Search Engine - How do I find new music now that I’m old and irrelevant?

Episode Date: July 14, 2023

We enlist a very overqualified person to answer this question, writer Kelefa Sanneh, author of Major Labels: A History of Popular Music in Seven Genres. Kelefa listens to more music than practically anyone on earth, and this week he breaks down how even a normal person can find new stuff when they feel like their ears have rusted. Check out the Search Engine newsletter for playlist recommendations from Kelefa, Search Engine's Noah John, and PJ Vogt. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, this is Search Engine. I'm PJ Vote. Each week, I try to answer a question I have about the world. No question too big, no question too small. This week, how do I find new music when I'm old and irrelevant? We'll get into it after these ads. This episode of Search Engine is brought to you in part by Serval AI. If you ever worked with an IT team, you know how quickly their day gets eaten up by repetitive tickets, password resets, access requests, onboarding. It all adds up. And as your company grows, those requests just keep. keep piling higher, pulling your team away from the work that actually moves the business forward. That's where Serval comes in. Serval can cut up to 80% of your help desk tickets, and it's not just another tool layering on AI as an afterthought.

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Get your team out of the help desk and back to the work they enjoy. Book your free pilot at serval.com slash search. That's S-E-R-V-A-L-com slash search. I always feel like a stoned college freshman when I try to bring this up, but would be okay for just a moment to admit that the idea of music doesn't really make any sense? Like at some point, humans figured out

that if you arrange strings a certain way, or if you blow through hollow wood correctly, sounds are made. I'm fine with that part. The sounds feel good to hear. I get that. But the fact that the sounds make us feel emotions, I have fundamentally never really gotten over.

Like, it's bizarre that there are melodies or snatches of lyrics that I heard as a kid that convinced me I was already a wistful old man. And it is more bizarre that there are sad songs that I've listened to so many times that they've accumulated all the sadnesses I felt. And then even more weirdly, I enjoy that feeling.

Like, I go back to that sadness, even on days when I feel great. So there's that level of weirdness, but there's a further one. At some point, we decided to have opinions about the notes that make us feel things. Like opinions like, your favorite song is cheesy, my favorite song is good.

That's a crazy thing to think, that one arrangement of the same five notes in a different order than another is superior? I know, I know, Stone College freshman. I guess I always felt envious of music. The work I try to do tries to figure out what's going on and how to feel about it. Then these stories we make

try to take the feelings I have when I'm working on them and give them to other people through sound. And sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn't, but it never works as immediately or as powerfully as a good song does. Anyway, maybe that's a long way of saying, I like music, and I like thinking about music. And lately, I've had a question about music that's not very intellectual or bonghitty.

That's just about something that's been bothering me. This thing happens to me. I don't think it's uncommon. But every once in a while, I'll get into a rut with music discovery. I'll just stop finding new songs. And when I do, I go back to the music of my youth, the stuff I liked when I was like 14, mostly like emo-y pop punk and some hip-hop. I'll just hang out there in old songs and old feelings until something new bumps.

to me, and then I'll listen to that for a while. But lately, I feel like the getting stuck in the old stuff happens more often, and it lasts longer. And a few months ago, I had that feeling of looking around and wondering, how long have I been stuck here exactly? Like, when was the last time I found something new to love? And I realized, too, that somehow this was a problem I no longer really knew how to solve. Or more accurately, every solution felt a little embarrassing.

Shazam more aggressively? Ask my grown-up friends to make me playlists. And then I realized, oh, wait, I have a job. And that job is to answer questions. So this week, I've invited Caliphasanae, the search engine. For 19 years, he's been professionally finding new music and getting audiences excited about that music. These days, he's a staff writer at the New Yorker, as well as the author of Major Labels, a very fascinating book that basically speed runs through the entire modern history of pop music. Calva is also a person who happens to possess what I would say is the least predictable mind I've ever encountered.

So I invited him here to answer this question. How am I supposed to find new music now that I'm old and irrelevant? Okay, welcome to Sir Chandon. I'm an expert in being old and irrelevant, so thank you for having me. So I had like a rough sketch of how I wanted this conversation to go. Basically, I want to understand how you listen to music, how you decide what you like, what you don't like. Then I want to ask you some soul-searching questions about my own hopes and fears.

