The Nine-Month Band
There’s So Much Music We’re Running Out
A Nine Month Band: A band that you know, like, and have followed for their whole career, but that you will often forget even exists for nine months or more at a time because there is just too much music to keep up with it all and you’re just too damn busy anyway.
When I first heard “Even Flow” by Pearl Jam, it was the fall of 1991. I listened to it on repeat for weeks. It had a huge impact on me. It caused me to act strangely. Yet I almost never listen to it any more, and at the rate music is being created, it is not unreasonable to think that I might never hear it again (after I listen to it for this article). Caught without an ark in the midst of a truly Noachian deluge of music and media, I fear we will never again see a common shore.
In the early-’90s, our family was in what you might call a rough patch. My grandfather’s construction company, where my dad and one uncle had worked, had gone under in 1986. So that year, my two closest cousins moved with their mom and dad (my dad’s brother) from our idyllic Midwestern hometown to California, promised home of Davis-Bacon Act high-wage construction work. Our nuclear family decamped to Omaha for a year and then set out for California ourselves in 1987, my dad a Reagan-era Tom Joad. Long story quipped: It all didn’t work out like he had hoped, and we were back in Nebraska four years later.
We had owned a tidy house next door to my grandparents when we’d lived in the prairie burgh where the erstwhile family company had been based. Now the four of us we were living in a two-bedroom apartment in a complex called Coach House. The kids at school called it Roach House (obviously). My dad delivered pizzas at night to make ends meet.
It had been a hot summer, the one right before high school for me. I was queasy with nerves. We’d lived in Omaha for one year in fourth grade, but I’d lost touch with my Omaha friends while we were in California. I’d also missed junior high in Omaha so I was headed to high school alone.
I had adolescent fantasies about joining the Navy, so after meeting with the guidance counselor that summer, I’d signed up for Junior ROTC, which is ROTC (the U.S. military’s Reserve Officers’ Training Corps) but, you know, for kids! (Another reason I’d joined was my unease about the idea of showering in gym class — I’d done it in junior high in California where I had had friends and the oldest kids were fourteen, and that was bad enough —J ROTC counted as gym and you didn’t have to shower. I think about a quarter of the kids in it were there for that reason alone.) JROTC turned out to be utterly ridiculous, social suicide, and a big mistake all around, but that’s a story for another time.
In JROTC I quickly made a friend, Bud. To this day, he is the only person from high school that I keep in touch with and by far the longest-running friend in my life. We had another friend, Randy, who was a couple years older. He had a driver’s license and a girlfriend.
While in California from the fall of 1987 to the spring of 1991, I’d listened to whatever was on the radio. But stations were local and radio was better then. I remember traveling to different parts of the country at that time to find that they were actually playing different songs on the airwaves when you went to different places. That experience is largely extinct today. What’s more, even the nationally popular, Top-40 music included a lot more rock back then, as well as some great early rap and hip-hop.
Right before we left California, I remember getting Shake Your Money Maker by the Black Crowes on cassette. I listened to it so much that on the breaks between songs I could hear a song from the other side playing in reverse. The tape melted on the dashboard of the car one day under the Central Valley sun.
While we lived in California, my friends and I wore out License to Ill and Eazy Duz It. We gawked at the videos for Chris Isaak’s “Wicked Game” and Billy Idol’s “Cradle of Love.” We listened to great rock like Guns ’n’ Roses, but also a lot of forgettable, hairsprayed junk from Nelson, Poison, Warrant, and the like. We weren’t the most popular guys in school by a long shot, but we knew girls, we sneaked into parties, we listened to music, we went to the mountains, we went to the ocean. We had a blast.
But when we moved back to Omaha in the fall of ’91, everything changed. Personally, I was starting over in a new school at probably the worst time for that to happen to a kid — between junior high and high school. That was pretty bad. Musically, Nirvana’s Nevermind and Pearl Jam’s Ten were released. That was pretty amazing.
“Even Flow” hadn’t yet been officially released as a single, but Ten had come out that August and sometime in September (it must have been because it was still warm in Omaha) the new local “alternative” station played the album in its entirety. They’d advertised it for a week ahead of time. I was totally enraptured. “Alive” was the single at that time and got a lot of airplay, but in that era of local radio, if enough people called to request a song, they would play it even if it hadn’t been released. For some reason, “Even Flow” caught on. It was played all the time. The single was released in April of ’92. By that time I was on my second cassette copy of Ten, having worn out the first one.
