Robin Sloan often seems to speak the words that are in my soul, and this time he really got to me. He bought a cassette tape of the new album by the band OOF and then wrote about the experience of albums vs. playlists:

I bought the cassette tape to play in my car and I’m glad, because it prompted me to listen to the album straight through, which, if I’m being honest, I might never have done on my laptop.

What happened (and this always presages a good experience with art) was that I surrendered to the strangeness, and the strangeness started to make sense. I entered OOF’s world, rather than insisting the band fit into mine, which is, of course, the demand of the Spotify playlist.

You’ve got to give things a chance. You’ve got to let them seep into your brain. […] OOF does not seem, to me, a band made for Spotify playlists. It seems a band made for cassette tapes in the car — for the decision, snap-thunk-whir, to give them a chance, and the slow but sure surrender to the dream of their world.

To be fair, not all albums are worth it—and that’s fine. But giving every album a chance to be worth it is something I think we should all do more of.