My Internet: Molly Mary O’Brien
The music writer wants to make the internet The Awl again.
Some Wednesdays, we quiz a “very online” person for their essential guide to what’s good on the internet.
Today we welcome Molly Mary O’Brien, a writer and freelance video editor with the blog, I Enjoy Music; podcast about music writing, And Introducing; and freelance work in publications like Dirt and GQ (where I am an editor). Molly visits lots of hyper-specific cat subreddits and thinks it is wack that only 15 seconds of a song apparently need to be “good” now. —Nick
EMBEDDED: What’s a recent meme or post that made you laugh?
MOLLY MARY O’BRIEN: Not a new post but someone replied to a post I made about the Beach Boys with this:
EMBEDDED: Do you tweet? Why?
MOLLY MARY O’BRIEN: Not anymore, which is a bummer. I was on Twitter from 2009 to the end of 2024, at which point it started to make me too crazy. I thought I was going to stick it out until the wheels fell off, but every time a post of mine broke containment, the results would be too depressing and stressful to handle (I’m … so sensitive). I still lurk a little bit, though, I can’t help it!
EMBEDDED: Do you post on Bluesky, Threads, or Substack’s Notes? Why?
MOLLY MARY O’BRIEN: I’m on Bluesky, because I simply have to post. It’s okay over there, though I have determined I am too earnest for Twitter and too cynical for Bluesky, and thus am looking for a secret third microblogging platform. Right now I like to post innocuous opinions about extremely popular old bands, or super vague opinions about music in general, just because the Bluesky folks seem to love that kind of thing. I’ll say “you know who really rocked? THE BEATLES” and get 20 replies being like “yes! Have you heard ‘Yellow Submarine’?”
EMBEDDED: What do you use Instagram for?
MOLLY MARY O’BRIEN: Ideally I use it to keep up with my friends. See what they are eating, what they are reading, where they are going on vacation, etc. But there’s way too much distracting flotsam and jetsam on IG to make that equation work. Instagram is still good for checking on set times for live music (at least one band on a bill will put “we go on at [time]!” on their stories), plus I have trained my Explore page to only show me recipe videos for chocolate desserts.
EMBEDDED: What types of videos do you watch on YouTube?
MOLLY MARY O’BRIEN: Lots of live music and music videos—pro-shot videos from recent shows and fests, fan-shot videos of shows I have attended and want to see if I remember correctly. KEXP sets, Like A Version, DJ sets from The Lot Radio. I’ve recently gotten into TPDTV, which is a bunch of British lads (and one lady) who go to different festivals and thoroughly vlog them; their video from this year’s Bonnaroo, which got canceled for inclement weather after a single day, really tickled me. My favorite YouTuber is a young woman named Caitlyn Rae who is essentially paid/sponsored to go out and have fun—she’s always going to Pitbull concerts and sailing on EDM cruises, and seems to be genuinely having a good time.
EMBEDDED: Will you miss TikTok if it is eventually banned, and if so, what will you miss most about it?
MOLLY MARY O’BRIEN: I’m gonna say no. I got rid of TikTok in January. I don’t love what it has done to music promotion / creation in general (it is wack to me that only 15 seconds of a song apparently need to be “good” now), and I think its trend cycle moves too fast for proper digestion/consumption. But maybe I’m just old and slow, and younger people have no problem with being a “tomato girl” one day and a “guava girl” the next.
EMBEDDED: Where do you tend to get your news?
MOLLY MARY O’BRIEN: For really big breaking news, it used to be Twitter, now it’s Bluesky. I like the format of clone.fyi, which is old-school link aggregation that makes me very happy. I could do better on this front. Maybe I should subscribe to a real, physical newspaper.
EMBEDDED: How do you keep up with the online discourse? How important is it to you to do this?
MOLLY MARY O’BRIEN: It used to be Twitter, now it’s more newsletters, and then a good deal of sharing links and news with my online husband. Keeping up with the discourse has been important to me for many years, since I was putting off my office job tasks in favor of reading Gawker. But I’m about to have a baby at the end of the summer, and I am not totally sure if I can keep this up with an infant in my care … we’ll see! I’m so damn nosy, I need to know what the people are talking about.
EMBEDDED: What’s the last strong opinion you had about a story, topic, or controversy online?
MOLLY MARY O’BRIEN: Someone recently uncovered the existence of a seemingly AI-generated band called The Velvet Sundown (as in, their music, written bio and promo photos all have that distinctive AI flavour) that has something like 700,000 monthly Spotify listeners. The strong opinion I have on them is two-fold: 1) Spotify filling their playlists with AI-generated music sucks, and is such an anti-art move from a company that wouldn’t exist without the work of artists; 2) historically, there’s always been a sector of music listeners who will accept the lowest common denominator of musical delivery, so that behavior isn’t necessarily new—just more nefarious when it’s AI, rather than, like, buying CDs at the Starbucks cash register. The good news is, you can always try a little harder to seek out something better than the lowest common denominator, and I think that seeking feels good.
