Sometimes the most pyrrhic ventures prove the most gratifying. Gleaning a decade’s worth of song in 2019 feels like sifting sand with a hula hoop, the enormity of the ever-accumulating archive sluicing through our woefully inadequate tools, its elusive pith elementally, stubbornly incompatible with the implements of capture at hand. Nothing like an egregiously mixed metaphor to communicate an aporia, a kind of category mistake: I get the sense that we should be doing anything else with the incalculable amount of music released this decade than grasping at straws, while the lion’s share slips through our fingers. If only taste didn’t imply abjection or preference a failure to hold.
But curation demands scission, and we can only deposit some faith that its trimmings might help make something of this most recent and most harried time slide into the future. All of which is to say that we at Tiny Mix Tapes are aware of the glorious futility of any enterprise as conceited as this.
Par for our predictably wonky course, TMT’s Favorite 100 Songs of the Decade are not arranged with the airless authority of the list. Less a ranking than a repertory, presented over the course of the next two weeks will be a succession of 10 themed mixes (count ‘em: that’s twice as many as usual). You don’t need to know what the word “phenomenology” means to understand that this decade’s myriad unruly soundings did not lend themselves to the schemes of valuation and accounting at work in the economization of life itself.
Somewhere between choreography and improvisation, we slunk from the BED to the OFFICE (in whatever configuration it took) to the GYM (or, you know, we wish we had), then, spent, to the BATH, and, revived, hopped in the COUPE (literal or figurative), skidded through the ALLEY, convened around the BONFIRE, teetered on the CLIFF, contemplated the VOID, and approached BEYOND. And none of it was soundless. And so we put the cart before the horse in saying that this lilting and braying and bumping and grinding and seething and soothing ensemble of songs did not just soundtrack, post hoc, a readymade ceremony lived in the concretion of stochastic skews and managerial directives and calculated risks.
Not a chance. Like so many granules of wet sand cohering palatial, these songs textured the very grist of our experiential apertures, the hermeneutic hula hoops of our conceptual scaffolds. The broken circle demands a new analytic (way of listening to the music), avows Moten. And then some: I want to listen to what sound does to interpretation. Sounds good. Us too.
BED · OFFICE · GYM · BATH · COUPE
ALLEY · BONFIRE · CLIFF · VOID · BEYOND
The BED mix is a new addition to the TMT Mix Collection™. Featuring solo artists with visions of love, maximalist sentimentality, and idiosyncratic songwriting, this early-morning mix offers personal style and endless possibility. Rest easy: from showroom to bedroom, this is how you bring Home™ to the destination of your choosing.
PART 1: “BED” mixed by Adam Devlin
Lily Konigsberg
“Rock and Sin”
[00:27]
[Ramp Local; 2018]
Looming along the edge of the club, or the party, until a break in the vibe reveals how to move. I could slide, but what about my hands, desolate without a message to read. I could spiral until interrupted by the right song, but who will sing it with me. Is it humiliating to want to be the shape of lovers entwined in the stars. Is it more humiliating to be waiting outside in a sequined jacket, resisting the impulse to text: will you come hold me like a shell you might pick up on the beach?
Click to the next page to hear the “OFFICE” mix by Weaver.