A YouTube playlist of 562 videos (and counting). With bonus playlists of tracks by Junie Morrison and Jenifa Mayanja.

I've now made YouTube playlists in 2010, 2011, Japan, 2013, 2014, 2015 and 2016. The above playlist is 562 videos (and counting) which means that this entire thing has now gotten completely and stupidly out of hand.

Every day on the internet I hear new music that I like (or think I like at the time.) But for the most part it doesn't stick. The next day I can't remember what I heard the previous day. And, more importantly, there's new music to hear which overrides the need to look back. (However, much of this music from the past year I have added to this playlist as I go. So this is the record of things I never look back over.)

I am currently living in an apartment with no internet in an attempt to mitigate my social media addiction. When my record player broke years ago I didn't get a new one. Instead I returned to CDs (which for some reason I'm ashamed to admit I prefer.) Most nights I leave my computer at the office and listen to CDs at home. I listen to many of these CDs over and over and over again and therefore they definitely stick. Something I find strange is that much of the music I hear online I don't know how to get on CD. Much of it doesn't even exist on CD.

I was planning to write more about how my music listening life is now so clearly divided between online and offline. But I think you get the idea. Instead...



Walter "Junie" Morrison died at the beginning of 2017 and to celebrate his life and music I made a short playlist of some of my favourite Junie Morrison tracks:





And I also discovered the music of Jenifa Mayanja this year (who is very much alive and amazing) and I also made a short playlist of some my favourite Jenifa Mayanja tracks:





(I wonder if I will actually do this again next year. I keep promising myself I won't do this ever again. Music makes me weak.)




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A playlist for 2016

I said I wasn't going to do this anymore, because YouTube now has too many commercials, but it seems I can't stop. I've now made YouTube playlists in 2010, 2011, Japan, 2013, 2014 and 2015. The above playlist is 346 videos long. 

Usually, as part of these YouTube playlist posts, I reflect on my internet addiction, which I suppose is more or less as out-of-control as ever. But I think, for the time being, I've said all there is to say about it. Perhaps the number 346 says it all...



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A long and short playlist for 2015 (with commentary)

I said I wasn't going to do this anymore, because YouTube now has too many commercials, but it seems I can't stop.

I've now made YouTube playlists in 2010, 2011, Japan, 2013, 2014 and now 2015 (also above.)

The playlist for 2015 is so long (over five hundred videos) that this year I've also made a shorter one that contains some of my favourites. 

In previous years, my commentary was about how things I do on the internet now seem part of, or even more interesting, than the rest of my artistic practice. But this year all I'm thinking about is my internet addiction. For the first time in my life I'm finding it difficult to read and I think it might partly have too do with how much time I spend online. 

I have just managed to spend two weekends offline, and will try to keep spending weekends away from this thing for the rest of the year. I don't particularly think I'll succeed. But we'll see what happens.

I think what disturbs me most is how little interest I have in doing anything else.



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A playlist of 115 videos for 2014 (with commentary.)

Previous playlists: 2010, 2011, Japan and 2013.



Yesterday I was reading about old school hip hop and realized that Missy Eliott is the same age as me. I wondered what, if anything, I could make of this fact. I thought of googling "(other) celebrities born in 1971" but then thought that would be pathetic. (Born in 1971: Tupac Shakur, Snoop Dog, Mary J. Blige.) I'm now wondering if this has anything to do with my recent, reignited obsession with hip hop, a music that I have been alive for the entire history of. A music that has changed, become less innocent, perhaps more cynical, over the exact same years I have.

If you have been reading A Radical Cut in the Texture of Reality, and I find it almost impossible to imagine that anyone is, you will know I have spent much of the past year obsessed with my own failure. I still can't quite believe that the most hits here this past year went to my post Must lead to something else, where I begin: "Most of my favorite artists follow a fairly standard trajectory. They start out okay or good, have a period of getting better and better, peak, then slowly or rapidly decline. (Some of them die young, before the decline begins, but that’s another kind of question.) I have now been making work for about twenty-five years and wonder if my decline has already begun, or will begin any minute."

