When my dad died earlier this year, we hadn’t spoken in months. We weren’t speaking because I wasn’t speaking to him, which was less a deliberate choice than a series of panicked, spur-of-the-moment reactions. After decades of arguments and sour distance between us, in the last months of 2023, our fights had scaled to a point where when he called me, I simply could not pick up the phone and join combat. I had just changed careers, parenthood was kicking my butt, and my dream of writing something, anything, please God, it’s what I was put on this earth for, right? was (and is) knocking hard down in the basement of my soul like the Babadook. And every time I talked to Dad, it meant shouts and recriminations and too often ended with an abrupt dial tone. I would stay fixed on those fights for days afterward, feeling both guilty and wronged, rewinding the arguments, playing them back, rehearsing for the next one. About that time Suede had just released the expanded version of their brilliant 2022 album Autofiction, and I listened to their song “The Only Way I Can Love You” over and over, brooding on the lines “And if I disappoint you, just know I wrote this for you/Another way to do what I do wrong.” 

Almost immediately after the last time we spoke, the last time we fought, sad but also terribly righteous, I ordered Dad a Christmas present. It was probably a bizarre thing to do, but it came to me as naturally as answering when my name is called. Another way to do what I do wrong. Gift giving is my love language, imprinted when I was very small and making Dad pictures with a crayon in my fist. The gift adult me chose was a recently remastered Beatles album, of which we had briefly spoken, and I included a note that told him how listening to that album with him furnished some of my best memories of childhood. I could never have actually said those words to him, and it was not terribly brave of me to hide the sentiment behind the Amazon warehouse, knowing that his response–be it disapproval or anger or even appreciation–would be kept safe away by miles and hours and the element of surprise. But with or without the note, it was what the Beatles album meant. It was what pretty much everything I have ever done has meant. I love you, Daddy. I’m trying to be good.

A few months later, I would be standing in the middle of his house, his only child and sole heir, surrounded by a life told in collections–rocks and model cars and coins and Shutterfly mugs of my daughter I routinely sent him on holidays, but more than anything else, all his physical media, especially music–his record albums, his CDs, his concert DVDs, his cassette tapes. Hell, the man had eight-track cartridges. His music lined walls and filled drawers, a mute chorus, waiting to be discovered, recognized. Listened to. Dad was never really on the internet, despite glancing contact with it through family members and friends and having finally invested in a Samsung phone not long before he died, and so every song or film or TV show that ever mattered to him found a place in his house. Curation was important to him. And among all of those songs and stories, his story began to assemble before my eyes, allowing me to be quiet and listen to Dad in a way I never did while he was alive. 

Honestly, he was a brilliant person. Brilliant and so cool. 

He only dabbled as a musician, but Dad loved music more than anything, and his taste was far-ranging and eclectic. Of course, he loved Classic Rock giants like the Beatles, the Monkees, Grand Funk Railroad, America, Creedence, but also dance and rap and hip-hop. His collection spanned everything from Southern Gospel to the Bee Gees, Beyonce to No Doubt. More than once I irritated him by not knowing some new popular song he wanted to talk about, since I was the one whose taste was seemingly stuck in the 1970s. (It is notable that the music I loved most, post-punk, alt rock, and glam rock, was pretty much the only music Dad didn’t.) As I picked through Dad’s musical hoard, I idly wondered whether it was possible to turn his house into an out-of-the-way music emporium, some kind of foothills Tower Records. There was more than enough inventory. And I considered writing about one of his possessions for the Gutter–maybe Michael Nesmith’s landmark musical comedy Elephant Parts. Or perhaps I could highlight something he wouldn’t have expected me to appreciate. Oh, look, Dad had a Sir Mix-a-Lot album.

But those ideas slid away from me as the months wore on and the practical necessities of administering Dad’s estate pressed upon me. And the chorus held its breath on their shelves as shadows lengthened and shrank in an empty house, until I came back finally to release them into other lives, the songs of a lifetime–keeping as much as I could, but donating the lion’s share. It’s true I could have sold the ones I gave, but for the pence I would get for the effort, it was more worthwhile to me to let them go for free. You could never pay me what they were really worth. 

In the telling it might seem as though his massive collection was a burden to me. It was not. It’s true it was daunting to sit among all these works and know they were his. It is true they presented a logistical challenge that cost more to deal with than I recouped, at least in terms of cash money. But that isn’t the point at all. His collection–his library–was to me a revelation. And it made me think how much more hollow his house would have stood without it. What I would have lost if it had all just been reams of playlists on his phone.

