Hi friends!

Long time no chat.

Part of the reason why is I’ve been hard at work reporting a story for the kind folks at Study Hall. The story is a semi-spin off of my astonishingly well read Jake Shane/Stan media essay, this time focused on The State of Music Criticism.

Like many, I was quite dismayed by Rolling Stone’s 5-star review of Life Of a Showgirl , which, to me, felt like it was fan service for Swifties. I was holding onto that feeling as I was sifting through the trove of recent essays, such as Kelefa Sanneh’s piece for The New Yorker, about how music criticism had “gone soft.”

I concurred with that piece to an extent, but I also felt like Sanneh was a bit tapped out of the reality for us lucky (or unlucky) few who are working in a famished music media. For us overworked media professionals, the question of softness if a bit small potatoes when compared to the more existential threats of a crumbling industry, AI apocalypse and the specter of stan harassment.

So I chatted about all of this with a crew of critics, including the wonderful Grace Robbins-Sommerville (), Matt Mitchell (the editor of Paste), and the always discussed Shaad D’Souza. Oh, and Zachary Hourihane, AKA The Swiftologist (if you’re chronically online and a pop fan, you understand the magnitude of this get!).

I am sharing a preview of the piece below. To read the rest, you can do so on Study Hall’s website here (it will ask you to put in your email, but then you can be sent other great articles and get tapped into Study Hall’s trove of freelance and media opportunities).

Thank you to the fabulous (read his Substack, !!!!) for commissioning me and for the helpful edits. And thank you to Eloise Goldsmith for the editorial guidance!

OH BUT FIRST ONE BIG LIFE UPDATE…..

Some of you may know that I’ve been a Contributing Writer for PAPER Magazine for the past 2-ish years.

As of this past week, I am now the Associate Editor of The FADER!!!

I am so excited for this new chapter. I’ll still be sharing my musings here, but for anyone looking to keep up with my work at The FADER (essays, interviews, etc), please follow The FADER’s social channels (IG, X, TikTok) and my personal socials (IG, x) where I’ll also be sharing my stories.

I have a lot to reflect on from these past two years of “working in media,” so maybe I’ll do that here soon (does anyone care? maybe…)

ANYWAYS THANK YOU <3 AND I HOPE YOU ENJOY THIS ESSAY, MWAH

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Why The Music Critics Keep Writing ...

It was easy to interpret that garish green affront as a harbinger of doom.

Rolling Stone, once the magazine of record in music, had launched a “homepage takeover,” complete with a matcha-moss colorway, to celebrate the release of Taylor Swift’s “The Life of a Showgirl.” My first impulse was to deem it payola, but a more likely explanation is that Rolling Stone is trying, like any outlet, to survive in a time of crashing traffic by tapping into Swiftie enthusiasm to generate clicks. The bargain appeared to be that this rabid stan energy would be so lucrative that it would help fund the rest of the magazine, which, one would hope, is primarily composed of deeply considered music reporting and criticism.

That cope withered under the reality of what was published that day: an unsettlingly laudatory, PR-ified five-star review of “The Life of a Showgirl,” which begins with a list of Swift’s accomplishments that would work well in a pitch deck assembled by her team. Swift, critic Maya Georgi opined, has “stood atop the pop world glittering in a sequined midnight-blue bodysuit,” “mesmerized stadiums,” and most crucially: “locked it down with a cowboy like her in football star Travis Kelce.” (Georgi’s effusive review felt perniciously similar to another genre of stan media I’ve written about).

Thankfully, Rolling Stone’s overbearing positivity was an aberration. “Showgirl” became a moment for the critical class at other publications to flex, with some even using Rolling Stone’s hagiography as a foil.

In her review, Pitchfork’s Anna Gaca wrote, “it is simply untrue to claim, as Rolling Stone did on Friday, that ‘Showgirl’ represents ‘new, exciting sonic turns,’” before pivoting to a deserved whack at “Wood,” a potential career worst for Swift: “Granted, there’s never been another Taylor Swift song that sounds so much like the Jackson 5’s ‘I Want You Back’ … with the spiritual energy of bachelorette-party penis décor.” Ellen Johnson appraised the new album’s ailments for Paste, and didn’t mince words: “The subject matter isn’t [Swift’s] stumbling block. ‘Lyrical hallucination’ might be a more apt diagnosis.”

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Hi friends! I know I mainly write about music, but I felt inspired by recent events to connect some broader ideas I’ve been thinking through to the world of politics, marketing and culture.

Music will be here, too, of course. I hope you get something of this, and, as always, thank you for reading!

Please consider subscribing (and paying if you’re so kind)! I balance this writing with my other gigs and it’s hard and time consuming to do this! Love ya

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I, like many, listened somewhat stunned to Ezra Klein’s September interview(?), debate(?), sort of meandering philosophy-session with writer Ta-Nehisi Coates for The New York Times.

There’s much to dig into in their warring op eds (Klein’s and Coates’s) and subsequent stilted conversation. Put most plainly: Klein, in reaction to Charlie Kirk’s political assassination, tried to argue that Kirk was merely going around college campuses, doing debate, discourse and persuasion. In his rosy portrait of Kirk’s career, he essentially turned Kirk into a banner for the virtuous act of political disagreement.

Coates responded clearly that one can condemn political violence without glorifying Kirk’s political project (which he defines as “hateful”), or casting him as a bastion of clear eyed debate (anyone who has seen Kirk’s work would be easily persuaded that his project was one borne out of our ever polarizing culture).

The two of them, to their credit, sat down to discuss their disagreement and what became quite clear is that Coates was trying to tell the truth as he saw it and Klein was focused on strategy. How exactly can democrats win? Where can they moderate? How should the “left” conduct itself in public to regain power?

To all of these questions, Coates responded with a simple fact, implicitly rebutting Klein’s claim that he, as a writer, must moderate his perspective because of the ripple effects it may have in politics. As Coates said: “I see myself as someone for whom it’s very important to state the truth plainly and to clarify things as best I can.”

I audibly sighed when he said these words. I was looking for what was bewildering me throughout their conversation, and then Coates described it so plainly.

Is it the writer’s role to be strategic or truthful?

More and more these days, the writers, thinkers and outlets who I long sought out for clarity provide little of it. What they provide instead is a sort of meta-commentary on “the way we talk,” “communicate” and effectuate our strategy.

This chin scratching mode paints a semi-picture of the pipes that make up our culture, but provides little description of the slop that’s sliding through them.

In music, in politics, in culture writ large, our discourse has been poisoned by a crisis of cleverness: many of the drivers of discourse are marketing experts (like Coco Mocoe, Bee Better and Eugene Brand Strategy), data and sales driven update accounts (like Pop Crave), and chin scratching political marketing messengers like Klein, and the Shorist brigade.

Less important are the analyzers: the critics or experts, here to provide insight, not gameplans. Klein, like so many writers and outlets, across topics, is thinking and talking like a strategist. Not a writer. Not a human. But a powerpoint presentation here to give deliverables.

Since when did so many of us become so hopelessly craven? Since when did efficacy become more useful than the truth?

@nytopinionHow should the left think about engaging with the right? The writer Ta-Nehisi Coates talks through that question with @nytopinion columnist Ezra Klein on a recent episode of “The Ezra Klein Show.” “I’m all for bridging gaps, but not at the expense of my neighbor’s humanity,” says Ta-Nehisi. #theezrakleinshow #nytopinion

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I wouldn’t usually be inspired to write about a spat between two elite writers, but I found myself sucked into this discourse, through, strangely enough, a question I’ve been chewing on regarding KATSEYE.

KATSEYE, for those out of the loop, is a global girl group organized by an American record label (Geffen) and Korean record label (Hybe). The concept behind the venture was to apply the Korean model of auditioning and readying pop stars through a rigorous training process to a group of girls from all around the world.

Per the plan, the labels assembled a final, truly global group (there’s a Netflix doc about the process), and they “debuted” with a well received EP. They then put out an unlikely hit with the galaxy brain song “Gnarly,” and built a steady buzz that turned into a cultural avalanche with …. their debut full length album?

No. With a Gap partnership.

@gapBetter in Denim.  This is denim as you define it. Your individuality. Your self-expression. Your style. Powerful on your own. Even better together. Featuring @KATSEYE.   “Milkshake” by @kelis Directed by Bethany Vargas. Choreographed by @robbieblue_ Explore the campaign at link in bio. #BetterinDenim

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KATSEYE were made the face of Gap’s “Better in Denim” campaign — a media blitz the brand launched with a truly remarkable performance by the girls to Kelis’s “Milkshake.” It’s a fantastic ad. The girls slayed beyond.

Anyone who watches it would think that and maybe even react with some enthusiasm. But, ultimately this is an ad. An advertisement. A piece of corporate marketing, people!

You’d never know that, though, based on the frothing reaction online. When the video was released, TikTok feeds were filled with outright fanfare over this corporate work of culture. People were screaming, doing the dance alongside them, and most notably … spending precious ink and oxygen extolling how amazing this ad(!) was. Worse yet, there was a world of discourse about how Gap “beat” American Eagle who had just released their problematic, decidedly “uncool” jeans ad with Sydney Sweeney.

To put it plainly, the fanfare made me wonder, why is it not deeply uncool to “stan” an ad? Or to care at all about marketing unless you’re being paid to do so? Since when did marketing becoming a topic of public interest rather than a niche profession?

@n1ckwilkins#gap #americaneagle

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I’m not the first to notice this rise in public interest in marketing, as if the topic itself is sports or music.

of Feed Me clocked people commenting “Marketinggg” as a form of saying “yasss” a few months ago and asked some thought leaders in the space to reflect on why normal people are complimenting marketing tactics as if they themselves have access to the pitch deck Google Slide.

A potential answer that arose, as shared, is that now ads are becoming more highly produced and optimized for social media, and hitting a true pleasure spot in young consumers that feels “worth leaving a comment over.” Writer raised the fact that TikTok and Substack has maybe made everyone “tuned-in and extra opinionated on marketing strategies and business in general.”

It makes a certain sense: with ads being shoved in our face via TikTok and Instagram, and with ads seeming more and more like general music videos or TV shows, maybe it’s only natural that people would begin to discourse on advertising as if they’re actual works of culture.

