changes

A few days into March I decided that, for the remainder of the month, I would only listen to music created by women. We’re a week into July now and I haven’t gone back yet.

My 8 most-listened-to musical artists of the last 30 days (last.fm profile screenshot)

Why?

I had a rather unfortunate first inspiration for this project. The thought started initially as I was trying to determine if I ever could or should listen to his music again, since he had been one of the artists up next in my discography listening project and in the dim past of the 2000s was a pretty important artist to me.) But this article and especially this thought quoted in the article

gave me pause, and made me rethink and question the importance and legitimacy of my little dilemma over whether to listen to music made by a terrible person.

I obsess over my music listening history, and in the past year or two I’ve done pretty well at parity between male and female artists in my listening habits. But after thinking on these things I took a serious look at the ratios in my iTunes library and my old CD/record collections, and they were straight-up horrible. I realized my habits and unconscious default in music-listening was still very much to turn to male artists, and I was sure I was missing out on a lot by not consciously looking for more women musicians, both new and long-established artists.

A second inspiration was Patty Griffin’s new album. My wife is a huge Patty Griffin fan, and I’m a minor Patty Griffin fan. In March I saw that Griffin had a new album coming out and surprise-bought it for my wife.

After listening to it a couple of times I started looking around for reviews and they were scarce. It seemed like there was a really weird lack of attention for an album of this calibre. I couldn’t help but think that if this exact set of songs with the same arrangements and production had been put out by a man, someone like Bruce Springsteen, Beck, Robert Plant (who does background vocals on a couple of tracks here), or for ultimate argument’s sake let’s say Ryan Adams, it would be hailed as “career-defining,” “return to form,” album of the year, 5 stars from Rolling Stone, Grammy buzz, all sins forgiven, big tour, &c. But hardly anyone was talking at all about this phenomenal album, and it seemed increasingly probable to me that this might be simply because it was created by a woman rather than a man, and therefore wasn’t thought of in that same way by many critics and fans of this type of music as made by men.

I love a good music challenge, so the decision was easily made. At the time, early March, I was working my way album-by-album through the Outkast discography, which I was committed to completing and, frankly, I was enjoying way too much to even consider putting aside. (Hot take: one of the strongest six-album runs in all of recorded popular music.) Around March 10, 2019, after finally listening to Idlewild for the first time, I took a rest from listening to music made by men.

What

I started immediately with Janelle Monáe, and honestly this was partly because she showed up on several tracks on that last Outkast album and was the most Outkast-ish female artist I could think of at the time. (Not listening through Outkast’s catalog again was my only actual sacrifice for this endeavor.)

But then I started digging. I discovered Sister Rosetta Tharpe, criminally overlooked by all the ‘History of Rock and Roll’ and American roots music syllabi, books, and documentaries I have encountered in my life up until now. I’m positive she wasn’t mentioned in the lectures or textbook of my college History of Rock and Roll course in the early 2000s. She is absolutely essential, though:

I tried several of Patty Smith’s albums for the first time. Now that I’ve finally listened to her it seems like everyone else in the world already knows about Patty Smith, but even though I’ve dug into rock and punk history at various points in my life both officially and casually (most notably in the aforementioned college-level History of Rock class), I was always allowed to ignore her. I found her first two albums revelational and possibly the best, key parts of 70s New York punk, not just the token woman spouting off some random poetry over guitars that my music professor made her out to be without even bothering to play any of her music for us. (Actually, “spouting off random poetry over guitars” sounds like a perfect description for potentially peak rock and roll, now that I think about it. I’ve long been an idiot for skipping on this.) It’s now clear to me that many of my favorite musical artists, male or female, would not exist as they do without Patty Smith - she’s foundational to post-punk and so much more. For example, a random track on her fourth album sounds like the whole future discography of R.E.M. distilled and prophesied in a single song.

I intended to go through Kate Bush’s discography, but after trying her first album it didn’t really stick. (I’ll probably still go back at some point.)

I crawled through new release playlists and mostly skipped the male artists. I came across Mereba, a great find.

I couldn’t wait for Big Thief’s new album.

I became obsessed most of all with Titanic Rising by Weyes Blood; I’ve listened to it at least 10 or 20 times now, but I guess not in the last few weeks.

The newer artists I probably would have found and listened to regardless of whether I was doing this project, but even in that case it gave me permission to really focus on them and listen to them multiple times in a way I might not have otherwise, if I’d been letting my listening time be taken up with so many men.

