For The Record-30. August. 2025
Some thoughts on Taylor Swift, taste making, and free-range tourism
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As many of you know, I work for an airline in real life. For its latest PR blitz, my employer has decided to let employees and frequent fliers vote on where we should fly next. It’s a fun exercise, and I suppose good for some press in an otherwise slow (aviation) news cycle.
The choices are Sardinia, Italy, Malta, and Ibiza, Spain. I voted for Malta and was obnoxious about encouraging everyone else to do the same. I found myself there in early 2002 for a soccer tournament and have never shut up missed a chance to talk the place up since.
We had a free day before the matches began, so I decided to do some sightseeing. I confused my cab driver by telling him just to drop me off "wherever" and that I’d find my way back. He did, and I did. Having that sort of unstructured agenda was my favorite style of tourism at that point in my life.
I wandered the narrow streets for hours, cosplaying as some sort of flaneur and checking out historical markers (there’s plenty of ’em), stopping at cafes, and poking my head into little shops just off the beaten path. By day, Natalie Imbruglia was playing in every corner café. By night, Kylie Minogue was booming out of every club. It was glorious.
When you have no agenda, you never know what you’re gonna find.
This is, of course, half the allure — both of travel and of crate digging.
My taste has been informed so much by the spaces I’ve lived in because of the people I’ve met there, the records that ended up in the shops there, the bands I’ve stumbled upon. You can spend 10,000 hours on Discogs and still not discover the record you never knew you needed in the local dollar bin or dive bar.
~Hiatt DB, speaking to Jacqui DeVaney for Dinner Music
So, on one extreme, you have fully self-directed tourism. On the other hand, you have obsessively curated, down-to-the-minute itineraries that suck the soul out of it all. There's no adventure, only box-checking (and certainly not the chaotic high-speed cab rides through Valletta I lived through; I’ll tell you that for free).
With the latter, you’re told precisely what to like, and why you should. For some people, that’s fine. But go to the well too often, and it results in a flattening of tastes. If everyone likes the same thing, what’s so special about it? If you pose for the same picture millions of others have, how unique was your experience?
It might not be unique, but it is easier. Outsourcing your planning takes a lot off your plate. Ditto someone telling you you should like this or that record to the exclusion of all others.
Recently, a piece in The Line of Best Fit talked about the return of tastemaking, noting:
By thoughtful content, I mean things like the articles that are obsessively reported, the albums that are too long and out of left field, the newsletters that critique instead of just list (I guess we also list, but you know what I mean), the playlists that are really well curated instead of the ones that just feel like brain dumps.
To give a concrete comparison, I think things like the listicle are going to lose, where the review (whatever its new form might be) or the deep-dive will soon win again.
I agree — and already see it happening in my own travels online. At the risk of being both-sides-y, I think the optimal answer is somewhere in the middle. That’s how I like to travel these days, and that’s how I aim to run this newsletter as well. Think of it as something akin to a local guide. They know the hot spots, but also the places the locals go. The best places to crate dig, the best dive bar. It’s not fully curated, but there’s a rough outline. You never know what you might find.
It’s tastemaking, I guess (?), but mostly it’s thoughtful—or at least thought out—instead of prefab content. In Valletta, I would've shuddered at the thought of joining a group. But if a local had shown up and suggested a few starting points before sending me on my way? I’ll take all of that you got!
What most of us want is a compass, not a map.
I’ve been asked before why I don’t review records by artists like Taylor Swift, Morgan Wallen, etc. To be clear, there’s nothing wrong with doing so — but burning through a word count on a record you’ve likely already read about 100 times feels too curated by half. There is, of course, a pressure to do so (Engagement! Metrics! All the things!). And as Ann Powers says below, there’s an element of gamification to it all that feels similar to speed-running one’s travel plans. The noise overwhelms the signal.
I'm much more interested in finding stuff off the beaten path — or records lost in the shadow of her latest announcement.
In other words, the sonic equivalent of those places I stumbled into all those years ago.
I’d love to hear what you think!
As always, thanks for being here.
KA—
P.S. If you ever get the chance, visit Malta. It’s fantastic!
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Various Artists:
From the Department of Cool People Doing Cool Shit:
has taken his ongoing Baltimore Sticker Series and turned it into a book!To mark its 50th anniversary, Patti Smith is reissuing her Horses album.
**Alert* Spoon has a couple of new tracks out. This is not a drill!
Apple Music is now allowing users to import playlists from Spotify and elsewhere.
Bruce Springsteen’s Born to Run also recently turned 50, and to mark the occasion, Dan Caffey decided to rank the album’s songs. Brave move, IMO! This is a record people have some strong thoughts about. If you happen to be one of those people, I’d love to hear your take.
We talk a lot about one-hit wonders, but what about one-album wonders?
Some Depeche Mode for your Saturday.
Mike Joyce of The Smiths has a memoir on the way.
Gorillaz are now Fortnite characters.
Longer Read:
Despite the fact that fans have always made music loving into a game, and that artists have historically engaged with that process in creative ways, the dominance of gamification within music is relatively new. It suits generations who grew up playing video games and learning basic skills like reading and math, in part, from educational adaptations of the same diversions. Anyone Swift’s age or younger could very well comprehend the world primarily in terms of gaming, the way a bookworm learns about it through reading, or an athlete does through the lessons of her body and of team interaction. Given this, making art into a game feels legitimate. But art can also be very different from most games, in that it can be open-ended; it can be something that people abide with, letting its meanings grow and change, rather than “solving” it. I think that’s what Eric Harvey’s comment laments — the loss of a sense of art as having meaning that is unfixed, unlimited. As a fan of Swift’s albums, I’ve found many moments that fulfill that definition within her recorded work. But I’m not always sure her presentation of that work encourages such richly personal and varied interpretations.
Ann Powers on Taylor Swift and “solving” the riddle of each of her releases.
AV Club:
For the Record Long Weekend Soundtrack (as chosen by you!):
This week’s playlist: Spotify | YouTube Music | Qobuz
*I am working on adding Apple Music to the menu. Look for that to come in the next week or two.
Enjoy your weekend!
Drive South,
Kevin—
P.S. As most of you know, I am a huge fan of the music streaming platform Qobuz. The sound quality is second to none, and the entire UX is fantastic. Thanks to our friend Kenn Richards, you can now see it for yourself.
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I'm with you Kevin. I'd rather write about the music and films that perk my interest than what everyone else deems as newsworthy. The same could be said for travel, although I have had some very memorable experiences in major European cities.
I loved this. I take a very similar approach when travelling. I love walking and getting lost, soaking up the energy of the place I'm visiting, and I prefer architecture and the outdoors to spending hours in a museum or an exhibition. There are some places my husband and I know verywell and visit once at least once a year (NYC, Paris, Berlin, the Mexican caribbean and, of course, Buenos Aires). In those places, we like living a bit like locals. We'll go to our favourite spots, and let the sights come to us, not the other way around. In many cases, it works even better than with a structured tourist plan, and we get to know the places much better than we otherwise would.