The thing about it then was that everyone listened to the grunge rock that exploded at that time, and Pearl Jam and Nirvana in particular. Sure, there was different kinds of music, but even if you didn’t like it, you couldn’t avoid grunge. Ten stayed on the charts all through high school. “Jeremy” was probably literally echoing in the halls of my high school even as it figuratively did so during my sophomore year when a local junior high kid shot and killed his parents one afternoon in a house a couple blocks away from the school. We were evacuated and stood for hours in the parking lot, sad and confused amidst a jumble of rumors and fears.
Vs.was released the fall of my junior year and was even bigger and more universally embraced. Vitalogy came out the next autumn, six months before graduation. Pearl Jam fever was starting to be suffered by only a narrower group by then, as kids branched into their various musical niches, but the band still formed a part of a soundtrack of my high school years that we all shared, along with The Chronic, Sir Mix a Lot, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Boyz II Men, and a solid mix of rap and rock from the Bush I/Clinton era.
What I remember most about that epoch was that there was a shared musical language and culture. You could dig deeper and lots of kids were into weird stuff too, but we were all into the biggest hits from a handful of genres. At least it seemed that way. But why? I think there’s a pretty simple reason: There just wasn’t as much music.
WRITER’S WARNING: This next sentence is a well-worn, hackneyed version of “Remember When” that has been completely played out by cheap, clickbait listicles the web over, but I am going to trot it out again here because it serves the premise well:
Pearl Jam’s Ten came out in 1991. That was twenty-seven years ago. Twenty-seven years before 1991 was 1964, the rock music equivalent of one second after the Big Bang.
In 1964, The Beatles had just released A Hard Day’s Night. The Rolling Stones’s first two albums would come out that year. You had some nascent evidence of rock music as we might recognize it today, such as “House of the Rising Sun” by the Animals or the Kinks’ “You Really Got Me” and “All Day and All of the Night.” But the Billboard charts that year still included Louis Armstrong, Mary Wells, and Dean Martin. Rolling Stone magazine was still three years away. Almost the entirety of rock music had yet to be released. It was a Long, Long Time Ago…
Handily, Wikipedia has index pages for music albums released by year. I am sure it is not all inclusive, but it provides a shorthand understanding of the amount of music that has ever been released and when.
If 1964 was one second after the Big Bang, let’s consider 1991 to be Year Zero. Everything before 1991 was BCE; everything 1991 and after is CE. There were 20,968 music albums released between 1964 and 1990, inclusive. This includes all genres. From 1991 to today, there have been 61,466 albums commercially released. By that measure, there has been three times more music released since 1991 than there had been from 1964 to 1991.
That is a lot of music to keep up with if you were fourteen in 1991 and are forty-one today. If you’re fourteen today, are getting into music, and want to learn the history and canon of whatever music you’re into, you have at least four times as much music to listen to to catch up to the current day as I did.
But even that doesn’t tell the story. For example. There were zero rap albums released from the beginning of time until the very late-’70s. The first rap single certified gold was by Kurtis Blow in 1980. Rap and hip-hop now comprise the majority or at least a plurality of all music released. Moreover, most people my age in 1991 weren’t keeping up with jazz, big band, and classical albums, which comprised a larger percentage of albums released in the 1960s than they do today.
It would be possible for me to manually scour the internet and tabulate how many albums of rock music were released from 1964 to 1991 and from 1991 to today. But it would not be feasible. The task would be made all the more onerous by the divergence of rock into myriad subgenres since 1964: metal, punk, new wave, glam, alternative, etc. And that only illustrates my point… which I shall come to soon.
Importantly, the pace of creation of commercial music has long been constrained by physical limitations on the number of commercial studios. There simply is only so much studio time to go around. Relatedly, there are only so many studio musicians, producers, mixers, techs, and the like.
