The rollerblader's playlist is limitless

A while back, I started missing the days of ripping discs from my parents' collection and making mixed CDs of all my favourite tracks.

I love music. It's got me through some tough times. I love how sound can help us form vivid memories. I love that repetition and listening context feel just as important to the aesthetic experience as any “objective” measure of music quality. I love Radiohead because Pablo Honey was constantly in the tape deck of the old Buick my parents drove.

I don't love how streaming services push this weird vibe of trying to constantly recommend new music based on some statistically determined idea of our existing taste. Mining endless petabytes with crude predictive algorithms seems like a terrible substitute for swapping mixtapes with friends. And, for all the merits of exploring new music, constantly grasping for the elusive perfect track or album seems like a great way to avoid connecting deeply with anything.

It seems like falling in love with music is as much about a commitment of time and attention as it is about the never-ending search for some mythical perfect match. One thing we've lost from the CD era is having to make part of that commitment up front. I think once you've spent ten bucks on a single album, or someone has gone to the trouble of burning a CD for you, you'll at least want to give it a few listens, even if it doesn't sound perfect to you right away.

Some of my favourite albums are ones that took a while to grow on me, and over time, some of the tracks I was once tempted to skip are now the ones I want to hear over and over. Scrolling through the sprawling, constantly shifting themed playlists and ever-present recommendations that seem to dominate streaming services, I feel like I might be losing or at least diluting a bit of that music magic.

At the same time, I'm no album purist, and I love a wholehearted acceptance of scattershot “guilty pleasures”—big shoutout to Herb Sundays. So, with all this in mind, and cribbing the title directly from a silly little video, here are a few hour-ish-long playlists I've made for rollerblading. Or walking. Or working. Or staring into space. Or anything that brings you those meaningful feelings that you want to bake into music.

In life there's some music you can listen to, and other music you can't listen to. But in rollerblading, it's not like the rest of life, because there's only music you can listen to. You can listen to anything on rollerblades. The rollerblader's playlist is limitless.