Only Solitaire in 2025: What’s On The Horizon

I would like to start 2025 off with a small apology to my readers and subscribers: as you have probably noticed, 2024 has not been a highly productive year for me — and for that matter, I do not just mean the reviews on this site (as you see, I regularly struggle to get more than one of those written and uploaded per week), but an overall assessment of my achievements. The reasons for this are numerous and at least partially motivated by internal factors (such as occasional, though fortunately not too serious, health issues, personal matters etc.), but overall, I think, the main reason is a rather heavy ongoing crisis of motivation. While I’m perfectly open to the idea of putting most of the blame on myself, I also can’t help whining a little about the external pressure and lack of stimuli.

Here’s «the world according to George» as of today, in a nutshell (feel free to skip this section and go right on to the constructive part if you’re a natural-born optimist with little respect for crybabies):

• 2024 brings no change whatsoever to the sociopolitical situation. My countrymen (some gladly, some reluctantly) have accepted that living with war is the new normal, when almost every new day brings news of more bombings, killings, and devastation as the rest of the world continues to stare with fear / apathy / impotence. Nationalism and isolationism are on the rise (at least, that’s the impression diligently created by the official agenda), while common sense and basic empathy continue to retreat further down the rabbit hole. ‘Gimme Shelter’ and ‘Life During Wartime’ keep their firm status as «songs of the year». Is 2025 going to be any better? No signs whatsoever on the horizon.

• Taking solace in scientific research and teaching / education is becoming harder with each day, and not just because of politics (which, fortunately, rarely find their way into fundamental classical humanities, just as it used to be in Soviet times). Rather, the critical issue is that academia — and in this respect, Russian academia is no different from international academia — continues to degenerate into a kind of battleground where the very fact of publication in a «high-impact journal» matters much more to the powers-that-be than any actual content of such publications, which logically and inevitably leads to withering and eventual death of science of such. Teaching brings a little more comfort because it’s joyful to interact with university students (= children) not yet corrupted by life... but just you wait until they start submitting their first grant applications. Is 2025 going to be any better? No. Things are going to get much worse in this department.

• From a very general point of view, culture — at least, interesting culture — has pretty much ceased to exist. Oh wait, I wanted to say that there is so much culture around, it’s hard to determine where to begin. Oh, wait, actually, those two things do not contradict each other. RateYourMusic says Magdalena Bay’s Imaginal Disk and Charli XCX’s Brat are two of the best records of the year. I listened to a couple tracks from the former and got bored. I listened to a couple tracks from the latter and understood that we are really fucked — because new and exciting music has to be rebellious by definition, but if this is what Warner Bros. now packages for us as «rebellion», I have no idea how anybody could ever be capable of peddling the real thing, other than locking oneself in the garage with a Remington Model 11. Is 2025 going to be any better? Pretty sure the people have already spoken on that one.

• The Internet has become smaller — a lot of the outlets have been outright banned by the Russian government, while certain others, in a braver-than-life fit of virtue signalling, prohibit their use by Russian IPs. VPNs certainly help (though it only keeps reminding you, day after day, how much the world wants your life to be a constant struggle), but it’s only part of the problem. Garbage ads, cookies, notifications, and spam are the norm, and this year, all of that has multiplied ten-fold through the arrival of AI, a.k.a. «Artificial Incompetence», polluting digital cyberspace with dead stuff — dead-looking images, cadaverous-sounding pseudo-music, and hollow-ringing texts (the only trouble I have distinguishing «articles» on websites produced by AI by those produced by real people is that quite a lot of real people had been writing their content AI-style for quite some time. Man-machine, pseudo-human being). Is 2025 going to be any better?... wait, don’t answer that.

