Secular church

Alexa play "The Strokes."

I begin the process of emptying out the coffee machine and the algorithm chooses to get me going withe guitar solo intro to "Last Nite." Is that the Strokes song I play the most? Haven't actually played a lot of Strokes recently - brain just went there. I pour the grounds into the garbage as Julian relays a conversation he had over 20 years ago.

I ask my college friends if they remember this one as I winkingly put on "Battleflag" by the Lo-Fidelity All-Stars - the song one housemate would blare without warning and without fail multiple days a week. We laugh and devolve into stories from years past as the song buzzes and fades far from perception.

I press play on Spotify on my Android as I brace for the cold outside my apartment. I walk through Brooklyn listening to my specific sequencing for GZA's Liquid Swords, which frontloads the top tracks. I unequally trifurcate my attention to avoid vehicular death, run through my todo list and the music blaring in my ears. I miss the Ghostface verse on 4th Chamber "Is the sky-blue Bally kid in '83 rocked Tale Lords? and rewind to the beginning.

Music permeates our lives, but it is too often a background, an afterthought. We reach for it so often that it just bleeds into everything else. A forgotten soundtrack to our lives.

Before the mp3-music-video-CD-cassette-LP-phonograph-radio, there was live music. Of course, the distribution of music through various pieces of hardware and software is among the most important cultural moments in civilization. It made the beauty of music available to almost everyone - at exponential exposure at a fraction of the cost of trying to replicate in person.

Yet, still, touring was still the thing in the early days of recorded music. Some might say singles and albums during those early days were promotional material for tours. But, eventually, bands like the Beatles, Kraftwerk and others started using technology to record music in the studios that proved very difficult to play live. In the case of the former, they just stopped touring at the absolute height of their fame.

Eventually, the paradigm flipped tour were in service of the albums instead of something a band just did annually like clockwork. When 6.7M+ kids flush with cash didn't blink an eye at plopping down $19.99 for the latest grunge rock album, touring didn't seem as financially necessary as before.

Now, bands are getting paid fractions of pennies for their albums online while tours produce a lucrative lifeline. Bands old enough to have lived through the era of well-compensated recorded music can tour as much as their heart contents, but for bands that grew up in the streaming era, this is a livelihood.

Maybe that's the point. Inasmuch as I would want any band that creates an inordinate happiness and joy in tens of thousands of people not need to do anything but make records to live prosperous lives, it seems unlikely to put that genie back in the bottle. Streaming killed the recording star, and bands need to hit the road to make the money they previously got through their albums and singles.

While many bands may love the euphoria that comes with even one hundred rapt fans, others may hate it. But that's the bands. Our compact with the bands that make the music we love is that we meet them on the road to witness them, buy merch, and support them.

But, it's not just for them. For us, it's a return to the solitary focus on the music. No household chores, no loud bar din, no haltered conversations. It's our church and the music is our sermon. It's the foreground and it reminds us, once again, what it means to surrender to the sound.