And then I just want to get to my headline question, which is just literally, how do I find new music? Yeah. So you write about music for a living, which if someone loves music and most people do, that seems like a fantasy job, sort of like working at the chocolate factory. We went to a concert recently, and it sort of like punctured that fantasy for me. It was a bad called a void. they were sort of a hot topic new metal sounding band.

I did not realize this is music that is having a revival, but apparently it is. Robot voice. You want to describe a point? Really, a band, I love this album they put out called Cult Mentality. When we saw them, they were part of a four-band build. All the bands were various types of emo, screamo. I think at least one of the bands was Christian. And so this was not a convention of taste makers.

And I always like being at a place that's outside of the world of taste makers and outside of what's supposed to be hip. Part of what was interesting to me going with you is like, it's not, I don't know, it's not like I thought like music critics jumped in a mosh pit a lot. But like you were kind of, like, my image from the show is you were like a head taller than everybody and you were just sort of spock-like absorbing the scene. Like you seem to be participating in a different way than if you were just going as like a music fan. Well, yeah, I mean, this is one of the,

one of the first weird things I realized when I started going to concerts for a living in 2002, when I got hired by the New York Times, it was like, often I was there by myself. Like, in theory, when you tell your friends, you've got this amazing gig of the New York Times as a music critic, they're like, great, we can go to free concerts whenever. And then after about a month or two, you run out of friends, right? And it's like a Tuesday night, and you're at some venue someplace, seeing some band that none of your friends particularly like, and they're like, maybe I'll stay home. And so you find yourself at concerts alone a lot, which is kind of strange already, right?

Most people who go to shows are there with friends. It's kind of a social thing. If they're not there with friends, it's because they're a super fan and they're super focused on what's going on. And so I kind of got used to being a person by myself at a concert, thinking about the music, but not hanging out with my friends, not necessarily getting drunk. And, you know, it feels like, oh, I get to experience music live. Like, that's exciting for me. That's fun.

That's interesting. This band, Caliph had taken me to see, he'd never seen before. When he'd invited me, I'd done what has become the modern ritual of checking out a band, listened to their top five on Spotify. And I didn't know what I thought of them, if I liked them or not. But now, we were at the show, and I was trying to make up my mind. Were they good? Were they corny? Did I want to be taken in by this?

I was also watching Kay watch the band, wondering what was happening in his brain. One of the first things I noticed seeing this band live was they don't have a bass player. Right. You pointed that out. I would not have noticed that, which seems like a big thing to not notice, honestly. They had two guitarists. They had two guitarists and a singer and a drummer, no bass player. I think you did some quick research on Twitter and found out that the bassist had quit, maybe? They talked about sort of trying to replace the bass player and clearly just, like, given up on that. Yeah, and they were playing to attract. Lots of musicians do. So it made me think about how the basic structure of a rock band like hasn't changed in 50 years, right? You still expect to see a drummer and a bass player and a guitarist and a singer if you're seeing a rock band.

And so watching this group, I was like, oh, there is a reason why most bands have a bassist. So this is already interesting to me. The whole time I'm at a show, I now realize I'm just wondering, do I like this or do I not like this? Kay, on the other end, is having a totally different experience. He's singing about genre. How genre in music is a set of rules, really, and how this rock band, with their lack of a bassist, is breaking one of those rules. and what that means. I don't know how many concerts you have to go to before Do I Like This,

with all of its underlying unspoken anxieties, becomes a boring question. But I'm a bit envious that Kay has somehow reached new metal nirvana. To be fair, though, he's been to a lot of concerts. He told me about how he first started going as a kid. I was living in suburban Connecticut. My first punk rock concert, I got my mom to take me to see the Ramones. Oh, wow.

It was, I think it was an 18-plus concert maybe. And so that was the only way they'd let me in was with my mom. So she came? She came, and she hung out by the bar while I was there in the pit, like watching the Ramones play, getting my mind blown. And then, you know, maybe half a year later, I went to see Fugazi at a club called The Channel in South Boston. Fugazi, kind of a post-hardcore band.

