welcome to my mixtape delivery service

albums I spent a lot of time with in 2023 & why I do this Substack

You probably discovered me via the year end edition of Substack Reads. A half dozen writers recommended their top posts of 2023. Margaret Atwood kindly shined a spotlight on my summer post about Sinéad O’Connor's last playlist.¹

As a thank you, I’ve given new readers a complimentary 30-day subscription so you can poke around. If you like what you read & hear, please consider a paid subscription. I’ve discounted it to $25 annually. Paid subs help me devote more attention to this project.

What is AHB’s Goodies? The basic Who I Am And Why I Do This is covered on this About page. In brief, the purpose of this mixtape delivery service is to encourage eclectic music discovery without resorting to algorithms—an extension of making cassette mixtapes in the 1990s.

Image via Pexels

What’s my problem with algorithms? I think back to this 1996 quote from David Foster Wallace² long before the Internet had grown into the unwieldy beast it is today:

“…if you’ve spent any time on the Web, you know…that’s completely overwhelming. There are four trillion bits coming at you, 99 percent of them are shit, and it’s too much work to do triage to decide. So…very soon there’s gonna be an economic niche opening for gatekeepers… Wells, or various nexes. Not just of interest but of quality… And we will beg for those things to be there. Because otherwise we’re gonna spend 95 percent of our time body-surfing through shit…”

As it happens, we’ve now outsourced most of our Internet shit surfing to social media overlords such as Meta and Twitter. We all know how that’s worked out. “Quality” and “curation” are not words that come to mind. There’s a reason the term “doomscrolling” struck a nerve.

Why turn to me as a gatekeeper? By some measures, I’ve worked at the intersection of writing, music, and storytelling for over 30 years.

For a snapshot of my precise tastes, I’ll point you to some old posts. For pure pleasure, try this soundtrack intended for “indie” coffee shops or this day-long collection of contemporary music from the United Kingdom called pre-Brexit optimist. If you’re interested in more high-concept listening, here’s a mix devoted to wordless vocals, or a playlist I co-created with Margaret for the paperback launch of her book The Testaments.

Here’s me. In a party hat. Welcome to my Internet mixtape party: 👋

Better yet, let me guide you through my “favorite” albums of 2023. This is NOT a best of list—I don’t listen to music systematically and I don’t believe in ranking art. It’s just new records I founds myself returning to most often. If you recognize the artists, or are compelled to dig deeper, my mixtape delivery service might be for you.

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Nine LPs which I played many times in 2023

This is a non-ranked list. They are in alphabetical order, by first name.

Click the album titles to listen to a one song sample on YouTube. If you’re reading this on a desktop browser, you can watch all the videos right on this page in the footnotes.

left to right: Ben ~ Bill ~ Kara

Ben Howard: Is It?³ — chill British surfer gets cozy with insinuating electronics

Bill Orcutt: Jump On It⁴ — dense thickets of spacey yet athletic acoustic guitar

Kara Jackson: Why Does the Earth Give Us People to Love?⁵ — striking folk poet with a deep, dusky voice and an equally deep perspective on mortality

left to right: Lana ~ Mac ~ Noname

Lana Del Rey: Did you know that there's a tunnel under Ocean Blvd⁶ —  millennial inverts the poetic male gaze of Leonard Cohen into the perspective of a contemporary woman being gazed at

Mac DeMarco: Five Easy Hot Dogs⁷ -and- One Wayne G — prince of dank memes makes bleary, lo-fi instrumentals woozy enough for indie but so densely packed with melodic earworms they reminds me of the The Beatles on morphine

Noname: Sundial⁸ — a hyper-conscious, very melodic rapper ready to critique anything and everything, from herself to the audience that her music most appeals to

left to right: Olivia ~ Pharoah ~ Rozi

Olivia Rodrigo: GUTS⁹ — Disney assembly line princess self-reincarnated into an individualistic pop-punk queen (with 90s alt-rock characteristics)

Pharoah Sanders: Pharoah¹⁰ — searching reissue of an obscure LP by a now-deceased spiritual jazz elder that is plainly recorded, occasionally wild and free, always compellingly ethereal

Rozi Plain: Prize¹¹ — highly textural, bohemian Britannia which sounds less like its ingredients (indie folk, cool jazz, synth patterns, a whimsical perspective) and more like a rigorously plotted Rube Goldberg device designed for chill sonic pleasure

As far trends go, it was curious to me that none of these records were by bands. This was unintentional. My working theory is that I was attracted to distinctive individual voices at a time when AI and insane geo-political forces seem intent on anonymizing humanity—sometimes reducing our creativity to computer-generated content, at other times turning entire cultures into canon fodder.

Another intriguing sub-trend I noted is that three of the album titles took the form of questions: Ben Howard’s Is It? or Lana Del Rey’s Did you know that there's a tunnel under Ocean Blvd. If I were to pick an Album of the Year from this list, though, it would probably be Kara Jackson’s Why Does the Earth Give Us People to Love?

A rather big question! Yeah, 2023 was that kind of year.

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In the near future aren’t we just going to listen to music made by Generative AI?

In the spring of last year, I was struck by a conversation between podcaster Ezra Klein and esoteric scholar/journalist Erik Davis. It was about the cultural values of the people creating Artificial Intelligence—a population that is first and foremost made up of technologists, futurists, and programmers.

Fundamentally, these are computer people not culture makers.

They discussed what their optimism about generative AI might be missing. Here’s the excerpt of the transcript most relevant to music lovers. It’s Davis talking — but the emphasis is mine:

…what does that look like on a culture-wide basis as we get used to enjoying cultural products that are produced by large language models and the way in which they recirculate, because you can cynically say, well, that’s already kind of happening. Look at popular music. What is popular music? Is it incredible acts of generative novelty? No, it’s more like mixes and matches of things, and a little bit of action thrown in, and a little bit of shifting here.

So it’s possible that reshuffling the deck over and over again, the deck is big enough, there’s still going to be enough novelty to entertain us, let’s say. But it’s hard to square that with any more expanded view of what cultural products do for us or cultural works — great literature, great movies, whatever. It’s hard to see it simply as an iterative process, that there’s some other dimension to those products. And are we actually getting to a place where…it’s sufficient to…be entertained by the reshuffled deck, or is it just going to be clear that there is this kind of difference that we’re losing?

I have very strong feelings on this.

The thing missing in AI generated works is going to be the imperfect human spark we recognize in the art we love. And I firmly believe we will notice.

Loving culture is about the humor and rage and lust and pheromones in it. And while robots and computers may well incite us to anger, I suspect that no matter how sophisticated they’ll never truly get us to love or laugh at them.

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Four LPs I loved but didn’t listen to that much

clockwise from upper left: Caroline ~ Feist ~ Camae aka Irreversible Entanglements ~ Taja aka L'Rain

Here are four more records I loved but didn’t hear as often. That doesn’t mean they’re not just as good as the nine selections listed above. In fact these four LPs might even be better! They just didn’t fit as well into the environment in which I do most of my listening—often while typing, browsing, emailing, spreadsheeting. These are times when it’s a requirement that the soundscape recedes into the background a bit.