Summer Album Blues

Things are not normal right now. That sentence has been repeated and emphasized and proven by the tragic churn of empirical evidence so many times through the first half of 2020 that it hardly bares being treated like anything but an obvious conclusion. This is not breaking news for the overwhelming majority of us.

A loosening grip on normalcy brings many changes to how we view the smaller and less identifiable rhythms and patterns our culture has spent years upon years getting used to and then, in turn, utilizing to grapple with the ebbs and flows of time. We are in multiple crises involving employment, finance, interpersonal politics, law enforcement overreach (note: this list is not comprehensive), and it’s all slathered in the bitter salve of a worldwide pandemic that reared its head seemingly on purpose into in the exact moment when it could cause the most possible anxiety and lack of control. While our large-scale worries get reinforced with stunning frequency, concerns whose smaller scopes make them harder to perceive get disrupted as well. We may find that these less noticeable things are the ones that we stand to lose in more lasting and fundamental ways.

One of the admittedly minor circadian cadences that could be on a precipice right now is the idea of “the record(s) of the summer.” For many music fans, the seasons bring a chance to refresh and reset with new groups of tunes or albums that reflect the nature of the times clearly and give them new motivational soundtracks for launching into activities based on time of year, weather, etc. Many fans may also adopt albums for other times: autumn, school year, calendar months, or any of hundreds of other times as they see fit. Mileage varies with this concept across fandom, and there is no right or wrong way to do it - as a fan, you just do you. 

This thought occurred for me as I listened to The Strokes’ newest album recently, The New Abnormal - and, no, its “Eternal Summer” centerpiece had nothing to do with it other than it being a bit of cheeky coincidence. This was the album that I had earmarked as what would probably end up being my personal summertime collection of jams, the one that would create a punch bowl for others to be thrown into and compared against throughout the dog days. These decisions are not scientific and they can easily change, but this one has an impressive list of characteristics in its favor: springtime release, arguably triumphant return from a revered band, high energy earworminess, blazing riffs, singability, Rick Rubin’s deft producing hand, and on and on. (I’m not trying to convince anyone here that they should also adopt this idea, it’s just how the record was slated in my head for how I thought it would fit into the reconfiguration of my mental wiring from early year into mid-year.)

Lest I seem intractable, it’s worth pointing out that there are many albums that would easily qualify as the “summer record” this year. The messianic rock-as-salvation epic of Dogleg’s Melee is a demolition derby of sheer energy and bluster; Lady Gaga’s Chromatica brings together influences and guests in ways that reflect her talent for art-pop as well as fostering a new global sense of community; Run the Jewel’s fourth record showcases El-P and Killer Mike only pushing each other harder, tightening up their prowesses even more (somehow) as they near a decade of near-flawless work together; Empty Country’s self-titled debut could be the perfect country-tinged travelogue for driving through any big-sky country, wherever one might find it. The list only goes on from there. 

But as I listened back to The New Abnormal recently, I couldn’t escape the idea that some of the shine had come off of it and that it didn’t feel any longer like it was my summer record. Since its release in April, there have been no changes or degradations to the album’s quality, my opinion of the songs hasn’t gotten more negative, the LP hasn’t been overplayed (for me), and it’s not suddenly less applicable for a summer-tinged lifestyle. With all that being the case, how and why would I get to place where I somehow enjoy the album less?

Here’s the thing: it’s not the album’s fault.

In all my years of music appreciation, whether as a professional who operates a sleek Squarespace domain online, or as a top-seeded amateur over beers with friends, albums have waxed and waned in my estimation countless times. This is usually a result of my personal relationship and history with the work. Hearing it too much can dilute it over time and its charm can die a death of a thousand cuts. Changes to personal fortunes can hit and associating them to music could make that music difficult to go back to. The songs could just pick up an aura of staleness as my tastes change in other, perhaps unrelated ways.

That isn’t what happened here though. The supposed album of my 2020 summer didn’t do anything to elicit a new layer of coldness in my estimation. What happened was that summer itself arrived and it wasn’t what I’ve come to expect it to be over my few decades on Earth.

All the aforementioned uncertainties in the world and upheavals in political thought have conspired along with things in my own life to make it so that my outlook is but a wispy apparition of the well-defined, if fallible, instrument it used to be. The way I’m relating to art and culture is changing in ways I was not planning on and am definitively not ready for in any way, shape, or form. The timekeeping signal of summer’s commencement is now nearly meaningless in that it doesn’t strictly coincide with newness or recalibration in the same way that it used to for me in my life. Look on social media anytime and see laments of users asking if it matters what day it is or making jokes (and valid observations) about how our current situation is a shit show given that much of the world is under restriction and/or lockdown. Effectively, time, as a social construct, is losing its edge and its importance. This only makes sense, as the construct of society itself slips further daily into a maelstrom. 

So, 2020 kind of stole my summer album. That’s more than a little bit of a bummer.

But this isn’t an argument to maintain grips on these things at all costs. As society pulls itself apart and hopefully quickly reassembles ideologically, economically, structurally, and in all the other ways that it needs to, the fact will be that some of our less-important rituals and paradigms will need to shift. This is but a part of growth and evolution. Some of these things may fall apart completely. There is a school of thought that would argue that these changes are healthy as they offer us the opportunity to grow, and I don’t doubt that one bit (dependent on the specific change).

We actually need to embrace these changes from whichever side we come at them from. I won’t push my sociological POV other than to say that I am on the side of justice, acceptance, and reform across a broad swath of American thought and philosophy. Wherever we stand as individuals in a free society we should safely have reasonable discourse on all the topics that are affecting our planet right now, and there is no shortage of action items to discuss meaningfully and fix.

Summer albums could be a thing of the past, or they may be absent for a bit while we sort things out. I think that I myself will probably be OK if it’s never the same again, if that’s the way it shakes out. I’ll take a better world for all of us. I’ll do all I can to argue for fairness and encourage healthy policies that empower citizens. I’ll be beyond happy when we are employed again, healthy again, able to stop looking over our shoulders for whatever boogeyman is coming for us next. 

If after all this all I’ve been forced to give up are a few of the more inconsequential bellwethers of entertainment culture that I spent part of my lifetime getting used to, I’ll be able to happily live in that new abnormal.