{"id":936978,"date":"2025-02-20T14:05:15","date_gmt":"2025-02-20T11:05:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=936978"},"modified":"2025-02-20T14:05:15","modified_gmt":"2025-02-20T11:05:15","slug":"what-do-we-do-when-music-doesnt-feel-real-anymore","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=936978","title":{"rendered":"What Do We Do When Music Doesn\u2019t Feel Real Anymore?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Columns<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

What Do We Do When Music Doesn\u2019t Feel Real Anymore?<\/h1>\n
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Reality Blues wades into the mysteries of our uncanny world, trying to catch a vibe. Today, allow us to reintroduce Meaghan Garvey as she resets the table for what we talk about when we talk about \u201creality blues.\u201d<\/div>\n
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By <\/span>Meaghan Garvey<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/div>\n

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Image by Chris Panicker<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/header>\n<\/div>\n
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I got into music writing the same way I got into anything in the early 2010s\u2014by accident, and because I needed attention. It was the dawning of an era that promised salvation through endless self-expression, the perfect front for young \u201ccreatives\u201d to inflict their various personality disorders upon the world. I had a Skrillex haircut, a semi-profitable online art store (funded by my much more lucrative gig as a bike courier delivering eighths of mid), and an apparently endless supply of blazing hot takes on such topics as Soulja Boy, Lil B, or a rapper called RiFF RAFF my friend put me on to\u2014he of the dilated pupils and bad-idea tattoos, who was known to rail a line and then freestyle for seven-and-a-half minutes in a studio apartment littered with Four Loko cans. I don\u2019t really recall angling to become a music journalist, or a writer at all. It was like I just kept typing into the void until eventually some sucker reimbursed me with $150 that would hit my account three months later.<\/p>\n

Back then, it was pure pleasure to spend the entire day, and sometimes all night, online\u2014falling into YouTube k-holes that would last four or five hours, then emerging with a bounty of new songs by unknown teenage rappers who are now probably several lifetimes removed from their brief tenures as Chief Keef wannabes. I don\u2019t mean to be the person who sits around complaining about how much better music was back in the good old days. (To paraphrase the cowboy in Mulholland Drive<\/em>, I believe that a man\u2019s attitude determines to a large extent the way his life will be, and that beauty, inspiration, and amusement can be found pretty much anywhere, so long as you are looking.) But I\u2019ll always have a soft spot for the music of that time, let\u2019s say from roughly 2011 to 2013: the Chicago drill extended universe, \u201cDreams & Nightmares (Intro),\u201d Gunplay, Lil Ugly Mane, Farrah Abraham\u2019s My Teenage Dream Ended<\/em>, \u201cCall Me Maybe,\u201d Glass Swords<\/em>, 2 Chainz and Juicy J\u2019s second acts, Young Thug and Future\u2019s first ones, \u201cI\u2019m God,\u201d Far Side Virtual<\/em>, I could go on and on\u2026<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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In the past year alone, I must\u2019ve had two dozen conversations with other writers and musicians who look back on this era as uniquely fulfilling\u2014some of them a few years older, some ten years younger than me. I\u2019m not quite sure whether to chalk this up to the fact that we were young and dumb and living in cheap apartments in some kind of delusional Obama-era bubble, or that we had not yet been lobotomized by our willing participation in the \u201cattention economy,\u201d or that digital streaming apps had yet to replace the fun of self-guided discovery with algorithmic slop, or that frivolous pop music could be enjoyed as such without pretending it was of grave socio-political importance. Whatever the case, I don\u2019t know too many people who would agree their life is edified by hanging out online in 2025, the way many of us would have back in 2012.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve tried to quit the music writing game a couple times since then, having come to the conclusion that there was nowhere left to write or I had nothing more to say, at least not on the subject of the hip and happening artists that so rarely hit like Detroit\u2019s Doughboyz Cashout did in 2012, or Chicago\u2019s Sicko Mobb in 2013. (Though honestly, what does?) But somehow I always find myself coming back around, although maybe not so much with the hot takes nowadays. The songs that captured my attention in the early 2010s often seemed to come from weirdos who were self-possessed enough to will their worldviews into being\u2014little triumphs of charisma over the status quo. I suppose that I was trying to invent myself the same way, too, hoping that somewhere between my Twitter account, my secret Tumblr pages, amateur DJ mixes, and a couple hundred blog posts would emerge some sort of meaningful, or recognizable, identity.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s been years since I stopped trying to see myself reflected in the internet\u2019s hall of mirrors, where life feels for the most part like a tedious performance. What interests me now is the challenge to articulate exactly how it feels to be alive in 2025, when \u201cWhat is real?\u201d feels like some sort of trick question and information floats on evanescent waves of feeling known as vibes<\/em>. These days it often seems like nobody believes in much of anything at all, or those who do believe in something find it hard to put in words. But now and then I wake up a little before sunrise and watch the sky go pink and gold over the icy lake, and that feels more significant than anything else that might have happened that day. Sometimes when I push past the doomerism, I wind up at the idea that the breakdown of consensus reality is a golden opportunity for us to reacquaint ourselves with our intuition. When it feels as if the world we knew is being redefined at will, and anything that we encounter may very well be simulated, we arrive at a new purpose\u2014to find out for ourselves what is real, and what is not.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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I have this memory of listening to Salem somewhere around 2010 and being overcome by a feeling I couldn\u2019t yet put into words. I identify it now as the feeling of being young and alive at the end of history: no culture, no future, no going forth in glory, but maybe a good party now and then. Now I\u2019m less young (though I still go to some good parties) but that end-of-history feeling is more palpable than ever\u2014the sense of living not just after the gold rush, but after reality itself. And in a way, it feels like freedom, if you believe, as I do, that you should never let a good catastrophe go to waste.<\/p>\n

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What I\u2019m listening to:<\/strong><\/p>\n

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Source URL: https:\/\/pitchfork.com\/thepitch\/what-do-we-do-when-music-doesnt-feel-real-anymore\/<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Columns What Do We Do When Music Doesn\u2019t Feel Real Anymore? Reality Blues wades into the mysteries of our uncanny world, trying to catch a vibe. Today, allow us to reintroduce Meaghan Garvey as she resets the table for what we talk about when we talk about \u201creality blues.\u201d By Meaghan Garvey February 20, 2025 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":936979,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[54],"class_list":["post-936978","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics","tag-pitchfork-com"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/936978","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=936978"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/936978\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/936979"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=936978"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=936978"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=936978"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}