EMBEDDED: What are your favorite newsletters?
MOLLY MARY O’BRIEN: I’m becoming a real newsletter freak. I love Biz Sherbert’s American Style, Meaghan Garvey’s SCARY COOL SAD GOODBYE, Feed Me, Blackbird Spyplane, Dirt, John’s Music Blog, The Small Bow, Fluxblog, Perfectly Imperfect, Nicstalgia, Daniel Docs, Debby Friday’s debby diaries, Nick Sylvester’s smartdumb, my friend Emily’s newsletter Delighter, Magdalene J. Taylor’s Many Such Cases, Never Hungover, Claire, gunkyard, Brett Davis’s ON REPEAT, miranda reinert’s Step One of a Plan … I’m eating good in the neighborhood.
EMBEDDED: How do you think Substack has changed media, if at all?
MOLLY MARY O’BRIEN: It’s given people a place to write about what they really care about, outside of the short and fickle and repetitive trend cycle. I guess that’s not really a change, so much as a return to what I remember digital media being at the turn of the 2010s. Make The Internet The Awl Again.
EMBEDDED: What’s one positive media trend? What’s one negative trend?
MOLLY MARY O’BRIEN: positive: more BLOGGING :)
negative: more party reporting at parties that do not sound very fun :(
EMBEDDED: Are smartphones bad for us? Where do you fall on the Jonathan Haidt-Taylor Lorenz divide?
MOLLY MARY O’BRIEN: I like that I can use my smartphone to give me driving directions, take quick photos, confirm restaurants are open or closed, get me into ticketed events, and even conduct phone calls. Last summer, my husband and I drove to Las Vegas, without having purchased Dead & Company Sphere tickets; as the sun went down and the lights of the Strip started to glow on the horizon, I pulled the trigger on a pair of (sort of) reasonably priced seats through the Gametime app. An hour later we were drinking enormous beers and watching John Mayer noodle as the screen projected a bird’s eye view facsimile of Haight-Ashbury. That was an amazing execution of smartphone capability.
But I was probably less stressed and more well-adjusted when my main format of going online was on my computer, rather than my phone. I am thinking of going full Family Desktop Computer in the future.
EMBEDDED: What’s something that you have observed about the online behavior of Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, and/or Boomers?
MOLLY MARY O’BRIEN: Every generation has their particular quirks, but at the end of the day what they have in common in terms of behavior online is a desire to be seen, heard, noticed, understood.
EMBEDDED: How do you find recommendations for what to watch, read, and listen to?
MOLLY MARY O’BRIEN: I have friends and associates with great taste!! My friend Jacqueline’s music recommendations are immaculate. If David Sims likes a movie, I will probably also like it. My friend Caroline has great taste in books. Also my music blog incorporates a lot of recommendations from other people, like my series Music Moots where I listen to song recs from musicians and other cool people. Also I live in L.A. and every conversation here eventually dissolves into a Portlandia “did you read it?”-style litany of recs, so I’ll never go dry in that area. The best recommendation I got in that realm was when a guy I met at a party told me about the movie Hundreds of Beavers, which is an incredible film unlike any I have seen.
EMBEDDED: Have you had posts go viral? What is that experience like?
MOLLY MARY O’BRIEN: Yes, the occasional Twitter post. The general experience: get excited for a few seconds, and then immediately regret everything. The most popular tweet I ever posted was this one. I was in Amsterdam on my honeymoon Eurotrip, posted it without much thought, then took some shrooms and went to a drum and bass music festival. Eventually I opened my phone and went, oh shit. All of the responses were pretty funny, with everyone sharing their “too stoned” tales, but the lesson is: don’t ever look at your phone while on drugs. Too scary.
EMBEDDED: Who’s the coolest person who follows you?
MOLLY MARY O’BRIEN: I saw that Karly Hartzman from the band Wednesday linked my music blog on her website, that’s cool to me! Also shout out to blogrolls, let’s keep bringing those back.
EMBEDDED: Who’s someone more people should follow?
MOLLY MARY O’BRIEN: Serge Neborak, who runs the NYC clothing brand/art project Drink.More.Water. Great internet presence.
EMBEDDED: Which big celebrity has your favorite internet presence, and why?
MOLLY MARY O’BRIEN: I don’t really go for big celebrities on the internet…does Father John Misty count?
EMBEDDED: Are you into any podcasts right now? How and when do you usually listen?
MOLLY MARY O’BRIEN: How Long Gone, Who? Weekly, Nymphet Alumni, Pop Pantheon, Black Bubblegum, and Time Crisis (which is, it must be said, an internet radio show rather than a podcast) are all on my regular rotation. I listen to podcasts when I cook, clean, and do other miscellaneous chores.
EMBEDDED: Have you ever been heavily into Snapchat? Do you miss it?
MOLLY MARY O’BRIEN: I used to work at Snapchat! I was on the curation team responsible for the user-generated ‘Global Stories’ product, so sometimes I’d be putting together a montage of drunk bikers at the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally, and sometimes I’d be putting together a montage of the world’s response to the 2015 Paris terrorist attacks. Often at like 3 in the morning. Weird job, weird time in my life.