And that was exciting in a whole different way. There was skinheads there. I'd never seen skinheads in person. Were they, like, Nazi skinheads? or just like... In my mind, that's what I'm wondering. I'm like, oh, is this, are they scary? Are they dangerous?

Are they violent? Is this bad? That was part of the excitement. I didn't talk to them to ask them. Knowing what I know now about the Boston scene at the time and who else was playing, I'm guessing they did not have a strong neo-Nazi ideology. But, you know, that was, that did give me a sense

that I was kind of submerged in some other world. And to me, that's the best thing about music, is that you can get submerged in some different, world, whether that's by going to a concert or just by listening to a song and imagining the world that the music comes out of. It's funny, when I was a kid, so I was growing up in sort of in Philadelphia, and I would go to shows in the city. And I've never been more physically scared than going to Philly punk shows.

Because it was like college kids from UPenn and Drexel and Temple, but then, like, violent, hardcore working class kids from Kensington. and there'd be a lot of fights. And a lot of fights would start on an internet message board and, like, somebody would say something cheeky. And then, like, the first hardcore show I went to, this very vivid memory of this guy was standing in front of me and he'd said something somebody didn't like on, like,

makeout club or something. And this kid walked up and just punched him in the face and said, you just got knocked the fuck out.com. And the guy went down, like, bleeding. And this guy took his bloody shirt off, and put it on like a trophy. And I was so scared, but also so addicted to the feeling of how scary that was. And like wanting to understand like, I think like music and drugs, what they share in common is they put very different people in the same place sometimes.

Like it's like one of the, their places where people cross over it, sometimes really badly. But I remember like that feeling of just like, what have I gotten myself into? I think I liked as much as I liked the music or more. Yeah, and it's also, it says something about the limits of representation, right? People talk about seeing themselves and their values represented in the culture that they love. And that's one thing that music can do, but another thing that music can do is provide a more alienating experience, right? You're gravitated towards something because it doesn't represent you, because it feels different, it feels wrong, it feels strange, and you're like, what's going on here? It's voyeuristic.

It feels sometimes like you're trespassing. And that's another form of pleasure of excitement that you can get from music. It's funny you say that because the Philly scene was obsessed with identifying trespassers. Like my favorite band was this punk band called Kid Dynamite. And the singer had this line about how something, something, something in my city. And I remember people got really mad because they were like, you moved here recently. Like he was like a poser for referring to the place where he lived as his city. And I just remember being like, I'm voluntarily choosing to go to a place where they hunt and eat suburban kids.

Yeah. And all I want to do is quietly be in that place. Like, I wanted that more than anything. Well, and that form of gatekeeping helps create and nurture intimacy, right? Usually any space that has that sense of intimacy is a space where some people are kept out, right? There is this dynamic between exclusion and inclusion. And so part of what is defined often, especially punk in America, is that it's been these tribal scenes that feel really, really intimate and really special. And part of what keeps them feeling that way is this sense that, like, not.

Not everyone is welcome. So were you addicted to the feeling of not being welcome? I think I was, yeah, I mean, I didn't. My relationship with punk as a teenager was, at first, it was very parisocial. Me and my best friend Matt in suburban Connecticut, you know, we were like nice boys who went to prep school. We didn't know a lot of punks. We weren't in a punk scene. So we were, you know, reading fanzines and hearing records and imagining what this world was,

But, yeah, I think part of the appeal of this world was it's not just filled with kids like us. Like, it's filled with maniacs. It's like, you know, you're hearing all sorts of stuff, and you're reading maximum rock and roll, and you're hearing stories about what's happening at CBGBs. And, like, there is this whole other world, and it doesn't feel like our day-to-day world. We're going to take a quick break. Afterwards, what is Kelifasane, a person unafraid of most things, afraid to talk about on this podcast? Find out after a word from the sponsors who make this show possible.

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I personally probably am too old to pass into a goth moment without at least a lot of unwanted commentary from my friends. It's funny, as much as I care about music, I think there's something in my mind that insists that caring now is probably silly. Like in my heart, I think I believe that music belongs to teenagers. Because when you're a teenager, your feelings are bigger than your body. Life is embarrassing. And music is really the only thing that speaks to that condition. As an adult, it feels strange to still be chasing that moment. Maybe even inappropriate.

