Getting Into Music #1

I write about aesthetic experiences a lot, not a philosopher or a theorist but as someone who has aesthetic experiences. I find that music tends to play a large part in my experiences and it’s something that has been a part of my life on the fringes as long as I can remember. I had friends who played music and played often and well, my parents’ friends played often and well but in jam bands I never knew how to appreciate as a kid. I was given a few different kinds of music lessons: singing, violin, piano, ukulele, and probably guitar at some point too. I never stuck with them very long, usually because (shockingly) instruments are hard to learn, on top of having no interest in actually performing any instruments; I just wanted to learn them to play the songs I liked. Whatever the reason, I have no ability to play any instrument today, something that I find a weak point when I want to talk about music. I never knew how to play or create music, so who am I to judge what other people make?

In May of 2024, Apple Music released its 100 Best Albums list, and it passed me by completely. I never really paid Apple Music any attention since I never bought in to the Apple ecosystem, a requirement for the streaming service to work as intended (I did try the app out early in 2025, only to discover that my gaming rig pc couldn’t get the service to run smoothly). I only came across the album list by accident during a late-night bout of couch-criticism; that is, watching YouTube videos about other people’s musical taste and making judgements verbally for the fun of it. Anthony Fantano’s video that covered the list came up and became just another target, especially when it came to his unrealistic expertise in every single album, artist, and genre that made the list. Overall, the list, as well as Fantano’s coverage of it, exists as a means to spark engagement—positively or negatively—with their content and through this gain new viewership and a larger soap box to stand on.

I started listening to the list even with the flaws in its creation, I want to feel like I know some things about music, after all. The list puts The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill (1998) as the top album of all time, which makes some sense in the influence that the album has had over the years, with references to the album’s structure seem to appear in The Weeknd’s Dawn FM (2022) and Hurry Up Tomorrow (2025) as well as Blonde (2016) by Frank Ocean. I continued down the list from there: Thriller (1982) by Michael Jackson; Abbey Road (1969) by The Beatles; Purple Rain (1984) by Prince. Number 5 was Ocean’s Blonde, which is where I fell a little off the list, and why it was easy to see the similarities between Blonde and Miseducation. I fell off of that list as it felt like, at that point, I was just listening to the most popular albums of all time. I struggled to get through albums like Purple Rain when I heard almost every song off that album on the radio as a single—the album is so highly regarded that I had been inundated without ever intentionally engaging with it.

I have since moved away from albums of songs I had already heard on the radio as a kid and m0ved instead towards new releases I hadn’t gotten a chance to listen to. I set up an account on Album of the Year as a means of tracking what I had listened to. (I did something similar with Letterboxd when I started watching more movies, using the site as a means to track what I was watching and what I had already seen as far back as I could remember. However, I find that I watch movies much less frequently than I listen to music.)  I found this method of following new albums felt a lot more fulfilling because I was able to listen to what I thought I would like, and listened to both Mei Semones’ Animaru (2025) and PUP’s Who Will Look After the Dogs? (2025) both of which I had wanted to listen to already. Animaru was a really fun blend of acoustic singer-songwriter music that I have enjoyed for a long time after getting into Pandora in 2012 and listening to all sorts of radio stations, but especially the early ‘00s acoustic like Never Shout Never, Lenka, and Relient K, and jazz influences that have been creeping in to my music tastes more and more since hearing Bohren & Der Club of Gore. Who Will Look After the Dogs? comes from PUP, who I was first introduced to while watching Luke Westaway, a punk music fan and musician. Since then, I have enjoyed listening to their work and how it evokes a cathartic angsty sound with rough lyrics and loud mixed guitars, though I found that this particular album got a little same-y for me as I listened down the line. Still, I really enjoyed it after Purple Rain.

It is at this point in my writing that I feel as though I am pushing up against my own ability to describe, in a way that is useful, what the music I’ve listened to sounds like to me and with my tastes. Although this does also make an interesting exercise to practice writing more musically inclined pieces, and maybe that means that this can be a series of essays dedicated to musical thoughts that I have. I want to leave this one on an uplifting note (I could certainly talk about music that I didn’t like, but that would be rather downer) rather than devolving into criticism I don’t feel personally prepared for.