Twitterbrain is not Music Brain
...more thoughts on the Rare and Underloved from 2022
In a confessional piece in The New York Times’ Sunday Opinion section last week, author Jenny Odell talked about her struggle to extract herself from Twitter. Odell is the author of the brilliant How To Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, so she’s well acquainted with the addictive perils of Twitter pre-Elon Musk. She writes about how her connection to the never-ending stream of ideas and opinions began to impact her physically:
I felt like my thoughts were running on shorter loops or never getting completed. Even my breaths were short, as though a full inhale couldn’t fit into such tiny intervals, and my joints would ache from a state of constant anticipation. It was the feeling of a furrowed brow, applied to my entire body.
I can’t shake that image, and only partly because like so many others, I’ve fallen into those large time-sucking Twitter realms. It’s a problem by itself. And there’s this: When you evaluate social media through the attention lens, you eventually become aware that the state Odell is describing is, in an alarming and fundamental way, anti-music.
Twitter promises everything, all the time. Music offers singular experiences, which unfold at a pace determined by the creator of the work — not the listener. The demands on your time, as great as they may be, are insignificant in the context of the minute-by-minute experience of time within the Beethoven Violin Concerto, or Miles Davis’ In a Silent Way.
What happens when we bring the brain that’s been operating at Twitter speed to music? Someone is probably working on a double-blind study that will apply science to this question. I already know that my own reaction — when I’m listening while scrolling, or turning to music to detox, post-scroll — is restlessness, mixed with a bit of anxiety, mixed with an attack of the “shoulds.” Maybe I really should be checking out that much-praised Wet Leg record again.
There is always more.
How to square this truth with the uncomfortable reality that music happens on its own schedule, and to savor it means willingly giving up control over time? It’s impossible to listen to two things at once — you go nowhere at all. Odell lands on a conclusion that sounds, at first, like a self-helpy aphorism: Letting go of one overwhelming rhythm, you invite the presence of others.
I thought about this earlier this week, attempting to corral a year’s worth of archive discoveries and underloved gems into a cogent form. This was tricky, and not only because of Twitterbrain: This year, as in recent years, there’s been an avalanche of these discoveries. Tuesday’s piece missed a few key ones that Echo Locator covered earlier in the year. They were huge eye-openers for me, and deserve wider attention. And full attention. There is always more…..
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You are exactly right about twitter and social media in general (instagram). I find it difficult to scroll through them both and maintain my sense of well being as an artist. They don't jibe. I feel it negatively affects me creatively and am just about at the point of not spending any time on either of them.