Galva doesn't think it's inappropriate, but he is sort of skeptical of the idea that any adult actually needs to move past the music they liked as a teenager. And that's why when you talk about like how to find new music, my first reaction is, why on earth would you want to do that? Well, why do you say that? Well, not that it's a bad idea, but, you know, various studies have shown

that people's peak of new music exploration came around the age of 24, and that by the age of 33 or so, people basically stopped discovering new music regularly, and for the rest of their life ended up listening to, you know, the stuff they'd listened to in high school in college. And I think there's some truth to that. I think for many people, the music they

listened to in high school, even if at the time they thought maybe it was going to end up being a little silly, probably still has a special place in your heart. And the music you listen to in your early 20s probably still moves you on some level. Maybe not every single album, but your favorite albums, or certain of those albums, probably still sound and feel really emotionally vivid. Is that the case for you? Oh, yeah, absolutely. I mean, my musical consumption is a little bit unusual because ever since the 90s, I've spent like a good portion of my waking hours, like trying to find new music in a way that can be a little deflating, right, if I'm talking to someone and they're like, oh, how'd you get into this thing?

Often there's not a cute story. Often it's like, well, I went through the entire billboard chart one week and listened to every single band on it. But no, there's the stuff I listened to in high school or in college, absolutely. It's still, it's etched into me. Well, this is, I mean, I feel like one of the other things I think about is that, you know, like, when I'm, like, in the car with my dad, thinking about his relationships and music of his youth and the relationship to my youth, there was, like, a pipeline for him for music. And it was, like, songs are played on the radio. You go to the record store and you buy the songs that you heard on the radio. And that's basically it.

Maybe the guy at the record store tells you about some other songs. And one of the things that's been interesting for my generation and the generations after is that every, like, five or ten, 10 years, it's not just that the music changes, it's like the discovery mechanism changes. Like, I will now feel weird because I'll find music on TikTok. And there's a part of my brain that says, don't do that. Like, the same way that I'll have skepticism about really enjoying a pop song or I'm like, should I be enjoying the pop song? I'm like, is this a legitimate avenue for finding music?

What? PJ, you got to stop second guessing yourself, man. What are you doing? This is insane. It's insane. It's a horrible brain to voluntarily live in. But I just mean, those questions don't, I'm not even sure how you would go about answering those questions. What would it even mean for a certain platform

to be the wrong way to discover something? I don't know. Like, would that mean that it's leading you toward music that you enjoy for a short time but don't end up loving for a longer time? I think that is kind of what I found from TikTok stuff. Because it favors, like, a 15-second hook, there are a lot of, like, literally bubblegums on.

where everything they have good, they sort of push to the front, and they don't necessarily last for very long. There's also just something that I find embarrassing about, I don't know, like, where you get your music from I feel slightly self-conscious about. But it's funny, there's a technical issue here, right? Which is the idea of musical pleasure

being front-loaded in a song so that all the exciting stuff happens up front. I think about dance hall reggae. A lot of those dancehall reggae tracks traditionally, like maybe they're in a dance hall hall with a chorus and then a verse. And then, you know, if you're in a dance hall with a selector and they're juggling, they're playing a bunch of dance hall records, they're only giving you like 40 seconds of each one, and then they're moving on to the next one. So there is a long tradition in popular music of front-loading. And the idea is that the idea that like the fun stuff, the good stuff,

happens up front. And so it's interesting to me that TikTok would be like the latest iteration of that. And you've seen certain tracks where there's just a fun little hook or a fun little sound in the first 10 seconds. And that's the thing that goes viral. Yeah, it feels like they spend all their ammunition. And then, which I guess is, it's like, I feel like I'm describing this stuff as if I'm more of like a fire and brimstone music fundamentalist than I actually am. I think it's just, it's strange. It's like the more I started to think about, like to go back to a question you asked before, like, the more I was stuck on, why am I not finding new music, the more I was like, why does that matter to me? Is it bad? Or should I feel like I'm cheating myself if at 37 I'm just like choosing to go on the same, like, feelings ride that I was going on at 15, like over and over again? Like, is there something in the human experience

I should be wanting that I'm not having? Well, I mean, you can never have the entire human experience, right? I mean, a different question you might be asking yourself is, like, why am I not listening to Beethoven? Like, why am I listening to popular music in the first place? And the reason I say that is because there's something interesting about the relationship between popular music and prestige, where traditionally popular music has been less prestigious than classical music or maybe even than jazz these days. It's been considered a little more disposable. And there's always two reactions to that, right?

