listen to
what
i’m listening to

"Where are your guts? I’m not afraid to sing the hard, bitter lines that the folks I’m singing about lived. If you’re ashamed of these words, you’re ashamed of America."

— Johnny Cash, Billboard Magazine Open Letter

(In response to radio stations suppression of his album Bitter Tears and refusal to play The Ballad of Ira Hayes, and the music industries unwillingness to challenge listeners to confront uncomfortable truths about American history.)


I want to preface all of this by saying that this subject may be too emotional for me to discuss with rigor, so I may have to come back to this later to better articulate my thoughts. Also, as I write this, I’m already aware of how parts may come off as elitist or disparaging— that’s not my intent and I’ll try to address that— but this is a topic that’s important to me, speaks to who I am as a person, and is reflective of what I see everywhere and what I’d like to see change, so lets talk about it.

In 1955, Ella Fitzgerald was arrested for the unwritten crime of singing to an integrated audience, with the cover that it was for throwing dice in her dressing room with Dizzy Gillespie. This, so that pathetic men could feel important in upholding the status quo of what people were allowed to listen to, while even more pathetic men stood by and let it happen. A quick internet search will result in you finding a photo of her sitting next to her assistant in a Houston Police Department holding cell looking humiliated. When I think about music, I think about this photo, and the beginnings of something that I see as purposeful and predacious; or rather, the continuation of, in a new way.

As of writing this, America’s literacy numbers have fallen once again. 54% of us read and write bellow a 6th grade level, 20% of us below a 5th grade level, and about 1 in 5 American adults are functionally illiterate with an additional 13 million who are completely illiterate. This is a tragedy, but to call it a failure is to ignore that it’s so painfully obviously by design in the wealthiest and most capable country on earth— part of the plan to keep ‘em dumb, poor, and distracted— continuing a long tradition of the ruling class encouraging the peasants to just stay illiterate and ignorant because you can know too much, and they can just read books on behalf of everyone and tell us what’s in them. While this doesn’t speak to the reasoning and problem solving skills that comes with life experience, it does speak to having a much larger and more complex mental library to reference when navigating the world, because literate individuals have life experience plus literacy, not just life experience.

I want to be very clear here following literacy statistics. People aren’t stupid. On average, human beings are an incredibly adaptable and capable species. 4,000-ish years ago we were using algebra; 2,400-ish years ago Socrates (Aspasia) and soon (especially) Diogenes were already tired of everyones bullshit; and we’ve built skyscrapers and satellites from sifted dirt and cooperation. In other words, we know how to do complex things and share our complex knowledge, which is why its so difficult to accept that despite our capacity for critical and abstract thought, we’ll simultaneously live something like ocean bottom dwellers content to just sort of exist and consume whatever detritus floats by. We’re forever impatiently eager to shut our brains off and get back to a state of doing nothing as quickly as posible, content to watch, listen to, participate in, and otherwise consume in every way— the poisoned, processed-food equivalency of everything. Again, that’s not said to be dismissively contemptuous of us, its said out of frustration and the desire to see us want better for ourselves. I wonder if all it really takes to keep the entire human race from advancing beyond elementary school despite our capacity to think coherently and logically, is just grain fermentation and the seizure-inducing spectacle of pop-sensation grandeur, so that a precious few can thrive at the surface.

I think about it all the time, that what seems to be one of the most essential parts of a system that keeps us at the lowest common denominator in order to provide industries with the largest possible captive, malleable audience to be taken advantage of with the least possible effort, is the upholding of a cultural norm that upon your 18th birthday you’re now to be treated as an adult even if you still have the mind of a child that’s not even fully developed for roughly seven more years, locking us in for life as adolescence with poor memories after having been encouraged to study to the back of the book for standardized multiple choice tests instead of encouraging lifelong learning supported by critical thinking skills; and I see it so clearly in the type of music that so ubiquitous.