(At the same time I know at least some people are looking at this because I obsessively check the blogger statistics. I suppose this is mainly what I mean by 'failure': this life of checking blogger statistics and compiling YouTube playlists. And at the same time I manage to do so many other things. I'm never quite sure how. I suppose I work quickly and don't look back.)

I was about to start writing this post about failure (even though I am continuously promising myself that I will stop writing about failure on my blog) when I stumbled on the Momus post 2013: A bloody good year to be Momus. I was going to write about what a failure my life is while, at more or less the same time, Momus was writing about how well things are going for him. (Momus writes about all the amazing things he did this past year but I could never bring myself to do the same thing in regards to my own past year. I wonder why. Is it only because I'm a self-deprecating Canadian?)

As many people seem to already know, Momus is one of my ongoing obsessions. (Others include: Hip Hop, Las Malas Amistades, Chris Kraus, The Transformation by Juliana Spahr, Alvaro Mutis, Lene Berg, David Graeber, I'm sure there are more I can't think of at the moment.) But for such a long time Momus has been an obsession very much connected to my own sense of disappointment. In my early twenties I was so obsessed with his first five records (Circus Maximus, The Poison Boyfriend, Tender Pervert, Monsters of Love, The Ultraconformist -- not actually his first five records but those were the ones I loved) and so much of what came after was a let down. Specifically, I had a story about him I told myself: that he made a conscious decision to sell out, that he wanted to sound more like The Pet Shop Boys, and more importantly to have their success, and this decision led him down a road that, for me as a listener and fan, was mainly a road of disappointment.

Strangely, I have the same story in my head about David Bowie, a story I heard in an interview with Nile Rogers, that when Bowie came into the studio to begin recording Let's Dance, Nile Rogers was preparing to experiment and get weird, but instead Bowie began the session by saying: "I want a hit." For Bowie it worked (for one album at least, after Let's Dance I think it was pretty much downhill), for Momus not so much (I think he had a minor hit with Michelin Man but then got sued by Michelin and had to remove the song from his record.) However, both of these stories are burned into my mind as a kind of lesson: when you make a conscious decision to 'sell out', it later becomes extremely difficult to get back onto the right artistic path.

I say 'strangely' because Momus begins his post with how excited he is that Bowie put out a new record in 2013. I was disappointed with Momus, but Momus was never disappointed with Bowie (I believe his major influence.) And the past few years I've come around to Momus again. I liked Otto Spooky, Ocky Milky, Joemus and Hypnoprism. I spent a lot of time this year listening to the first MOMUSMCCLYMONT record and now there's already a second. And I realize I've listened to every record he's ever made many many times, and even on the records I liked the least there were a few songs I still listen to. Disappointment is part of life and yet shouldn't go on forever.

I'm wondering if I'll have to stop making these YouTube playlists because there now seems to be a commercial between almost ever track. When I started the playlists in 2010 I don't recall it being this way. Everything on the internet is becoming (unsurprisingly) more monetized. More ads on Facebook, boost your post, more commercials on YouTube, etc.

Something has changed in how I listen to music. This was the year I decided to try living with no internet at home (in a futile attempt to spend less time on Facebook), and because of this I mainly leave my computer at the office. So at work I listen to music on the internet and at home I listen to CD's. This split has somehow begun to fascinate me. I listen to music in completely different ways on my computer than I now do at home. The most obvious difference being at home I listen to albums all the way through while on the computer its always some form of jumping around or shuffle. The computer is really the land of A.D.D. And at home I'm listening to the same records again and again, while the computer ignites my thirst to hear something new, always new. More music than I will ever be able to listen to and a slight sense of defeat that I will never make it through it all.

