On the Media Menu: 80s Music Flashbacks and Massive Fantasies
My minimalist year in music was dominated by Conan Gray’s Gen Z throwback to synth-pop; plus Brandon Sanderson's mammoth fantasy, Wind and Truth
Outside of videogames, I have no plans to do year-end “best of” rankings for all the other media I’ve consumed over the past twelve months. That’s mostly because I don’t have anything near a consistent or current media diet — I rarely watch television as it airs, most of my reading focuses on my never-shrinking “to be read” pile of books that I’ve bought at any time in the past decade (or longer), and my resistance to seeing movies in theaters makes my cineaste experience the opposite of au courant.
Worst of all is my experience of music, an art form that I haven’t been current on since sometime in the mid-1990s. That doesn’t mean I’m ignorant of what’s going on. I read Vulture daily (plus plenty of other arts and entertainment news) so I know who’s out there. I just don’t usually bother to listen to any of it.
Except for “Not Like Us,” that rocked.
Judging from my Apple Music 2024 round-up, I listened even less this year than last. That’s probably because I spent a lot of this year delving deeper into podcasts, specifically non-politics podcasts: The Rewatcher: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, my beloved Blank Check, a lot of Triple Click for videogames, a couple of history podcasts. Anything but politics (sorry Pod Save America, I just can’t anymore). All those ate up most of my driving, walking, cleaning, and cooking aural space.
According to Apple, my music king for 2024 was Conan Gray. Who was also king of my 2023 list. This is what happens when your primary playlist is “Recently Played.” Actually, since the 2020 lockdowns, my main musical tastes have run to BTS, Conan Gray, Olivia Rodrigo, Taylor Swift, and Run River North (an indie band you’ve unfortunately never heard of). With BTS sidelined for Korean military service, Run River North apparently broken up, and Taylor Swift fading from my rotation, that pretty much leaves real world besties Conan and Olivia at the top of my list (her “Bad Idea, Right?” was my favorite song last year since it was the story of my life in my twenties).
I’d actually started to fade a little on Gray toward the end of last year. While his sad, small-town, gay-boy teen angst spoke to a part of me that’s still alive, closeted, and depressed, his album Superache had eventually become too depressing. It’s good, but it’s a lot.
Then, surprise, this year he releases Found Heaven, an ‘80s homage that spoke to the small-town gay boy in me that wasn’t always depressed. “Boys and Girls” picks up where Book of Love left off, “Fainted Love” explicitly calls back to Marc Almond and Soft Cell, and “Eye of the Night” is every power ballad I ever played on air from the WPKY-FM adult contemporary playlist.
Gen Z is making Gen X music, we really can all get along!
Maybe, maybe not. But “Lonely Dancers” is my most-played song of the year for a reason. Go give it a listen. Trust me, you’re not too old.
Currently Reading
After finishing The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi, I decided to read Devery S. Anderson’s Emmett Till: The Murder That Shocked the World and Propelled the Civil Rights Movement. Predictably, it made me even angrier. Definitely worth reading for an exhaustive history of what actually happened and how deeply racist the South was (and, in many ways, still is).
After that, I really needed something lighter. I mean “lighter” figuratively because the book I’ve picked up next is Brandon Sanderson’s Wind and Truth, a 1,400-page behemoth of a fantasy novel, itself the fifth in a series of gargantuan 1,200-plus page novels.
Gigantic, intricate, and densely woven fantasy worlds are Sanderson’s entire gig, and The Stormlight Archive, which is Wind and Truth’s homeworld, is explicitly a keystone connecting most of his fantasy output of the past two decades. It’s similar to how Stephen King’s Dark Tower series eventually encompassed almost all of his fictional work, though Sanderson is much more deliberate in what he’s doing (King’s series didn’t go full metafictional and interconnected until it more than halfway through).
Knowing Wind and Truth was on the calendar for a December release, I started re-reading the first four books back in the spring. Since this book is being touted as the climax to the first arc of a ten-book series, I wanted go in prepared and a simple online synopsis doesn’t do justice to what Sanderson has assembled over the course of the series. It’s intricate but propulsive so if you are daunted by mammoth page counts, I’d recommend putting that aside and diving into this one. It’s well worth it. Also, it’s far easier to recommend making such a large investment of time knowing that this book is an endpoint, even if the larger series continues.
You’re not going to be left hanging waiting for something like George R.R. Martin’s Winds of Winter, is what I’m saying.
One note for those who pay attention to author’s lives outside of the work: Sanderson is a Mormon who teaches at Brigham Young University, which I know is a red flag for a lot of LGBTQ readers (and others!). It’s a somewhat justifiable flag, given the existence of famed sci-fi/fantasy author Orson Scott Card (Ender’s Game), a very publicly Mormon author whose work is filled with some of the most vile anti-gay tropes I’ve encountered (and I’ve encountered a lot). I read one novel by Card back in the 90’s, Lost Boys, that posited gay men as pedophilic murderers and I never read another fictional word by him, regardless how lauded he may be in certain science fiction circles. He’s the definition of Fuck that guy.
Sanderson has no public politics that I’m aware of (not that I’ve particularly searched). More relevantly, in his more recent books he’s gone out of his way to include a few queer characters and has been increasingly forthright in depicting some sexuality for his characters. I don’t need to have gay characters, etc., pop up in every book I read but I appreciate the effort in general. I’m actually a bit surprised I haven’t seen some backlash to that from the more neanderthal aspects of fantasy fandom. Give them time, I suppose.
So, feel free to dig in and explore one of the more interesting fantasy worlds of recent years.