Continued…

At the end of March, I figured I should make it a full month, so I decided to continue on to April 15. Then the middle of April came and went. If a male artist came up on a playlist or on the radio it was okay, but whenever I was making a conscious choice to listen to something it was still always going to be a female artist, or at least a band led by a woman. It just became a habit, and I liked it.

Jay Som always on repeat.

Early 70s Carole King albums always on repeat.

LEGACY! LEGACY! by Jamila Woods has been my latest obsession throughout June and is my current AOTY. This album could be and likely already is the basis for an entire curriculum, a much more worthy curriculum than the one I encountered in that History of Rock and Roll class mentioned above. Rather than write more myself I’m just going to point you to some good things that others have said about it, as well as what Woods says about it herself.

Some of these artists and albums were new to me, but many were old, long-standing comforts that I’ve just allowed myself to listen to again and again these past months. Maybe that’s why it has been so easy to just continue with my women-only listening program. We’re now a week into July, and I haven’t stopped yet. I haven’t even listened to the new Vampire Weekend, which this post tells me I could perhaps somehow justify because it actually includes occasional collaborations with some female musicians. (That article is so weird to me, by the way. In one sense I like that it brings light to a heartening trend. On the other hand, how about more articles just about female musicians themselves, rather than how awesome the veteran indie dudebros are for finally bringing a few female voices into their projects 10 to 20 years into their careers.)

What Have I Learned?

I thought I already knew better, but keeping myself focused exclusively on women artists for so long made me finally become more fully cognizant of the weird, incorrect ideas inculcated in me as a 13-year-old boy trying to learn about music and make his way in the adolescent social world: that the default, recognized source for “good music” was a group of white men with guitars, and that music made by women was not for me and listening to too much of it could actually somehow be risky to my perceived masculinity. I think I’ve finally eradicated the last remnants of these pathological thoughts from my system.

So, what now? I think having written up this post I might be able to finally close down the formal listening experiment. At the outset of the project I had envisioned epic twitter threads sharing all the awesome music and musicians I was discovering and exploring each day. That did not happen, and it’s not going to, other than I incorporated some of those thoughts and links above, in this post. Instead, going forward I’ll just have to make sharing neat and unique stuff that I enjoy a more general or daily practice on my part as I go along, not some impossible perfect plan. That’s another post and project, though.

I might finally listen to that new Vampire Weekend, the new Khalid, and a few other male artists' tracks I’ve been banking up over the past few months. But going forward my musical selections and defaults are never going to be the same again, and I’ll probably continue for quite a while to listen to more female artists than I do male artists before I reach some kind of parity. Also, I think I’ll always be immediately skeptical about any new band entirely made up of dudes, and playlists entirely made up of bands entirely made up of dudes.

My 5 most-listened-to albums of the last 90 days (last.fm profile screenshot)

Standalone post link: Some Thoughts and Highlights After Listening Exclusively to Music Made by Women for the Past Four Months


I wanted to write a full essay that thoroughly explores my thoughts about this album, Mesita’s Twitter song project, and how it all is actually impacting my views on life, art, &c., but since I already have notebooks and drives and clouds half-filled half-empty with so many other such good intentions that I never follow through on, I’m just going to post this now, and state that I think that Mesita’s You Are Beautiful is pretty much one of the most honest pieces of art I have ever encountered.

It’s simultaneously a breakdown and a breakthrough. It includes petty rants about fantasy football, music vloggers, and needing to buy a window shade at Ikea because the sunlight “feels fing bright” as the season changes. At the same time it’s filled with grief over a mom dying of cancer, personal firsthand details from the Columbine tragedy, and an underlying desire to simply be heard, connect with people, spread positivity, and pay the rent in the midst of a stalled music career. It shouldn’t necessarily work, and I’m still not entirely sure if it will work for anyone in the world I know who might read this post and then listen to the music, but it really works for me. It works all the better for the rawness, the asides, the missed notes, the improvised lyrics. I can’t stop listening to it. Some of the most random bits repeat in my head, and I guess this is because a hook is a hook, even when the lyrics are about watching Mad Max at an Alamo Drafthouse in Littleton, CO. One of my big takeaways is that singing about whatever comes into your head at the moment can end up being at least as relevant and much more revealing as whatever dramatic or antic nonsense usually constitutes a pop song. This is the pedestrian and the profound jumbled up together. It is like a rambling message from an old friend. It is like scrolling through someone’s social media feed and seeing their silly meme retweets and their most vulnerable and insightful moments, originally separated by days or weeks, all together. For better or worse, it is now my favorite album of 2019.

