Music Molly

music for the weird art project zone (megamix 15)

WE'RE BACK! 2026! Wow. Let's get into it.

I Enjoy Music Photo Club (?) (!)

I love New Years / January so much. Not in a "I'll start drinking green juice way" exactly, but I am into a fresh start, a do-over. Recent Januarys haven't even been great for this. Last year we kicked things off by driving away from a flaming Los Angeles; five years ago I clocked in at my job and by the middle of the day no one was doing their jobs because everyone was watching 'da insurrection' (sometimes the January do-over gets taken a little too literally, like trying to do over the election). But I continue to dig the opportunity to try to take another whack at this thing called life, with my zest renewed.

Januarys also give me the opportunity to think about the I Enjoy Music Content Strategy, give it a few tweaks, and approach the delicate art of blogging with refreshed energy. Something I want to explore this year is the Weird Art Project Zone. As is, I approach each I Enjoy Music blog post with the focused reverence of a Dutch guy in the 1600s painting a pile of fruit and bugs...but any additional efforts to avoid just 'making content' and celebrate the act of doing creative stuff ⭐_{just because}⭐ are of utmost importance to the blog this year.

One idea I had for this is a mail-based photo club. I would like to do a test run of the club soon, which I can explain to you now! I will need to gather a small number (<10) of people for this. If you are one of these people, this is what I would ask you to send me:

a digital photo file of a photo you've taken at a music event (concert, festival, rave, recital, street performance, whateva). doesn't have to be Professional, doesn't have to be from a nice camera, doesn't have to be 'technically good' in any way, but it's important that you like the photo, and that the photo means something to you, musically/visually
a short written paragraph about the photo's backstory / why it means something to you
your mailing address

Then, at a certain point in time after everyone sends me their stuff, I will

print out everyone's photos and stories
send everyone in the club an envelope with a selection of these photos and stories
so you end up with a real physical memento of someone else's important music memory and you can do with it...whatever you'd like

That's it. Does this sound fun/intriguing to you? If it does, will you shoot me an email at ienjoymusicblog@gmail.com and say "this sounds fun"? I would not charge money for such a thing, at least at the beginning—$$ for this venture would come out of the I Enjoy Music slush fund, and if it feels like it has legs, maybe a future rendition would require a small fee for postage/printing. Anyway...just an idea that I had that I thought would be fun to do an experiment with, and it will require Readers Like You to make it good, so get at me please!!!

I listened to your fave songs of 2025

You probably already know this, because oops I sent one of the posts as an email, but I spent the last month of the year listening to YOUR favorite songs and writing about them. I have already said this, but it's truly the best time of the year, in a way that feels way less brainhammering and more personal than Big List Season. I love seeing why people connect to certain songs, I love seeing the breadth of genres represented (this year ran the gamut from goth techno to bluegrass to nouveau opera and beyond), I love seeing which artists had albums that really popped (Geese, Wednesday, Pretty Bitter), and I love getting recs that get me further into a new artist's output (right now, Pelados [Brazilian indie pop] and Brown Horse [UK Americana]). Life-affirming shit. Makes me emotional. Below, an embed of a post that has all of the EOY posts linked. Thank you sooo much to all who participated...

Music in the house, out in the world, on the computer...

It still feels a little hard to not be as out and about as I used to be, what with the wee childe in my care, but I'm doing my best to make it happen.

Went to my favorite mall (The Shops at Santa Anita, the one I wrote about at the end of my essay about AI music and virtual influencers) and we went into the Kpop store. As a former teenybopper, I respect the wide variety of merch on display, though all of it had a cheap and uncanny quality, as if printed via Redbubble or something. There were signs everywhere that warned you of the security camera's unblinking eye; I imagine shoplifting is somewhat of a problem at a place like this, with so many desirable and palmable trinkets. Those rectangular tubes on the left are apparently Ateez-branded lip glosses. I would have loved a Nick Carter Backstreet Boys lip gloss back in the day...

