soliloquy's super hell blog

this blog started with a review of one of those. and it is momentarily revitalized with:

this is not a review, but a reflection on how i talk about and listen to music. the review would be honestly quite boring. it's one of those albums that I instantly clicked with. I walked out of my apartment within seconds of finishing the album to find it on CD. Music like this is so special, because it's rare when music moves you, feels perfectly molded for your specific core and your ears SPECIFICALLY.

every single song when i listen to an album i tend to habitually express somehow with my body language or a comment to myself how i felt about it. if a track's kind of mid I'll do an "ehhhh" hand gesture to myself, or if it's bad I'll say "oh my god that sucks" or whatever.

For this album, for 95% of the tracks all I could muster was, a sort of "well yeah no of course i liked that it's a great song duh" it didn't like. knock my socks off or change my life. it just was a REALLY GOOD MUSIC LISTENING EXPERIENCE. every single song felt nice and fun to listen to and it was so empowering to listen to an album like that.

So why was one of my immediate responses to try to justify myself? To sit down and engage with other people's perspectives to either seek validation or get mad at someone for having a bad take. Am I not allowed to just click with an album without having a dissertation in my head as to why actually this album is just as good if not better than Melodrama? Even if it's not, it doesn't matter anyways!

the beautiful thing about music, and often the frustrating part of it, is that everyone's ear is tuned a certain way. certain things will resonate with someone while either flying under someone else's radar or even being a negative. It's how Imagine Dragons keeps charting while people like me sneer at them. It's how Drake continues having stans. Everybody's standards for what a "good song" is is different, even within the community of music freaks like me.

The older I get, the lower my tolerance for music discourse gets. People who base their entire life on listening to the best most critically acclaimed shit and sneer at anything that has any amount of flaw i honestly hate more than the types of people uncritically bumping the new ed sheeran album or whatever.

i lost my thread. there's a reason i stopped using this blog, beyond the fact its aesthetic no longer represents my music taste well. but perhaps as my opinion and perspective on music matures i should let go of the side of me that feels the need to justify why i love an album, and instead spend a little bit of time just loving the albums that give me that dopamine rush on first listen, like this album. I'm no better than anyone else.

Kaguya-sama wa Kokurasetai: First Kiss wa Owaranai