But recording equipment and technology has plummeted in price as it has soared in quality. The audio recording and mixing software, GarageBand, was released by Apple in 2004. Professional mixing equipment is still expensive, but that is more to do with elitism and restriction of access than necessity. Microphones are cheaper and better and GarageBand and its ilk have made mixing boards unnecessary for all but the most discriminating of musicians and fans. As long as you have some baffling on the walls, an album recorded with twenty-dollar mics and a Mac Book Pro with GarageBand can approach the quality of a professionally-mixed studio recording. The result has been an explosion of amateur music recorded in closets and garages around the country, which from a production-value standpoint are almost indistinguishable from professionally produced, studio-recorded music. This is obvious to anyone as anyone with access to Soundcloud or Bandcamp. Of course, with lowered barriers to entry, the talent level of musicians releasing their own music is hit and miss. This is also obvious to anyone as anyone with access to Soundcloud or Bandcamp. And in the age of EDM, even musical instruments, the last Expensive Things in musical production besides speakers and amps, are now optional.
Of course, for professionally produced, commercially released music, there still are physical constraints on the amount of music than can be put out each year. There are still only so many studios, and only so many producers, A/R people, marketers, and technicians to go around. In fact, there are far fewer. And due to digital streaming, there is a lot less revenue going into the companies paying for the studios, producers, A/R guys, set musicians, marketers, and all the rest. (And even less left for the artists themselves.) This means that there remains a natural limit to the amount of music that can be commercially released each year. That limit has actually gone down since streaming went — ahem — mainstream, leaving less money in the system to pay for producing commercial music: There were 3,402 albums released in 2006 (at least that have Wikipedia pages); there were only 1,342 released in 2017, a decline of over sixty percent in eleven years.
There were 3,402 albums released in 2006; there were only 1,342 released in 2017, a decline of over sixty percent in eleven years. At the same time though, there is an uncountable amount of personally recorded music now being released, an amount that is increasing at an exponential rate.
At the same time though, there is an uncountable amount of personally recorded music now being released, an amount that is increasing at an exponential rate. In fact, as I write this, a friend texted me a link to his latest effort on Soundcloud.
In basements and dens from Austin to Calgary to Kiev to Shenzhen, aspiring singers, songwriters, and DJs are recording and releasing their own music every day and night. Most will be heard only by a few friends. But some will catch on, even if only in local scenes. In sum, there is about a mole of music a month being created and published in some way, wave, or file extension today.
But even if we limit the discussion to professionally recorded and commercially released music in the rock genre (defined as broadly as possible) there is still probably five or six times more of that kind of music that has been released from 1991 to today than had been released before 1991, going back to 1964. The same is true of every kind of music that has existence since at least the 1980s.
The consequences of this unprecedented musical proliferation are obvious today in the form of the proliferation of genres and subgenres, the self-segregation of music fans into various tribes, and an increasing lack of any kind of broadly shared musical-cultural experience. This is similar to the increasing atomization of our tastes in television, films, games, books, and really everything else, most importantly including politics.
It is easy to mourn the loss of a true “popular culture,” if such a thing was every something to be eulogized. And I am uncertain whether it is a good thing for any society to share so little of its culture among all or nearly all its members. On the one hand, we lose a common cultural language when we congregate into small groups who all like the same niches of music and other media. On the other, we aren’t all force fed lowest-common-denominator pop-culture gruel — we can choose our tastes. On the other other hand, that takes more work and leaves you with that much less in common with anyone beyond your fellow niche aficionados.
But for me, there is a more concrete adverse impact of the stratospheric rise of music creation over the past twenty-five years : The loss of a general canon, even among fans of what were once cohesive genres of music.
The explosion of content and corresponding loss of canon is not unique to music in general or rock music in particular. Most famously, it has been alternatively mourned and celebrated in literature departments at Western universities, where how and even whether to define a “canon” of literature to be studied by entry-level students has become a fraught exercise. Mostly, this is to do with the recognition that what was considered the canon of Western literature excluded much of the work of women and people of color, even those that were part of the West, however that was defined. But at least partially, it is because literature suffers from the same explosion of content in recent years as music has. There is just so damn much stuff out there, and so much more generated each year, that it gets more and more difficult with each passing decade to decide what is and what is not worthy of study as the basic strata of what every student of literature should be familiar with (and if there even is anything that every student of something should be familiar with or anyone group trusted to define what that is).