Last thought (for now) on YouTube playlists. If I love all these obscure songs enough to compile them every year, why aren't I delighted to be among the obscure and relatively unknown? Why do I consider my own relative obscurity as such a complete failure? Is it only because I feel that music - as a thing in itself - is so much better than anything I'm capable of? Yet these seem to be the (mostly obscure) artistic things I love most.

And Missy Elliott is still really good.



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A playlist of 70 videos (with commentary).

It seems now every year I make a YouTube playlist. I made one in 2010, 2011 and in Japan.

I have written a short post On making YouTube playlists.

All year I have been working on one for 2014. And now, twice, I have hit the playlist limit of 200 videos. Previously I didn't realize there was a limit and now I've hit it twice. I'm trying to think a little bit of this idea of a limit. Who would possibly take the time to watch a playlist of 200 videos? I know the internet has almost completely changed the way I listen to music, an endless stream of songs so many of which I can barely remember even a few minutes after having listened to them. So many amazing songs and wanting to organize them into playlists each year is almost defeatist.

I can keep adding songs to the playlist but eventually hit a limit. Then I go through the playlist, delete some of the weaker songs in order to make room for more. At the end of the year I'll remove as many songs as I can bear in order to get the list down to some reasonable size. I will try for under a hundred. None of this seems to me like a particularly good use of time and yet, internet addiction aside, it does also possibly spring from some desire to share.

The number of songs on the internet feels infinite yet, as I compile them, I hit a limit. It is not a real limit: I could simply begin a new playlist, but the limit in itself is perhaps useful, curbing the compulsive activity ever-so-slightly, forcing me (eventually) to start making decisions. With so many of these songs I would like to hear more, know more about the artist, but so often I don't. The slot in the playlist is as far as it goes. The curiosity is there but not the followthrough. Of course there might also be information I will stumble upon randomly at some future moment.

Along with the 200 video playlist limit, I am also continuously hitting the 5000 Facebook 'friend' limit. I have been thinking about writing about this other limit for a while, a limit made somehow resonant due to the inclusion of the word friend, but songs always feel like the more telling metaphor. And anyway I'm embarrassed to write about Facebook, fearful that it's evidence, a verdict too clearly depicting just how little I live.



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On making YouTube playlists

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It seems now every year I make a YouTube playlist. I made one in 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013 and I'm already working on one for 2014. There is also the playlist I made of music from Japan. I have  written about this process twice: A play list of 83 videos (with commentary) and A play list of 96 videos (with commentary).

I have been meaning to write about all of this again. How these internet habits feel like a part of my art and life, and how often they feel more like art than my actual art practice, and yet how this idea has also somehow become thinner and less compelling to me since I first wrote about it three years ago.

Also I wanted to write about how videos keep disappearing from these lists. I just opened the playlist from 2010 and the fist thing I am told is that '12 videos in your playlist have been deleted from YouTube.' The internet is a place where things disappear and nobody notices. In fact, the internet is a place where things appear and disappear and practically nobody notices.

2011: 10 videos in your playlist have been deleted from YouTube.
2012: 6 videos in your playlist have been deleted from YouTube.
2013: 1 video in your playlist has been deleted from YouTube. 

As time goes on more and more of these videos will disappear. And I have no right to them, I have only compiled them for a moment in time. YouTube is a privately owned corporation and can delete whatever videos it likes.

Art is ephemeral. Life is ephemeral. But what is strange (or actually completely predictable) is I have absolutely no recollection of which videos have disappeared. I have no notes. They are gone, and if YouTube hadn't told me of their absence I think I would have barely noticed.

I don't know if my logic will be as apparent to everyone else as it is to me. But all of this leads me to believe that there is still something really remarkable about writing books. The books will also disappear. But not quite yet.



