I will buy you some music
Welcome to Reasonable Things, an occasional newsletter about music, language, and meaning from Joel Heng Hartse.
A new academic year is beginning, I’ve got innumerable writing project on various burners, and I’m reading a lot of books. Despite the vagaries of 21st century living, it’s good to be alive and doing stuff! I hope I’ll have more to share in the coming months.
All I have to say today, though, is this:
I want to buy you some music.
I’m increasingly disillusioned with almost all forms of online life, and looking for ways to extricate myself from it. (It would have been better to have never gotten involved from the beginning, of course, but who was I to know that accepting a Friendster invitation in 1999 would lead us all down a path of societal collapse?) This is especially true of my relationship to art and media. I buy more books than I used to, and more records. I just got a cassette and CD player. I go to more concerts than I used to, which has been awesome.
I’m reading Liz Pelly’s book Mood Machine, a history of Spotify, and it’s making me want to remove this platform from my music-listening habits, in large part because it is a business that doesn’t actually care about music. I haven’t cancelled my subscription yet, and I recognize that digital music is, for better or for worse, a big part of our culture, so I want to point more people to Bandcamp, a platform that I think is more ethical and human than most others. (Though it’s not perfect by any means.)
Today is Bandcamp Friday, which means all proceeds from Bandcamp sales will go directly to the artists rather than the platform taking a cut. I used to do this on Twitter (another platform I am happy to no longer be using), but I’ll just do it here, directly — here’s your invitation:
Reply to this email with a description of the kind of music you like. you can be as general or specific as you want. Please do this by about 7 pm pacific time on Friday, Sept. 5, the sooner the better.
I will buy you an album or EP on Bandcamp that will be gifted to you via the email that you used to email me.
That’s it! Email me now and I will send you some music!
♥
JHH
Vancouver, BC