So with that introduction, here is You Are Beautiful, by Mesita:

and here’s the addendum bonus track:

And I might gather some random tweets about the album that I liked, both from Mesita and a couple of other random Mesita appreciators of the internet, and come back and embed them here. No promises.

• He goes on an actual rant about New York pedestrians in one song, so this is both figurative and literal.

Standalone post link: You Are Beautiful

So years ago I remember coming across a thing called Digital Writing Month from some educator-writer type people I followed on twitter, and when seeing the usual pre-November hype for NaNoWriMo (which I always like the idea of but don’t actually want to do) I suddenly remembered it and thought I might try it this year, because it kind of fits with the project of this site.

But I guess it’s not really a thing anymore.

There’s a hashtag, but it’s kind of a ghost town. There’s this nice blog post from 2015. A lot of those people are out there still doing their thing, but in other frameworks with other names. I don’t know whether or how I would fit in to any of it. So, despite having zero community with which to do this, I might still kind of try it. By “it” I basically mean “create something random on the Internet every day for a month” and share it on this site. We’ll see. My NaPoWriMo attempt in April only lasted for like 4 days.

P.S. I am pretty good at covertly doing random, pointless things. This website is a great example. Another is that I wore a Halloween costume yesterday that was so low-key that no-one recognized it as anything unusual, and I didn’t tell anyone about it. I dressed as Lionel Richie from the cover of his 1982 self-titled album.

Standalone post link: DigiWriMo?

Thanks.

You better count your blessings for real. AMEN.

Standalone post link: Thanks

I used to be meticulous about tracking even my most minute reading updates on Goodreads¹, but I’ve fallen off in the past few months, and I’m not entirely sure why.²

In the meantime while I try to figure that out, I’ve decided to post random³ updates⁴ about my reading on Twitter and also to experiment with creating a new thread/series here on this website that will serve as a running log of my reading life.

I may end up going back to active Goodreads use because I have a lot of friends there and I like to see what they are reading, and I think at least some of them like to see what I’m reading as well. But I’m still going to try this other method for 2020. I guess it is part of making this website my home location on the internet and keeping my content for myself and out of silos.

Tweets Cited

Standalone post link: My Reading in 2020

Here are some of the things I’m working on and thinking about now…

• Finishing up a two-week winter break where I truly didn’t think much about work and just spent time with my family.

• Despite the break, something I was focusing on at work and will again is the development and curation of our school district’s Sora/OverDrive collection of ebooks and audiobooks. You need to be a student or staff member to access these, but you can see some examples of what we are doing here.

• Reading whatever I want, and tracking it faithfully on Goodreads again. Maybe I will start sharing things about my reading on this site and other social media as well.

• Watching movies again. About to do a deep dive into New Korean Cinema. (I track my movie-watching on Letterboxd.)

• Pondering making a concerted re-entry into social media and updating this site for the first time in months, starting with this ‘now’ update. I feel like, if nothing else, I should be sharing more things that I like, do, read, see, eat, etc., so that I can give a little more promotion to businesses, artists, creators, authors, etc. I’ve gotten as shy online as I have always been in person, and I’m ready to push back.

This page was last updated on January 3, 2021. See my prior ‘now’ updates here.

Credit for the ‘now’ page concept goes to Derek Sivers. I had envisioned a page of this sort for my new website, but my concept was vague and I didn’t have a clear way forward until I happened upon someone with a ‘now’ page and followed the trail back to the source. I think you should make one too.

Standalone post link: Now (January 3, 2021)

Here are some of the things I’m working on and thinking about now…

• I’m reading and reviewing children’s fiction to help determine the 2021 nominees for the Beehive Book Awards. I could always use more readers, so if you are interested and especially if you know kids who would be interested, let me know and I’ll hook you up with the list and some great books to read.

• Newly obsessed with and recommitted to getting my district’s library catalog in better shape after attending a Cataloging workshop courtesy of the Utah State Library and the main cataloging librarian for the Salt Lake County Library system a couple of weeks ago. I’m even, like, regularly referencing and importing authority records and other next-level MARC record stuff like that now. Hope it is helpful.

