That made selecting the albums for this list, and ranking them in strict order, more of a challenge than I expected it to be. I also gradually, gratefully, softened on my selfish perspective of objectivity, which made it more difficult to have concrete opinions and ratings for the music I respected. Only the absolute cream of the modern crop made it into permanent rotation, while I spent hours resting in the comfort of nostalgic Final Fantasy OST playlists, exploring the decades-spanning catalogues of artists like Prince and Kylie Minogue, or sinking whole workdays into a 10-hour loop of “Beneath the Mask” from Persona 5. A lot of albums wouldn’t stick the way they used to, and even if I appreciated them, I wouldn’t listen to them over and over like in years past. But as the years went by and life got busy, keeping up with wave after wave of new music became more of a burden than a joy, and it became more difficult to stop and smell the roses. I doubled down on this by about 2013, starting to catalogue my music experiences with a spreadsheet of new releases, along with my thoughts and ratings on them.
Instead, for fresh content, I sunk deeper into the world of podcasts-especially football podcasts, which consumed multiple thousands of hours of listening time that might have been invested in music at an earlier time in my life.Īt the beginning of this decade, I was an obsessive list-maker, stuff-ranker, absolute arbiter of quality with objectively correct taste whose opinions were fact because they were based on specific, curated criteria.
PYRAMIDS FRANK OCEAN KEY SIGNATURE OFFLINE
I switched to carrying around an older iPhone with very limited space, so even with the streaming power of Tidal (yes, Tidal), I could only keep a handful of albums offline for regular access. Then a few years ago, I lost this device, which permanently changed my listening habits.
This rapidly became consolidated onto an iPod, which held thousands of albums, some of which I had purchased with money, giving me access to anything I already enjoyed at any time. At the beginning of this decade, I lugged around not one but two binders of physical compact discs which I had purchased with money in order to listen to music I enjoyed.