I can “get” all of this and still find it depressing that the public doesn’t immediately say “silence brand!!!!!” when confronted with an ad.

And I find it more depressing that people seem to think it’s cool to unpack marketing as if it’s film analysis or a music review. There are multiple videos with hundreds of thousands of views breaking down just why the KATSYE x Gap moment is so incredible.

What if people spent that time instead pondering art or the world as it is?

Why do we give marketing the relevance it’s begging from us in the first place?

@keanawoods66Katseye Rejuvenated Gap #katseye #gap #marketing

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I can’t help but wonder if this wider interest in marketing is not a mere change in the quality or nature of ads.

Maybe, it’s that in an alienated world mediated by digital platforms, the most interesting topic isn’t policy or culture—it’s attentional dynamics.

Attention is the primary commodity that platforms are exploiting, and people know that this valuable resource is being wasted away. Thus it makes some sense that the consuming masses are seemingly giving some deep thought to the nature of that exploitation. The problem is, though, that people aren’t questioning this attentional theft itself (how awful and evil it is), but rather reflecting on its mechanics; How KATSEYE harnessed our enthusiasm, or, in the case of Klein, how Kirk practiced politics and wielded digital platforms to cultural and political, success.

Coates was talking of the substance of Kirk’s legacy, but Klein couldn’t get past the objective strategy behind it, as if the strategy itself was worth more than the reality of his legacy.

Klein was talking about marketing; Coates, the world.

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All of this is a self fulfilling prophecy. As people talk about more and more about marketing, it becomes the show itself — the album roll out, the fashion campaign political communication.

Remember when Trump won and everyone was suddenly talking about podcasts (Trump won because he went on them, apparently) rather than policy? As we focus on how marketing is done, substantive questions of the world itself get sidelined.

Implicit in this focus on marketing is a focus on everyone but oneself. What will politically-moderate strangers think of this article? How is this album campaign breaking to the masses through (or not)? With everyone so concerned with other people’s opinions and attention spans, there is little time for individuals to reflect on the nature of their own experience.

Time spent on identifying “good marketing” or “effective political communications” is time spent pondering a vague imagined other. When done en masse, don’t we all veer into the same milquetoast middle? The same conceptual center?

I don’t know what will bring us out of this strange, sad state. But a first step is to sit down and ask: what do I think? And to look away from that bright light pointing to the illusionary masses.

And for all of us to decide, collectively, please, that “marketing” is not a cool pastime.

And if it’s yours, maybe it’s worth charging for your time and labor. I sure do!

Hello, dear readers!

It’s been too long since I last wrote on Substack … I suppose the last article was a “load-bearing post.” I wrote a quippy blog about the strange, often teary state of music (video) journalism.

It went viral. 20,000+ people read it. Substack made a video about it? And so did Mina Le? And now I’m #6 “Rising” in the Music category on Subsatck???

Most meaningfully, some very cool, very thoughtful people reached out to me to share their own thoughts about the piece.

Writing, in certain miraculous moments can be like a sort of cosmic bat signal. The right people may hear your frequency and reach out, which is why I knowingly smiled when I got a DM from . He read the piece. It made him think.

I have followed Derrick Gee (IG, TikTok, Substack) for a while, and thought about him a bit when writing my piece. Gee has worked in radio and for labels for years.

More recently, he’s carved a meaningful niche in the online music media ecosystem. He hosts a radio show for a dedicated community of Patreon subscribers and makes videos exploring niche, but buzzy topics (like mysterious AI jazz on Youtube or why Skrillex still wears Beats headphone from 2013). Most relevant to this conversation, though, is his interview series — though “interview” may be a misnomer given the specificity of the format.

Gee invites artists to come to his home in Australia where they sit down with him and play some music — obscure or iconic selections that excite or inspire them. He, in turn, does the same. The music becomes a launching point for the artists to discuss their influences, latest project or the world writ large. It’s a musical equivalent of the Criterion Closet interviews, and is very needed in our music media ecosystem, given that our era of streaming slop means that too few regard music as a serious art form worth discussion beyond fandom histrionics … but I digress!

Notably, Gee has sat down with a stellar (and, by my accounts, “cool”) group of musicians, like Lorde, MJ Lenderman, and Ichiko Aoba among others. He makes a point to only invite artists who he thinks he could connect with or admires on some level. That said, he makes sure to treat them as the “ordinary people” that they are.

In my original piece, I focused on a few choice creators/podcasters — Jake Shane, Las Culturistas, Call Her Daddy and Zane Lowe. These people, I claimed, all have a heavily emotional, adoring tone in their interviews which mirrors the parasocial mania of internet fan culture. There’s some thread between that positivity and Gee’s interviews, which are generally smiling and sweet. The smile he shares with his guests, though, is different from the performative passion I was describing in the article. So I thought both that tenuous connection, and the fact that Gee is building something new, unique and curated, could make a chat with him an interesting addendum to this long discussion we’ve been having here on my Substack.

I also just think he’s smart and thoughtful and committed to highlighting music appreciation in a real and rooted way. So we spoke over Zoom about all of this.

Read below for a lightly edited deep dive with the one and only, .

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We’re thinking about similar things from different vantages. I’m curious how my piece struck you and what your initial thoughts were on my argument?

Derrick Gee: It was very funny. The “brand” that I built is not one that criticizes people too much. I wrestle with this idea of how I could potentially be used by the industry. I built my profile without any artist's involvement. I am grateful that I don't need it. If I decided tomorrow to shut down my interview show, I don't think it would matter. But I like doing it when I can do it beautifully. But I can see, as soon as my channels start to build, the industry gets their claws out and they start to go, “You are our mouthpiece now. You are mine.”

I just have to be really protective about my taste, and what I want to do. I get offered certain artists that I'm not a fan of. I have to ask myself, “Why do I want to speak to these people? Is it because they're famous? No. Is it because I think there's something to talk about?” Then, “Yes.” You see people speaking to artists, and you can tell they don't really care about them, they're just doing it because it's leverage to build a brand. Lots of new faces are popping up in video form with microphones being nice to artists. As someone that has been a long-time radio host, I am part of that, in a sense of being a content creator and putting artists in a context that's different from one that is purely journalistic. But also I built my reputation off my taste and my opinion on what I like.

I don't like seeing [music media] growing in a way where the music is not a central part of the conversation. There’s Chicken Shop Date and Hot Ones, which are great, but every music label now wants a version of that. And then there’s me putting my lens through that. I don't want to do a gimmick. I want to talk about music.

I can see some music journalists being critical of what I do. Meanwhile, I think I have some integrity to what I do. I don’t consider it traditional journalism. I’m in this gray area that I'm happy to be in, but I don't think it's fully explored or matured yet.

I see what you do as very distinct from the creators that I wrote about. Your show is the equivalent of the Criterion Closet for music. That said, your tone with guests is very positive, which is where I see the potential thread between your work and this new music media landscape, which is generally quite friendly to artists. It seems like you’re grappling with this as well. I’m curious to hear you expand on that.

Derrick Gee: There's sometimes discourse around the fact that I do brand deals. That's what funds my business. I don't do brand deals with music labels or artists. I do brand deals to have a career out of this, but also to protect the fact that I don't have to take money from labels, which a lot of music content creators do.

[Regarding being critical,] I prefer to be investigatively journalistic. I’ve done viral videos around music culture and trends. I do my research, and I go deep on that. I like that kind of “journalism.” But I liken myself much more to a radio host or a presenter. I don’t think people are asking me, “Why aren't you asking X person about X controversy?” The criticism I see [about me] is more like, Who are these influencers that are walking billboards for certain brands? How can you be a real journalist, which I've never said I am, if you’re also promoting things?

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I'm a journalist. The reality, though, is: most young journalists or people who work in digital media are balancing output with rigor. It’s a huge challenge. So whether that’s happening within digital media, or on the creator side, the pressure to produce is a culture-wide issue.

Derrick Gee: It’s survival, right? The funding model is different. I had an interview last week with Ichiko Alba. That's a four-camera shoot. I spent so much money on translators, editing, and the post-production side of things. It took forever. Sometimes an artist can cancel an hour before. I don't have anyone paying my salary, so if you cancel, I've lost a day and I've lost money. My wife plans to leave the house with my son when we do interviews here. All of this impacts my life.

I’ve thought, Should I create a music platform and bring in other people? Demonstrably, it doesn't seem like there's enough money to survive and do “music journalism,” unless you're Billboard and attached to a whole other thing. This new wave of music media isn't people flying the flag and saying, “We've figured it out. This is how you make money.” But it is saying that it’s sustainable if one person can do it on their own and bear the brunt of all the production and post-production … and then shill yourself off to some headphone company sometimes. What would traditionally be the banner ad on the side [of the website] is you now.

Does that lose any integrity? It’s in the eye of the beholder. It’s all media, though. Everyone's still trying to figure out how to be editorially independent and creative, whilst paying bills. My interview show doesn’t make money. That’s what they call a loss leader. It’s the pure part of the business at the moment. [With that,] I can do what I want.

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I think what I was trying to work through with my article is this: maybe avoiding being critical, or “access journalism,” is the cost of survival now, because if you lose access to talent, there's not another income stream or attention-stream to make up for that. And culture doesn't have reverence for or interest in criticism on its own, so access is fundamental.

Derrick Gee: I do wonder about the definition or use of criticism now. On the channels that I exist on, there's too much criticism. Anyone can be a critic. You see random kids going, “10 Worst British Albums of all time.” Who are you? What is your background? What gives you the right to say that? These people get millions of views. I have witnessed that there’s a lot of criticism out there … and maybe this is born out of Fantano-culture and the tribalism of fans, but there's a lot of people that like to rank and criticize things. These people aren't journalists, but their opinions are out there. I would argue there's more criticism than ever, but there isn’t an investigative nature to it, which is like, “I'm going to explore this idea, and share how I formed my critical opinion.” There's a lot of “critics” in bubbles that speak to an audience that don’t like something anyways. [They say something like], “Yeah, all rap sucks these days.”

I'm 25, so I don't even remember this era, but I’m told there was a time where there was higher trust in institutions. We know, of course, that institutions are problematic, but institutions can provide a framework so a society can collectively look at something and discuss it. Criticism in The Times, or in more recent times, Pitchfork, can, theoretically, create a common language for discussion. Today, with our siloed culture and stan culture, we’re separated. Swifties have a different internet than me, and I listen to Taylor Swift! That siloed culture leads to these dynamics of both stan journalism and overly positive access journalism online.