I’ve never lived in a war zone— for example— so in comparison, I realize that on its surface this is such a privileged thing to even talk about when compared to much more visible examples of oppression and immediate threats of physical violence; unless you see what I see, which is the much cleverer, less noticeable tactic in the same struggle for power. My whole life— and yours— I’ve been subjected to music against my will that’s made by doing little more than pushing a preset beat on a Casio keyboard and singing a 6th grade poetry contest winner into an autotune machine (although that’s not entirely fair, and I’ll give some of the 80s and 90s a pass and be more specific that it really started to get bad right around when Nelson Mandela died for the second time in 1997, becoming unbearable upon his third and final death in 2013), and if chart-toppers are meant to be the unobjectionable pre-self soundtracks to our respective coming-of-age narratives, that doesn't explain why they’re also pumped through every public speaker to every age group as if it’s worthy of such distribution as fluoride in our water supply. It doesn’t explain why we live in a world where the most popular songs are almost always the worst— reused across all markets with only slight adjustments to an audience viewed not as people but consumable assets— and why we fucking put up with it and never demand better for ourselves.

This is also a difficult topic for me to articulate my thoughts about for several reasons. One is that our growth isn’t linear, so you can be an astrophysicist who still beams with pride at their grating attempt to once again playing scales on their childhood instrument, and that’s honestly perfectly fine and I’m proud of you for both; across all categories, we’re all going to be in different places with regard to ability or appreciation. Also, it’s not to say that I’m without guilty musical pleasures, that I never listen to things that are regarded as popular, or that it’s not important to just plain be silly for no reason. My aversion isn’t to popularity itself, as if we must all conduct ourselves in the manner of absurdist hipsters who move through the world as a personified meme while exclusively listening to bands that are so obscure they haven’t even agreed on a name yet, or as if what’s good must be bad because there’s no inherent value in a type of joy that appeals to the great unwashed; I, too have some songs on my daily playlist that are sitting comfortably at over a half billion streams. I’m suggesting though, that we should all be much more critical of what we consume, just as artists are— or should be— critical of what they create. I’m suggesting that just because we like something doesn’t mean we should, because what I see in music, specifically pop music and chart topper’s relationship with the public, is an abusive relationship. I see a partner that wants to abuse us, and I see us choosing the evil that we know because it’s too difficult to get out of the relationship, despite the existence of musicians who want to love us and who have given everything of themselves through their instruments for us.

The thing is, pop stars aren’t innocent performers. They’re complicit. They’re the opium house attendants, keeping you under and making sure that you leave with an empty wallet and returning with a full one for more. Every time >The Artist< regurgitates the proven formula into the gaping maws of their eagerly awaiting swifties, they participate in the enshitification of America and the raise to power of Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho. If our pop stars really wanted to be honest, their next breakup song would be to breakup with us. They would walk out on stage with the curtain drawn behind them and a single spotlight focused on a guitar propped up against a wooden stool, look their audience in the eyes, and apologize to a chord progression other than I-V-vi-IV as part of an earnest explanation of how we can all do better by each other; that its time to stop worshiping at the alter of mediocrity because they’re not an icon, and if we had respect for ourselves we’d leave them behind and stop listening to what’s little more than nursery rhymes for adults. Ultimately nothing is going to change until we change, but I’d like for those who are in a position to help effect that change to take a satisfied look at their bank accounts, and then do so.

My musician friends, not everything has to carry weight to be valuable. Not everything has to ache to be true. Let yourself have lightness, too, but bare the burden of your gift. It’s not being asked of you, its being demanded.

Until then, what wanting better for ourselves looks like is no longer drooling over our keyboard as we smash our fingers on the enter key to get our tickets before they sell out in under a minute, shooting our money guns at opportunities to participate in hyper-ecstatic golden-idol worship ceremonies of the people who are complicit in our mistreatment. What wanting better for ourselves looks like is instead, is pausing and allowing the cellist in the subway to move us to tears for nothing more than the joy of knowing that their music will continue to reverberate through the corridors of our future selves, who desperately needs the money dropped into their overturned hat thats orders of magnitude less than we’d spend on >The Artist<‘s Big-Top Razzle Dazzle Experience and Feats Of Athleticism, complete with several costume changes and a laser-light show. What us doing better looks like is a world of no billionaires or hundred-millionaires, but several million new hundred-thousand-airs who’s names were previously unheard.