At first, the battles over the loss of canon were fought about what works from previously excluded author-groups should be included in canon. Of course, with only so much time for study, each book added to canon meant another got kicked out of the club and into a sub-genre, to be studied by fewer and fewer. Next there were battles about creating multiple canons, which could be considered an oxymoron until you ponder whether there is a Western culture cohesive enough any more to be considered to have a single canon. Finally, the battle is fought over whether there should be any canon at all. Why should freshmen lit students even have to read the same works? Why not let them each choose from among many canons, or create their own based on their interests with advice from underpaid grad students? After all, there are only 8–10 semesters in undergrad and if canon is defined too expansively, there would be too little time left for depth and specialization of study. In response, you might say that freshmen by definition have not yet read enough to know what they want to study and what is or is no good enough to be considered part of even a sub-canon of a genre they might be interested in; and at some point, someone has to set the basic set of knowledge from which students of something can build. Don’t they? I don’t know. The answer is easy in math and science — you can’t learn calculus without knowing algebra, etc. But the answer is not as easy in literature…
And so with music.
As a fourteen year old in 1991, had I had enough money (I didn’t) or access to a library or permissive record store (I sometimes did) I could have devoted my time to listening to the canon of rock music as it stood in 1991. And if I spent some solid hours each week devoted to the task, I could have probably finished in a summer.
If a fourteen year old today, how long would that task take? A year? Could it ever be completed? As “rock” branched out, would you have to listen to the corresponding sub-canons of ever harder and faster metal? Alt country? Dad rock? [gag] Nu-metal? Ska? Whatever Sublime was doing? Who’s even doing rock any more? Arctic Monkeys?
And what if you don’t want to be limited to rock? What if you wanted to listen to all the “must listens” of all popular music? Well, in 1991, I think you could still have done that over the course of a high school career and gone into college having heard most of what you “needed to hear.” Today, I’m not sure it’s possible.
Of course, those hypotheticals are based on a fourteen year old — someone with TIME. Someone who can come home after school and listen to records all night long. Someone who can spend weekends at a record store or on Spotify listening and listening and listening.
As us young music fans age and get jobs, spouses, children, in-laws, forced kids’-friends’-parents friends, and all the rest of it, our time to listen to music is drastically curtailed. And yet more and more music is commercially produced. And almost infinitely more amateur music is produced.
For instance, one of my favorite bands (naturally, as a middle-aged, upper-middle-class white guy) is Wilco. Once, while I was busy working as an attorney, a friend asked me if I’d heard the new Wilco record. I said no. When I got home, I found out that Wilco had put out three records since I’d last listened to one. (In fairness, only half of each one was good.) Yet in those years that had flown by while I was working away I had not even heard about them. That speaks to how busy I was, how atomized media has become, how little money the music industry now has to spend on advertising, and how much music is put out each year.
And I have it easy. My tastes are established and the music I mostly like is now a very small niche in the overall music market today (though I try to stay somewhat current in a few other niches). Yet I still can’t keep up. If I were younger and trying to listen to all the new hip-hop and EDM coming out, it would be a full time job. And for a lot of young people today, facing the gig economy, not to mention all the aspiring DJs, it might just be.
Keeping up with new releases of bands I already know and like it hard enough. It takes real work to discover new music by new artists in the genres I try to keep up with. I won’t find that out in major media, and “my” music is itself now an aging, niche market, so I have to spend extra time to find media that covers the music I like to learn what is new right now. A lot of that time is spent looking at what “Users Also Liked” recommendations on various streaming services when I am listening to something I already know and like — such recommendations are something that streaming media truly excels at, even while it does so much externalized damage to the music industry as a whole — so those recommendations come at a steep price.
Staying current with the artists I already know and discovering new artists in the genres I like takes too much time for me, even though I am now a stay-at-home dad. So I have to cut corners. I just have to accept that new stuff is going to come out — by artists I already like and artists I would like if I knew them — that I will miss. Maybe I’ll catch it later. Maybe not.
That’s bad enough. It’s hard enough. But I and my generational cohorts and descendants will face a problem that our progenitors never faced: On top of staying current with new music, it would be nice to occasionally listen to the music you used to listen to, the music you grew up with. But if you’re trying to keep up with new music and live a busy life in the age of a music avalanche, it becomes just about impossible to revisit the music that (to paraphrase Gotye) you used to know.
