Yo La Tengo
“You Can Have It All

I don’t post songs that much anymore. At least, you know back in the day when this tumblog was known as B. Michael’s Notebook Miscellany,¹ part of what I wanted to do was post a song every day. Every morning. We had a morning operations meeting where we’d go over different problems and ideas and stuff. ‘Work on our strat,’ as Alex Blahh would say.

You know, though, I personally don’t really listen to that many songs on Tumblr anymore.² And since I don’t do that, I guess I figure it’s not really worth posting a lot of songs, either. I mean, you could break down the reasons why I at least used to post songs.

1. I wanted to be the first to post a leak. The problem is, I don’t really have many followers, so if I was first (a perhaps unverifiable achievement, anyway), someone would post the song a few hours later and get all the reblogs. And ultimately, who cares?

2. I wanted to, like, write an essay or mini-ssay on a song. I still kind of do this. It’s OK. Tumblr’s interface is a lot nicer than many; you can embed the song in its little Flash player (grrrr, though) and then press play as you read whatever I wrote. The problem with this approach is that I don’t think people do that. A lot of times, people are at work, and they’re probably not big dorks like I, who sits with his headphones on all day. Also, it’s a lot of work to write an essay that really takes like 3:30 to read. Perhaps.

3. Annotated song lyrics. Here’s one example. And here’s another. I’m a big fan of this practice, and since hearing the song usually goes along with understanding the song, it makes sense to make these posts audio posts. They do take a while to make, though. It might be worth making a single-serving tumblog for this, but I have like a million of those. If someone wants to make one, I’d contribute occasionally. You just have to call it “B Michael’s Great Idea For This One Single-Serving Tumblog.” Jk.

4. I’m hearing the song right now, and the hearing it has inspired me to post it because I want to share this feeling I have right now with, as stupid as it sounds, with all my followers. I like this motive the most. Writing is whatever. I’m a terrible writer. Look, I just wrote, “Writing is whatever.” The whole reason why I’m all into writing about music is that I love music, and it speaks to me in really you know kind of voluminous, multi-valent, complicated ways. Ways by which words fail me. And posting the song is an invitation to participate in this feeling, in a unique way that’s inexpressible by means of words.

I believe strongly that the Audio feature of Tumblr is one of its unique selling propositions. Its player is much nicer than many embedable players, and it’s the only service that offers a native player (or at least it was, at the time). So I feel a little bad (or ‘bad,’ as it were) about not posting more audio posts. I’m going to get on that a bit more.

On the other hand. Really, how many people listen to the songs people post?