Essentially, for the past several years I’ve been placing myself into survival mode — not physical survival (though you have to be somewhat careful about that in Putin’s Russia, too), but emotional survival. The people whom you love, respect, and admire; the books and other works of art whose value you under no circumstances place in doubt; heck, even replaying the Mass Effect Trilogy every once in a while makes life more worth living than it might actually be. But another useful maxim is — never stop doing what you want to do — and this is why, as long as I live and breathe (and have an audience of a couple hundred people to whom this might actually mean something), I shall do my best to keep on keeping on.

This year, I pledge to diversify and branch out again to keep things fresh. I promise no set schedule, no rates of acceleration, but I do promise a few variations on the old scenarios to stir up the pot a little bit. Here are the review categories that are going to be relevant for this year (and then we’ll see what happens):

1) Rock’n’roll history — US albums. I know that diligent chronological treatment of early artists, including some decidedly second-rate ones, is not everybody’s cup of tea, but history is important, and possibly more important today than any time before, given how seriously deprived we are of clues to the future in the present. Besides, this is the one thing that gives this collection of reviews a face of its own, rather than being just another voice in a million. As of now, I have barely scratched the surface of 1962; I hope very much to eventually be able to get at least to 1964–1965 — the era of transformation, in which American popular music, for the first time in the history of popular music, was forced to compete on par with popular music from across the other side of the ocean.

2) Rock’n’roll history — non-US albums (UK above everything else, but also including US/UK-influenced pop/rock-bands and artists from other countries). I am intentionally going slower here so as to give US history a chance to catch up chronologically — currently stalling at the end of 1965, but still slowly pushing on toward 1966. At some point, the two chronological tracks may finally align with each other.

3) Rock’n’roll Greats: Given that there are some artists that are more easy for me to write about than others (though it also takes more time due to the sheer amount of things to say), and given that many — if not most — of my readers, want it or not, prefer reading about music they already know than the other way around, I am going to allocate some time to a few «high priority» artists, putting them ahead of the rest. In practical terms, what this means is: be prepared for more Beatles, Stones, Kinks, and Who reviews (my «big four») disrupting the chronological order. You do want to read yet another Rubber Soul write-up, don’t you?

4) Early Artist Highlights: I have been listening to a lot of pre-rock’n’roll era artists over the past couple of years, but have no desire or strength to try and review their entire catalogs (this is a far more tedious feat than going through any select 1960–1962 discography). Instead, though, I will occasionally dust off a favorite and/or highly representative track from one of those artists and discuss it, perhaps in the context of their overall career. Starting off with Billie Holiday some time really soon, and then we’ll see where this leads.

5) Random Notes On Random Artists: A small side section for those interested in what I might have to say on jazz, classical, ragas, French chanson, or even Russian rock music (ugh). Plans for this section are very vague and experimental, but why not give it a try. If it doesn’t work, I can always pretend the site was hacked by Ted Gioia or something.

6) Video Moments A-Z: This will be a continuation of my «Great Moments On Video» series, but probably in shorter form as I slowly take the time to rewatch my several hundred musical DVDs (yes, I still keep those) and pick out some particularly enticing highlights (provided they can be found on YouTube, of course — no fun reading about a cool musical video or concert if your eyes can’t see it).

7) And, of course, there will be more game reviews — mainly adventure titles from the old days (as I plan to eventually revisit all the Sierra and LucasArts classics), but with a (relatively) newer title thrown in from time to time for good measure. Again, somebody has to leave behind a comprehensive critical history of plot-based video games. Might as well be me.

If some of these plans do not come to pass, or if some of them fizzle out after a few tries, please bear with me because, in reality, my #1 reason for this kind of strategies is a desire to do everything in my power that helps keep my sanity, which sometimes involves doing the strangest things (for instance, I found out that one great way to cool my nerves is to record video game playthroughs and post them on YouTube — almost like some kind of «game therapy»). The #2 reason, of course, is still to leave behind some sort of wholesome and systematized legacy that might be, if not any more meaningful, at least a little more readable than Robert Christgau’s, bless his C-pluses and D-minuses. This is why the reviews will keep coming — be it at a snail’s pace, or (hopefully) a little faster than that.