Spring is here! For Mixtape #8, we asked our editors and contributing writers what in culture they’re cleaning out for spring. Here are some of what we’re leaving behind and what we’re making space for this season.
Jay Shelat: What’s out for my spring: badly written romance (this is about Heated Rivalry), people refusing to read beyond their “comfort genres” (this is about TikTok), poor literacy rates (this is about Emerald Fennell), the music at my gym (this is about contemporary pop music), any mainstream Bollywood movie about India’s “past” (this is about Narendra Modi), and Timothee Chalamet (until Dune 3 comes out [this is about ballet and opera]).
Bekah Waalkes: Playlists are OUT! This spring I will be listening to one concise album at a time, over and over and over. I’ve been enjoying two new albums lately: Tinariwen’s Hoggar, for 45 blissful minutes of Tuareg guitar, and Robyn’s Sexistential, which does have a couple of skips for me but nonetheless offers 39 minutes of frothy dancepop concoction.
Olivia Stowell: For spring, I am freeing myself from the idea that the ambient “discourse” sets the terms for what art, culture, and media are “relevant” or “interesting,” in favor of setting my own terms and leaning in to good recommendations from brilliant friends. In light of this aim, I am cleaning out the following: Harry Styles, Emerald Fennell, Y2K nostalgia, Ottessa Moshfegh, podcasting as a concept, Sabrina Carpenter, and espresso martinis.
Marissa Fenley: Microplastics.
Jordan Baldridge: It’s time for me to move on from bedroom pop. If I could speak for the collective, I would say it was time for us to move on from bedroom pop. If (like me) you still sometimes yearn to feel sad, trapped in your apartment, languishing within the confines of the pandemic’s most sleepless nights – there is now nearly a decade’s worth of back catalog for you to enjoy. And for artists: if you’re making pop music, no need to make it feel like we’re in your bedroom. If you want to record in your bedroom, create something strange enough to warrant hiding while making it. If Clairo herself can move on, so can we.
Farah Bakaari: The tyranny of protein must come to an end, expeditiously!
Mitch Therieau: This spring I am relaxing my hater muscles. I am letting go of my reflexive animosity toward Geese, the band, and admitting that those live videos are pretty electric. I am letting go of my disdain for “brodernism” (Krasznahorkai is good). I am retiring my grad-school-era opinion that Walter Benjamin is overrated, or at least overly—and overly reverentially—cited. As it turns out, Walter Benjamin is correctly rated. These days I seem to like most things. Recently I’ve found myself liking 2010s K-pop; straight-leg jeans; Anne Hathaway’s microexpressions; and this video of Julian Lage, the greatest living guitar player, looking a little bit out of his element for once, playing alongside Derek Trucks.
Martha Henzy: I’m late to the game on leaving Spotify, but as I’ve parted ways with the streaming service I found myself combing through my own back-catalogue as if cleaning out a box tucked on a high, high shelf. My long-forgotten playlists document the many seasons into which I stashed Ravyn Lenae’s 2015 Moon Shoes EP (a feature of my “fall 2016” and “winter 2016” playlists, as well as a mixtape simply titled “you feel good”), my much more fleeting interest in Vladimir Vysotsky (a consequence of my enduring love of Mikhail Baryshnikov and the film White Nights), and more abandoned playlists called “running” than I can count (my attempts at running were similarly forsaken). Cleaning out and combing through, I’m struck by how odd it is to erase my own archive, to realize that I still have a guilty attachment to all the “I swear I’ll listen someday” podcasts I’m leaving behind for good.
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