EMBEDDED: Are you in any groups on Reddit, Discord, Slack, or Facebook? What’s the most useful or entertaining one?
MOLLY MARY O’BRIEN: I’ve been going very old school internet after adopting a stray cat, and visiting lots of hyper-specific cat subreddits. There’s one for when cats wrap their tails around their bodies, and one for when they splay their toes. Oh my god I’m so sorry.
EMBEDDED: Do you use Slack or Teams for work? What’s the best thing about Slacking with your co-workers? What’s the worst thing?
MOLLY MARY O’BRIEN: Being freelance means mostly not needing to be on Slack these days, but I don’t mind when I have to use it. The worst thing about Slack when I used to work full-time in digital media was a specific kind of culture where people announced, to very large channels, whenever they were taking 20 minutes to get lunch or an hour to go to an appointment. With all the comings and goings, it was like a goddamn airport terminal.
EMBEDDED: What is your Wordle starting word?
MOLLY MARY O’BRIEN: I do not play Wordle!
EMBEDDED: Do any of your group chats have a name that you’re willing to share? What’s something that recently inspired debate in the chat?
MOLLY MARY O’BRIEN: One is just called CATS 😼🎩 because it was originally a group of friends who like to talk about the musical Cats. We recently discussed the pros and cons of watching the just-canceled television show Étoile.
EMBEDDED: What’s your go-to emoji, and what does it mean to you?
MOLLY MARY O’BRIEN: I love the magic wand 🪄I think the olive is gorgeous 🫒 but I probably most often use this woman 🤷🏻♀️ because I am often saying the equivalent of “what the hell, man” in my private correspondence.
EMBEDDED: Do you text people voice notes? If not, how do you feel about getting them?
MOLLY MARY O’BRIEN: Love a good voice note when the time is right. Great for gossip from an OPSEC standpoint.
EMBEDDED: Do you pay for a music streaming service, and if so, which one? What’s a playlist, song, album, or style of music you’ve listened to a lot lately?
MOLLY MARY O’BRIEN: Apple Music! It’s not perfect but I feel good being off Spotify, which seems to get clunkier and clunkier to use with each passing year. Genre-wise I’m all over the place per usual … playlists, let me shout out Matthew Perpetua’s Mildly Funky Workplace, and this Despacio playlist (comprised of music played at the special James Murphy / 2manydjs mobile soundsystem, lots of vibey dance music).
EMBEDDED: If you could only keep one streaming service for TV and/or movies, which would it be, and why? What’s a show that you’re really into right now?
MOLLY MARY O’BRIEN: HMMMM if we’re really trying to be accurate with my current solo TV watching behavior, it would be Paramount Plus so I could keep watching my beloved RuPaul’s Drag Race.
EMBEDDED: What’s your favorite non-social media app?
MOLLY MARY O’BRIEN: Shazam.
EMBEDDED: What’s the most basic internet thing that you love?
MOLLY MARY O’BRIEN: Is Mercury In Retrograde?
EMBEDDED: Is there any content you want but can’t seem to find anywhere online?
MOLLY MARY O’BRIEN: Wow that’s a great question. I feel satisfied by the content I have found online so far—“I am happy with what I got from the dumpster.”
EMBEDDED: Do you regularly use eBay, Depop, or other shopping platforms? What’s a recent thing you’ve bought or sold?
MOLLY MARY O’BRIEN: I like Depop and Poshmark for when I have hyper-specific clothing needs. I just got a couple maternity dresses from Poshmark because the idea of buying brand new clothing that I will only need for a limited amount of time did not feel right. One of the brands is called “Ripe,” ugh.
EMBEDDED: Is there a site you like for product recommendations? How do you decide, for example, which air filter to buy?
MOLLY MARY O’BRIEN: I have dabbled in the Strategist and Wirecutter but I also am more than happy to just google “thing I want” + “Reddit” and see where that takes me.
EMBEDDED: Have you recently read an article, book, or social media post about the internet that you’ve found particularly insightful?
MOLLY MARY O’BRIEN: Not explicitly about the internet, but Tom Scocca’s “On Smarm” is one of the most instructive essays I’ve ever read about how people express themselves and communicate right now, and that of course ends up relating to the internet.
EMBEDDED: What’s the last thing that brought you joy online?
MOLLY MARY O’BRIEN: The album art for a release from a producer named Pablo Arrangoiz, who has many aliases, but one of which is Doctor Hotdog:
Thanks Molly! Read her blog and listen to her podcast.
More My Internet Emily Oster ∙ Alyssa Vingan ∙ Paul Krugman ∙ Karen Hao ∙ Noah Kulwin ∙ Sean Monahan ∙ Derek Thompson ∙ Marisa Kabas ∙ Ed Elson ∙ J Wortham ∙ Tavi Gevinson ∙ All
Oh HELL YEAH. Molly rocks (thanks for the mention!!!)
And this is about to become my new favorite newsletter.
lol