One reaction is to say, like, no, this stuff is not disposable. Kendrick Lamar won the Pulitzer Prize, God damn it. This is great world historical art that will stand the test of time, right? That's one possible reaction. Yeah. The other possible reaction is to say, fuck the test of time. Like, who cares? Like, who cares about posterity?

If you're thinking about posterity, you're playing the wrong game anyways. We should be thinking about pleasure, like what makes us excited. Who says that a 40-year-old's point of view on music is more valid? than a 13-year-olds. Who says that in 20 years we'll have a more accurate perception of what was happening in 2023 than we have right now?

I sometimes think about like one-hit wonders where the fan base doesn't seem to last for that song and it kind of fades away. I sometimes wonder if we could think about a one-hit wonder like a dying language. Like at some point in history, the last person who really enjoys

rude by magic is going to die. And we'll no longer have any link, we'll no longer have any connection to what it was like to really love that song by that Canadian reggae band. And that maybe that makes it that much more precious, that that little bit of pleasure that spread wide but not deep among a whole bunch of people, like maybe that's going to just go away and we can celebrate it while it's here. Or maybe, as often happens, it turns out we're just not that good at predicting what

it is that's going to last. If human beings were going to choose one of our species to professionally have deep thoughts about rude by magic, I feel like society's working. We picked the right person. But I digress. My original question was about why it's become harder for me to find new music, harder than it was for, say, my dad back in the day. Besides my increasing irrelevance, I wondered had something else changed, like something external to me.

Calva had a partial answer for that, about, an external change. One he says has to do with a group of people he belongs to. Music critics. In the not-so-distant past, the professional rock critic was this scary, cool, nerd king who would solemnly inform you that the music you loved was for posers. It was an imperfect system. These guys were mostly guys, they were gatekeepers, they had their blind spots. But something has changed fundamentally in my lifetime, in the music criticism landscape that has made it hard. harder for consumers like me, which is that most music critics have gone from being suspicious arbiters of pop music to almost relentless worshippers of it. I'd been dimly aware of this change,

but it had never occurred to me to ask why it had happened. Well, I mean, it was linked to a sort of crisis of confidence in my industry, the music criticism industry, right, with people starting to second guess, like, well, what does it mean to criticize people or who gets criticized, literally, who are we to judge? And that's an interesting question. It's an unanswerable question. And it created this topsy-turvy world where professional or semi-professional music critics, people who write or talk about music in public, tend to be, I think, these days, less judgmental than your average listener. You go to your average listener, your average person who just like likes to listen to music, they'll have a long list of stuff that they hate, like a long list of stuff

that's like, Justin Bieber is the absolute worst, or it's, I hate country music, like, hip hop has sucked since 2005. Like, they'll have really categorical sweeping opinions. Yeah. And it's unlikely that someone who writes about music for a living would ever issue a sweeping opinion like that. And do, I mean, you're someone who writes about music for a living. Do you have privately held sweeping opinions?

Occasionally, yeah. Occasionally, I have things where I'm like, you know what? I think this artist sucks. Or I think this artist is overrated Or I just don't get it But you keep it private Well, I do have to think Like is this an article that I want to write?

Yeah Would you be willing to bleep something for me? Yeah So if I'm sitting around thinking You know what? I really don't get Oh wow Yeah

That stresses me out for you to say that Yeah like I feel like those albums kind of suck I feel like even the hits are a little bit bland. Like, I'm not even sure I believe that the fans really love it the way they claim they love it. Yeah. I don't know. What would it look like to write that article or what would I hope to achieve by writing that article?

The point of that article would be to tell everybody that the music of is not as good as they think it is, which isn't what Calva considers to be an interesting version of his job. Calva generally does not express strong opinions about which music is over. He's much more interested in why other people like what they like. He says the funny upshot of this, though, is he listens to a lot of music that other people then end up judging him for. In other words, my friends are more likely to turn up their nose at what I listen to than I am to turn up my nose at what they listen to. Really? Oh, yeah.

