Everything Is Embarrassing

Personal Record is a subjective, critical chronicle of uneasy listening. Tune into Personal Record for everything from Music for Airports to music for dissociating in the back of the club, delivered with anxious panache.

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It’s hard to believe, what with the layoffs, and the pay rates, and the tweets that range from “distasteful” to “death threats,” but somehow, in 2023, there’s still reverence for music critics. God gives his toughest battles to his most Discog-pilled, anxiety-prone soldiers. I know this because I will sometimes dabble in the phrase — “I write about music,” I’ll say at parties, eliding the mosaic of gigs that pay my rent — and immediately, there is a tonal shift. We were talking about art, and now, we’re Talking About Art.

“What do you like to listen to?” I’ll ask, trying to steer the conversation back to mutual terrain. The answers depend on the answerer, but there’s a current of shame, brains whirring like overtaxed laptop fans to summon the right answers. No one cops to the Josh Groban record they accidentally memorized working at a gourmet grocery store, the “Twerkulator” that helped them crush their fastest mile.

The final verdicts range in genre, from punk to garage to goth to techno, but the answers people seem most satisfied with confer some sort of cachet — niche listening habits that make you rarefied, something that was dug out of a crate or on Bandcamp or through the friend who’s Ty Segall’s European touring manager that once did a ketamine retreat with Kim Gordon. Names beget names; each reference is a star we hope will form a constellation of our tastes.

Merriam-Webster defines “embarrassing” as something “causing a feeling of self-conscious confusion and distress,” but at 11pm on a Wednesday, pacing in pajamas like a feral dog to Sylvester’s “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real),” I take umbrage with part of that phrase. There is often nothing confusing about embarrassment, which is, of course, self-conscious — to be embarrassed is often to be painfully aware of your own faux-pas, to be caught open-mouthed with a can of Cheez Wiz in the stark refrigerator light. It is, for me at least, to know what you like to and to know (or suspect) exactly where it starts to cross into cringe. There are people whose bodies I’ve explored that I would not allow into my Apple Music history.

Sonically, a large portion of my diet is highly-processed and from a can, nostalgia like Say Anything’s “Alive With the Glory of Love” rubbing elbows with Supertramp’s “Goodbye Stranger” and viral TikTok hits. If, as Joan Didion said, we’re to remain on speaking terms with our past selves, how did the girl who wrote thinly-veiled John Mayer fanfiction in middle school (me) become someone who could make a two-hour playlist of niche tropicalia tracks, then rattle off a slew of modern acts carrying that torch (from Boogarins to Sessa)?

My own voyage to any semblance of “cool” is studded with the things I learned to be ashamed of, from the Train CD I spun incessantly at summer camp — legitimately kind of awful, with one exception — to the Joni Mitchell I wouldn’t cop to for a few years because it was soft and feminine, and I was trying to seem like someone who deserved a job at my college paper, in a scene where the people with power were almost all men.

I wonder sometimes about the folks who plaster their Spotify Wrapped across their social feeds, fandoms shoved willy-nilly into an incongruous list. In that stark light, exposed by the algorithm like a roach on the bathroom floor, I would be revealed for all my embarrassing contradictions. I would have my critical authority snatched like a bad wig (let’s not talk about critical authority; I’m not sure who has it, who deserves it, whether it even exists). The karaoke hits butt up against the multifaceted ten-minute instrumentals, and sometimes, as I hope we all know and can admit to ourselves, we want very few facets. We want “What Is Love” loud in the aisles of the liquor store, but we want our acquaintances to see us as people emblematized by Black Country, New Road or Mandy, Indiana.

I raised this question to a group of friends this weekend. We’d just slugged nips of espresso liqueur and were toggling through things we once loved too zealously — My Chemical Romance, Regina Spektor, the soundtrack to RENT. Someone mentioned a boomer that wears flat caps and sings wholesomely and earnestly; we decided that maybe earnestness is the axis upon which this all tilts, a song that takes itself too seriously or can’t take a joke, and so becomes one.