I Identify As Kraftwerk's Ninth Studio Album

Hi Blogger. My strange friend. One of a million interfaces, and orange like a jaffa cake. So I guess I'll write a post. One of those posts where I type some kind of DIRECT BRAIN COMMUNICATIONS, y'know, without even a picture lined up (woah). Today I've been looking at old last.fm stuff. Yeah, that site. Did you ever have a profile? Do you still scrobble? Well, it seems I took around a year out from scrobbling. It felt liberating to just listen to stuff without thinking of the statistics. I'd used last.fm since 2008. Two different accounts, however, because you can't change your username so I decided to finally make a new one in 2013. It felt like my music tastes and attitudes had changed a lot between 2008 and 2013. I listen to stuff more from a perspective of base enjoyment these days rather than the intellectual curiosity that drove a lot of listening habits previously. I don't know, I like cheesy stuff and pop nonsense and all manner of kinda odd things and I've embraced that more and more. That doesn't mean Depeche Mode and Split Enz won't be my top artists again, but y'know, things are just different. More carefree. I like that.

My last.fm profile today.

Anyway, so I ended up not scrobbling my listens for a while, and during that time I had around 6 months of listening to pretty much only kpop - from when I discovered SHINee's 1 of 1 in October 2016. And then this month I suddenly re-discovered last.fm. I felt really nostalgic for it and decided, yeah okay, let's use this thing again. It's inspiring me to listen to new music a lot more and to really actively enjoy music discovery and playlist building again. All that good stuff. I'd totally forgotten how last.fm shaped my music listening habits. The changes to the site hasn't changed that primary impact, so for now, I'm deciding to make it a thing again. I'm going to listen a lot, and try to talk to people there too (I might need to learn Portuguese, since the site seems to be used mostly by Brazilians these days).

Today I found records of my old last.fm profile. Snapshots of it from all the way back in 2008, 2009, 2010, and it made me feel kinda sad. It's weird to look on your past self, and somehow I felt melancholy that I'm not 2009 me any more. I mean, who even was that person? It almost feels like recording myself is pointless, because truly as soon as something is recorded I'm not that person any more. I don't really relate to my memories of a child me, or a teenage me, or even a me from a few years ago. It feels sometimes like I'm an alien within myself. I'm not sure if my sense of self is somehow warped. I mean, when I look at those old records of what I was listening to during a specific month years ago, yes, it does feel like me. It does feel representative of who I am. But I feel segmented, like a big orange, into all these different pieces. And I know that we are all just jumbled up collections of stuff, but sometimes I want this cohesive whole. I guess that's one reason people love horoscopes. You can just say, well, I'm an Aquarius. I mean, hey, I know I'm a Ravenclaw, and that my favourite video game genre is JRPGS, and that my favourite music genres are synth pop and post punk new wavey stuff and 1980s Japanese electronic - and that I prefer a slightly industrial infused brand of synth pop (Depeche Mode, Deutsch Amerikanische Freundschaft, and Kraftwerk's Electric Café album).

My top artists, 29th December 2009.

This all feeds into my thoughts about being places online as well. It's like we're segmenting ourselves even further to place ourselves neatly into different services and sites. Does my username describe me better or worse than my legal name? Photographs don't feel like they capture me either. The only thing that really feels like me is my physical self. My body is me. So why be online at all when my body can't be there? Take my body and throw it into a big pile of synths and have John Barnes rap next to it like in that New Order football song.

11th April, 2010.