I just bought an album (Failure - In The Future Your Body Will Be The Furthest Thing From Your Mind) and realized for the first time ever that I had to add it to two playlists.
I have a delightfully anachronistic relationship with iTunes: I still use it in this, The Year Of Our Lord Two Thousand and Twenty. Not only do I still use it for listening to music, I still use it for syncing things (namely: music) to my phone. That makes more sense now that I'm on an iOS device, but the other big 'benefit' to it was that Google Play Music's Windows app would sync playlists to Play Music, and then also the software does a pretty good job keeping my folders organized and labeled correctly.
All of which is to say that I have a playlist scheme
My primary playlist is another anachronism, called simply 'iPod.' This has always been the playlist I use to sync tracks to my portable music thing, both back when I was using an iPod Mini and its subsequent replacement Nano, when I had an iPod Touch from work, and my more modern work iPad and personal iPhone. Basically, this is a more convenient way to deal with not syncing things than unchecking them form my library. I don't need Short Music for Short People ruining my music app's view, but I do want it to come up on random.
The other playlists started life more recently, I think about 2011 or maybe 2012. They are: 1 - High School, 2 - College, 3 - Adult Life, and 4 - The Cancer Years. I only created 4 about six weeks ago, because I 'forgot' I had had a new life-changing event, and I believe I use life-changing events to categorize my music strata and determine where terranes begin and end. This isn't as simple as year of release; I didn't 'discover' grunge until late 2018, so I can't place it in 1 without being dishonest. To an extent, I also won't count something I listened to on and off in a previous era unless I actually owned the albums. The ex that was super into CAKE when I was still in college did not mean that I got to put their first three albums in 2 - they went into 4, because that's when I bought and incorporated them into my consciousness.
Anyway, I think it's worth documenting somewhere that the signifiers - to use my language from earlier, the faults - that separate my listening are graduating from high school and starting college; graduating from college; and beginning diagnosis and treatment for cancer. To use a slightly different metric, the first CD I remember buying was Oasis' What's The Story, which I would have bought in 1995. Some of the earliest music I had at all were Green Day's first works, the collected 1,039/Smoothed Out Slappy Hours and Kerplunk, though I'm pretty sure I had a copy of Dookie before Insomniac came out. I started collecting music in 1994, basically. I graduated from high school six years later. Owing to my garbage performance as an academic, I finished college six years later. Owing to random chance, I was asked to go get my neck ultrasound six years later. I'm actually, by the logic of my musical proclivities, two years overdue for a life-changing event. I'm pretty sure nothing meaningful in-the-long-run happened in 2018, but who knows. I'm decidedly still operating within The Cancer Years, so it's not like I have a convenient name to assign to the new stretch. I stopped performing music in 2019, but that would have been seven years anyway... it's not terribly important if there's no answer to this, I just thought it was interesting that there's probably a perceptible shift in my listening tastes for each set of experiences. If I use the right music tool, I can even time travel to whatever the most relevant group of music is. Pour one out for my college years.