Derrick Gee: I think this culture of everything being “nicely, nicely” existed before on different platforms. In the blog era, a press release goes out to 10,000 people, and then 10,000 blogs post something that's throw away content. Artists performed on morning shows and they asked softball questions. Commercial radio [would ask artists], “Hey! Do you like Australia?” Some of that is necessary.

People say that today people won't do things unless they're eating hot wings. I don't think that is true. Lorde coming on my show was interesting. My show is an hour long and I like to talk about music. She did 3 things in Australia. She did a Vogue photoshoot, she did the national broadcaster, Triple J, and me. What is her creative, journalistic decision in doing this? She could have done the morning shows here to reach middle Australia. Looking at the stats now, our Youtube interview has 100,000 views, not a million views. Maybe I'm trying to post-rationalize, but maybe there is a little bit of an acknowledgement that there are things out there that will take a bit more time to appreciate her as an artist and as a listener. That has more value to her than a 60-second video of her ranking snacks.

This sphere [of music media] is still maturing with the Jake Shanes of the world. I don't think we've been in it long enough to know who's gonna stick around. Jake Shane is a lot closer to Jimmy Fallon than he is to most music journalists. That’s not a bad thing. Jimmy Fallon has his place. He hypes it up. Could I do it? No. But there are a lot of people who like that kind of thing.

@octopusslover8Therapuss session 86 with @Selena Gomez is out TOMORROW at 7 PM PST 🐙

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I take your point. I guess I was harping on Jake Shane, because what feels new is he has this style that’s evocative of stan culture. And that feels new, and very potent and powerful. Stan culture is this monster eating the world, and maybe it always was. But the internet makes it feel so overwhelming.

Derrick Gee: Jake Shane is not small, right? He's a known entity now. But there is still that feeling with him of, “Oh god. How kind of this artist to do an interview with this young fan.” That relationship's kind of weird. The artist wants media, views and attention through his platforms. I don’t think they're giving as much as they are taking from him, but he's fine with that. I started my show here my home. I still do it every week for my Patreon, and then Jamie XX's people said, “Do you want to do something with him?” And I said, “Why doesn't he come in here and play music with me?” That's how the show began. It wasn't a concept, it was just, “Join me.”

I used to work at a record label. The thing I got tired of was people obsessing over musicians as magical beings. They do incredible things, but they're ordinary people. As I continue to do this show, I want to present that, not gas them and not bow down to them. I don’t get nervous with them, because they’re just people. And I want it to feel that way.

[Stan culture] does eat the world alive if all we do is look at artists starry-eyed. To your point about Zane Lowe, he’s very good at what he does. But he has a company that he represents. That company has a lot of power in terms of promotion and streaming. He has a lot of great relationships and supports artists early in their career. Therefore they build a long-term relationship where you can always support their music. It's an ecosystem. I do look at [Zane Loewe] and how he treats people, though … not everyone believes it, right?

It's hard to believe [his enthusiasm] over the course of watching so many of his interviews. It’s just not likely that he would be so enthusiastic for so many people.

Indeed. But it depends on the business. Because he is great at what he does within the structure in which he exists. He gets paid by Apple to represent big music. People go to him for that reason. Jake Shane’s business is built around him as an individual being stoked. And me, as a much smaller business, [I ask,] “Are you a music fan? Tell me about it.”

In your article, you wrote about how there's not much discomfort in a lot of these [interviews]. I thought about that in the prism of what I do; the discomfort for me is that we both play each other shit that we might not like. It’s kind of scary. But my business doesn't rely on being excited by them, and my business doesn't rely on them needing me to disseminate their promotion on streaming services. My business, and why they might be interested in my business, is they want to show that they think about music and want to contribute to the great music that’s been out there. Not every business is built like mine, and not every business is built like Jake Shane's. Not many big artists go with Fantano, because of his reputation. It’s a bit fatalist to say, “The business means journalists have to be stans.”

Another angle to look at this is that streaming has devalued the idea of music as a precious art object. Music is vibes, music is playlists, music is algorithms. Music isn’t something where you go to the criterion closet, except you are subtly doing that.

Derrick Gee: I think a lot about how Letterboxd has their top 4 films, right? That's such a great and clever format. You could not do that for music for a multitude of reasons. If you name 4 albums I've never heard of, then “Fuck you, you think you're better than me?” Whereas, if you have someone mentioning four films that you've never heard of, you're like, “Oh my gosh, I need to find out what they are.” There needs to be more of that in music, and I don’t know if it ever has existed, or maybe it can't because of the kind of gamification of it with the ranking culture.

I avoid that, because the only thing I know how to do is tell people about music I like. I don't think about rankings, I don't think about the song of the summer, I don't think about the best album of this year. The best album for me for this year is probably something that came out a long time ago, because that's what I found this year. I take music appreciation so seriously, and I put myself in different contexts [to do that].

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xx

Hello! Thank you for reading. I’ll be posting monthly essays/interviews on pop and politics here. Please be sure to subscribe, and follow me on social media (my Instagram and X), so you can follow my other writing and work.

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Ok, now on to the show!

Pop PR cycles have incorporated a new beat to their familiar song.

Yes, there are still the magazine covers and fan events, and since Brat, a perilous increase in hectic last minute pop star pop ups. But in the last year or so, a new world of interview mainstays has become central to the rhythm of the roll out.

It’s a world I find somewhat troubling because it masquerades as media, but is really closer to Official Standom. Maybe it’s simply entertainment. But its perilous proximity to a seemingly serious “album sit down” means I feel called to diagnose this subgenre.

Let’s call it “The Girls and Gays Pop Star Sit Down.”

Of this category there are a few prime purveyors.

1. Therapuss with Jake Shane

2. Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang

3. Call Her Daddy with Alex Cooper

4. Honorary Mention: Zane Lowe on Apple Music (straight man but the affect is the same)

What unites all of these pieces of media is a giddy sensibility where the host has the affect and enthusiasm of a super fan.

The pop star, in turn, acts bashful and pleased and at least appears to model a sense of safety and comfort, which in turn, makes the viewer feel as if they’re part of this intimate gabfest with their fav.

These types of interviews, now so central to the pop ecosystem, essentially codify stan culture’s uber-emotional tone, making the weepy sentimentality of super fan discourse the official company line.

The normalization of this screaming, crying affect makes it harder for all of us to discuss art as art. It implies that if you’re not weeping, you’re soulless.

This shift towards stan sentimentality in pop interviews is most embodied by internet creator Jake Shane.

Shane became famous on TikTok for videos of him “reenacting” historical events like Abe Lincoln getting shot, or scenarios, like a chicken laying an egg, as himself: a goofy young man.

As his status online rose, he also talked more and more about his OCD, anxiety and prescription treatment. He carved a niche in culture that was equal parts absurdist (the silly gay guy fluent in bits) and deeply vulnerable and self-effacing, and thus approachable to all.

It was an affect that worked well on the interview podcast he started soon after his rise, “Therapuss.” On it, he talks to stars like Charli xcx, Lorde, Camila Cabello and Benito Skinner about their work and life, taking on the role of the “therapist” within the proverbial “therapuss.”

Part of what made his show pop off, other than his wild access to top talent, is that, whether genuine or not, Shane is seemingly an adoring fan of everyone he sits down with.

The moments from the show that get the most traction on social media are when he emotionally spazzes out about his interviewee’s discretion or art, serving as the stand in for the audience member who presumably would also be moved to tears by the idea of getting early access to Lorde’s new album.

These are not so much interviews then, as they are love fests, or in their more therapeutic moments, cross confessionals where Shane opens up about his own problems, creating room for the celebrity to “get real” too.

@octopusslover8Therapuss session 76 with @Lorde is out TOMORROW at 7 PM PST 🐙

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Part of Shane’s appeal is that his viewers perceive him as a proxy for themselves. His openness about his struggles with his mental health, sexuality and dating makes him relatable to a young audience that is similarly plagued by uncertainty and doubt.

But he’s able to express these relatable sentiments while still being enmeshed socially and culturally within A-list culture. He is very close friends with Sofia Richie (son of Lionel, sister of Nicole, ex of Justin Bieber, and now wife of Elliot Grainge, CEO of Atlantic Music Group).

I have no doubt that publicists are now genuinely eager to book talent on his show, but his path to such open access, surely (at least partially) has its roots in his glitzy social milieu.

He is thus able to scratch the ultimate itch for our parasocial culture: to be strikingly vulnerable and open about your struggles while still in proximity to, and beloved by, our culture’s coolest.

Shane’s pop star kiki’s then are their own kind of fan fiction.

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@octopusslover8I’m gonna whisper @tate mcrae

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I wouldn’t harp on Shane’s star studded therapy sessions if it wasn’t representative of the overall tenor of so much pop music media right now.

Other shows, like Las Culturistas with comedians Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang, walk a similar tight rope, with the hosts expressing outright fanfare at their guest’s presence, while facilitating an easy convo about life, love and art.

Las Culturistas has been around for nearly a decade, but in recent years, it has risen in prominence via both hosts’ upward trajectories. And the show’s status has been supercharged via its inclusion in the pop ecosystem, with Last Culturistas having key sit downs with Chapell Roan, Mariah Carey, Tate McRae, Kelly Clarkson and others (not that relevant, but just today they released an episode with Michelle Obama).

It’s clear that they’ve become a go-to destination for pop’s brightest stars because their positive, enthusiastic ethos helps gin up a similar sentiment in others.

The same story of emotional applause applies to Call Her Daddy, Alex Cooper’s media juggernaut. Cooper’s interviews with stars are casual, yet highly professionalized girl’s girl sit-downs where she takes on the affect of a close confidant and supporter, always affirming the ideas and feelings of her guest.

And it applies too to Zane Lowe’s show on Apple Music, where Lowe, the supposed consummate professional, similarly takes on a strangely lauditory and weepy tone with artists.

@mattrogersthoDont you think @tate mcrae is a cheetah? #lasculturistas

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It’s clear: these interviews are fulfilling a demand.

This is pop music media in an era where stan culture is all encompassing.