This isn't a new argument, though, not for me and not for humanity. I was saying all of this over 25 years ago, and someone like me was saying all of this over 2000 years ago when >The Artist< was heavily drugged lions being stabbed to death by Carpophorus to the cacophonous acclaims of the Roman Colosseum— because catering to the masses to eat with the classes isn’t exactly a secret— but I wonder if the act of emperors stepping on our necks for thousands of years has created something of a shared generational global trauma now coded into our DNA that’s preventing so many of us from ever even trying to get up.

I’m afraid that Langston Hughes was wrong in all of his Harlem speculations of a dream deferred, and that it will instead be met with the rapturous trembling of a stadium of those who are whole-heartedly inhabiting lives of mental derangement in their embrace of the aforementioned chicken-nugget equivalency of everything instead of perusing a dream, any dream; their individual screams culminating into a deafening end of us.

It bares repeating, to the extent that it’ll be what I say with my last breath. My friends, we are a field of wildflowers that has been turned into a lawn. Poisoned and kept in a suspended state of adolescence, they call it natural, call it order, and call it right; but the inarguable natural order is what the lawn replaced— diverse, wild, and free— forever returning; and they have us perpetually bopping our heads along to the thought-interrupting 1:1 drum beat of this season’s Billboard hits to prevent it from happening. I want us to be more than just mental patients in a rec-room agitating each other while waiting for the call for lights-out while some of us hide several extra pudding cups under our gown that we’re not even eating, causing others to have none, and it can start by cutting the wires to the music being played over the intercom.

Again, it’s lazy to say that if it’s successful it’s bad, but turning off your radio and ignoring your playlist suggestions to explore new genera is a good place to start; it’s a small act of defiance that’s accessible to everyone and easy to do no matter where you live or how many jobs you work, and nothing will change until we no longer find the detritus that we’re expected to feed on acceptable.

All this to say, when someone asks you what kind of music you listen to, I’d like for you to join me in reminding them that there are 195 countries, and 150 years of recorded music.

What you won’t hear if you’re with me, though (and this has been true my whole life, so I can’t see it changing), is mumble rap, the type of blaring metal music comprised of indistinguishable noises that induces vomiting without even having to ride the steel roller coaster that it’s blaring from at the county fair, and music where racist white southerners clip Hollywood-White plastic Halloween teeth into their mouth before doing their best impression of Kermit the Frog singing their target audience’s favorite country music alphabet song; “America, beer, cowboy, dirt,… freedom, gui-tar, heart, in-di-go,… moonshine, nighttime, road sunset truck,… whiskey, x’s, yearning, z, now I know my ABC’s, and it’s all I’ll sing for 60 fuckin’ years.” >insert guitar strum here< (Although Dolly Parton, as a person, gets a pass for all that she’s done. Thank you, Dolly.)

Updated 06.01.25

"The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.” - Ludwig Wittgenstein


Your assignment is to write the lyrics for a song with the following restrictions.

01. You’re not allowed to write about love and loss, or interpersonal relationships; reminisce about the earlier years of your life; use religious symbolism; make references to money, clothing, jewelry, cars, obsession, killing, or dying; mention raising your hands above your head or putting them in the air in an way, climbing a mountain, or swimming in a sea; use any number that starts with the number one followed by nothing but zeros; speculate or assert that you or a person of interest are loco, fou, crazy; or write any lines in the form of a question.

02. You’re not allowed to use the following 50 words, listed in alphabetical order, plus the 10 additional updated words, especially with regard to country music.

Alone, always, baby, beautiful, bleed, body, breath, broken, change, crazy, dance, dream, end, escape, eyes, fall, fear, feel, fight, fire, forever, free, hold, hope, I, kiss, know, life, light, lost, love, me, mine, need, night, one, pain, promise, right, rise, run, shadow, stars, tears, trust, together, true, weekend, yeah, you.

+ Beer, dirt, Friday, girl, little, radio, road, sun, truck, whiskey.

03. There must be a combination of both showing and telling; not one or the other.

04. Each line must be roughly the same length, within several words of each other.

Updated 06.01.25

Whenever this subject comes up, I’m asked why I can’t just let people listen to what they want, and the answer is because the music that you listen to renders your invisible prison cell visible— and I want you to be free.