I remember when Pandora debuted their streaming subscription model, soon flanked by Apple and Google Play and Spotify, and how the idea of owning nothing felt positively weird to me then. But now owning nothing, or next to nothing, is normal, and we pay our streamer lords their tribute for access to their clouds without ever worrying that we could lose our favorites and our downloads. Of course we won’t. The fees are low. At least it’s cheaper than buying everything, isn’t it? And certainly it is easier. Did I have to plead for Dad to drive me to the mall in 1989 so I could (hopefully) grab The Cure’s Disintegration? Probably. But Songs of a Lost World arrived complete in my YouTube Music queue as soon as it was released. It couldn’t disappear as easily, could it?

Rejecting my evangelical upbringing with much wailing and gnashing of teeth, I have struggled with ideas of religion and belief all my life, and this is something that put me at odds with Dad and made him suspicious of all my choices, from music to studies to politics. But one thing of which I am ever more confident is how art, in this case music, is communion. It is a sacrament. There is no human anywhere who doesn’t need art, which is another way of needing other human beings. The most misanthropic bastard in the world still needs a song in his heart, and even if that song is sung by someone long dead, the human heart behind it is deathless. We are the ones who save each other, across space and time, and art is one way we do it best. I have always appreciated the way I could sometimes see the world more clearly through Clive Barker’s or David Bowie’s or James Baldwin’s eyes. But I was still somehow surprised when The Animals and Beyonce showed me my dad.

I think, too, having fully lived on both sides of streaming, that owning nothing might be more of a burden than boxes and boxes of albums and DVD concerts in your dead father’s house. I think that physical media is only wasteful if you don’t cherish it. And it is so easy not to cherish the cloud. I marvel at the democratization of media that streaming offers, the ridiculous convenience of it, but also am increasingly aware, with David Zaslav sending the hard work and vision of countless artists to the trash unseen for a tax write-off, that what we can stream is still only what we are allowed to stream. And that could change. I have a personal copy of the Swedish dramedy Gösta, an HBO show, and that is the only way anyone can watch it now, presumably because it didn’t make HBO enough money out of the gate. You can’t buy it digitally or a physical copy, and that is not at all uncommon for contemporary series. But it is easy to forget an album or a show when there is so much else, bread and circuses and TikToks. 

It is hard to forget a well-loved library.

This disposability of streaming media bothers me. It has for a long time. What once gave me immense comfort in the currency of media, the meta-language of reference, repulses me now, as I see a world so terminally online and algorithmically manipulated that art is debased into content. If needing art is needing other human beings, content is avoiding same, and if it’s hard to say when a show or a book or a song becomes one or the other, you still know it when you see it. While art is banned and policed, content consumption is an anesthetic. And by saying this I do not discount how art offers comfort or how content hammers on discontent for engagement. Again, the difference is hard to proscribe or describe, but you know the difference. You know it because you are a human being. And reference and recognition have been similarly debased to substitute for thoughtful reflection, for criticism. This is how cultural literacy is on the decline at a time when culture  is both ubiquitous and cheap as free. Not to be immodest, The Cultural Gutter represents one of the only places you can get real criticism, because we love what we write about and we’re not selling you anything. More than that, we’re not selling you.

Being responsible for someone’s final affairs is eye-opening, and it’s hard to come out of that process without a new perspective on everything a person accumulates in life. I found it particularly surreal to go through mementos of my own childhood. (My Strawberry Shortcake dolls still smelled like berries!) It inspired in me a recommitment to enjoy rather than hoard–write in the special journal with the nice paper, drink the good wine, wear the dress that has to be dry cleaned. Enjoy it. That’s why you bought it. That’s why someone gave it to you. It also can be a powerful inducement to simplify–why are you keeping that knickknack from college? Do you really want that book or blu-ray, that toy?

Somewhere between these sentiments, managing Dad’s meticulously-curated library–the songs of a lifetime–has strengthened in me a conviction of how important art is, particularly music, which I have been less thoughtful about than films and books, even though music is so often my first comfort and counsel and joy. Communion is far too important to trust to a streamer’s ever-rotating library. A sacrament is too crucial for the artists who craft it to be paid pennies based on a rapidly narrowing share of cloud. It is not that I’m making a plea for physical media as such, although I’m not not doing that, but more that I am freshly aware of how important it is to value the art that informs your life, and taking the time to purchase an actual album or book or whatever else is an act of valuing something. It is an intention. And if there is anything which you want to fill your life and to survive you, it is your best intention.

My Dad’s library is now dispersed, and I have kept what I could. Among the records I kept, I found the Beatles album I bought him for Christmas. It was still in the giftwrap on the floor of his den, and at first I despaired. He never even opened it. But then I looked, and I saw he had not only opened it, but he had taken the note I sent, and he had carefully pasted it inside the album cover. Curation and intention. Communion. And I’m glad my Dad never converted to listening to songs on Spotify. I never could have told him I loved him that last time.

~~~

Angela chose “House of the Rising Sun” as the song to accompany her father out of the funeral chapel, and it has spookily followed her everywhere since.