MP3 Scratching
Hua Hsu's "Stay True," Twyla Tharp's "The Creative Habit," Daft Punk, Nirvana, Nostalgia, MP3s, and a couple Playlists
In her book “The Creative Habit,” noted choreographer Twyla Tharp introduces a concept key to her creative process which she calls ‘scratching’. She describes it as ‘digging through everything to find something’ and compares it to ‘clawing at the side of a mountain to get a toehold.’ One ‘scratches for little ideas. Without little ideas there are no big ideas.’ ‘Scratching is what you do when you can’t wait for the thunderbolt to hit you.’ It’s an architect wandering a museum, a designer in a vintage store, a chef in a market without a dish in mind. You’re scratching in hopes of finding something that makes the blank page, or in Tharp’s case ‘the empty white room’ feel less intimidating. Goalless–but importantly not aimless–action with the purpose of stumbling on something you didn’t realize you were looking for.
I’ve been thinking about the idea of scratching in relation to Hua Hsu’s recent book Stay True. Hsu surveys a vertical slice of his own life in order to process a random act of violence committed against a close friend.
In “Models For Being” in the New York Book review, Lucy Sante notes that Stay True is “concerned with the preservation of memory, the material constituents of which turn out to be matchbooks, ticket stubs, snapshots, mixtapes, zines.”
In one particularly moving instance, Hsu learns that his deceased friend Ken left detailed notes in a philosophy book that he gave to him but that Hsu had disregarded. Hsu makes us feel the weight he felt when he realized the notes exist; the notes themselves were a bigger gift than either of them could have known at the time. He studies them, scratching as a grieving process, in hopes of creating a posthumous dialogue with his friend.
Looking at Hsu’s detailed survey of his own memory, perspective, and taste through Twyla Tharp’s idea of scratching compelled me to do some of my own.
A formative moment in Hsu’s life is the night he hears “Smells Like Teen Spirit” on the radio before it blows up. He discovers he loves the rush of being first to know, and the feeling of benevolent superiority that comes from introducing other people to songs he knows they are going to love.
As soon as Hsu hears Nirvana, he understands that it is something he's been waiting for without realizing it. Nirvana becomes a building block of his nascent personality and taste. He positions himself next to Nirvana and in opposition to Pearl Jam, who in his perception is inferior. Later, he describes watching a precious thing that feels (but isn’t actually) obscure become the biggest thing in the world.
“The day came when far too many classmates were wearing Nirvana shirts. How could everyone identify with the same outsider? It wasn’t the band’s fault. Cobain seemed nonchalant, even hostile, toward his fame. I couldn’t blame him for the adoration foisted upon him. He was, after all, good-looking and charismatic. But I would ensure that I'd never be like the poseur in my civics class who started humming “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and then singing the words “And it smells like/ teen spirit” Everybody knows that’s not how the song goes. I began making a zine because I’d heard it was an easy way to get free CDs from bands and labels. My worldview was defined by music.”
Born a decade after Hsu, I had a much easier time of it. Where he had to dig through crates and use zines as a way to get new music, before I was thirteen, I was able to download whatever I wanted (assuming nobody needed to use the phone for the 45 minutes it took for Freak on A Leash to finish). Once my family got Broadband everything opened up, especially if you knew where to look.
Even after Napster was rendered irrelevant, there were plenty of ways. Whether it was private FTP servers with referential names like “Pacha,” “Queensbridge,” and “Marshall Stack” for dance, hip-hop, and rock, respectively, or the assortment of file storage websites like Zippyshare that turned a blind eye until things got blatant, scuffed and/or mislabeled 96 kb/s versions of songs off Limewire, the explosion of public and private BitTorrent trackers like waffles and what, the blog era and aggregators like Hype Machine… for High School and College Mo, all these different modes of access amplified the thrill of hunting down new songs.
By the time I was listening to music, Nirvana was oversaturated for me the way Pearl Jam was for Hsu. There was no way for me to understand Nirvana’s counter-cultural significance when Heart Shaped Box was the first song anyone my age would learn on guitar.
Daft Punk filled a similar role as Nirvana for me because electronic and dance music weren't popular where I grew up. As electronic and dance music continuously grew–from Da Funk to Get Lucky–I remember feeling similar prideful feelings to what Hsu describes for having “called it” so early. Years before I saw Steve Angello headline the main stage at Ultra with Swedish House Mafia, and before I knew what Cowboy Bebop was, I remember being obsessed with a specific Cowboy Bebop AMV for his song "Voices." I remember the hunger I felt for new bootlegs or remixes in the three years leading up to Justice's CROSS.
After I finished Stay True, I looked up Hsu’s other writings and read a lot of his New Yorker work. In the context of Daft Punk’s retirement, Hsu writes about Daft Punk’s last New York show at Keyspan Park in Coney Island in August of 2007. I was there too.
Eight days earlier, Kanye West released “Stronger.” "Stronger" samples Daft Punk and its video directly references Interstella 5555. It’s ridiculous to think of Daft Punk as outsider art, but I grew up hearing variations on the condescending “they don’t play instruments” about dance music and hip hop, the two genres I cared about. When “Stronger” became the biggest song in the country, my own interests felt affirmed.
“For their 2006-2007 tour, Daft Punk played inside an enormous, flashing pyramid, and no matter how hard someone who’d seen it tried to describe it, you were unprepared for the reality of it. An entire minor league baseball stadium in Coney Island full of people enjoying the same mass hallucination. Milling about afterward, and the magic of running into friends you didn’t know were there. Wondering, the following morning, if you had, indeed, seen a robot trash collector on the boardwalk outside the show. An MP3 of that night’s gig made the rounds, and sentiment often compels me to favor this bootleg over “Alive 2007,” which was recorded on a different night. It starts with a long stretch of nothing, then small ripples of cheers through the crowd when the pyramid is finally illuminated. The MP3 isn’t professionally recorded or properly mastered, like “Alive 2007,” but I believe I can hear my friend shrieking during “Music Sounds Better With You.”
That initial affirmation quickly faded. “Stronger” got played into absolute unlistenable dust that fall, and it had the effect of popularizing something that I felt possessive of to the person who, as Hsu jokes, sings, “And it smells like, teen spirit.”
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The first Playlist is the result of me scratching at my nostalgia relating to dance music. There’s stuff that I remember from the late 90s when a friend’s older brother introduced us to DJ Tiesto while we were playing StarCraft, there’s French house, the blog house era, EDM, a disco song, a couple Italo disco songs, some dubstep. The YouTube playlist has the exact versions that I was looking for, the Spotify playlist has the closest things I could find.
22 47 Nostalgic Dance Music YOUTUBE
The second Playlist is stuff I’ve had in heavy rotation. Some electronic, some grime, some prog rock, some rap, some nightcore…
22 48 Watermelon Caffeine YOUTUBE
Do you have a process similar to what Twyla Tharp describes? Did any of this spark some musical nostalgia for you? My weekly playlists are built off stuff I can’t stop listening to; if there’s some stuff you’ve been playing over and over recently, I want to hear it.