Because you listen to so much stuff that you're going to listen to stuff that they like down on? Yes, and also, if I talk to someone and they're really into stuff that I really into stuff that I really, really don't enjoy. Like, I've got 57 questions. Like, I'm about to learn something about how a different corner of the musical world works and about how they think about music, and that's going to be fascinating to me.

Can you tell me a story about a time where that recently happened? Well, I was in the car with a friend of mine recently who has Sirius XM, and I turned to the highway. Sirius XM's, like, New Country Station. My friend was basically just, like, absolutely not in my car. not even in the background for five minutes.

And that was kind of, it was kind of inspiring to me. What kind of inspiring? Well, the idea that music could still have enough meaning, culturally and socially, that someone would want to not allow a genre in their car. Yeah. That the music could have that kind of power, that the web of associations could be that thick,

that someone would be like, I'm not even listening to this for four minutes, because I don't like the way it sounds, I don't like what it represents, it stresses me out. Whereas to me, I'm like, these are perfectly nice songs. There's some great songs on country radio.

What are you talking about? And so the idea that someone could have a more judgmental reaction than me was, like, kind of inspiring in a strange way. I said at the top that what I like about music is its weird power. That sounds provoke feelings, that we have feelings about the feelings.

Two different people can hear the same song, some twangy country ditty about how your ex-wife took your dog and left you for a pickup truck or whatever and one person can appreciate it, another person can feel rage, I like them both. And I like Kalava,

the person just observing all this, appreciating the complicated web of associations and judgments. I like all of that. But after a brief break, we're going to stop messing around and do what we came to do. After some ads, Califasana will teach me,

and maybe you, how to find music on the internet in 2020. This episode of Search Engine is brought to you in part by Rosetta Stone. Spring is the perfect season to start something new, and learning a new language is one of the most rewarding ways to do it. Longer days, fresh energy, and new plans all make it the ideal time to dive in. Rosetta Stone has been a trusted leader in language learning for over 30 years, and their immersive method helps you absorb a language naturally, no memorizing random words, no translating

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Shop in stores at Nordstrom.com or, you know. download the Nordstrom app. Here's my question for you. Yes. U.K. are walking down the street tomorrow. An air conditioner, unfortunately, falls out of a window and hits you on the head.

You go into a coma. You wake up from your coma two years later. Your family's fine. Your job miraculously is in place. Your only priority for some reason is just catching up on new music. You take out your laptop or your iPhone. What do you do? So I wake up from my coma.

I've checked in on the fam. The fam's okay. The fam's like, we love you. We're so happy to have you back. What we'd like you to do is sit in front of your computer for a few days and catch up on music that you'd missed. That's a sign of our love to you. Yeah, where would I start? Would I start maybe by looking at the Billboard Hot 200, which is their list of just the 200 most popular albums measured in a complicated way from streaming algorithms and other things?

So yeah, I might look at that and just see. like, what's popular? What's on the charts? And I'd look at the little numbers, too. I'd be like, what's been on this chart for a year? What's a blockbuster? Right. What's like, what's huge?

What's dominating the culture? For me, it would be partly a journalistic question, right? Sometimes I go to Ticketmaster and just see, like, pick an arena and be like, who's playing that arena this year? Oh, wow. Who's like, who's selling tickets in this place? That's interesting. Then, yeah, I'd probably go on to Spotify, and I would look at some.

some of their year-end lists. And I'd look at both, like, what's critically acclaimed in the last few years, but also, like, what's just super successful? What are the biggest hits? What went number one?

It would be easy, and I think, fun, to listen to all the songs that went number one on the Hot 100 chart while I was in a coma. Right? That would tell a little story.

You could do that probably, depending on song length and churn, you could do that probably in about an hour. Right. And that would be a super fun hour. Because you'd hear time passing a little bit, too.

Yeah. Like, you'd hear, like, ideas filter through. Yeah, and you'd be like, this makes sense. And then you'd be like, oh, that person had three number one hits. That person is now A-list, and they used to be B-list. Like, that would be really interesting. That's pretty good.

