The Vibe Shift Was Real After All

2022: The Year in Review

Just past midnight as May 12 flipped to May 13, I put on my earbuds and opened up Spotify. I lay in bed next to my sleeping partner. My mind whirred with anticipation. I knew sleep would be far off; I was going to just lay back and enjoy this.

Enjoy what?

C’mon, you already know … Kendrick Lamar’s Mr. Morale and The Big Steppers. The night of release with that new tracklist smell. I pressed play. Track One; “United in Grief.” There’d be no skips.

It’d be no stretch for me to speculate that I’ve listened to Kendrick Lamar more in the past decade than any other musical artist. Spotify all but says so — he regularly appears in my year-end Wrapped Top-Five artists even in his lean years with no new releases.

When DAMN. arrived in April 2017, I listened to the album front-to-back no fewer than 26 times on a long weekend in New York, including slipping the DJ $50 to play it on repeat at the Crocodile Lounge in the East Village until just shy of 3 a.m. [If there were other patrons in the bar beside my friend and me, I sure as hell don’t remember them. I blame the fernet.]

From 2012 to 2018, I saw Kendrick Lamar annually in concert, including multiple SXSWs and the early-career statement set at FADER Fort that introduced me to him and coerced me into downloading Section.80 and good kid, m.A.A.d City before I even made it home.

I’m self-aware enough to know that merely disclosing even some, much less all, of the above makes me a very specific kind of white millennial male—possibly 40, definitely living in Austin, probably deep into aged single-malts and astrophysics, maybe bought a Bitcoin way too early and cashed out the minute the technoutopians started singing its praises — but I assure you the love and endless listening happened organically and enthusiastically. Kendrick Lamar was my 30s. You get it.

But on May 13, 2022 — more than five years since Kendrick’s previous album and mere hours before my first of seven Friday conference calls — I found myself checking my watch during both the front and the back halves of the double album. Highlights were plenty — the slashing menace of “N95”, Sampha’s ultraviolet hook on “Father Time”, the jaw-dropping slow-motion Jenga tower of “Mother I Sober” — yet even with all night, my patience was thin. I turned the album off just shy of 2 a.m., revisited it again in the morning, and periodically returned to it over the summer.

Still, as I lay awake listening on the first night, I calculated the distance between DAMN. and Mr. Morale. It was even longer than the span bridging good kid, m.A.A.d City, and DAMN. Kendrick Lamar wasn’t really my 30s at all. He was the first half of my 30s. Only by continuing to listen did I keep him current for me.

Then I thought deeper. (Big mistake.) I began to notice objects in the rear were farther than they appeared. If my life was music and my 30s were a double LP, the tracklist peaks midway through Disc Two before intrusive, stray pandemic-induced sounds and words of scattershot quality swallow the ambiance whole — marring the overall sonic experience. I thought I once had a masterpiece in the making, now it’s merely a flawless EP buried in a concept album. I was aiming for Dark Side of the Moon and I wound up at The Wall.

Had it really been five years since DAMN.? Damn, indeed. How come I only remember two of them?

In that instant, as May 12 flipped to May 13, the present faded into the past. John, that last Kendrick concert wasn’t last year, it was four years ago.

You didn’t leave your corporate job last fall, that was three falls ago.

That partner you’re laying next to? You’ve been laying next to her for almost two years. In your 20s and your 30s, you said you’d be married by now.

After you left your corporate gig in 2019, you said you’d be your own brand.

Instead, you’re working 80 hours a week for various people and places who won’t even so much brief in a blog post without three quick syncs with five key stakeholders — that ain’t even your name on the byline, buddy.

Who are you and how did you get here? And why are you so damned tired all the time?

All That You Can’t Leave Behind

I don’t know how many of you still listen to rock and roll. It’s okay if you don’t; it’s been a while for me, too. The genre hasn’t been anything genuinely interesting since The National last hummed on all cylinders. Spoon is consistent and satisfying as a steak dinner, but there’s nothing else on the grill. The Black Keys are still serviceable, although they long ago spit-shined their metallic grime into a technicolor Wall of Fuzz.