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117 Japanese YouTube videos I've listened to while in Japan (with commentary)

I am in Japan. I am here in residency at The Museum of Art, Kochi. During the day I meet with Tori Kudo (from Maher Shalal Hash Baz.) We are at the very beginning of our project together. Some evenings we go out. On the evenings I stay home I spend my time listening to Japanese music on YouTube. I think there is something a bit shameful about this. I should be outside seeing things, not staring at my computer as usual. But there is only so much time I can spend wandering around Matsuyama, and it is almost impossible to communicate with anyone here. (So far I have managed to learn no Japanese.)

Today we drove up into the mountains. I found the view spectacular. Half way up there was a small museum with Japanese oil paintings from the turn of the century (as well as older, more traditional works.) I was particularly struck by some very large, shadowy ink drawings of pine trees from the eighties (or of the artists memories of pine trees that no longer exist, that were killed off by a tree disease, as was explained to me.) Now I'm back at the computer and soon I'll be fast asleep

Most of this Japanese YouTube music I know almost nothing about. It's exciting to listen to music again that I know nothing about. Music that, when I google it, I get only Japanese explanations, utterly garbled by google translate so I am back where I started. I already knew the 2006 album Kyokutō Ian Shōka (Far Eastern Consolation Songs) by 戸川純ユニット (Jun Togawa) and it was the first thing I tracked down when I hit the record stores of Japan. I am listening to it now. My big internet discovery here is the 1987 12" EP Yawa Yawa by パイナップル4.9 (Pineapple 4.9). I can't believe how much I like this record. I think I just discovered it last night but maybe it was already two nights ago. I wonder how many times I'll listen to it over the next couple of weeks.

(Actually, most of this music I like a little bit less than Maher Shalal Hash Baz or Reiko Kudo. But it feels too strange to me to hang out with them and then go home and listen to their music. Something about that seems wrong, I'm not sure why exactly. Yesterday we did karaoke together. Too strange to listen to them karaoke and then immediately listen to them again on my iTunes. But they remain my favorite music.)

At night, I click on the Japanese-titled YouTube videos, not understanding a word, or even what they are, and then if I like them I cut and paste the Japanese name of the band into Google or Last FM in an attempt to learn more. Sometimes I get some information, like the name of the artist in English, and other times there is little or nothing. It's completely ridiculous. A tedious, labor intensive search for unimportant details, as if just listening was not enough in itself. And yet here are a hundred and seventeen songs, many of which suddenly feel meaningful to me. I have no idea what they're singing about, or what the context for this music might be, if other people like it, how obscure or popular it is, etc. But listening makes me feel like I'm in Japan, somehow just as much, or more, than aimlessly wandering the streets of Matsuyama or doing the all the usual tourist things. (Also it's really cold here, apparently making me want to go out a bit less.)

I've been meaning to write about the project that I am starting here with Tori but it seems it's too soon. (Actually, that's what I meant to do when I sat down to write this.) Instead there's just these one hundred and seventeen clips that I stare at while trying to think about other things, what this project I am here to make might be, might become, what is the reason for it, how to we proceed, etc. Outside the window is Japan, and on the computer screen in front of me is another form of Japan. And that's all I can think to write for now.


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A play list of 96 videos (with commentary.)

About six monts ago I posted a YouTube play list of 83 videos. In the accompanying commentary I wrote that "what I realize in a way only now, is that my blog, my YouTube Favourites, my 8Tracks mixes and my Facebook page feel more to me like my real art practice then my actual art practice. They are more a part of my daily life, I am more deeply engaged with them, they are more intimate and more public, they are not labored over and overworked in the same way my professional artistic life is, they are not marred by grant-writing and publicity. It is the old dream of art as completely interwoven with life. It is simple, lonely, semi-public and locked to a larger corporate and social network. I hope in the future that I will understand it more."

In the past six months I fear this idea has become something of a self fulfilling prophesy. Many people, including my publisher, read this text and have begun to, at least partially, see my practice in these terms. I have begun to post videos on Facebook even more frequently and, some days, it seems to me it is the only thing I manage to accomplish. Well... an internet addiction is nothing particularly original and to call it an art practice doesn't add that much surplus value to the condition. But I was hoping to think over the question a bit more.