Like, I want to know what's happening out there in the world in a literal sense. I want to look at the streaming metrics to see what was streaming well. Where do you look at streaming metrics? You know, I just like literally go to Spotify and click around and see what's getting a lot of streams in the U.S., seeing what's getting a lot of streams globally. maybe I'd look at some of their most popular playlists, like what's on rap caviar, assuming that still exists in this sad future

while I'm nursing my head wound. So, yeah, I would feel like there was a story that kept going. It was like I missed two seasons of a show, and I'd be like, what happened in those two seasons? What's happening out there? How can I enjoy it? So I'm looking for all these different places and all these different cultures

while knowing kind of tantalizingly that I'm missing stuff. While knowing that, like, you know, this week, someone released an amazing song, and I'm not going to hear it for, like, five or ten years, if ever. You like the feeling of infinity, like the feeling that it slips through your fingers. That I'll never touch the bottom of the pool. Absolutely. Like, thank God.

Okay, what about with... This is, like, such an infuse of your position. It's like, this is so unethical. I'm just like, just help me specifically. I can help you specifically, PJ. Okay. Hip-hop. Hip-hop.

Hip-hop. I loved sort of, like, New York-era hip-hop. Like, New York-era hip-hop. And everything changed. And I'm kind of like just the very, like, New York-90s, New York-80s, New York-2000s? What do we do? 90s, 2000s.

What, up through 50 cents? Like, DJ Premiere era. Oh, okay, okay. Like, how do I find more of that? Like, is there a contemporary version of that stuff? Yeah, of course. And in fact, you know, what they call, you know, more of a boom bap hip hop that might sometimes be known because it has those really like those really staccato backbeats.

Yeah. Yeah, there's a whole world. There's a whole scene of hip hop that is a little more old school. Uh-huh. Existing almost as a backlash to the stuff that's currently popular, which tends to be more southern, more melodic, less enunciated. Yeah. And so, yes, I could send you down a whole rap.

whole of crisply enunciated and or sort of like drugly verbose kind of New Yorkish hip-hop. And how does someone do this if they don't have access personally to you? Well, I think algorithms are actually pretty good. So it doesn't take that long to figure out like, oh, if I'm really into Nas or whatever, or Gangstar, like, what else are people who listen to that listening to? Right. You know, you can even do Google searches to just see, like, who's influenced by that? What are their fans on Reddit talking about?

It can be as simple as that if you want something that's really continuing the tradition of something you already like. The trickier thing that someone might want to do is to find something that occupies a similar structural position. What do you mean? Well, like, you know, Nas in the 90s was, like, cutting-edge hip-hop whose first album was like a cult-class, His second album had some hits, and he's revered in this world of hip-hop, but not quite a pop star. Yeah, which honestly, as I love Naz's music,

I also loved that. You know, like, I loved sort of like what he represented in relation to Jay-Z. So how do you recreate this? But that's a trickier question, because then you're trying to find, well, like, who is it who's like revered in the world of hip-hop, but they're not quite a pop star?

Yeah. But people are excited about them. And the reason I say that's trickier is because that's gonna end up somewhere sonically very different. Right. And so that's going to end up with, I don't know, does it end up with NBA young boy or something?

That's going to end up with some rapper now who doesn't sound at all like Nas. I say, I'm the definition of a bandit. And then you'll have to figure out, like, do I like this? Is this good? Did hip hop used to be good and it got bad?

Yeah. Or is this, can I wrap my mind around this? And so one of the things I love about music is like, is like figuring out how to get into something that feels different, it feels alien. And ironically, one way that things can feel alien, especially as we, me and you, PJ, get older. Yes.

One way that's something that can feel alien is that it's like new and popular. Right. And you're like, oh, this is what the kids are listening to? Well, it also, there's something reassuring about that because you're like, there is pleasure here I can unlock. Like, it's not something that's so avant-garde and weird. Like, on first listen, it might not do anything for me,

but it's done something for a lot of people. And so I kind of have it. faith that if I like shake the package long enough, I'll be able to open it. It's funny. I feel like in talking to you, I have so often preached the importance of like, well, we can learn from people's listening habits, right? Like people are interesting. We can see what's popular and we can learn from that.

