Blog

Short blog posts, journal entries, and random thoughts. Topics include a mix of personal and the world at large.

Year of NewJeans

Is my 2023 top 10 list of songs going to be mostly NewJeans?

I absolutely cannot stop listening to NewJeans’ latest pre-release EP, featuring the songs Super Shy and New Jeans. Both are the typical NewJeans flavor: catchy, cute, innovative, and super fun. Best of all, there’s more music to come as the full mini album is coming out next week. Expectations are rightfully very high.

NewJeans’ release at the beginning of this year - the tracks Ditto and OMG - has already solidify their place in my 2023 top 10. Unless a new song blows me away during the second half of this year, Ditto is likely number one (I’ve play the song more than 800 times already). A melancholic, hauntingly beautiful track that talks about platonic longing for a special someone.

So that’s two slots taken, with Super Shy and New Jeans knocking dangerously on the doors, and more releases coming up. Can I really dedicate half the slots to one group? That last time this happened was back in 2015, when Red Velvet came out with Ice Cream Cake EP and The Red album. Coincidentally, the creative director at the time for Red Velvet was Min Hee-jin, who is now the executive producer of NewJeans. Talk about someone tremendously good at her craft…

The 2023 list is going to be tough. Which is a good thing because who’s complaining about lots good music? Contenders also are aespa's My World EP, and LE SSERAFIM’s Unforgiven album. Both features songs I’ve been really digging. Why does it look like all I listen to are Kpop female groups, you ask? That’s where the innovation is, my friends. Kpop male groups are all trying to do the tough guy BTS thing. That gets tiring after the fifth track that sounds exactly the same.

Hello, boredom

How is the no-twitter experience going for me? The complete lack of any social media! One word: boredom. Boredom is back in my life with a vengeance, and I have to say, it’s alright. Instead of watching the twitter feed scroll by on a separate monitor at work, I just zone out. Sure there was an initial itch to take out the phone, only to realize there aren’t any social media apps on there either. I either sit with the boredom, or go chat with my coworkers.

Boredom it is!

Twitter was how I got the news in the morning. The problem was: after I’ve read up on the latest news, the scrolling afterwards can be endless. Since deactivating my account, I’ve been relying on actual website. The good thing about those is the amount of new content is finite. I’d look at ESPN for the scores, and that’s it. No more scrolling. It’s really liberating.

What I do instead is simply lie on the couch and listen to music. Remember when we use to do that exclusively? Music wasn’t just background accompaniment. Back in the days of cassette and compact discs, we’d put on an album and listen to in attentively all the way through. No social media to distract, no smartphone to scroll through. I’ve reclaimed some of that experience, and it’s quite nice and relaxing.

It is said that the smartphone killed boredom. We’re so stuck to our phones now that I don’t think we know how to handle boredom. The horror of having to stew in our own thoughts for even one second. The itch to bring out the phones whenever we encounter boredom is immense. Would you be able to stand in a grocery store line just standing, waiting? You’d probably be the odd-looking one out. There’s something wrong with you, who is not face deep into your smartphone.

Yearly music top 10

It’s weird seeing people posting their Spotify and Apple Music yearly wrap-ups when there’s still a whole month to go in 2022. What if there’s a new release in December that you simply cannot stop playing over and over? That song or album would count towards this year, right? I don’t know, it just seems like people are treating December as a throwaway month. As if it’s already time to wind down 2022, even though there’s still 31 more days to go.

As for me, I don’t stream music from any platform, so no year-end wrap ups for me to show. Like a dinosaur I still buy and download each album, then use iTunes to catalog them all. There’s something to not being beholden to an Internet connection to enjoy my tunes. I’m sure Spotify and the like allow users to download playlists. Music is super important to me, so I rather have actual files that I can fully backup onto an external location. A lot would have to go wrong for me to lose it all.

Not that a year-end wrap of my musical listening would be of great interest to you readers anyways. Every song on the list would be Kpop, the only genre of music I’ve listen to for the past decade. I do make my own top 10 songs of the year, which you can check out in my year-end blog post that comes out on the 31st of December. That list is not about the most plays, however. What counts is the impact and meaning a new (to me) song has during 2022.

And there’s been times when a new song coming out in December have made it onto my year-end list. There might be one this year!

The end of the line

My very first iPod was the fourth-generation model. 20 large gigabytes of raw MP3 storage power. It retailed for $300, which is a hefty sum for a young high school kid who had to rely on his parents to make the purchase. Parents who weren’t rich to begin with, because otherwise I wouldn’t have had to wait until the fourth iteration to buy an iPod. I think I was still rocking a CD player before getting it; the cheaper alternatives simply would not suffice.

20 gigabytes was very well large enough to fit my entire MP3 collection back then. Almost all of it downloaded from infamous peer-to-peer sharing sites such as BearShare and Kazaa. Surely the statute of limitations have ran out on that sort of stuff, right? But what a revelation that was: my whole music library right in the palm of my hands. No more burning and swapping CDs. Music listening was never going to be same again.

Until my iPod got unceremoniously strong-armed robbed from me during junior year. Those days, the white-colored headphone cords - iconic to the iPod mystique - made any wearer an obvious target to thieves. Much like smartphone thefts of today, dudes would come up and snatch the iPod right out from your hands before you can even react.

