Dear listeners,
Sometimes, to listen to music, you have to do something more than just listen.
Personally, I spend a significant — disproportionate? unhealthy? — amount of time on social media, and I find myself drawn to accounts that are music-adjacent, or perhaps music-enhancing. They’re not criticism or reporting, but through a hammered-home gimmick (all great accounts have them) they serve up extremely engaging information about certain styles and scenes that you might otherwise allow to float on by.
Here’s a list of some of the accounts that fill my screen, along with a song that each one either brought me back to or introduced into my life.
Get your scroll on,
Jon
Listen along while you read.
1. Drumeo (TikTok, YouTube)
Drumeo’s videos are created as an extension of a drumming-education platform. The clips feature drummers talking about their craft, and the account’s most intriguing recurring series forces well-established drummers to invent a part for a song they’ve never heard and which is outside of their usual style. The results can be chaotic: Dennis Chambers, a jazz fusion and funk legend, treats a Tool song like an unwelcome pop quiz that he then casually rewrites; Dirk Verbeuren from Megadeth takes a surprisingly patient approach to “Mr. Brightside,” perhaps finding the Killers not quite muscular enough; and Liberty DeVitto, who played for decades with Billy Joel, takes a wry joy in pounding along to Deftones, as if unleashing a lifetime’s worth of backlogged pugnacity.
A rediscovered song: Bring Me the Horizon, “Can You Feel My Heart”
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
2. Ryley Walker (X)
All the stories Ryley Walker tells on his account on X (formerly Twitter) are true, he says. The ones about performances pulled off — or not — while heavily under the influence; the one where someone told him he drank like John Bonham; the one about smoking crack while listening to late-era Jane’s Addiction; the one about stealing Wayne Coyne’s beer. Some are just drolly bizarre: “I was kicked out of Phil Elverum’s studio in Anacortes for playing a xylophone blacked out and falling on it true story.” Walker — an excellent and sometime disorienting guitarist somewhere between jazz, psych and folk — is over 2,000 days sober now, and has been using his Twitter as a catalog of self-laceration, but also self-forgiveness, telling cheerful stories about fumbled opportunities and meet-drunks with his heroes. Those posts are interspersed with ones that communicate a pure-eyed love for music, and also a clarity about indie-rock piety that can only come from having loved it a little too hard: “Cold fact is most indie rock bands guitar tunings are closer to Alter Bridge than they are to sonic youth.” Sick — and accurate — burn.
A rediscovered song: Ryley Walker, “The Halfwit in Me”
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
3. UKgaragelectuals (Instagram)
When I lived in London in the late 1990s, club culture was evolving rapidly. Jungle was giving way to the sensual thump of garage (speed garage, 2-step garage, U.K. garage and more), and soon, these new sounds were knocking at the door of the pop charts, too. This meme page — full of relentless and exceedingly niche microscene jokes comprehensible to a select few — is a soothing reminder of chasing down white labels, and trying to find peace with how much remained unknowable.
A rediscovered song: Shanks & Bigfoot, “Sweet Like Chocolate”
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
4. Prep School Indie Kids (TikTok)
A slash of cultural criticism masquerading as a jokey TikTok account, this page follows a strict format: identifying an indie musician (indie-rock mostly, but not exclusively), then laying out where they attended boarding school. The Strokes (obvs), Maggie Rogers, the guys from Okkervil River and many more — all of them the beneficiaries of educational privilege. Whether this bothers you depends on whether you deem art only to be worthy when it’s the product of struggle, or maybe whether an artist has disingenuously played up a struggle narrative for clout. But given the caveats that it is possible for the well-off to struggle, and it is possible for a less financially fortunate child to attend an elite school with financial aid, this data dump of details is a simple reinforcement of the fact that privilege — creative, financial, educational and more — is hiding everywhere, or maybe isn’t hiding at all.
A rediscovered song: Del Water Gap, “Bug Bites”
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
5. robtmb (TikTok, YouTube)
“Real-music” blowhards will tell you that genius takes unending labor and devotion, but in fact plenty of genius is casual and improvisatory. The producer robtmb makes original beats, generally in less than a minute, but he’s best known as an expert at speedrunning in FL Studio, the most common hip-hop production software, which means he recreates well-known beats from scratch. XXXTentacion’s “Moonlight” in 29.67 seconds, Lil Tecca’s “Ransom” in 16.45 seconds, Soulja Boy’s “Crank Dat (Soulja Boy)” in 13.65 seconds. Certainly the originals took longer to make. But maybe they didn’t?
A rediscovered song: Lil Tecca, “Ransom”
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
6. Guess the Year (Instagram, TikTok)
“Jerry’s voice sounded a little younger.” “Bobby’s tempo was pretty upbeat.” “Donna’s on that.” “It sounds early Brent.” If any of those sentences make sense to you, you might be a worthy contestant for this Grateful Dead-centric show, which interviews fans about the band, and plays old recordings for them to see if they can pinpoint when during the band’s long, strange trip they sounded like that. It’s a testament to the intensity of Deadhead devotion that plenty are able to nail down the year of a dusty live recording, an indication that not everyone who tuned in was tuned out.
A rediscovered song: Grateful Dead, “Beat It on Down the Line (Live at Madison Square Garden, New York, NY 3/9/81)”
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
The Amplifier Playlist
“6 Social Media Accounts That Changed How I Rediscover Music (The Songs)” track list
Track 1: Bring Me the Horizon, “Can You Feel My Heart”
Track 2: Ryley Walker, “The Halfwit in Me”
Track 3: Shanks & Bigfoot, “Sweet Like Chocolate”
Track 4: Del Water Gap, “Bug Bites”
Track 5: Lil Tecca, “Ransom”
Track 6: Grateful Dead, “Beat It on Down the Line (Live at Madison Square Garden, New York, NY 3/9/81)”
The post 6 Social Media Accounts That Changed How I Rediscover Music appeared first on New York Times.