Where cliche’s like “Gaga’s music saved my life,” no matter how genuinely expressed, have become the cultural oxygen.

Pop stars, no longer mere singers, are now representatives of a whole fan community, and by proxy, subculture.

And pop stars, positioned as emotional forces, have become de facto spiritual leaders: the rare figures whose art can “help” young people come out of the closet, feel less alone, and find community.

Their art and their very existence represent a great bright hope at the end of some uncertain tunnel. With that, these interviews are not thoughtful sit downs with an artist presenting their work, but expressions of the extreme emotional forces that are flowing through pop music culture. They are more ritual than conversation.

@gaytimesAre YOU @chappell roan's dream girl? 👀 #chappellroan #callherdaddy #podcasts #hottogo #thegiver #goodluckbabe #sapphic

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Look, very few want hard hitting interviews or sober critiques of pop these days.

Critical writing on music is a fallow, fallow field, though myself and my brave colleagues try our best.

If you want to see the pure apathy the online pop community has for any attempt to treat artists as artists and not as critically immune diarists or emotional gurus, just look at any of my or my colleagues’ DMs or replies.

When everyone from Halsey to the indie band Tennis post snide and snooty calls to harangue Pitchfork critics, it becomes clear that any of us who are trying to be pop-critical have little support or back up.

I’m not saying any of this to advocate for a sort of hard hitting Barbara Walters-tone to pop star interviews. But I think we can split the difference, or at least try to advocate for a modicum of seriousness.

Or at the very least, get curious about why these parasoical cry sessions seem to facilitate such virality.

These interviews are not the cause of this rabid, weepy fanfare. But they codify and amplify it. And I think, maybe, by naming that, we can begin to see them a bit more soberly.

@theeswiftologistThe art of interviewing is in a painfully slow decline 😭 even Zane Lowe can’t win….. #katyperry #zanelowe #swiftologist

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I say all of this while also knowing that the social impetus to be kind and lauditory in interviews is strong.

I struggle with this often.

I’ve interviewed artists I love. I’ve interviewed artists I feel meh towards. A few too, whose work or music I don’t particularly love. It’s the job.

The simple human impulse to be smiley and kind and congratulatory is strong .And when talking to those whose work I deeply admire, the pull towards enthusiastic hysterics is magnetic.

I often beat myself up after interviews for falling into these traps.

I do so because I think that my job isn’t necessarily to be nice and smiley and become friends with Doechii. But because ultimately my goal is to produce understanding and insight. And often friction is required to get past the cliches or talking points artists so often fall back on.

Not every interview needs to be cutting nor profound. But a sense that we’re striving towards understanding should at least guide our work. That’s the bare minimum.

In a healthier music media ecosystem there would be space for variety. Some fun and frivolous moments, and many others that are a bit more measured.

But I sense that the lean reality of media means that gravity is pulling us towards this more profitable model, one that feeds the sugar frenzy of stan culture.

I know many are doing something different. I know I try my best to. But I wonder if the general public truly wants that? And if not, maybe it’s time for us to do the hard work of making a case for it again.

Let’s get serious my loves.

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Thanks for reading! For those of you who take pop music discourse seriously: where do you go for these more serious discussions and interviews about pop music? I have my own ideas, but I’d be curious to discuss with you all here <3

Hi! Thanks for reading :) I’ll be posting essays here bi-weekly. In non-Substack news: I interviewed global girl group KATSEYE for PAPER this week. Check that out here.

If you’re not subscribed to this newsletter, please do so <3 excited to keep building this and be in conversation with you all. xx

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Everyone remembers C,XOXO summer.

You were there … remember?

When Camila Cabello shocked the world with her dizzying rebrand as a hyper-femme Miami cyborg here to wake us up out of our collective pop slump?

Her 2024 album brought us such surprises as “B.O.A.T.,” a piano ballad that sounds like an emo smash was sold and stripped for its parts, returned to us as a rusted, beautiful husk. It samples Pitbull’s “Hotel Room Service,” its iconic melody delivered as simple synth line that echoes until it forms into a brand new mass.

It also gave us its lead single, “I Luv It,” a neon blast of bubbles, all fizz and no protein. Its chorus, the song’s title repeated over and over again, sounds like a remedy to doubt or outright hypnotism. I love it??? I love it.

If you didn’t recall the summer of 2024 as such, you wouldn’t be alone.

I though was part of an elite few who can relate. While the world was lost in the Brat-green blizzard, we were harboring a humid heart ache while listening to Cabello’s album-closer “June Gloom,” a song which teeters between an orgasm and a weep.

Last summer, I listened to this album almost daily. I did so because I loved it, but also because I’m spiteful. You see, I staked my meager bit of credibility on the album’s quality and success. I profiled Cabello for PAPER — still, the biggest story of my career—and was the first writer to preview this head scratch of an album for the public. I was feeling confident in my assessments that, while confusing, it would ultimately prove Cabello’s many nay sayers wrong. I wrote: “The writing is both diaristic, bluntly personal, and imagistic, too, offering visual impressions of Miami landscapes rather than always telling a neatly constructed story. And Cabello here sounds playful, often drenched in a robotic autotune that never hides her sprawling range. The album’s mix does not feel necessarily ready-made for the Top 40, though it’s surely set up to zoom past the Top 10.”

Commercially, I was wrong as wrong can be. C,XOXO debuted at #11 on the Billboard charts, and never rose. It produced no immediate “hits.” And culturally, it couldn’t get past the brick wall of Brat’s success, as Cabello’s new alternative sound sparked rumors that she was desirous of Charli’s alt pop throne, just as the British star was reaching her imperial era.

The negative turn towards the album wasn’t helped by the fact that one of its lead singles featured Drake and was released during the peak of “Not Like Us”-mania. It’s a bummer. “HOT UPTOWN,” was perfect “Passionfruit”-era Drake — the type of Drake cut that melts into the air, irrefutable and misty. It was well positioned to be a song of the summer, but the specter of pedophilia that haunted the rapper post-beef and the smell of his flailing made the song’s natural sex appeal feel creepy and loserish. The song failed to launch.

It was always going to be hard for Cabello to reach pop music’s chicer upper echelon.

Cabello started as one fifth of the wildly successful, if unhip girl group, Fifth Harmony. After leaving the group in a tizzy of individual flair she found success through songs like “Havanna,” which worked as a piece of quintessential radio fodder: bright and sexy and different, if not also very on the nose. The song trafficked in the sounds of her native Cuba and contemporary trap, but did so while winking directly at that fact (“Havana, ooh-na-na/Half of my heart is in Havana, ooh-na-na/He took me back to East Atlanta”).

Throughout her career, though, there have been signs that Cabello was capable of pop that elevated mass appeal fodder for something a bit more surprising. Even on her debut album, Camila, she has “Never Be The Same,” a smash success which circles around a clawing falsetto refrain: “Nicotine, heroine, morphine/Suddenly I’m a fiend and you’re all I need,” she sings, squelching up at every ee like a nervous yelp. There’s a delicious hookiness to the melody, something symmetrical and familiar, but it’s also grating, a vocal gesture that stretches past the limit of her agility and towards mess. It was an early signal that her pop perfect veneer could be cracked to thrilling effect.

In the years that followed her chart smashing debut, Cabello found more success, but she never elevated her image towards that of the pop girls who somehow could straddle the line between artfulness and mass appeal (Lana, Lorde, now Charli at the smaller end .. Beyonce, Rihanna and Gaga at the most gargantuan scale). She continued to mint hits. Her collaboration with her ex, Shawn Mendes, “Señorita,” still remains one of the most streamed songs in the world. It still, though, falls into the same pit as “Havanna” — depicting a scenario and failing to elevate it beyond itself. Here, Shawn, a white Canadian encounters his lover, Cabello, a Cuban raised in Mexico and Miami, and the song they produce goes as such: “I love it when you call me señorita/I wish I could pretend I didn't need ya/ But every touch is ooh, la-la-la.”

Her hits being so hopelessly literal didn’t help to counter the case that Cabello was chronically uncool. In interviews, she seemed, nerdy and earnest. A theatre kid. A video of her singing “I’ll Be Home For Christmas,” pronouncing the holiday as “kwis-mars” continues to make the rounds online as a moment of perpetual cringe. Her fans found these moments to be proof of her authenticity, but for those primed to shirk at such public displays of try hardedness, they cemented her image. Meanwhile, conversations surrounding Mendes’s sexuality remained at a near constant, prodding level, the public mining displays of his relative femininity for proof of his secret desires.

In the crude reality of these headline-conversations, there was something abject and familiar in this story. The girl who tries too hard and fails. No wonder so many wanted to look away. Her public fate was our collective greatest fear.

C,XOXO, then, was to be her escape from this cruel status. In its surprising, electronic textures it, she would earn the respect of pop’s snobbish class. In her all around vulnerability, she would earn the sympathy of the public. All in all, this portrait of her, though messy, would earn good will, because there is a nobility in swinging for the fences.

This is the earnest, heart warming story I glommed onto — both in my conversation with Camila and then via my subsequent trauma bond with this strange, strange album. But to most, the album’s initial sputter — its inability to shine amidst BRAT’s omnipotent radiance — meant that Cabello’s wild attempt at self revelation was embarrassing.

The public thought this because they’re terrified of failure. And in C,XOXO’s initial commercial failure, they saw a fearful self reflection. What if you try and the world still doesn’t get it? In our winner takes all cultural ecosystem, that’s a dire fate. But in a more subtle and well tempered world, there’s space to take in failure as a shade, a hue, a feeling, a mere part to the whole.

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Cabello certainly approaches failure as a feeling, rather than a destitute end point.

Throughout the record, she contends with the limits of her own self conception, like on album standout, “Chanel No. 5” — a crudely drawn piece of piano-trap whose simplicity makes it truer. Throughout the song, her voice lilts, overwhelmed by autotune. She’s bragging, but the music’s quiet sadness and the unsureness of her delivery renders her boasts as half-hearted. Its chorus goes: “Cute girl with a sick mind/I know just how to play my cards right/Wrist, wrist, spritz, spritz, make him come alive/Chanel No.5.” I don’t believe her in this song. But I feel her intention, I sense her broader aspiration towards untouchability. It makes the song both a therapeutic release and a work of motivational self-talk. And to me it’s deeply moving.