Still, I’ve been easing my way back into it. Mostly the classics. You know … The Strokes, The Killers, all that gritty post-9/11 NYC Meet Me in the Bathroom bullshit. If I’m adventurous, sometimes I pay respects to Velvet Underground, Television, and Talking Heads. Listen, I’m a very specific kind of white millennial male … I know exactly what’ll scratch that itch.

And, I’ll be honest, lately, that craving is satisfied more often than not the shit my parents put me on to. Springsteen. Fleetwood Mac. Billy Joel. U2. I have a Questionable AF Spotify playlist … I’m not kidding, Questionable AF is the actual name of the playlist. I assure you: however much Bob Seger and REO Speedwagon you were prepared for, you were not expecting enough.

All that is to finally approach today’s, and this year’s, thesis. Within rock-and-roll’s long and storied history is a very specific sub-sub-genre of album. Usually released over a decade or two deep into a band’s career: The classicist album. And that’s what I want to talk to you about.

A classicist album is the first good-to-great record a band or artist drops just after they’ve edged out of the zeitgeist. It sounds kinda like their old stuff, but also like a band of dads wearing their old sonic palate like a costume. Maybe there are a couple of modern flourishes — some Ableton loops here, some tasteful autotune there, a timely lyric that roots the album firmly in the present even as the music retreads well-worn ground — but for the most part, you press play and it sounds like the band you grew up loving to death but like four degrees cooler. Your favorites already took their art as far as youth would allow and now they’ve come back home older, softer, and wiser. You always know a classicist album when you hear it.

More tellingly, you know a classicist album when you hear the media sing that record’s praises. The cliche celebrating the release is unmistakable. It’s the first time you hear a reviewer write (and mean!), “Their best album since …” and then they say Exile or Dark Side or Born to Run or whatever.

Yes, two types of albums get the “best album since …” treatment, and it’s vitally important we don’t confuse a classicist release with a creative renaissance. Unlike a backward-looking classicist album, a renaissance indicates some kind of sonic or thematic evolution from the band’s observed early-period excellence. [See Green Day’s American Idiot. Allegedly their best (and certainly biggest!) since Dookie, but the power trio’s 2004 punk-rock opera is a grown-ass record for grown-ass grownups. Dookie, released ten years earlier, is a spray can of teen angst shaken with Red Bull.]

The standard-bearer for a classicist album is U2’s All That You Can’t Leave Behind. After storming through the 80s with earnest skyscraping anthems that were as unsubtle as they were inevitable, U2 switched up their flow and spent the 90s gliding through Madchester Euro-step and soaking their lyrics, liner notes, and stage shows in irony. Yes, 90s U2 was still unmistakably U2 — for all their musical shape-shifting, their line between leitmotif and self-parody mostly dissolved by The Unforgettable Fire, but then they kept crossing it over and over and over again. Only by Achtung Baby, instead of eulogizing Martin Luther King, they were avoiding jilted exes in a drippy, drunken haze. Go back and listen to Zooropa, it’s fucking batshit by U2 standards — or anyones. But when Pop fizzled (there’s no way I’m the first person who wrote that), U2 dug back through the crates and unloaded All You Can’t Leave Behind at the turn of the Millennium.

All You Can’t Leave Behind sounds exactly like your idea of a U2 album — Joshua Tree-era U2 with just a hint of Achtung Baby. There were no surprises. No charming Johnny Cash lead vocal turns. Their much-ballyhooed “return to form” — god, that overcooked chestnut — spawned four massive hit singles, scored a couple of GRAMMYs, and sold a gazillion or so records. The mainstream music press gobbled it up.

In retrospect, the album’s almost maddeningly capable. The album served up heaping platefuls of sonic comfort food in post-9/11 America, especially in NYC, right around the time The Strokes and all them were toiling in dive bars, taking dead-aim at dinosaur acts like (gulp!) U2.

The thing with All You Can’t Leave Behind is … I don’t revisit it much, nor its even more self-consciously classicist follow-up, How to Dismantle An Atomic Bomb. [God, U2, those album titles. Yeesh.]

I mean … fine. If Beautiful Day comes on, I’ll blast it. I’ll wistfully daydream about being 19 and driving with the windows rolled down between Philly and the Jersey Shore anytime the sunsoaked guitar echo of “Walk On” starts jangling.

