On Being Interested in Stuff Almost No One is Interested in

I bought a CD the other day. This isn’t something I do very often. I’ve never been a believer in copyright law, and I barely have an income. But, still, I do like to support people that are doing things I think are worthwhile, and I like physical music releases as a commodity, so from time to time I’ll pick something up. This time, what I bought was meditation by arboreal, which is the most recent release from Perpetual Abjection, a wall noise label which deals exclusively in ultra-limited editions involving elaborate handmade packaging, often incorporating extremely unconventional materials, such as a piece of bark or a condom. This approach, obviously, makes the fetish value of their releases exponentially greater than the average, and the noise itself is also, quite often, exceptionally good. Together, these things make the label one of my favorites in the game right now. Probably every couple of months, I’ll find myself looking through their Bandcamp page again, not only to see if they have anything new out, but to drool over pictures of sold out releases I would have bought if I had been able to. Such were the circumstances that led me to purchasing meditation. In this case, the packaging involved a standard jewel case spray-painted black, with either dried sea lavender spikelets or two dried barley spikelets glued to the cover (I opted for the barley), and dried Japanese maple leaves inserted inside, all of these things having been collected personally by the artist in Japan. I paid about $25 for this album – $10 sticker price, plus $14 for shipping (the label is based in Thailand), and the rest being various for taxes and fees. Although meditation is definitely not my favorite album Perpetual Abjection has put out (that would probably be The Rotting Home , or पूर्वचित्), I do like it a lot, and I consider the price I paid a bargain. Once it arrives, I don’t really see myself ever willingly parting with it. Certainly not for less than ten times what I paid. It is also true that it was released back in April, in an edition of 20, and that when I bought it (meaning, last week, November) there were still seven copies remaining. As of this writing, there are six.

I hope it’s clear enough that I’m not really trying to tell you about this weird album I bought. I could, of course, I’ve written about similar stuff before, but its purpose here is illustrative. It’s just an example. The point is that it is an album that couldn’t sell 20 handmade, limited edition, very reasonably priced copies in six months. The point, more precisely, is that there exists a level of obscurity beyond which there is no longer any cultural capital, any “clout” that could be gained by knowing about the work that exists there. This seems self-evident when flatly stated like this, but I think it’s easy to forget, because we are speaking about that which is, be definition, near-universally overlooked. I think it is worth stating because it can sometimes appear that such things don’t really exist anymore. We live in an era of radical and accelerating cultural fragmentation; to survey the present media landscape is to gaze out upon an incomprehensibly vast expanse of incomprehensibly specific niches, comprising a kind of fractal structure where close examination of any “one” cultural phenomenon will inevitably reveal it to be, in fact, made up many more obscure subcultural ones, which are themselves made up of sub-subcultural ones, and so on and so forth, downwards into seemingly infinite granularity. You are welcome to draw your own comparison with “the rhizome” or whatever here, I already went through that phase a decade ago. The consequence of this which I find actually interesting is that it has changed what it means to “have taste” – it is no longer a matter of simply knowing what is happening in culture and where it has come from, but of demonstrating the capability to navigate its highly fractured and treacherous terrain effectively, to trek far and drive deep without getting trapped in this or that pit of algorithmic quicksand; perhaps now more than ever, no one is impressed if you only know the names everyone else knows, and everyone is impressed if you know a name they had thought no one else did. A great deal of the hatred of “pretentiousness” online, the jokes about “five hour black and white Bulgarian movies about the life of a pigeon” and whatnot, are rooted in insecurity and resentment around the existence of this dynamic, and a misapprehension that its effect scales indefinitely, that the more “esoteric” you are the greater the social benefits you enjoy. But this is not the case, of course: someone else does have to also know the names that you know, enough of them, at least, that their congruence can give the unknown ones meaning and identity, or else they’re as worthless as foreign currency. If you can’t manage this, if, say, you are interested in albums that sell fourteen copies in eight months, you stop being perceived as cool and knowledgable, and start being perceived as weird and vaguely suspect. Your friends will probably still be interested, because they’re your friends and they (hopefully) find your idiosyncrasies charming, but if you’re trying to make new ones you’ll generally want to find something else to talk about. Any interest pursued past this point is one that’ must be pursued for your own reasons, on your own time, with no expectation of external validation. Either you are guided by something inside you, or you are lost.

To be clear, I don’t think this is a particularly uncommon thing. I don’t think I’m anymore special than anyone else. Really, I think most people that are actually curious about the world have interests like this. If you’ve found your way to an essay like this, you probably have at least a couple. I think, actually, that it’s probably very important to have interests like this – despite all that stuff I said up there about fractals and fragmentation, it’s nonetheless the case that culture today is under enormous pressure from enormously powerful forces (algorithms, governments, multinational media companies, etc.) which seek to turn all true difference into false difference, to force the whole structure into alignment with the same old discourse of the same old master. The incomprehensibly rapid rate at which culture morphs, mutates, and transforms itself now, of course, always outstrips the pace at which this homogenization occurs, but you can’t keep running forever. Sooner or later, you will either have to reconcile yourself to it, or build fortifications capable of weathering its assault – and there are no better, I believe, than those of continued, stubborn interest in things you have no “reason” to be interested in, in things which you gain no discernible benefit, social or financial, from being invested in. To be interested in records no one listens to, books no one reads, films no one watches, is to resist the encroachment of this especially pernicious kind of living death. It can feel strange sometimes, and sometimes lonely, and sometimes alienating – but it also feels real. It feels like, I know what I’m doing, and I know why, and I know that this kind of certainty is increasingly hard to come by. I know that I am doing this because it is meaningful to me, and for no other reason. I know that I am doing it because I would not recognize myself if I did not.