Went to karaoke and my friend Lucas did Caroline Polachek's "So Hot You're Hurting My Feelings." I have listened to that song at least 20 times and I swear I never truly heard the background vocals in the bridge, which say "Show me the banana"?? Sometimes it takes karaoke to really get into a song's innards.

Ice Spice's song "Big Guy," from the latest SpongeBob movie, nailed the lyrical requirement of being Just Stupid Enough To Stick, and Chris and I have been muttering SpongeBob, big guy, pants okay around the house for the past couple of weeks. But I really wanted to highlight Ice Spice's transformation into a SpongeBob character for the promotional materials. I like that she did not insist on being a unique sea creature, like an octopus or a manta ray or whatever. She's a proletarian fish, the same species as the "MY DIET DR. KELP??" guy. Only her orange curls mark her as the rap sensation she is—that's true iconography.

For Christmas, Chris got me a nice lil cassette player / radio, plus a lot of Grateful Dead bootleg tapes...thrilling! Having some Dead bumping in the background of doing baby activities like "looking" "grabbing" and "going goo goo ga ga mode" is just perfect. I dream of seeing Dead & Co again someday...

Cheeky dance music scamp Fred again.. had some interesting merch for sale over Christmas: a USB drive necklace, no doubt inspired by his "neverending album" USB, as well as by the hardware needs of a DJ on the run. I love the sacred treatment of an object of data management—the USB flash drive was a fairly common thing to use in the 2010s, but when you think about it, we might have taken it for granted. A flash drive is kind of a magic wand...portability and information exchange, in a handheld geegaw you can buy with ease in the CVS checkout line.

That being said, the instant sellout/markup/resale of this precious limited edish item, as well as the excitement around the idea that there were secret Fred again.. songs loaded on the USBs, also feeds into a grander theme around Fred's work, which is Hype / Scarcity. Last year Fred did a bunch of "pop up" shows at venues with capacities that his fandom quite obviously outpaced long ago; he clearly values the special feeling of an underplay that satisfies a small but thrilled group of people, and it's true that getting sweaty in a packed, tiny club has a frisson that playing cavernous arenas with strict designated seating just doesn't give you.

But Hype / Scarcity always threatens to veer toward Crass Consumerism. People draining their wallets and hoisting their phones to just to say they were at the gig, or worse, treating music fandom like the purchase of limited edition clothing: the more hoops jumped through to get the goods, the more dedicated the listener?? Eugh. Ethan Sawyer wrote about this very 2020s kind of fandom in his newsletter Human Pursuits, def worth a read...

I listened to music because I saw people saying it was good

Eavesdropping time.

I listened to Bellows' "Thick Skin" because Miranda Reinert said it was good on her blog. I listened to Shirt's "The Drama of Being Alive" because Rashad Rastam shouted it out in his newsletter. I listened to Cool Sounds "And That's How I Got The Congas" because Shaad D'Souza recommended it in Perfectly Imperfect. I listened to Frida Kill's "City Gurl" after reading about them in Bands Do BK (very fun pregame music). I listened to "You Came Out" by We Have Band because Die Spitz said it was "the most sleazy of the indie music" in Perfectly Imperfect. I listened to The Hellp's Riviera after reading their interview with Eli Enis (who by the way seems to be one of the only music journalists getting CONTROVERSIAL and THOUGHT-PROVOKING MATERIAL out of their interviews rn). I listened to Quiet Luke's Machine of Love & Grace because Serge Neborak said "shit sounds like the future." I listened to La Dispute's No One Was Driving The Car because Michele from I Have That On Vinyl said "it fucks hard" (true - the end of "Autofiction Detail" gave me a teenage feeling). And I listened to KIYOKO's techno set in a japanese coffee house because Brian ("Big Iron" on Bluesky) dug it (it opens with Philip Glass, nice).

Email me about what you're listening to - or any music stuff at all - and please, if you're interested in Photo Club, let me know! ienjoymusicblog@gmail.com :)

Thanks for reading I Enjoy Music! If you like it, tell a friend.