All that is to emphatically underline (or obfuscate?) the point of this entire retrospective: 2022 was the year I felt like I stopped pushing the boundaries of life and love and youth and art and experience, and started getting cozy inside familiar haunts, making my new house a home, retracing my steps, and being my own idea of who I’ve always been, or perhaps more accurately, refused to acknowledge.

2022 wasn’t a particularly bad year — it didn’t start great and hasn’t always felt great — in fact, it was really strong. Still, it’s hard to square the past 12 months with the handful of years that closed out the 2010s. If anything, 2022 felt like a blast from the whole of my past.

If 2020 empathetically ended the prime years with a nuclear blast, and 2021 was just a collection of 2020 B-Sides, then 2022 was the first year back in the studio trying to remember what we were working on and what we’re capable of. I doubt I experienced that alone.

It was indeed a great year, filled with all the things I think filled good years in the past. There was progress, pivots, and a narrative arc. Major things happened in my life and in the world. Yet a lot of what happened felt, more or less, like it a loose approximation of things that have happened before — Russia invaded Ukraine and they are still at war, revolutionary protests against the Islamic Republic in Iran, Brazil crushing it at World Cup, Donald Trump running for President but as the pendulum seems to be swinging back to the political center — and things reached some sort of, if not pre-pandemic normalcy, then an uneasy equilibrium that feels on-brand for the times.

No Metrics, Just Vibes

I’m gonna be honest — I just sorta assumed 2022 would be a flaming port-o-john of a calendar year. I lost my cat in January and some other weird shit happened in my life and I kinda said to myself, “fuck it, maybe the good will kick in for 2023, if there even is a 2023”.

In Spring, Sean Monahan — the erstwhile founder of normcore-coining art collective K-HOLE — sent shockwaves through the embers of the urban intelligentsia by predicting an ambiguous “Vibe Shift”. “Sometimes things change,” explained The Cut, “and a once-dominant social wavelength starts to feel dated.”

Monahan came at this vexing premonition from the perspective of a very specific kind of white American male. 35. Educated. New York to the core. The type of guy I probably woulda struck up breathless discourse with at the Crocodile Lounge way back when. Referencing the lead-in to 2022, Monahan told The Cut:

“[2020 and 2021] were still real years. People’s opinions were changing, things were happening. It was just that, you know, culture and pop culture were not really putting out bangers during most of the pandemic.”

As the last vestiges of Deep Covid lifted, many of us were let out into a vaguely unrecognizable world — suddenly IRL felt like the Uncanny Valley. The trajectory we found ourselves on in the 2010s ran its course. What followed was a devolution, in a way. I wholeheartedly admit to devolving.

As 2022 started, I was still fighting with reality. I sucked wind through all the survival-prompted things I did and became to fill pandemic space and time. At the same time, I wanted to “get back out there.” But “out there” wasn’t out there anymore, and there was little left to get back to. 2019 me wouldn’t make it in 2022. Neither would 2020 or 2021 me. Still, there I was, trying to live three timelines at once, trying to be three people in one and finding out they were probably better off not meeting.

The vibe shift was real. Painfully so. I burned out. I wasn’t that man anymore, or that man, or the other man. I needed grounding. I needed to go back. Not to 2019 — no, farther.

In late June, I made arrangements to stop working altogether. I already have a wonderful life — a wonderfully supportive and delightful partner, a beautiful home, a couple of charming fur babies, and some money in the bank. What would I do knowing life was already full enough? Who am I and where do I go from here? How can I not be so damned tired all the time?

Summer 2022 was liberating as all hell. No goals, no metrics, just vibes. I was going to run, learn a new language, read, refocus my business, apply for some moonshot jobs. I’d cook and clean and do crosswords and dress in aggressively unfashionable yet unrelentingly soft apparel.

War Sparrow

The cover photo here is something I reference to myself all the time. When the world is shit or I have a mountain of tasks ahead of me, I go into what I took to calling “War Sparrow” mode. (Sparrows always look like they’re about to go into 19th Century battle. The illustration above incorporates 100% more Star Wars into the mix.) I just do the next thing. Then the next. I rarely speak or laugh. I just execute in surgical fashion.

