Doomscrolling
Doomscrolling
Serialising the album Pretentious Incongruity by Key 13 (@keefmarshall)
Pretentious Incongruity: 2020-2024 is a retrospective compilation looking back at some key milestones in the first five years of Key 13 as a recording identity.
Track 9
Key 13 does shoegaze. I’ve listened to a lot of Shoegaze and Dream Pop over the years – MBV, Ride, Kitchens of Distinction, Cocteau Twins and some more recent additions like Airiel, M83 and the amazing Amusement Parks On Fire. This was my attempt to do something in that vein – I honestly don’t know quite where the exact style came from.
It’s important to include here as it’s the first track I actually sang on, myself. It’s the first real “song” I ever wrote, with lyrics and everything. I don’t think I did too badly although the mix is terrible, even this updated version. Everything is far too loud and there’s more reverb than most people would use in a lifetime. Believe it or not, the reverb is substantially dialled down here from the original!
The tempo change in the middle was to meet that week’s /r/songaweek theme – I think it works quite well, but it makes it a song of two halves.
The track was written around the time Russia invaded Ukraine. After two years of the pandemic, following years of political turmoil in the UK due to Brexit, I’d been increasingly finding that my interaction with social media had been reduced to scrolling through (then) Twitter, getting angrier and more depressed by the day. The only sane path of action seemed to be to turn away and isolate – physically, to avoid the virus, and mentally/socially to avoid having to deal with the outside world. The title and lyrics attempt (very crudely) to capture this feeling.
I didn’t regain confidence with social media until later in the year when I discovered Mastodon – Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter being the final catalyst for change. Finally, there was somewhere I could actively engage again, rather than passively doomscrolling.
Influences: see above.
– From Key13’s Pretentious Incongruity: Track Notes
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Lyrics
Food banks
Bombs and tanks
Fraud and lies
Fuel price
Pandemic hasn’t gone away
So isolate…
Headlines
Darkness
Can’t take
All this
Today is worse than yesterday
So turn away…
Just turn away
Tomorrow’s yet another day
So turn away.
Isolate
Turn away
Isolate
Such an important part from Keef’s thoughts here: “Finally, there was somewhere I could actively engage again, rather than passively doomscrolling.” So, so important that it cannot be understated. Passivity is what creates issues in so many aspects of our lives.