There’s no real need to pit this album directly against it contemporaries. But for me, I find this kind of mess more nourishing than something as self-aware and clear as a BRAT or Lorde’s new single, “What Was That.” There’s an ignorance, and a fumbling quality to this music that satisfies something deep and unspoken.

It’s not a diary page, torn out yet legible. It’s a blurred vision, a flash of the car, a sense memory that stumbles into words. It’s the sweaty feeling of bed rot and drunken car rides home, sprawling out in the backseat with a guilt that’s crawling up your throat. It’s regret. It’s hope. It’s not a story. It’s a feeling.

If the world allowed itself to sit with that, I think they would find something glimmering and meaningful. I think they would hear what I heard, and what many others did, which is a portrait of an artist trying something amidst a spite the size of sky scrapers.

Oh well. She’ll get ‘em next time.

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Thanks for reading! Please subscribe, and if you’re curious to follow my words and work in general: follow me on Instagram and X. <3

Also: A part of this story and my deep feelings towards the album is the fact that my dearest friend from childhood, Jasper Harris, co-produced it. That’s a can of worms I get into in my PAPER profile if you’re curious.

Hello dear readers.

It’s been so long.

I owe you an explanation.

This newsletter — where I posted my musings on pop music, algorithms and politics — got a surprisingly sweet amount of attention 2 years ago when I hit my stride. Nothing huge, but enough that some editors saw it and felt confident enough to accept my messy pitches.

Some of those stories did quite well and after a few different happenstances I became a Contributing Writer for PAPER, which was exciting, but quite overwhelming, so I stopped writing here. (If you want to catch up on what I’ve written about, I’d suggest my profiles of Camila Cabello or Parvati Shallow or Doechii).

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My Substack-pause was needed, but sad, because I loved writing here, where I could feel free to flex 2,000 words on the aesthetics of Beberhexa. I needed some time to focus and read and make coffee and bop around the world, but as we descend into a period of history I can only describe as somewhere between TBD and Hell, I feel a calling to think out loud with you all.

And to reflect a little bit on what I’ve learned these past two years in Media and Music.

My life has changed so much, but my takeaways are fuzzy.

I sometimes wonder if half-reviewing the 10-30 albums sent to me a day makes me more aware of market trends. I sometimes wonder if interviewing scores of musicians has given me any novel insight into how one should conduct their life in the arts, or an understanding of the invisible string that binds all creative processes. I sometimes wonder if hammering my head against a keyboard in exasperated confusion, trying to find a new adjective to describe “frenetic” music (a bad-habit-adjective of mine) really has resulted in any improved writerly muscles.

Or if all of these acts, done over and over again, have resulted in a sort of zen tedium.

Music is music.

Writing is writing.

Emails are emails.

Copy is copy.

The act of doing all over and over again isn’t an excercise in reaching nirvana, but is rather more akin to rote muscle memorization. When it’s boring, it’s lifeless and heart breaking. When you’re in the zone, it’s like the best day of mowing the lawn: satisfying and green and fresh and thoughtless.

The truth is: I wish I was a romantic. I wish I could cower at the altar of craft and weep.

But, if anything, I’m a propagandist, interested in billboards and magazine covers and neon signs that etch into your brain forever.

Maybe it’s because I love pop culture more than I love writing. Maybe it’s because I’m ultimately interested in a politics of the masses more than an individualized, Liberal quest for solitary enlightenment. Maybe it’s because I have a politics inspired by Pop hegemony. Yes. Maybe it’s because I want my writing to speak in the language of pop music, which is to say the broad strokes of mass appeal.

To me, writing transcends mere lettering when it can tap into the cosmic blood lust of pop.

I think it’s because I’m from Los Angeles. My iron was forged in that spotlit crucible. I remember being 17, bleary, gay, sweaty, self-hating, and seeing Frank Ocean in a crowd of depressives under a warm California sky. To me, there was a supersized intimacy, a sort of smallness to Ocean’s music (blond and its lush, lush bedrot) that, when transposed to a crowd of tens of thousands, became as powerful as any mass movement. Except it was dreamier and ambient … like every human on earth had one day dunked their head inside aquarium waters, seen the fish and dolphins up close and then had to silently keep living their lives, never to mention it again.

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I guess I’m talking on the level of vast, vast feelings and mass, mass scale and to me, in an age of mass, mass crisis, that’s the only thing worth talking about?

I’m not saying that a Sabrina Carpenter will move us out of neoliberalism, or authoritarian descent, or even trite party politics. But I am saying that pop music in its anthemic splendor has a rare ability to express the deep pathos of our time, in all of its contradictory scope.

Maybe that’s what I’ll do here. Stare at pop until it gives me some profound revelation.

Read if you want 2,000 words on Oklou, divinity and algorithmic capitalism.

Read if you desire 100 thoughts on KATSEYE.

On pop music in a time of joyless decline and infinite feelings.

I’ll try to make it worth your while.

More soon.

Tobias Hess

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Hey! Thanks for being here :) Please subscribe to this newsletter if you haven’t yet! I write essays on music and culture in an era governed by algorithms. And consider signing on for a paid subscription to support the production of this newsletter. I’ll be trying my best to roll out more paid-only content . . . stay tuned and hop on board!

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There’s an article making the rounds. It’s about how label reps are “depressed.” You see, pop stars just aren’t “popping” anymore. Few new acts break through, and most that do find themselves stuck in the dreary limbo of being a one-hit-Tiktok-wonder. I mean, think about it: how many new, truly famous pop stars from the past 5 years can you name? Billie? Olivia? Ice Spice? Black Pink?

Era-defining stars, by definition, are rare, but our time today feels markedly different. If other eras were defined by the rare comeuppance of a new pop messiah who fed us glorious manna, then this moment feels defined by a relative hunger. It’s not just that we’re not drinking godly nectar, but rather that we’re scrounging through the troff. “Stan Mother!!!” I call out to the empty void . All I hear are echoes. And then the quiet hum-back of one Sabrina Carpenter.

The death of the mono-culture and the rise of an algorithmic, highly-personalized one has meant that Big Pop is categorically uncommon. In an era where “music discovery” is facilitated by attenuated algorithms rather than mass-taste-makers or gate-keepers, big ubiquitous pop (which is, after all, short for “popular”), becomes a rarer thing. How can we all get hip to the same cultural moment when all of us are siloed in our narrow, weary, threads? And even when we do all tap into the same phenomena, the rapid flow of the algorithmic stream makes it nearly impossible for any of us to grasp onto anything long enough to hold on, let alone to gasp for air.

So when you can’t go big, go reasonable.

Those same depressed executives seem to be re-defining success. They cite artists like Laufey and JPEGMAFIA, who don’t stream like The Biggest Artist Ever but who do sell out shows and have strong merch sales, as the potential new model. The executives seem to have re-set their focus on modest, sustainable breakthroughs, rather than dominant stars. And look, I’m all for re-adjusting expectations. For a return to regarding value as it is rather than as it’s speculated to maybe become. But I think music execs are making a grave error with this.

I believe that execs resigning themselves to the good-enough rather than the Mega is reasonable. But I fear that it may be a cover for tacit defeat. A quiet resignation that music, and pop music in particular, is no longer the big, pulsing heart of culture.

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Some of us who are obsessed with music, be it as makers or consumers, may forget that music is not destined to remain all that popular in relative terms. In fact, it may help us to consider music as directly competing with other cultural forms like movies, TV, video games, etc. Doing so allows us to see music as part of a broader cultural ecosystem of competing mediums. Thus the the relative decline of pop stardom speaks to not just music’s stand-alone stagnancy, but it’s comparative diminishment in culture.

It’s easy to get lost in the glimmering narrative of Taylor Swift’s overwhelmingly dominant Eras tour, which has descended on the globe like a series of militaristic takeovers. A record breaking global tour does not spell music’s decline. But if we are to read the tea leaves than we could see this tour as a potential last gasp of The Ultimate Megastar. Taylor Swift, with her Eras tour and Beyonce. with her Renaissance tour, are culturally totalizing in a way that may soon no longer be possible. Because, after all, who will have her Eras tour in 10 years? I believe in the Church of Olivia Rodrigo, but that’s a lot of eggs in one basket. Can she sustain? Can Billie?

It’s not these artist’s fault, but rather the industry writ-large’s. The decline of the pop star is indicative of a stagnant, hopelessly non-proactive industry that has foregone any sort of interest in artist development or investment. That relies on algorithmic platforms to thrust people to mega-status. And that makes no correctives when those same platforms sweep those artists away in the rushing pace of culture. I mean what would you expect of such a business model?

Sure, execs cant take refuge in sustainable stars like Laufey or JPEG, but if you want to make a case for your form’s cultural import, its necessary dominancy, then low-key B-listers doesn’t cut it.

It’s like today’s movie business. We have the movies, but very few movie stars. In this context what do we get? Franchises. And while Marvel may be a certifiable mint for Disney, the cultural centrality of the Cinema has certainly waned in opposition proportion to the franchise’s rise. A movie business with no movie stars becomes hollow, rendering itself a container for whatever IP it chooses to depict. A music industry with no stars feels similarly vacant, just the home for contextless sounds and trends. And when that’s the case, how are you supposed to defend the cultural import of your medium?

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Time moves on. Things change. But if we are to be so bold as to try and hold on to a thing of the past — that is music’s central force in pop culture — then maybe we’d be wise to at least try to hold onto one leaving thing. Our stars.

Give me a star and I’ll give you an industry. But if you rather have the whole thing fade into sort of casual obsolesce then at least make it quick. Allow me to smile in my Eras hoodie and dance to our Last Great American Dynasty, before finally killing off this thing I so foolishly love.

I love music, but I love music as a prism to see it all. The drama of the whole world condensed into a song, a moment. Fame, humongous, glorious cultural centrality is a necessary component to that. Sigh. I guess I’m a maximalist. Because when I close my eyes and I imagine the power of pop, I get this Big Image, this sort of allusive dream that floats above me and crashes in like a tidal wave. It’s like Beyonce singing on a cop car. Like the world becoming blue when Melodrama dropped. Frank Ocean disappearing but haunting us with his timeless, empty beauty. It’s music, but it’s also fame. The ultimate metaphor and container for all that the world can hold. I liked eyeing it to see if it cracked under all that earthen pressure. If it combusted or turned to diamond. But if Mega Musical Fame, if Music as The Biggest Thing in the World, is no longer possible, well, I guess, I’ll simply take what I can get. Pop without the popular? Maybe it’ll have to do.

