Automating music discovery through algorithms has forever changed the way we learn about and consume new music. But have we lost something precious along the way?

I moved to Seattle in the summer of ’96 and left just after a year. I would not stay put. In the five years after college I’d move to Ocean City, Maryland, to my birthplace in Allentown, PA — then Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Seattle, the south of France, then back to Seattle. I didn’t have much of a music collection, but the one thing I always took wherever I moved was my small box of CDs and cassettes.

You could argue I’d moved to Seattle at the wrong time because Kurt Cobain had just died, Soundgarden had split up (the Screaming Trees too), Alice in Chains’ singer was dead, and Pearl Jam — well, the more I listened, the more I didn’t care for Pearl Jam. Mudhoney still played but they hadn’t made the scene like the others, it seemed like they were still playing in their basement. Grunge had come and gone.

But if grunge was like the smarter kid brother to metal, with its punk-like sensibilities and lyrical depth, there was still another descendant. That’s the scene I entered in ’96: heavy on the guitars and emo-like vocals, but decidedly weird. Much of the influence came from a city 75 miles south of Seattle, the state’s capital, Olympia, WA, and a former band leader who’d started an independent record label with his mom, Calvin Johnson.

K-records had been around for almost 15 years by the time I arrived to the Pacific Northwest. The way we learned about things pre-internet was a lot different then, rich with surprise. My new friend Don had turned me on to Modest Mouse, a trio from nearby Issaquah, hardly adults: their new EP featured the K-records logo on the bottom corner. You could even hear Calvin in the background vocals on some songs, his distinct baritone.

And then the band Built to Spill, on the eastern boundary of the PNW in Boise, Idaho: they had a project going with Calvin called The Halo Benders, again with that K-records logo. Beck had just made his world debut with Odelay: now here he was in Olympia recording with Calvin and cutting an indie-looking record with grainy photos and rough-sounding production.

As a young, would-be writer set loose in the wilderness I made this music my soundtrack with Calvin Johnson my inspiration. It wasn’t the music he made as much as the DIY ethos: a kind of, this-is-how-I-sound-and-I-don’t-give-a-damn sound. It seemed his mission was less about the music and more about its independence from corporate America, a middle finger to ‘the man.’

As I learned more I discovered Calvin was connected to Ian MacKaye, of Fugazi and Minor Threat fame, who’d started an independent record label on the east coast and given rise to a movement called straight edge, promoting abstinence from alcohol and other drugs, an all-ages scene where the price of admission was low (roughly $5) for a long list of performers. The emphasis was on the music, the people making it and enjoying it, not on the profits or partying.

I experienced this once at a small Seattle venue called The Velvet Elvis, where Calvin’s latest project Dub Narcotic Sound System was playing, featuring several other bands from the region. In a rare moment of live music sobriety I felt the punk DIY ethos myself when Calvin invited the audience to join the band on stage and dance at the end of the show. I rocked out beside the drummer, who just smiled and nodded at me as he drummed, a time (unlike many other live shows) I’ll always remember, though now more than 25 years in the past.

The PNW scene felt small like that, the more you got into it. I’d even see Calvin at a live show once and introduce myself: he was there to see the same band as me, and had a kind of skittery quality I couldn’t pinpoint as shyness or self-consciousness, maybe both, with his large, wandering eyes and fur-lined jacket, a pair of obscenely large headphones gripping his neck. I just told him how much his music meant to me and he said thanks. And then I walked away feeling dumb.

Or the time I met the singer’s mom from Modest Mouse wearing one of their T-shirts at a Starbucks where she worked, and her telling me her son was Isaac. Or the woman I had lunch with once who was trying to get a job at my office, who said her husband played drums (for Built to Spill) and she’d managed Modest Mouse on their first two albums, when they were so young she had to buy them beer.

The scene felt small, because it was, and the only way you could learn about it was through word of mouth. Through going out and meeting people, going to shows, talking to record store employees, listening to college radio. It was a time rich with surprise.

And maybe that’s what I miss most these days, is the loss of surprise. The organic discovery of inter-connections and influences that used to come from talking to people and making new friends — now that comes from algorithms. From machines or people we don’t know.

With music now so readily available and consumable, has it lost its value — and diminished the value of those making it? When discovery is spoon-fed from technology vs. happened-upon through circumstance? Have we lost the mystery?

Maybe, to play off Calvin’s first band name, the “beat” has happened. What’s next is no mystery.

Categories: Memoir, music, writing

Tags: grunge, K records, pacific northwest