Mike Zahn On This Magic Moment
To my ears, the global pandemic muffled the last echoes of postwar Anglo-American pop music as it’s been heard since the Fifties. My intuition was shaped by psychic distances traveled while sensing these vibrations, and gained clarity when sorting through modish archives of sound which animated memories of my musical experience. When these past months unfolded as they did, I resolved the discipline of quarantine would bring with it opportunities for fresh surprises. To this end, my response to Covid-19 demanded an imperative to discover the contemporary, revisit the familiar, and reflect upon the venerable. Counting the days accommodated my new routines, with Spotify remodeling the promise of free-form FM radio. Given minimal effort, I became my own program director, and compiled playlists for time spent in the studio, the car, and the kitchen.
When Frank asked for this contribution, my interest was piqued by his observation that the 45 rpm record was in truth the prototypical form of the download. It served as such before the fact. I liked the implications of his comment, as it recognized novelty and ephemera weren’t unique to streaming content. Nor was this anything unusual. While nothing is more discarnate than code, the fleeting and fugacious have always induced how meaning accrues to music. Indeed, the format of the throwaway single was designed to be transient, pressed in a million copies heard over and over again, here, there, and everywhere. Despite the numbers, these small vinyl disks carried within them an intimacy capable of forging emotional bonds which sometimes lasted decades. I shared these feelings with Frank. In them, we grasped an understanding that our current moment marks the return of the song, that thing which the auteurist primacy of the long-playing album had obscured since the mid-Sixties.
I’ll suggest there is, or was, nothing normal about all to which I’ve alluded. There exists now a chance to make things new, again. The mystery of the new is that it’s always just that, new. It’s never normal. This may be especially so now that summer’s here, and the time is right.
When Frank asked for this contribution, my interest was piqued by his observation that the 45 rpm record was in truth the prototypical form of the download. It served as such before the fact. I liked the implications of his comment, as it recognized novelty and ephemera weren’t unique to streaming content. Nor was this anything unusual. While nothing is more discarnate than code, the fleeting and fugacious have always induced how meaning accrues to music. Indeed, the format of the throwaway single was designed to be transient, pressed in a million copies heard over and over again, here, there, and everywhere. Despite the numbers, these small vinyl disks carried within them an intimacy capable of forging emotional bonds which sometimes lasted decades. I shared these feelings with Frank. In them, we grasped an understanding that our current moment marks the return of the song, that thing which the auteurist primacy of the long-playing album had obscured since the mid-Sixties.
I’ll suggest there is, or was, nothing normal about all to which I’ve alluded. There exists now a chance to make things new, again. The mystery of the new is that it’s always just that, new. It’s never normal. This may be especially so now that summer’s here, and the time is right.
| Mike Zahn is a visual artist who lives in Brooklyn.