Podcasts have devastated my relationship to music. Confirmation of that sad fact came earlier this month in the form of my Spotify “Wrapped,” the streaming service’s personalized report of what I listened to this year, including a playlist of my top songs. In the past, this annual playlist supplied a loop of sonic pleasure, propelling me through workouts, dinner preps, and hours-long commutes. This year, I haven’t even opened it.
That is not to say I’ve embraced silence: According to Spotify, I spent 71,661 minutes on the app over the past 12 months. That’s 49 days. But 55,088 of those minutes were spent streaming podcasts instead of songs. Whereas I used to listen to music all the time, now I fill every available moment with the sound of people talking.
I suspect I’m not the only one. My change in listening habits comes from a compulsion that many people in my life share: to make every minute of the day as “productive” as possible. By that blinkered calculus, an informative podcast will always trump music. But listening incessantly to podcasts has actually narrowed my interests and shown me just how limiting too much information can be.
Before I finish brewing my first cup of coffee, a BBC report is already streaming from my speaker. “Not another podcast, Papa,” my son complains, wiping his sleepy eyes as I butter his toast. “I need to know what’s going on in the world,” I tell him, even though I can see how much he and his sister would rather listen to something with a beat.
After dropping him off at school, I cycle through long-form podcasts on my walk home, during my own breakfast, and as I get ready for the day. Many of these are political, and they run the ideological spectrum. I reserve The New York Times’ podcast The Daily for a short lunchtime treat. Then at the gym in the late afternoon, I’m back to eavesdropping on other people’s verbal marathons, many of them about exercise and nutrition. I used to turn on house music or jazz automatically when I started cooking in the evenings. Now I have to force myself to play anything other than chatter.
The pandemic was the turning point for me. I scarcely listened to podcasts before those days of tedium and seclusion, when overhearing a conversation almost felt like having company. The number of podcasts has exploded since then, and algorithms have deftly toured me around the new offerings. I’ve found some excellent ones; their charming and informed hosts now serve as unlikely rivals of my favorite musical artists.
The podcast boom is not the only reason I’m listening to so few songs these days. Hip-hop, the genre I grew up on, has entered a period of sustained decline. Everyone thinks the songs of their youth represent a golden era. But the rappers I listened to when I was younger really were better than today’s artists, or at least more innovative—maybe because the genre was younger, too. Dr. Dre concocted a sound that changed how the West Coast made music. Nas and Jay-Z could not only rap circles around the best of their successors; they could also smuggle some serious ideas into their hits. Consider this Socratic inquiry from Jay-Z: “Is Pius pious ’cause God loves pious?” That type of lyric rarely comes around anymore.
In the late 2010s, so-called mumble rap took off. Critics lamented that the genre—and the styles it continues to spawn—ignores lyricism and craft, a complaint that gives short shrift to the infectious exuberance these modes can produce. Still, even some of the most prominent contemporary artists worry that something has gone awry.
This fall, Billboard reported that, for the first time since 1990, its Top 40 chart didn’t contain a single rap song. Observers have proposed plenty of explanations. I favor one offered (perhaps apocryphally) by the mumble-rap pioneer Young Thug: that the enervating, yearlong feud between Drake and Kendrick Lamar degraded the genre. “Since then,” a viral quote attributed to Young Thug contends, “everyone in the world is leveling up, except hip-hop.”
In this dispiriting context, podcasts have grown all the more appealing. (Some of the best rap artists from my youth now host their own.) When I do return to hip-hop, it’s mostly to indulge my nostalgia.
Choosing between podcasts and music reminds me of something the critic Dwight Garner observed about the value of reading a book on olive oil. “Extra Virginity is another reminder of why subpar nonfiction is so much better than subpar fiction,” Garner wrote. “With nonfiction at least you can learn something.” That’s how I used to feel about podcasts. At least they help me improve my grasp of international affairs and prepare for the AI apocalypse. BigXthaPlug and NBA YoungBoy don’t teach me anything.
But more recently, I’ve found that trying to make every listening minute count inevitably becomes counterproductive. The internal pressure to optimize free time and always multitask is ultimately exhausting, not enlightening.
The world never ceases to produce grist for discussion. That doesn’t mean we need to fill our ears with all of it. In the new year, I think I’ll try a little more silence.