My last book, Revenge Fantasies of the Politically Dispossessed, sold approximately four hundred copies last year, while my blog gets about one thousand hits every month. Such comparisons are a bit specious. To read a book is a much greater investment of time and attention than to glance at a blog for a few minutes. But I can't stop thinking about all of these questions and contradictions. What does it mean to be an artist in the age of the internet? The art galleries are still full of art, the theatres full of performances, clubs still full of bands - yet I can't help but feel the reality of art has moved, or is in the process of moving, elsewhere. Art as something you do, or share with, a few friends on line. And then every once in a while something goes viral.

Recently I wrote a text entitled Insincere YouTube Auteur. I've been wondering if there is a way to move my entire art practice onto YouTube. (YouTube is not just video. YouTube exists somewhere between home movies, commercials, video art, diary, b-movies and cinema. Or something like that.) I remember a student once telling me that she had a realization: more people would see a YouTube video of a baby eating a lemon in one hour than would see all of the work I make in my entire life. (I don't know if this is true but is it a startling idea nonetheless.) Yesterday I had the idea that I could take already successful YouTube videos, for example turtle humping a shoe, and put my own voice-over on top of them. Has someone already done this?

I mainly use YouTube for watching and listening to music. In this I believe I am not alone. The fact that music has plummeted from the extremely high audio quality of CD's to the almost pathetic audio quality of YouTube is also a fascinating turn of events, further proof that rock n' roll has never been about audiophiles. At a certain year in one's life, the perfect song sounds even more perfect when it sounds like shit. I think this phenomena is somehow a metaphor for art on the internet: the momentary excitement of ephemera. This has been the case for most pop culture over the course of the last hundred years. But on the internet we can all be making it. For now at least. For better or worse.


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A play list of 83 videos (with commentary.)

I made a YouTube playlist in 2010. I called it 2010. I posted it on my blog (above.) I made it because my iTunes stopped working and I was looking for a way to listen to music. I did it very quickly and simply, scrolling through my list of favourites and adding the ones I wanted to listen to over and over again. I have made many works over the past few years but somehow this YouTube playlist feels like one of the most simple and satisfying things that I’ve done. It feels like pure autobiography, that if someone were to watch it they would know far more about me than I would ever want them to (this can’t possibly be true but it feels that way.)

Some of the songs have video attached but many have only a single image or a slideshow. These images are often album covers or photographs of the singer or band. It’s strange using video to watch still images. It’s strange the collage of still images interspersed with the occasional blast of moving imagery. It is a random assortment of imagery arrived at because of music I wanted to listen to in the privacy of home. But its very randomness is telling, a mirror of the randomness of the internet.

I have always made mixed tapes/mixed CD’s for friends. Of course, the thing my YouTube playlist most resembles is one of these mixes that I have been making for as long as I can remember. But somehow it is also different. It is a mix of old favourites and songs I just discovered moments ago. It is looser, more eccentric. I did it quickly and when I watch it it continues to surprise me. I never remember what’s coming next.

In 2010 I also wrote a text about artists and the internet for the Austrian periodical Spike Magazine. In the text I say that the internet changes what it means to be an artist in ways we cannot yet get our minds around. What I didn’t say, what I realize in a way only now, is that my blog, my YouTube Favourites, my 8Tracks mixes and my Facebook page feel more to me like my real art practice then my actual art practice. They are more a part of my daily life, I am more deeply engaged with them, they are more intimate and more public, they are not labored over and overworked in the same way my professional artistic life is, they are not marred by grant-writing and publicity. It is the old dream of art as completely interwoven with life. It is simple, lonely, semi-public and locked to a larger corporate and social network. I hope in the future that I will understand it more.



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