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A quick plug for my LA-readers! I am planning a Vanderpump Rules theme party/rave in LA at El Cid with my FAV podcast “Sexy Unique Podcast.” It’s on August 2nd and tix are on sale now. Would love to see you there!

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The heat is unbearable, the air is dense with fire-smoke and I’m playing Padam. The world feels hotter and more hateful these days, but still I’m seeking refuge in the typical place: pop music. It is the gay boy’s lingua franca after all, our ultimate symbology, our casual fodder.

“Padam Padam” — Kylie Minogue’s silly, essential comeback. Even I have hyped myself into a Padam-fueled mania. Everything about it is gorgeously gauche, from its plucky bass to its title, a riff on the 1951 Edith Piaf song of the same name. I like this allusion. With it, the lavish aura of French big band has found its way into the dehydrated vibe of global, gay club-pop. A little pomp for our circumspect circumstance.

I love the song and though I raise my arms in revelry at the club whenever I hear Padam’s ominous intro, I do wonder: am I dancing or memeing when I’m screaming along? Because I can’t shake the thin smile that came upon me when I fist heard the tune, when I saw gay boys on Twitter share their Grindr messages featuring the phrase. “Padam” would go one blue message. “Padam” would go the response in orange. “Padam, padam/I hear it and I know . . .” like a Grindr message’s startling alert, if you know, you know. And we laugh at the familiarity. But is it a laugh of recognition or sort of comic despair?

This fuzzy feeling — that space between sincere enthusiasm and ironic amusement — is not a rare one for the pop-listening gay boy. Gay boys’ affect, after all, leans ironic. Hedosnism in our niche is often mere subtext for a generalized ambivalence to clear-cut modes. In our vibe-world, nothing is right, nothing is wrong, nothing is serious, nothing is purely comical. Everything is everything. And thus we can feel deep ecstasy to Padam and turn it into silly, forgettable fodder at the same time. We can say something as crass as “Meghan Traitor is MOTHER”, feeling genuine sincerity even while smirking knowingly towards out girls. We are gemini-people. And pop girls, the centers of our world, seem to bear the brunt of our twin impulse. We worship and laugh at. And we feel ambivalence regarding which we are enacting. The ironic stan. The sincere jester.

And I can luxuriate in that grey zone, and take refuge in our unique culture of sneering turning into pleasure turning into sincerity turning into bleary nights not caring. But these days I feel that the pleasure of this indistinction is souring. It all icky, a sorry coverup for the gay boy’s misogynistic impulse.

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I’m thinking of Tanya from The White Lotus [SPOILER . . . but where were you!?]. Jennifer Coolidge’s iconoclastic heiress meets a grim, watery fate after she is trapped on a yacht by a gaggle of seemingly adoring gay men. Those gay men, she finds out, are trying to "murder her” for her latent fortune. But they get her aboard by wining and dining her, lavishing her with praise and setting her up with fabulous clothes, food and men. Their feigned worship was all a front for a dark plot. Maybe that’s why her line, “These gays are trying to murder me,” became the iconic hallmark of the show. How many of us have felt that same mixed impulse? These fun gays . . . they’re scaring me!

I though of Tanya when I recently witnessed a slew of horrid fan attacks on mid-tier pop divas.

A boy threw his phone at singer Bebe Rhexa. It hit her right in the eye, leading her to collapse to the ground and go to the hospital. After, when the press asked why he would do such a thing, he responded with terrifying honestly: “I thought it would be funny.”

Oddly enough, the same thing happened to pop girl Ava Max, who was slapped on stage by a crazed male fan(?).

And then more such occurrences: someone gave a wheel of brie to singer P!nk. And then, someone else, their mother’s ashes.

Some of these occurrences feel deranged. Other’s, like the brie, potentially tongue in-cheek. But I can’t help but notice that these string of strange fan attacks and offerings seem to have struck B-list pop girls who are often the butt of adoring(?) jokes on the gay web. These are not untouchable mega-stars, but our stars. Gay micro-macro celebs who we both love, find amusing, and share a communal exasperation regarding the fact that it is our community who largely populates their fanbases.

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Let’s take the case Bebe Rhexa. Her career has largely consisted of providing vocals to the world’s biggest songs made by other people. In the days before her attack, I saw joke upon joke about her tour. She was pricing tickets at literally 8 dollars a pop. The sad reality of that proved to be good fodder for the half laughing, half-omg gay internet tribe.

It was a similar laughter that reverberated across the gay internet when, days later, a young gay boy came out to his mom in front of Rhexa in a now-viral TikTok. The video is hopelessly earnest. It’s also too, insane. To come out to your mother with your favorite pop star as witness, like a minister, is cute but also??? The comic absurdity was not just the strangely sincere encounter, but the fact that it was Rhexa who was bearing witness. Of all the people? we thought, laughing aloud.

Rhexa’s dirt-cheap tickets. The hilarity of this coming out ritual. And then too, the phone toss. It all feels part of the same breath of half-laughter. The smirking gay boys laugh and laugh. That is until someone takes the joke and boinks her in the eye. Violent contempt, it seems, is only one mark away from ironic amusement

Over a year ago, I waxed on similar themes. Unpacking my tepid adoration for one Carly Rae Jepsen, I tried to find the thread that ties gay fans to both campy queens and sort of casual pop girls like CRJ. I wanted to know why gay boys seem to “Stan” every pop girl, regardless of their explicit allegiance to the gay community or stereotypically campy affect. I wrote:

It’s a moral and aesthetic lack of clarity that I believe allows for the infinite stanning of pop girls. While gay icons may seem classically required to exude the vibes of Judy or Cher — that is the over-the-top, the messy, the glamorous — the overwhelming queer adoration for every pop girl shows that something more than a love for excess is at work here. We don’t know if we’re joking because we don’t know what we like and that’s, sort of, the point. We don’t know what’s good and we never want to define it, because once the idea of “good” is solidified, we surely fall outside its bounds.

When I wrote that, I posited a low-key radicality to the gay man’s all around pop standom. But time, and recent violent events, have colored this differently. To love all pop stars, even as a joke, is not radically liberating, but instead may stem from a desire to dominate: a smirking abjection masked with feigned excitement.

That’s the scary thing. The clap of ironic applause can so easily slip into a brutish hurtful thing. Ru Paul famously said that he connects with Cher and Diana Ross, his pop divas, because they exemplify both strength and vulnerability. I relate to this. It’s that same wide breadth of being — the pain and the glamor and the strength — that allows me to identify with the multitudes of pop girls. But too often, gay boys seem to mistake an identification with pop divas and their expansiveness as an invitation to render them a blank canvas. It’s a canvas for us to draw both tragedy and trash upon. For us to cry at and laugh around. Meanwhile, there she was, the whole time: fully colored in, a presence unto herself. We didn’t need to turn her into irony-pilled discourse, we could have simply noticed, and appreciated.

With my pop girls, I don’t know if I’m laughing or loving. But maybe she deserves to know about the tenor of my laugh. She has good reason, after all, to doubt the sincerity of its sounding.

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On Sunday, I made my pilgrimage upstate. I was going to my alma mater, Bard College — a small semi-chic liberal arts school in the Hudson Valley. It’s where I spent 2018-2022. It’s where I went to school. Where I became a writer. Where I zombied my way through bright college fields.

My time there was recent and . . . complicated. But wow is it green in June!

The Hudson Valley is, after all, a sort of pastoral-heaven with rolling green hills and hamlets boasting a city folk’s dream of country life. New York City has always shaped the region, but since COVID, even I, a recent resident, noticed a marked shift. City dwellers, either re-locating or buying second homes upstate, turned swaths of towns into newly painted Domino Magazine spreads. Under the generous blue sky, all this new sheen looks even more glistened. The Adirondacks towering over my my Labne Sour Cherry Ice cream from Fortunes. It’s a strange dream.

I wasn’t there just to eat ice cream though. I was going to see Illinois (the musical) premiering at Bard’s ostentatious, Frank Gehry-designed Fisher center. Illinois (the album) is a staple of the 2000s indie cannon. It’s also considered the crowning achievement of Sufjan Steven’s ouvre. Illinois is one of two albums that Stevens wrote to tell the story of a state. The songs’ subject matter lilt between the quotidian and dream-like. John Wayne Gacey Jr. appears, chopping up his victims dressed as a clown. But so does stubborn, aching love. Dreary self-doubt.

Stephens is a masterful writer and composer. He infuses his songs with a breathless scope through his rhapsodic instrumentation, but his work is always grounded to the soil. His lyrics are vividly specific, meticulously rendered.

This is my first paid-only post. Once a month, I will be writing a more personal piece for those that subscribe.

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You can reach me at tobiehess@gmail.com or @tobiasfornow on all platforms — always looking to connect!

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Hey! Thanks for being here. Please subscribe to this newsletter if you have not yet. I write essays on music, tech and the vibe economy. And consider signing on for a paid subscription to support the production of this newsletter. This month I’ll be rolling out paid-only content . . . stay tuned and hop on board!

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+ on a different note: I am organizing a Real Housewives-themed rave in Bushwick on Friday 6/30! Get your tix here and say hi when you’re there — would love to meet any NYC readers <3

Trigger Warning: Because of the content of the show, this article explores themes of sexual abuse and exploitation, including graphic descriptions of the show’s plot.

The Idol is, among other things, fan fic. Yes, it’s set in our world: a world where Britney Spears, Vanity Fair, Live Nation and revenge porn all exist. And yet, like the bright filmic filter that creator and show-runner Sam Levinson uses on his other mega-show, Euphoria, something’s a bit off, or heightened, here.

Over-saturated. A sticky sweetness that’s delicious but rots sugary. Like that last shot you take at the club when the smiley haze becomes suddenly nauseating. It feels pretty good, but now we’re blacked out and we wake up to the Uber-fee. We threw up in the back!?

