Why I'm Not Listening to 2022 Drops

I’m a cat person. And before the groaning starts rising from the cheap seats, loving these animals has taught me a lot about myself. If I had a love language, archetyped after my favorite animal, I speak cat fluently. Recently, I learned about the term “whisker fatigue.” Basically, whisker fatigue shows up when the bowl a cat usually eats from begins to overstimulate its whiskers. The feline will consequently begin to appear agitated, simply because their feeding bowl rubs them the wrong way.

I have musical whisker fatigue. Ever since the pandemic started, I delved into the feeding bowl of streaming sites. Not a day would go by without me checking AOTY for the latest drop of the week. Every Friday, before the sun was up, I’d check my Release Radar playlist on Spotify for any gems I’d missed. And by Saturday evening, I’d make a point to check the Browse Tab on Apple Music to tie up any loose ends. All my social media on the weekends was focused on one thing and one thing only: music. And not just any kind of music. New music.

But now, I’m agitated. I’m hungry and yet dipping my psyche onto the relevant mediums for something new leaves me more frazzled than before. Music is my soul’s sustenance, but the bowl that these scrumptious snippets of sound plink into is flooding my senses. I long for the days of listening to music on the radio, when “torrent” was a fancy word for a continuous gush of water and streaming wasn’t even a thing yet. Hearing hits over and over again, listening to albums only if you really, really appreciated the artist’s work… Perhaps, this is just an offshoot of the nostalgia for pre-Covid life. But, I’d really like to go back to drip irrigation of yesteryear.

Still, I might be lying. I might listen to new stuff in the new year, simply because I want to. I must. But, I think I’ll change my approach. The same way changing a feeding bowl helps my furry faves with their fatigue, a solution for me and people like me could be found in the altering of the way we interact with music. Maybe I should savor this experience I’ve been brought into, listening to 2016 projects on repeat. Maybe I should listen to albums only once and forget them, just to get the rush of fleeting experience again. It’s only fair, really. The way things are set up now, musically, I actually could have the lived experience of nine lives.