According to the 37% rule, by age 30 you’re supposed to stop exploring, pick the best option from everything you’ve encountered, and spend the rest of your life comfortably committed to it. By that logic, at 55 I should have settled on a handful of favorite records sometime during the Clinton administration and now be calmly rotating them until my last day on Earth. Instead, I’m anxiously awaiting the new Anthrax release, obsessing over Remi Wolf, going deep into Doechii, disappearing down the rabbit hole of Angine de Poitrine, and paying tariffs on an Genesis Owusu record shipped from Canberra because I heard one song on KEXP and apparently lost all executive function. If my musical life is an application of the 37% rule, then sometime around age 30 I accidentally checked “Remain Evergreen” in the operating system settings.
At this point I’ve accepted that my musical taste isn’t a carefully curated identity so much as a raccoon repeatedly breaking into different dumpsters. The algorithm has no idea who I am. Every week it confidently recommends death metal, hyperpop, Appalachian folk, Japanese hiphop, and some lo-fi basement recording by a masked man with three monthly listeners. And the embarrassing thing is that it’s right every single time. Frankly, neither the algorithm nor I have the slightest idea who I am anymore.