Thanks for visiting HTFHTS, an algorithm-agnostic experiment in playlists and personal essays. I decided to start this project because music and words help me to make everything almost feel like it makes sense, or at least validate that practically nothing makes sense - ever.
Ready to explore the absurdity through cadence and critique!? How about a little wax poetics on emotion!? It’s all here, baby.
The first stop on this journey is Teletherapy, an ode to checking in through screens, screens, and more screens. Take a listen, then read on!
[Listen on Pandora]
One and three-quarter trips around the sun, and it still looks as though the global chaos that showed up at the outset of the decade continues to persist in very real and scary ways. Many of us now find ourselves actively working through the trauma that’s arisen or compounded in these turbulent times, doing our best just to make good out of okay and get through each and every day.
To a large extent, the songs on Teletherapy saunter, shout, and even rejoice about such trials, serving as very literal documents on themes of mental health, transition, and healing. They describe feeling things realllllllly strongly and trying to strike a kinder equilibrium while moving through difficult emotional checkpoints.
I tried to capture what might be a more general but just as emotional grappling with these principles in the organization of the track list - a sonic bell curve, if you will (and you must!), intensity peaking somewhere in the middle and with a soft message of hope (Nao) at the end.
We start off quiet, something bubbling in the subconscious that has yet to be perceived as any one thing (Gigi Masin). This ramps up as the emotion and any thoughts connected to it come into focus (Tony Njoku, YATTA, Deb Never), finally hitting a peak (ML Buch, Japanese Breakfast) and causing us to act in some way, inevitably coming back down so we don’t altogether short circuit and explode.
As rugged individualism gains more and more traction in our powder-kegged isolation, teletherapy is something we grab onto for dear life to help us practically (and calmly? lmfao) remain and operate within community - whatever that means to you. It’s a functional life raft, and hanging onto it is tough for the meaning-making brain.
These songs remind us that hanging in the balance of every emotion, thought, and experience we casually express as monolithic is also its complement - the heartbreak of love (Tirzah), renewal of death (Spellling), and emptiness of being seen (Japanese Breakfast), as just some examples.
That nearly everything in our physical realm seamlessly connects to the digital only complicates matters, the Tele- of Teletherapy another kink in the curvature. What does it take, and what would it practically mean, to close every single tab? (Angel Wei) Our identities neither begin nor end with physical location or bodies, creating a boundary-less expanse wherein our digital extensions complement, co-opt, and even compete for the time and attention we could otherwise put into caring for our actual flesh-and-bone selves.
To altogether “disconnect” is somewhat of a farcical notion, too, since crafting and maintaining digital identities serves so much more than just extra-curricular self expression. With the personal, public, private, professional and civic all funneling into 3 or 4 leading platforms, digital upkeep can literally mean the difference between putting food on a plate and going hungry, getting to vote or being rendered invisible by a tenuous democracy.
The more glitchy electronic tracks (Angel Wei, YATTA, James K) on Teletherapy point to this din and distortion of everyday digital intake, output, and overload. They reference the self who feels joy and pain, and whose joy and pain at times become inseparable from digital commodity. It’s about the doublespeak of posting one thing and feeling another, meaning lost in translation in every direction through the absolute imperfection of words and imagery.
Talking about all this distortion has also got me thinking about Auto-Tune and its role in music. I was recently listening to a podcast - can’t remember which one, my bad! - where the hosts were gleefully chatting about when Auto-Tune first arrived on the scene in 1998 with Cher’s absolute banger “Believe.” (Jennifer Lopez’s 1999 banger “If You Had My Love” also gets the Auto-Tune effect, though not quite as flamboyantly.)
Prior to 1998, Auto-Tune was more like a not-so-secret Industry Secret, employed by producers as an editing tool to finesse vocals that just didn’t cut it. When Believe came out, people freaked out because number one, nothing so outwardly robotic had penetrated the pop charts before, and two, it gave away the secret we all already knew about! And yet, it still worked for Cher, whose larger-than-life pop persona already, and for so long, flirted with the fantastical, spectacle, and cyborg.
When the aughts hit and T-Pain infused Auto-Tune into Hip-Hop, the attitude shifted. Befuddled amusement turned into anger, and the industry not only relentlessly made fun of T-Pain but also accused him of ruining music forever.
I’m talking about this now just to speculate about how and why things have come full circle to a point where seemingly all genres, tier of artist, and relatively skilled vocalists employ Auto-Tune in both hi and lo-fi production. And I think it’s in large part due to how much we’ve collectively naturalized the digital extensions of ourselves - to the point where Auto-Tune moonlights as organic and unremarkable, of equal artistic legitimacy to adding on dueting vocals or a woodwind. It’s the honest clusterfucked lens through which we process everything. And it sounds great!
Kind of cool, kind of trippy, kind of and always overwhelming! Like everything. At the end of the day - and this is my biggest thesis of this essay and playlist - life and living it are both a lot.
It’s right there for you 20 seconds into the mix on Tirzah’s “Fine Again,” a quiet and dreamy track with skittering synths and gently sung reassurances “I’ll make you fine again” - all punctuated by moments of complete silence. These moments are the emotional underbelly of the track, the loving pauses it takes to truthfully and believably assure someone you adore that everything’s going to be okay. They give space to notice, space to process, space to take in and work with whatever it is as it comes to form.
It’s hopeful and yet it’s sad, and I think it’s sad precisely because it’s so hard to do. To make someone “fine again” is … well, it’s maybe impossible, at least phrased or intellectualized as such. In its deadpan hyperbole, that line registers like an admission up front that the cards are stacked against that which is so beautiful and deeply desired, the thing that in an alternate universe would be the lightest and easiest story to ever unfold.
Teletherapy helps raise our baseline to just about “fine.” And maybe some days, that’s good enough.
If any of this hits, you’re in great company. With me, with this playlist, with a network of sticky thinkers whose stickier, less kind feelings and thoughts, must, over time, settle to a simmer and open up space for something else.
I hope you enjoy it :’)
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My goal this week is to be fine and look fiiiine. Thank you for this! Loving this playlist.
New goal this week is to be fine and look fiiine. Thank you for this!