As of this week (yesterday actually) The Beat is officially 20 years old! How did we do it? With a lot of music.

The Beat began in 2002 as a column for Comicon.com, then run by Rick Veitch and Steve Conley, and spun off into The Pulse, a daily news site run by myself and Jennifer Contino. I’d been used to working a 9-6 (or more accurately 10-6) jobs but by nature I’m a night owl. I do most of my writing between midnight and 3 am – it’s just when my head is clearest and I have fewer distractions. As The Beat spun out into its own standalone blog (as we called it in those days) you can bet there was a lot of music playing in the background to keep me amused and focused.

My playlist was built from my hundreds of CDs ripped to iTunes – yeah you could do that then. There may or may not have been another hundred gigs of music downloaded over a phone line a few MBs at a time from something that might have sounded like “Limewire.”

Eventually, iTunes became Apple Music and got shittier and shittier. I switched over to Spotify, shitty in its own way, but easy to navigate and it made some pretty good suggestions for playlists. FOr a while you could import your iTunes lists into Spotify but that connection was broken long ago. SO I made new playlists from their vaults. And my iTunes folders went off to a storage drive on a shelf.

My original playlist survived as a file, however, a compendium of more than two days of music that was my most beloved jam. I was able to find that playlist and import it to Spotify using https://www.tunemymusic.com – with a few hilarious mismatches. But I went over this list and removed all the misfires and added a handful of tunes that have made their way into my permanent earworms along the way. 

But in general, consider this a throwback to the wonderful world of 2010. There are 80s newave bops, 90s trip hop, 00s ambient, some weird shit, some stuff you hear literally every day. My two demigods Amon Tobin and Luke Vibert are represented. It’s just music I like.

Two songs that I couldn’t find that are sorely missed: a bootleg version of Rammstein’s cover of “Das Modell” that survives on YouTube:

Great break to the guitar blast and the mistuned underbeat make this a yes from me!

Also, I couldn’t find the song “Schwarzkopf” by James Kochalka, the cartoonist who once had a music career that seems to have been scrubbed from the internet. Maybe I’ll ask James if I can upload it as a special treat.

Finally, sadly, I had a few tunes from Lutefisk, one of my most favorite local bands from my LA days, but they are also nowhere to be found on the internet any more. (Luckily I still have the CD.) They survive in my memory vie a band sticker I put on my filing cabinet that I’m looking at right now.

As I look back on 20 years of (almost) daily writing, many things cross my mind. To be honest, this playlist is my autobiography. Some of these are just bangers I like to listen to. Others are an intimate part of me whose meaning no one else will ever know. The songs that accompanied my greatest joys and sorrows are on here. The moments that crystallized in memory to become the core experiences of my life are embedded somewhere in here. As Paul McCartney put it:

There are places I’ll remember
All my life, though some have changed
Some forever, not for better
Some have gone and some remain

OR, as J.R.R. Tolkien put it:

I sit beside the fire and thinkOf people long agoAnd people who will see a worldThat I shall never know
But all the while I sit and thinkOf times there were beforeI listen for returning feetAnd voices at the door
 
(You can’t find an album of Tolkien’s song recorded by Donald Swann on Spotify or anywhere now either.)
 
So for you, loyal readers, I hope you accept this as a little gift. Thanks for sticking with me for 20 years. I hope I’ve given you some smiles, and maybe left you a little more informed.
 
I’ll have a few more Beat 20 special posts later this week.
 

 

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