Fan fiction is a form most practiced by young girls and queer fans of pop stars and franchises. With it, a fandom creatively inserts their perspective into a narrative or pop culture property, evoking new pleasures from what’s already so pleasing. There’s a playfully radical nature to fan-fic. The world, imagined or real, becomes the malleable clay in which new(ish) narrative can form. The medium’s lack of ultimate originality is why the it’s usually cast aside as pedestrian and unserious. But there’s no deeper measure of testing the cultural impact of a cultural property than the amount of fan fiction it inspires. Justin Bieber. One Direction. Harry Potter. Dr. Who.

The Idol is the world’s most expensive piece of Britney fan-fic. Jocelyn, the mega-star played with cool-girl ease by Lily Rose-Depp, is almost immediately compared to Spears. Dan Levy, playing a bumbling member of Jocelyn’s team, remarks to a Vanity Affair reporter working on a profile on her that, “like Britney,” the media has been “so brutal” to her. In another allusion to Spears, that reporter remarks that she has watched her since she was child, insinuating Jocelyn’s own Mickey Mouse Club.

In The Idol, Jocelyn is alone, controlled completely by her label, yet defiant in small ways. As the mega-American pop star Britney phantom, Jocelyn becomes a vessel, a literary trope to be played with and re-arranged. Like all good fan fiction. Except this time it’s not young queer fans and women who get to re-imagine pop culture in their image, but Levinson and the pop megastar himself, Abel “The Weeknd” Tesfaye, who co-created the show and stars in it as well.

Such fan-fic roleplay-fantasy would explain the baffling moments of agency that Jocelyn displays. To be fair, trying to apply a feminist reading to The Idol is like applying a Marxist reading to a Margaret Thatcher speech . . . like duh! But truly, all of this is the crudest shit imaginable. I mean, the plot essentially boils down to a story of Jocelyn refusing the control of her label by embracing the control of a sex-cult. Don’t worry though — she likes it. In fact, the scenes are a series of grating reminders that no matter what you see Jocelyn likes what’s going on

Like when Jocelyn is talking to her best friend/assistant about The Weeknd’s character, Tedros, who is a club owner and cult leader. Jocelyn’s assistant remarks that Tedros is “rapey,” to which Jocelyn responds by insisting that she “kinda likes that.”

Like when Jocelyn masturbates while choking herself, only to tee up a scene where Tedros ties a cloth around her face, asphyxiating her util she’s nearly dead. That is, before he generously cuts one literal vagina-shaped hole for her to breathe. She likes it!

Or like the moment Jocelyn refuses the patriarchal control of the intimacy coordinator who’s managing her album cover’s photo shoot. He demands she put her top on because nudity was “not in the rider,” a technicality she defiantly ignores. The intimacy coordinator is then punished by being locked in the bathroom by Jocelyn’s bullish manager. The true annoyance of patriarchy, the show tells us, is the liberal paternalism of the social justice professional. Why? Because she likes it!

She likes it all. Nudity. Liberty. Domination. Pain. As she croons in the chorus of her single, “I’m just a freak/you know I want it bad” . . . “You can pull my hair, touch me anywhere/ball and chain.” Every scene, as if contractually obligated, ends with such a sentiment. She’s a freak and she likes it and did we mention yet that she’s a freak who likes it?

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The challenge she faces, the show tells us, is the fact that everyone around her is just so hellbent on limiting her sexual freedom. Her label wants her to sell sex, but within a pre-set boundary. And they control her activities accordingly. Well, everyone does. The coddling intimacy coordinator. The concerned friend and assistant. The team stressed by her sexual exploits. If only she wouldn’t be so sexually liberated, so risky. She’s a victim, but not in the way you would think. The world doesn’t force her to be a “freak,” but punishes her for it. We sympathize, because it is true that those in her orbit are concerned about her exploits for self-interested reasons. But also: isn’t this a convenient struggle to depict for the series’s notoriously ogling writers?

And none of this is to say that this broad dynamic or psychology is possible and/or real. Many people do crave expansive sexual liberation, as well as domination and subservience. This is not a novel nor particularly interesting idea. And plenty of artists have explored the pleasures of pain in ways that negotiate the complex interplay between freedom and restraint. But The Idol, which reportedly was re-written and re-shot because The Weeknd found it to be taking on too much of a “female perspective,” only reveals these deeper themes glancingly.

If I’m being generous to the plot’s construction, I could posit that Jocelyn is mourning the death of her mother (who once guided her career and died one year before the show’s events). And now she is caught in the bloody churn of global capital and culture. Thus the attention granted by one charismatic sexual agent (The Weeknd’s Tedros) gives her a sense of both guidedness and agency too. She’s consenting here to the domination. But generosity is often naïveté and this Britney figure, this global pop star mega-victim, reads to me as mere wish fulfillment for a crude male gaze. If we get a glimpse into her psychology, it’s because of Rose-Depp’s surprisingly confident and wrenching performance. But when my eyes drift to my close-captioned subtitles, the words blare as hateful and grating.

(TW: an insane sex scene in the show can be watched here).

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That’s to say nothing of Jocelyn’s very powerlessness in relation to her label in the first place.

As Hazel Cills wrote for NPR, this trope of the pop girl megastar victim is nothing new. “Jocelyn's suffering and alienation under the weight of her surveilled pop career feels all too familiar. She's the young woman ensnared in the music industry machine, coached by handlers, every bit of her body lit flatteringly for the camera, her personality and humanity sanded down for the sake of the brand. You've seen her in film or television before.” Like most tropes, it comes from a place — be it the timeless Star is Born narrative or the the ongoing tragedy of yes, one Britney Spears. But to make this show revolve such a trope and, crucially, set it in 2023 feels like . . . well, a choice. A fantastical one at that.

Cills correctly posits:

“In Jocelyn's case, her troubles also don't feel in step with what's demanded of mainstream music stars in 2023. The extreme, over-sexed artifice championed by her team hasn't been en vogue these days among the tween audience I imagine her label is trying to court, who'd sooner find themselves in the lived-in songwriting of stars like Olivia Rodrigo, Lizzy McAlpine, SZA, Lana Del Rey and Taylor Swift.”

It’s not to say that patriarchy and music-biz machinations don’t serve an outsized role in the music industry today, but on the grandest of grand scales such as Jocelyn’s, the story doesn’t pass the smell test. Who is an IRL Jocelyn — fame-wise — today? Taylor Swift? Well, she just re-recorded her first few records to right a wrong made by a male empresario. And she’s profited millions upon millions. Beyonce? Well she has complete control of her career and output, doing fully no press for her latest record. Why? Well because she’s Beyonce. Even on a smaller scale of the megastars, Doja Cat released one of the biggest smashes of the 2020s with her album Planet Her and then admitted it was a “cash grab” listeners “fell for.” Now, she’s making a seemingly heavy-metal inflected rap album? IDK, seems like she’s in some sort of driver’s seat.

If the 2023 mega-pop star generally possesses power and agency, albeit with caveats, why then did Tesfaye, Levinson and the suits at MAX tell this particular story using a character rendered so weak under the tyranny of the label system? Why did they fire a female show runner and completely re-shoot the show to fit Tesfaye and Levinson’s vision? I can’t help but think that pop music, and the pop girl victim archetype is not a narrative or even cultural reality the minds behind the show are interested in exploring, but rather a simple literary trope they are using for their own boorish myth-making.

The American Pop Star, or Britney as The megastar victim, is the ultimate expression of the interplay between a woman’s sexual agency and society’s control. In The Idol, the writers re-tell the cruel story of what was done to Britney, only to re-write her as enjoying her subjugation. It’s a fantasy of domination turned up to the megawatt scale of pop super-stardom. Jocelyn then, could have been any profession, but there’s something special and fun and huge about pop. Incel-propoganda, it turns out, just isn’t as salacious when set in a kitchen or department store.

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There’s one more nervous fantasy I felt lurking between the lines.

Yes, the mega-American pop star victim trope feels dated, but on a more basic level: so does the American pop star trope as well.

A very thoughtful reader of this here blog, who also happens to be a crafty music manger, shared a very insightful, yet strange insight with me during a recent chat. “America’s inability to produce new pop stars,” he remarked vaguely, “is becoming a problem for America.” Here(!) Here(!) for the end of American cultural imperialism, but objectively: I’ll take the point.

The music industry today is spending more money on emerging markets, namely Latin music (Bad Bunny is The artist of the decade at this point) and K-Pop (Blackpink has broken records with their latest global tour). Additionally, catalog, that is songs that are two years or older, is streaming better today than new releases.

Thus two realities are baking into the industry writ-large: non-American music is scaling bigger in an industry that increasingly needs mass-volume to be profitable (because of streaming) and the bread and butter of industry revenue-wise no longer revolves around artists topping the charts upon release. If the timescale of profitability has now greatly expanded, then a label’s ability to create cultural thunderstorms that are all consuming (such as early Britney, Rihanna, Gaga etc.) becomes no longer the defining factor of the business. And thus a Jocelyn, or someone who can Break The Internet because of one salacious photo (I will spare you the details of that one plot point), becomes a less crucial figure to both create and exploit. The industry wants a steady stream, and doesn’t necessarily need an uncontrollable, momentary deluge.

I think our current moment reflects that business reality. At least for American artists. The past few years have created some megastars. Billie. Olivia. Ice Spice and . . . Who else? The rest of our crop of pop stars are legacy acts like Taylor Swift and Beyonce, who have worked for a decade plus to grow their committed global fandoms.

And still, even with this lack of rising American stars, the industry is doing better than any time since the ‘90s. Major label catalogs —which includes Queen, Whitney, etc, among newer acts — are the stable portion of the label’s investment portfolio and those global mega-stars (who can reach Huge Latin Markets re: Bad Bunny and are literally shaped to be global acts like K-Pop), well those are the new shiny possessions to have.

The American pop star queen is thus no longer the ultimate image of the music industry, no matter how hard Kim Petras tries. And America, believe it or not, may be edging towards sounding sonically provincial.

America too may simply no longer be the best in show at producing new pop stars. The show certainly discovered so when they cast Jennie from Blackpink as one of Jocelyn’s back-up dancers. In the premiere’s best scene, Jennie’s character is tasked with showing Jocelyn how to properly execute some exciting choreography. She delivers. There’s a professionalism and a rapturous quality to her dancing. A commitment to sex appeal that feels both perfected and direct.