Yes— Musical preferences are shaped by many factors, such as cultural exposure, personal experiences and memories, socioeconomic status, and just plain emotional and psychological needs.

Yes— While studies that have explored correlations between musical preference and personality traits indicate that individuals who prefer complex genres score higher in openness to experience— or have higher educational attainment— than individuals who prefer simpler or mainstream music like top-40/pop-country, correlation does not equal causation.

Yes— While intuitive judgments might associate simpler, mainstream music with less intellectual curiosity, these judgments often reflect biases, stereotypes, and cultural elitism (lookin’ at you, hipsters), rather than actual cognitive abilities or developmental stages.

Yes— It appears to be incredibly reductive to try and link the multi-dimensionality of intelligence, with musical preference, especially when factoring in aforementioned emotional and psychological needs, and as a way to socially connect.

Yes— Selective curiosity means that being intellectually capable of appreciating complexity or novelty doesn't inherently mean one always desires it or chooses it in every domain of life, and intelligent people still seek emotional simplicity, familiarity, or comfort in particular contexts— especially when tired or stressed, when the inertia of friends and family pull them into repeatedly engaging with simple music, or when music isn't their primary interest.

Cool. Cool cool cool. Now that I’ve buried myself:

Here’s the thing. Virtually everyone experiences continual exposure to music, willingly or not, so if an individual has genuine intellectual openness— a significant marker of intelligence— both passive and active exploration beyond highly simplistic mainstream music would almost inevitably occur, especially given a long enough span of time.

Intelligent minds inherently seek stimulation, and repetitive, predictable content becomes dull quickly, so it’s genuinely unlikely that someone with high cognitive ability and openness would remain indefinitely satisfied with a genre characterized by repetitiveness and simplicity, such as mainstream top-40/pop-country.

The number of intelligent, intellectually open individuals who never transcend the narrow boundaries of a simplistic, repetitive genre like top-40/pop-country is— just through lived experience— statistically negligible to the point of being almost non-existent. It would represent such a minute proportion of a data set even as large as the population of a country so as to be statistically insignificant when charting what would of course be a bell curve.

In other words, it’s statistically improbable— borderline impossible— that a significantly intelligent, cognitively curious adult, given prolonged cultural exposure and sufficient free agency, would remain confined exclusively to a simplistic, repetitive, mainstream music genre like top-40/pop-country. I claim that if one could carefully measure intelligence— IQ or equivalent— along with openness to experience, and musical preferences in a large, representative sample, that we would clearly see a strong inverse correlation between cognitive openness/intelligence and prolonged exclusive preference for simplistic music; so, top-40/pop-country— which is explicitly produced for simplicity and mass-appeal— overwhelmingly attracts audiences who are less intellectually curious, less cognitively engaged, and generally lower in measured intelligence or education level.

To put it plainly— completely unhedged— outside of briefly or intermittently enjoying simplistic music for emotional or nostalgic reasons, listening to the top-40/pop-country as an adult is proof of stunted growth. However, rather than it speaking to inability, we can recognize that this is intentional— and it can be a starting point instead of an end. An individual can escape the invisible prison cell that they’re being held in by forcing themselves to explore outside of their comfort zone— through the pain of it— until they like it. Crave it.

I want to note that talking about this isn’t intended to make disparaging remarks about anyone; it’s meant to reach out to them, grab their hand, and help pull them into a life that’s comprised of everything that it can be. This also isn’t intended to insinuate that anyone should listen to what I listen to as if it’s a paradigm of musical appreciation, just that everyone should be exploring— on their own journey— in the interest of becoming their best self.

While criticizing someone’s musical preferences might illicit a defensive response, and cause you to question why I can’t just let them listen to what brings them joy, the music that we listen to shapes, reflects, and— in the case of top-40/pop-country— limits our intellectual growth.

Remaining loyal to simplistic, repetitive genres serves only to participate in our own hinderance for the benefit of individuals who would take advantage. Actively exploring complexity in music is a way to fight back.

I love you with all my heart, stranger reading this just now, and again, when someone asks you what kind of music you listen to, I’d like for you to join me in reminding them that there are 195 countries, and 150 years of recorded music.

Updated 06.01.25