I didn’t get another iPod until my freshman year of college. When I actually had my own money to spend yet another $300 on one. This time it was the 5th-generation normal size iPod that featured a color LCD and can play video. That thing got me through most of college, until I got my very first smartphone - an iPhone 4, Verizon edition - sometime during year four. The iPhone rendered the iPod redundant and obsolete, just like video did to the radio star.

So that was my experience with the most famous MP3 player of all time. Apple announced yesterday the last of the iPods - the iPod touch - has reached its end of life. The legendary lineage that revolutionized the music industry is no more. A hearty salute to a key piece of consumer tech history.

Waiting for class

On my daily walk to work, I would see students parked along each side of 19th Avenue. Now that 50 percent of courses are back in physical session, there’s quite a few of them every morning. I would see the students sit in their cars whist waiting for their classes to start. It brings me back to my own college days. Instead of 19th Avenue, I would park at the other side of campus on Lake Merced Drive. I too have to get there early in the morning just to snatch a parking spot.

But I wouldn’t sit in my car to wait for classes to begin, however. Partly because I didn’t have a smartphone until my fourth year of college. The kids these days have it easy! Super fast Internet device at the palm of their hands. I too would chill in my Toyota Corolla if I had an iPhone back then. Instead I went to the library or the student union and sat there, listening to music on my iPod. Remember those?

Speaking of music, a few days ago the streaming service Spotify had an outage. One of my friends texted the group saying he now has to listen to his own MP3 collection, which only dates out to around 2010. I of course don’t have such problems. Unlike everybody else, I have not made the transition to streaming. To this day I continue to buy and download my music, stored completely on device. Not as a defense against Internet outages, but more like I’m a digital hoarder and prefer to have my curated collection.

179 gigabytes and counting…

But that’s the thing with streaming: there’s always this theoretical possibility that the services will go out of business and then you wouldn’t have access to your music anymore. Or your TV shows and movies. Videos I tend to watch once and forget about it, so losing access wouldn’t hurt. Music, however, I listen to constantly every single day. Therefore I would like some modicum of insurance in case shit happens. So long as I can still buy individual songs and albums on the iTunes Store, I will continue to do so.

Doing nothing

Well, I did it. I managed to do absolutely nothing for about four hours yesterday afternoon, and I don’t feel one ounce of guilt about it. All I did was sat in the chair and listen to music, periodically glancing at the twitter feed, or chatting with my friends on text. Normally on a holiday like yesterday’s Labor Day, I would be taking advantage to do more. Even if it’s just watching the backlog of subscribed shows on Youtube, in my mind that’s way more productive than getting lost in music for a few hours.

Finally, some progress.

I’m the type of person who uses busyness as a gauze for any mental anxiety I’m dealing with. So long as I’m being productive, I won’t then have the time to face any internal demons. Obviously it works for awhile, but then I’d have to keep going always. If I ever stop, then I will have to think about those other unpleasant things. For better and for worse, the feeling of accomplishment salves the pain.

It works, until it doesn’t.

Of course then even when I’m otherwise mentally okay and feeling content, the urge to keep productive remains. This is why I generally cannot relax and do nothing; weekends are for more stuff, not less! This is the toxic side of “time is your most precious commodity” that people seldom talk about. We try to cram as much life in as possible, not allowing any moments of stoppage. As with anything in life, too much towards any extreme is bad for you.

What’s all the toil during the workweek for if I can’t lounge around in daydream for half the weekend day? Life is enough of a cyclical hamster wheel as is. No need to make it worse. Daze on, my friends.

Forgot how good it sounds

A crucial component of my piano learning setup is a proper set of headphones. The Yamaha CP88 keyboard I bought doesn’t have any speakers built-in. I don’t think my housemates want to hear my horrible beginner's pecking for an hour every single day, so some discreet headphones is the way to go. Not to half-ass anything - look at the price of the piano alone - I went for a pair of relatively expensive beyerdynamic DT 770 PRO.

Sound quality is important, but so is comfort. If I’m going to be wearing headphones for hours, I don’t want to feel burdened by them after 30 minutes. The DT 770 PRO fulfills that superbly, with excellent comfort and zero fatigue after an hour of wear. I would probably use the beyerdynamics to listen to music regularly, if not for the fact it is corded.

Indeed, after many years of wireless music listening with various AirPods and Bose noise-cancelling headphones, it’s very difficult to go back to being tethered to a cord. There’s no freedom to move, with means wearing them to cook or exercise is a complete non-starter. The cord being there at all can get in the way and be rather annoying. The only reason I went with wired cans to pair with the piano is because I don’t want to introduce any lag.

Well, and also because the CP88 keyboard doesn’t support any wireless connections.

I did try using the DT 770 PRO for some typical music listening, and I have to say I had absolutely forgotten how awesome a good pair of headphones can sound. The clarity of the bass and high notes is amazing. My AirPods sound like crap in comparison, as bad as the headphones they hand out for free on airplanes. It’s kind of funny how much quality we are willing to trade away in the name of convenience.

Not to say I’m giving up the wireless stuff anytime soon. However, I think for serious music listening - like hearing an album for the first time - I’m going to plug in the beyerdynamics from now on.