Ah, Millennial Optimism
Updated: 7 hours ago
Millennial optimism, now there’s an oxymoron, I think to myself as I empty a cup of Matcha Latte down my throat. It’s not as voluptuous a baddie as the one from Meraki, I’m talking about the drink, not the drunken. But it is easier on the wallet by a good 30 bucks.
Yet honestly, when I searched #millennialoptimism on Instagram, kids had, to my surprise, re-discovered the Flickr aesthetic of yore. From back when there wasn’t much going on and YouTube was independent and full of weird-ass vids. Hell had yet to break loose on the present scale, AI wasn’t a thing outside well-funded laboratories and it had trouble adding numbers. Our good Professor Ugail hadn’t yet come up with an innovative approach for the mathematical modelling of faces to be used by surveillance tech. Limewire was where you went for pirated music, and of course various iterations of Piratebay. People built their little music libraries on portable HDDs with Windows Media Player and Winamp. Doped out hippies watched Milkdrop visualisations of their favourite tracks with frissons of delight.
On the whole, the Internet was really liberating, bringing people together, likeminded people who followed each other on Blogspot and later Tumblr. There wasn’t much hate. Quite little hate. Or at least I encountered very little of it in chatrooms like #kotari on mIRC. Meanwhile, thoughtless people would fill their Twitter, when it arrived, with their breakfast photos and inane observations, like a Seinfeld episode sans humour. And equally moronic people would like them.
And when old Donald’s presidency was just a Flickr in Matt Groening’s eye, George Bush Jr was the worst American president ever – he started the second Iraq War and the War on Terror on falsified pretexts. There was war then, Palestine wasn’t free. But in the decade before the Wall Street Crash of ‘08, we in Raajje had a window to thrive.
Maumoon’s rule was slackening, giving way to the will of the people. There was a clear demarcation between good and evil, about what was worth fighting for. There was an appetite for modernisation, for human and civil rights, to ‘engage in full intercourse’ with other nations as our first President Mohamed Amin Didi said in a book on the Maldives, the man can’t resist a double entendre.
Yameen Rasheed and Moyameeha were still alive and commenting prolifically on the blogosphere. Minivan News and Dhivehi Observer were going for Maumoon’s jugular. Facebook was not full of fake news, the term was yet to enter the common lexicon.
Baywatch, the CD Store in Male was still making sales. We bought 200 Rufiyaa CDs after thumbing through magazines of rich friends, glossies like Spin and Mojo and Kerrang! And Metal Hammer. And after heated discussions about the merits of bands vs other bands. Radiohead vs Bjork. Soundgarden vs Nirvana. Fiona Apple vs Tori Amos. Locally, Illsight vs Violet Addiction vs Tumour. Ziya Abbas was still alive.
But I want this to be a piece about the tunes. Metallica was feuding with Napster, you should read up on that, but little has changed: they were dicks then and old dicks now. But if you wanted to escape the stultifying range of music available in Raajje you had to look beyond the taste of your friend circle and venture out into the unknown. Maybe read reviews on tinymixtapes, or even Pitchfork, which was not yet bought out by Conde Nast and did funny pieces like this one on Jet’s album. It was a golden age of music journalism, where writers engaged deeply with the music sans assistance from GPTs. In 2001 Warp Records darling Aphex Twin released Drukqs while another Warped star Autechre dropped Confield, both masterful albums that greatly impacted yours truly and put the ‘experimentality’ of Radiohead in context. It was an era of promise, of human endeavour reaching sublime heights. No machine was imitating us, we did not see machines as possible encroachers of our territory, cannibalisers of human artistry. Art was safe. Music was safe. Writing was safe.
My boss showed me a song he’d made for his little son on Suno. He made me listen to all of it, his expression beatific, like it was his own creation. But he is not a man for art, art means little in a world of prompts. Maybe it’s the friction from a person who hadn’t grown up with AI, who remembers a time when skills had to be honed over years and decades to make something worthwhile. Now, there’s a great democratisation of skills – anyone can make art. And maybe that’s OK. I’m certainly not writing on AI, what would be the point? The process of making sense of your thoughts, arranging them in sequence, the feel of the words against your thinking organ. Which I know prompters on AI miss out on, but maybe it’s me with my privilege calling out persons of lesser ability. Not everything was rosy in our time, far from it, but human effort was valued, and greatly so. Anyhow, let me make you a playlist. A decidedly millennial one.
Before that, though, just how did we millennials listen to music? Those of us who had some means listened on cassettes bought from any of the several shops that had music blasting so hard you could hear it from yards out. Charlie was one, Soundtrack another. That’s when we knew what to buy, reading through those magazines. And a CD from Baywatch was maybe a yearly treat for yours truly. We listened to whole albums and this has been said a lot, but if you bought an album on the basis of a good review on Mojo, and couldn’t get into it, well. You were dead. All that money was dead. The best you could do was hope for an exchange with a friend. Unless you were a real smooth talker like a friend of mine, who went to Soundtrack and exchanged my Peter Andre album for Megadeth’s Youthanasia. Which I listened to so much, I knew the solos by heart. Not that I played the guitar, but I could run the notes in my mind.
Now, tracks are conveniently skippable, and the search functions and algorithms are basically replacing all our tastemakers. Who reads music journalism but other music journalists, I wonder. But I’d like to think there is space for this, at least in Raajje, where some kind of curatorial and appraising hand can work its magic and help find the nuggets at a time when our music is proliferating and maturing, as you can clearly see from acts like Pest and LFM. So now, without further ado, a millennial playlist if you will.
Comments