are misinterpreting the lyric as implying that Josie, the girlfriend in the song is under-age but that's a whole thing and I'm not going to get into it. Instead, because I got earwormed by the viral videos, I sought out the actual video on YouTube and was pleasantly surprised to find the song was as good as I remembered and, more importantly, the video had been remastered and looks better than it did on MTV back in my parent's living room.
Don't Change
Of course, on YouTube, one video is never enough, not when there's a playlist (and money) to be made, so I was served up a platter of same-era songs that had also been given the restoration treatment. And why did I sit through this? There are a lot of reasons for that, most of them having to do with a deadly combination of exhaustion and apathy, but also because the Algorithm does serve up some gems, like this forgotten 1982 hit by INXS.
INXS made it really big in the late 80s / early 90s with the albums Kick and X and by made it big I mean they were all over MTV when I got home from school in the afternoon. I made it a point to find some of their earlier records after realizing that I liked them better than the current hits. But I haven't listened to them in years, so seeing this video - which I'm not sure I had ever actually seen before - in HD on YouTube was a bit of a weird nostalgia cemented in a fantastic New Wave track.
Postscript
I’ve been wanting to write about music for a long time. I mean, if you’re a long-time reader of Learned, you’ll know how often I reference music in my usual essays. But I’ve always put it off. There was always something more important to get to or something more “on-brand” or on topic. So I didn’t write. Well. I didn’t publish it. I’ve got a (digital) drawer full of writing about music that’s been gathering dust for close to a decade now. And I decided that the status quo needed to change. Thus, Pitchmark.
As with my other experiments here on Substack, I’ve built this new newsletter as a section of Learned, meaning that your subscription shouldn’t change. In fact you should have still seen the Learned logo at the top of this email (assuming you got this in your inbox). And, really, it’s still me, still writing the thing from the ground up, it’s just the topic that’s changed.
I’m still going to get back to Learned in April and I’m going to be continuing with Also, but there will now be a third, occasional newsletter to go along with those. I hope you’ll stick around and enjoy it with me.
Joel
Watched the first video, which brought a tear to my eye. Looking forward to spending time with the other music as well. Years ago, I had friends who were my music gurus. They gave me mixtapes and invited me to concerts that I never would have attended otherwise. Got married, moved away, and I’ve been missing that ever since. Happy to have your recommendations anytime!