The Dreariness of Curation

Part of what’s nice about music, for instance, is that there are constantly new things to listen to. Or, if you’re a music journalist, part of what’s terrible about music is that there are constantly new things to listen to. Being a music journalist means turning the exploration dial all the way to 11, where it’s nothing but new things all the time. Music lovers might imagine working in music journalism to be paradise, but when you constantly have to explore the new you can never enjoy the fruits of your connoisseurship—a particular kind of hell. Few people know this experience as deeply as Scott Plagenhoef, the former editor in chief of Pitchfork. “You try to find spaces when you’re working to listen to something that you just want to listen to,” he says of a critic’s life. His desperate urges to stop wading through unheard tunes of dubious quality and just listen to what he loved were so strong that Plagenhoef would put only new music on his iPod, to make himself physically incapable of abandoning his duties in those moments when he just really, really, really wanted to listen to the Smiths. Journalists are martyrs, exploring so that others may exploit.

Brian Christian, Algorithms to Live By (April 19th 2016)

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