But like, if I take my own advice, like most people as they get older, listen to less and older music. Which is not what you're doing. Well, but yeah. And so, and maybe, you know, maybe there's wisdom in that, too. Maybe I should take my own advice. And you should just... I really don't think you should do that.

Like, there's a reason why that question of, like, what are the 15-year-olds listening to is, like, an increasingly unusual question for aging people to ask and really care about. And what is the reason why is because, like, why do you care? Yeah, why do you care? Why are you trying to keep up with this? Like, for many people, maybe, that's not the most likely route to musical pleasure. Yeah, it's just that music is unique in that, like, I don't know, like the best directors are not the youngest director.

or the best novelists or not the youngest novelist. Like, you can go on and on. There's something about music where it's just, it's a youth culture. Yeah. And to me, there's nothing more fun than realizing you like something that feels like something you wouldn't or shouldn't like. Yeah.

That's the best part about music. Well, because at that point, you're also like, wait, so then who am I? Right. Which is like such an enjoyably upsetting question. It really is. Yeah. Okay, thank you.

Thank you. You. Calva Sane is a staff writer for the New Yorker, and his wonderful book is called Major Labels. It's fascinating. If you enjoyed this conversation, I think you'll love it. Kelva also had some actual music recommendations, like songs and artists, which I will share instead of hoarding. You can find them in my newsletter, which is over at p.jvote.com. Stick around after these ads for a recommendation from search engine.

Welcome back to the show. So sometimes on search engine we have recommendations. is there from me, sometimes is there not from me. Search engine producer Noah John, welcome to Search Engine. Welcome to On Mike In Search Engine. Oh, thank you, PJ. So, we were talking about music this episode. You have a very popular music TikTok account.

That's right. Do we discuss this on the show? Do we not discuss this? Yeah, absolutely. We can. So your TikTok is called Without Warning. It's great. But the fact that you run it means you've been producing this. when you have like a wealth of knowledge about this thing that I've been asking a stupid person questions about. And then yesterday we had this conversation in the office. Yeah, yesterday, you had me very excited because you said that you listened to Mac Miller for the first time

on your ride back from Montreal. Yeah, which I was saying I feel embarrassed about because I'm just like not a relevant person. And Mac Miller is like not a new artist. In fact, he died a while ago. And it was like, why am I suddenly listening to this now? But I started listening to the album, swimming and it just like really got me. Yeah, swimming is definitely incredible. And I think it's okay that you're getting into him now. I know a lot of people that are a long-time fan of an artist, I feel like have some type of resentment towards fans that come in later,

especially if that artist had passed away. Yeah. But I don't know. I think it's a great thing that a lot of people are becoming more familiar with his work, even if they're doing it after he is no longer with us. But I was going to recommend specifically his, 2014 mixtape Faces. What would you recommend out Faces?

Like, where to start? I would listen to the song Diablo. On that song, which he produced himself, has a really beautiful sample of In a Sentimental Mood by Duke Ellington and John Coltrane. And I don't know. He just went crazy on that song. Okay.

Diablo, other faces. Yeah. Thank you. You're welcome. Play a couple keys on the piano. Okay, you want to do the credits? Search Engine is a presentation of Odyssey and Jigsaw Productions. It was created by PJ Vote and Shruthi Pina Menini.

And it's produced by Garrett Graham and me, Noah John. Theme and sound designed by Armin Vizarian. Fact-checking by Elizabeth Moss, show art by Ali Moss, no relation. Our executive producers are Jenna Weiss Berman and Leah Reese Dennis. Thank you to the team at Jigsaw. Alex Gibney, Richard Porello, and John Schmidt. And to the team at Odyssey, J.D. Crawley, Rob Moranee, Craig Cox, Eric Donnelly, Matt Casey, Casey Klauser, Mora Corinne, Josephina Francis, Kurt Courtney, and Hillary Schuff. Our agent is Oren Rosenbaum at UTA.

Follow and listen to Search Engine with PJ Vote now for free on the Odyssey app or wherever you get your podcast. If you have a question for this show, you can leave a comment on the newsletter at pjvote.com. Thank you for listening. We'll see you next week.