• Writing this in the “Canyon” lobby of the Natural History Museum of Utah while my son is at his friend’s birthday party somewhere in the museum. (It might be my favorite building in Utah so I couldn’t resist mentioning it.)

• I started a variation on Bullet Journaling in October and so far it is going quite well, better than any other journaling, notebooking, or task management system I’ve attempted up to this point in my life. (I drafted these notes in said journal at said natural history museum lobby before posting them on this site.)

• It wasn’t really my idea but we got a puppy in August. Her name is Luna. She has awesome foxlike ears with multiple points of articulation that could probably make useful contributions to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence if only she could better communicate with us what she is hearing. Sometimes she’ll go on walks/hikes with me or watch horror movies with me, but mostly she just chews on whatever stuff is around, including my children.

• Continuing to work on making this website functional and useful to myself. I toyed around with doing P.O.S.S.E. with this site as my basis, but I found out I actually don’t like the reality of how it works, so I am moving towards not having this site be my source for everything but rather using it as a central curation and archival location for everything I do anywhere on the internet that I feel like is worth noting or saving.

This page was last updated on November 9, 2019. See my prior ‘now’ updates here.

Credit for the ‘now’ page concept goes to Derek Sivers. I had envisioned a page of this sort for my new website, but my concept was vague and I didn’t have a clear way forward until I happened upon someone with a ‘now’ page and followed the trail back to the source. I think you should make one too.

Standalone post link: Now (November 9, 2019)

Some of the things I’m working on and thinking about these days…

• I’m still tinkering with this website, but I’m going to start sharing things from it on social media networks, and basically publicly acknowledge its existence.

• Taking some actual time off work to take my kids on adventures big and small, and to give my wife a break since the kids are home all day every day right now.

  • Big adventure example: camping by the Colorado River outside Moab and Arches National Park.
  • Small adventure example: riding bikes yesterday at a nature park by our neighborhood. Well, they rode bikes and I mostly sat at a bench and wrote in a notebook.

• I’m in serious summer project mode at work, when I’m at work. Right now I’m about to set up a new theme and revamp a lot of things at granitemedia.org so that the site can be more secure and functional, and hopefully a bit easier to read and navigate. Beyond that, I am generally attempting to learn, fix, and improve a lot of things I often can’t make the time for during the school year.

• I’m chairing the Children’s Fiction Committee for the Beehive Book Awards again next year. Right now we are in summer reading mode, just finding potential nominations for the 2021 long list which we will meet to determine in the fall.

• Just finished up a month four months of listening exclusively to music made by women. Best listening project I’ve ever done, though I didn’t know quite how to end it.

• Currently on a deep dive into the films and art of Apichatpong Weerasethakul. Taking a little break from my Film School Drop Outs 2018 Challenge.

This page was last updated on July 7, 2019. See my prior ‘now’ updates here.

Credit for the ‘now’ page concept goes to Derek Sivers. I had envisioned a page of this sort for my new website, but my concept was vague and I didn’t have a clear way forward until I happened upon someone with a ‘now’ page and followed the trail back to the source. I think you should make one too.

Standalone post link: Now (July 7, 2019)

Some of the things I’m working on and thinking about these days…

• I’ll be attending the Utah Coalition for Educational Technology and the Utah Educational Library Media Association conferences next week.

• I’m chairing the Children’s Fiction Committee for the Beehive Book Awards. We’ll be announcing the nominees for the 2020 awards in sessions at said UELMA conference next week. I probably really should be crafting 45 second booktalks right now.

• I’m building out this website, with the aim of it becoming a central home for all my personal content and activity on the world wide web. I’m building it mostly from scratch to force myself into learning more about web design and coding.

• I’m trying out this Coaching Digital Learning MOOC from the Friday Institute.

• I’m gearing up to transfer content, create tutorials, and curate new digital resources as our district phases out an old digital video platform at the end of this year.

• I’m just finishing up an exhaustive listen through the discography of Sonic Youth. Up next (actually already started) are Outkast and Parliament-Funkadelic.

• Though we are now deep into 2019, I continue to plug away at the 2018 Film School Drop Outs Challenge on Letterboxd.

This page was last updated on February 26, 2019.

Props for the ‘now’ page concept go to Derek Sivers. I had envisioned a page of this sort for my new website, but my concept was vague and I didn’t have a clear way forward until I happened upon someone with a ‘now’ page and followed the trail back to the source. I think you should make one too.

Standalone post link: Now (February 26, 2019)