If you’re trying to keep up with new music and live a busy life in the age of a music avalanche, it becomes just about impossible to revisit the music that (to paraphrase Gotye) you used to know.
Trying to maintain currency with new stuff from the artists you already follow, new artists and new songs in the genres you follow, and new artists and new songs in genres you are interested in but don’t follow closely, and new artists and songs that are “big” and/or “important” now, regardless of genre, and also reminisce with your old faves creates an intractable dilemma. It is exhausting and temporally impossible. It makes your head hurt like trying to imagine “eternity” in Heaven did when you were ten.
The problem is compounded by the fact that you don’t listen to the radio any more. Yes, there are “channels” and “stations” and “play lists” on streaming services, but a lot of the time you open up Google Play Music or Amazon Prime Music or whatever and you want to type in something into the search bar. So you have to think of something to listen to. So you have to start recalling every song or band that you’ve ever listened too, decide among them, and put that in next to the magnifying-glass icon and start listening. Every time. Decision fatigue is real. Memory is faulty. You start to forget songs and bands. Or they just don’t come to mind in the few seconds before you think of something more recent and decide to listen to that instead, or just pick a station and let the algorithm do the work.
Later, you think of something you should listen to but you forget when the time comes. This frustrates you. You think of all the music you’re missing and get despondent. You realize it’s been fifteen years since you listened to Pearl Jam’s Ten. Where did the time go?, you think. You wonder what you’ve done with your life. You get happy at some stuff, regretful at others. You block it out and move on.
Eventually, you come to a realization: You are going to listen to X hours of music between now and when you die. The best you can hope for is to make the most of that time. If you never listen to something again, so be it. If you miss something great in the future, life will go on.
That long journey brings me to my point: The Nine Month Band. To me, a Nine Month Band is a band that you know, like, and have followed for their whole career, but that you will often forget even exists for nine months or more at a time because there is just too much music to keep up with it all and you’re just too damn busy anyway.
You wish you could listen to a Nine Month Band more, but you can’t. There’s just too much stuff out there and too much new stuff coming out.
When you do remember remember a Nine Month Band, you will listen to them for two or three days, a song here, a song there, or maybe even a full album or two. Then you will forget them again. You will try to keep up with new stuff.
Then, a few weeks later, you’ll remember a different Nine Month Band.
Sometimes a Nine Month Band is as good as you remember. Other times, you don’t know what you were thinking ever listening to them in the first place.
A Nine Month Band may still be putting out new material, so you’re really thinking of a Nine Month Record.
Based on my current life expectancy, I will listen to any given Nine Month Band 54 1/2 more times before I die.
I will listen to any given Nine Month Band 54-1/2 more times before I die.
But is actually less than that because I will discover more bands that will become Nine Month Bands, and eventually there will be so many that they will become Ten Month Bands, then One Year Bands, etc. Also, I will probably listen to far less music as I have more and older children than the one-year old daughter I have now. Moreover, I will probably listen to less music after I’m 75… At least I think so now. So, maybe I will listen to any given Nine Month Band forty more times before I die.
Do I want to listen to certain bands forty more times? Am I listening to too much music? Not enough? Is there anything better to do? Is it all just a charade and a waste? Or is life beautiful?
Hard to say, but when you consider all that, it gives things a little perspective.
Now, in no particular order, and considering I am a middle-aged white guy with a graduate degree who grew up in the Midwestern suburbs, here are some of my Nine Month Bands:
- Vampire Weekend
- Gorillaz
- Stone Temple Pilots
- Blur
- Whiskeytown/Ryan Adams
- Wu Tang Clan
- Oasis
- Alice in Chains
- David Bowie
- My Morning Jacket
- Led Zeppelin
- OutKast
- REM
- Gun ’n’ Roses
- The Black Keys
- Dire Straits
- Ray La Montagne
- The Decemberists
- Tame Impala
I am sure there are others. Check back with me in nine months. Until then, we’ll have to come to terms with the fact that there’s a lot more music today than there every was before. There’s so much music, we’re running out. Running out of time. And a few years from now, there’ll be even more. And it can’t, it won’t, and it don’t stop.