For me, 2022 was about trying to harness that state of serene resignation and determined stoicism as often as possible. Just do the next thing. Put the work in. Eyes on the road.

Amidst all the election-ing and Musk-ing and Putin-ing and those domestic terrorists who keep shooting up schools and stores, it was all hard work.

Yet as the outside world got less noisy — and, really, 2022 contained no shortage of noise and no shortage of moments when our neighbors needed us at our very best — I was able to get down to business. It was all simpler, even as it proves to be difficult.

I found simplicity in minimizing decisions as best as I could. I developed the stickiest routine I’ve ever had. Coffee. Water. Duolingo. Crosswords. Meditation. Audiobooks. Deep work. Cleaning. Cooking. A lot of NFL on Sundays. Days became weeks. Weeks became months.

I listened to the same old songs, over and over. I ate the same foods multiple meals in a row. I rewatched sitcoms and even finally got around to watching The Office. I made it a point to try and get really good at being a life partner. I try to talk to my family and friends more often, even if current terms dictate that I don’t often get to see them very much. I did, however, get to see the vast majority of them at some point this year — many of them at my surprise 40th birthday bash.

For me, the greatest joy I felt all year was in doing the kinds of things I would’ve found laughably dull a handful of years ago. Those long walks with podcasts playing. Making garlic and herbed popcorn for just the two of us while we watch a cheesy 90s action film. Setting my bills on autopay and trying not to panic when my bank balance inched way, way too low.

All the while, I decided I’d taper off Xanax. One less vice. One less crutch. One less thing from my past I didn’t love and didn’t want to bring into this new life. And as the number of pills dwindled and shades of what I brought into 2022 gradually faded, this new life got better. Or, at the very least, I began to enjoy it more. Hard to be mad when there’s fresh greens growing in the garden — thanks, boo! — and new opportunities to dream about and work towards. It’s all just been doing the next thing, and doing fewer extra things.

I can’t escape the sensation that a lot of us probably closed ranks, looked inward, and tended to their gardens in lieu of yelling at a world gone mad. The vibe shift was into first gear. Slow and steady. Quiet. And as the year progressed, I could feel myself feeling both younger and older. More like myself even as my career sat, and still mostly sits, suspended. Engine revving for whenever, wherever the rubber ends up meeting the road. Lord, I hope it’ll be soon.

Shut Up and Play the Hits

“Did old music kill new music?” The Atlantic asked that at the beginning of this year. All the growth in the music market — streams, sales, spins — is coming from old songs. Candidly, I get it.

There’s tremendous comfort, safety, and pleasure in repeatedly doing and sampling the best of what’s already come.

There’s plenty of ill in this world and plenty to tear down and rebuild. I think we’ve seen a lot of what needs to change this year and in the years that led us here. 2019 things aren’t all going to make it in 2022. Neither will 2020 or 2021 things. Most things from those years that were once in my life are now gone. They weren’t great for me or they just didn’t fit.

But there’s also plenty of good. And a little good goes a long way towards making hard things and hellish times feel a little easier and a little sweeter.

In 2023, I want to get married and turn my business into something that generates enough semi-passive income that we can both be comfortable. I want to lose the weight I put on during the pandemic, or finally accept that my older, more svelte body ain’t coming back after the next run or the next month.

I want to get better at the things I’m already good at. I want to cultivate greater appreciation for the things I already enjoy. I want to be better with, and to, other people. I want to write things I like to write and not keep aiming for “The Most Important and Articulate Essay Ever” every damned time I click “Write New Story.” I don’t want to keep pushing myself, constantly expanding and exploring the world out there because my inner world could never be enough. I want to, in the words of LCD Soundsystem’s swan song documentary concert film, “Shut up and play the hits.”

2022 was the year I stopped being young, cool, next, extra, or loud. I edged out of the Zeitgeist. Maybe Kendrick Lamar did, too.

2022 was the year I decided to take stock and make sure the only baggage I could bring was all that I can’t leave behind.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to do some work and go listen to U2.

We’ll see you in 2023. Who the hell knows what the vibe will be like then.

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