Everything Is Embarrassing
An honest assessment of music taste and the humiliation that comes with it.
Published
Personal Record is a subjective, critical chronicle of uneasy listening. Tune into Personal Record for everything from Music for Airports to music for dissociating in the back of the club, delivered with anxious panache.
It’s hard to believe, what with the layoffs, and the pay rates, and the tweets that range from “distasteful” to “death threats,” but somehow, in 2023, there’s still reverence for music critics. God gives his toughest battles to his most Discog-pilled, anxiety-prone soldiers. I know this because I will sometimes dabble in the phrase — “I write about music,” I’ll say at parties, eliding the mosaic of gigs that pay my rent — and immediately, there is a tonal shift. We were talking about art, and now, we’re Talking About Art.
“What do you like to listen to?” I’ll ask, trying to steer the conversation back to mutual terrain. The answers depend on the answerer, but there’s a current of shame, brains whirring like overtaxed laptop fans to summon the right answers. No one cops to the Josh Groban record they accidentally memorized working at a gourmet grocery store, the “Twerkulator” that helped them crush their fastest mile.
The final verdicts range in genre, from punk to garage to goth to techno, but the answers people seem most satisfied with confer some sort of cachet — niche listening habits that make you rarefied, something that was dug out of a crate or on Bandcamp or through the friend who’s Ty Segall’s European touring manager that once did a ketamine retreat with Kim Gordon. Names beget names; each reference is a star we hope will form a constellation of our tastes.