It’s a machination of the show that Jocelyn feels stilted in comparison, but when looking at other rising IRL young American pop acts, we feel the lessened craft. GAYLE is meh as an opener for Taylor Swift. Kim Petras perpetually fails to launch. Shawn Mendez, Charlie Puth . . . . yaaaaaaawn. True great pop acts, like Charli XCX, Tinashe and Tovë Lo are popular, but remain comparatively relegated to their queer, cult-fanbases.

Maybe, part of the reason then that Levinson and Tesfaye set a story right out out of the early 2000s, today, is because they needed the ethos of another era of pop domination to explain their stilted plot’s context. Jocelyn is written in a fantastical dream world where she loves her mega-domination. But she’s also written in a fantastical dream world where The American Pop Princess Upstart reigns eminently supreme.

Or maybe they simply wrote it to fulfill all their brutish fantasies.

Regardless, their dream reads as more nightmarish than idyllic. And if this is the last gasp for the American pop star trope, then it’s too bad that it sounds like such a shrill and scary shriek. I hear the yelp throughout my hallways, but I turn away and nestle in my AirPods. “Blackpink!” begins the song — a call to arms for a new day.

You know, I just realized that K-pop stars are also called “Idols.”

But then again, so was the Golden Calf.

Some idols we worship, while others we are compelled to burn in effigy. Maybe though, for this one, MAX could do us all a favor and simply not renew.

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Hey! Thanks for being here. Please subscribe to this newsletter if you have not yet. And consider signing on for a paid subscription to support the production of this newsletter.

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Lastly, on a different note: I am organizing a Real Housewives-themed rave in Bushwick on Friday 6/30! Get your tix here and say hi when you’re there — would love to meet any NYC readers <3

In March, I threw an idea out there. It was sort of a haphazard and partial, but I figured I’d see if it would stick. And it did, at least in my little orbit. Space Case, a podcast hosted by the band Space Kidettes, even made a whole podcast episode riffing on my theory. Half-baked as it was, I think I was articulating something.

My idea was such: since the advent of streaming, I have noticed two aesthetic movements that seemed to directly emanate from the strange dynamics of the streaming economy. One was bedroom pop, which developed because it aligned well with Spotify’s preference for vibey, background listening. And the other was hyperpop, which was in direct opposition to that preference. If things were becoming too floaty and forgettable, Hyperpop was there to demand your attention.

For many reasons, least of all the natural flow of culture, both of these genres feel dated, stale and tired today. Much of hyperpop sounds like a simple series of honks and booms and bedroom pop, akin to the soundtrack of a pleasant Kia commercial.

That being said: I think the cultural and economic lessons of both genres were learned in some crucial ways. And some difference was split between bedroom pop’s background vibes and hyperpop’s foreground demand for attention. That difference, that median, is what I’m calling 2020s Totalism™

As I’ve written about previously, “[2020s Totalism] splits the middle between complexity and straightforwardness, as filtered through the taste of the Zoomer generation’s technological hive mind.” Artists like Pinkpantheress, MGNA Crrrta, even Ethel Cain are all new acts who are striking some balance between streaming’s imperative for music to work as background aura and the artistic desire to engage the listener.

I guess I was mulling over all of this when I found myself in conversation with Tom Moore, fellow Bard college alum (go raptors) and founder of Dots Per Inch Music, at a packed sushi dinner with mutual friends. Moore, it turns out, has been directly involved with many artists who are, to me, making 2020s Totalism.

Dots Per Inch is a small NYC-based label that was part of the early careers of a good crop of today’s indie darlings, releasing early records for Grace Ives, whose delicious, melancholy dance-pop, has become a cornerstone of whatever “indie” constitutes today and Lucy (Cooper B. Handy), who is akin to an even more mysterious Alex G for north-east music nerds.

Today, Moore is working with, among others, May Rio, an NYC pop act who’s earning deserved recognition for her dreamy, tender, strange pop music and NYC-based duo Amiture, whose haunting catalog combines the allure of the southern gothic with the rush of NYC grit.

All of these artists, to me, represent 2020s Totalism in that they too split some difference: the difference between easy streamability and strange engagement. They don’t sacrifice their music for the incentives of the platform because they don’t need to.

I wanted to talk to Moore about the place where aesthetics and incentives collide, and get some answers for myself about why the sound of 2020s Totalism may emerge through some of the artists he works with.

This article has been edited for length and clarity.

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Tobias Hess: I'd be curious to hear the context of the industry writ large when you started Dots Per Inch [in 2016]. What was the landscape like then? 

Tom Moore: I can't speak much to the landscape of when I started it, primarily because I didn't really have access to it at the time. Maybe you had a similar experience coming from a place like Bard. It's not like there is a clear, pre-cut path from turning a music degree or experience in music generally into a job in recorded music.

I was very determined to work at XL or Merlin. I think part of the will to start the label came from me being 22, naive, and not believing in myself enough to get those jobs at established companies. But another part of it was that ultimately these are pretty small companies. Some of them make lots of money, some of them really don't. They all have a pretty limited ability to hire in the first place and many of them were started in the ‘90s and had an entire management structure that was impenetrable to a 22 year old with little idea of what he was talking about at the time. So the label started because I couldn't get the access I wanted in order to learn about the business.

I started it because I knew good music and I knew musicians that weren't really being properly handled as recorded projects. So the first 3 years were really just pretending I knew what I was doing: fucking up, fixing it, doing it again. All the pretending came from translating what I’d read in books, newsletters, and Music Business Worldwide. In the beginning, I was learning exactly how I could be useful to talent—as opposed to how talent could be useful to me, which maybe contradicts stereotypes about artist/label dynamics.. 

Back then, the M.O. was, can I provide value to this artist? If so, how? And I think that kind of open mindedness is what allowed me to work with talent in the early days that were willing to trust me—which is something I am still so grateful for considering how little experience I had back then.

For example, when it came to working with LUCY, my central role was in improving his SEO and introducing back catalog to my small list of contacts. That was what really started our entire relationship. Is that the bulk of what a record label does? Absolutely not. But that was the beginning of our relationship almost entirely. It was like, Hey, it's really hard to find your stuff online, can I help? It wasn't really a label in the beginning. I just kept calling it a label because I knew what it would become.

Tobias Hess: So you were thinking of it as, “I'm a fan of these artists. They're super underground, DIY, and I want to help them get to the next step?” 

Tom Moore: It was more that I recognized that these underground DIY artists were actually really interesting pop projects. I think that was my angle in the beginning. Like most folks cherished their inaccessibility, and I thought that that was problematic. I think that music should be listened to. Should you sacrifice your art for commercial gain? Obviously not. But there's a lot of area between those two fundamentals that I think is under-explored. So no, it wasn't about how I can get them to the next step? It was more about how I can get these artists listened to? Maybe do some “dirty work” such as marketing, which is not that dirty, but in some circles it might be considered so. It boiled down to, how can I do this so as to keep the artist able to focus on their work, make them some money, finance the project, and help them with other things beyond the label as they come up?

“Most folks cherished their inaccessibility and I thought that that was problematic. I think that music should be listened to.”

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Tobias Hess: I'm curious to hear more about the idea of these DIY projects having “pop potential.” It's not clear to me what the economic model for that is when streaming is an industry of scale. Where do DIY and pop meet? And how does that make sense? Wouldn't it just make sense for an artist to go all in on Bandcamp, for example, if you know the dividends that minor Spotify success would pay is almost nothing.

Tom Moore: Some bands can do Bandcamp. Model/Actriz could probably do Bandcamp. Grace Ives could never make the money that she makes everywhere if it weren't for streaming, partnerships, & tours. 

So the problem has been that there's this assumption that if you're coming from SUNY Purchase, Bard or Vassar [Editor's note: these were all colleges in the same music scene as Bard — where we both went to college], or whatever the hell, you can't do these commercial things without sacrificing integrity. I think the approach should be more case by case. I think that every time you have an opportunity, it should be asked: does this undervalue or undercut my work or my vision as an artist? Most often it doesn't. Most often, seeing more exploitation on the marketplace does not interfere with a vision for a project. If there is a world in which your music could be its own thing, and then also exist in the context of a mood playlist, then a mood playlists doesn't devalue the work and should not be avoided.

That's where the name of the label comes from. “Dots per inch” is a measure of image quality. The label has always considered itself in the business of image production and presentation, which is the more superficial side of music. To say it is superficial is not to detract—packaging is very important in show business. The label makes this packaging, be it SEO, marketing blurbs, or sync pitches. The artists create the music.

Tobias Hess: I've been exploring the idea of a  new aesthetic that emerges from streaming — it’s an aesthetic that emerges from this dynamic where music can work on its own, as an engaging piece of work, but then also work in a background context, like in a mood, emotion or context playlist, which I’ve been calling 2020s Totalism.

Tom Moore: I fear that you might be overvaluing the importance of the mood playlist. I think that mattered a lot more four years ago. When May Rio, who I'm working with right now and is in the middle of a campaign, puts out a song, it gets on Fresh Finds or Lorem. Lorem has a massive impact. But you're on Lorem for one month and then it's over. Songs with editorial playlist coverage have only caught on roughly 1 in 10 times for DPI.

But if you get onto the algorithmic playlists, these can have lasting positive impacts for an artist’s career. On these playlists, people save at higher rates and they engage (eventually) at higher rates. I've seen artists get on an algorithmic playlist, such as Discover Weekly or Spotify Radio. When artists that I've worked with get on Discover Weekly, Release Radar, and Spotify Radio, people click through and listen multiple times. They listen on the artist's profile page, which often means that they're physically typing in the artist's name into the search bar, which is a very high quality level of interest.

And I think that's part of working with the artists that I do: they don't really make “mood music," which is maybe a competitive edge in the algorithmic ecosystem. But the general strategy is get on as many playlists as you can in the front line period, spend all the marketing money you can, get the song everywhere. Never assume that you know the audience before the audience knows you. What happens is you get this spike of low quality interest, and then it goes down, and then sincere fandom emerges from the ashes of the playlist shotgun. That's what happened with both Amiture and Grace Ives—to different scales. 

Similarly, that happened to Lucy (Cooper B. Handy) to a large extent. We had a big splash around the Music Industry is Poisonous. Then it was like a year of no one really fucking around with it. And then we put up the EP, Devoted. That kind of triggered interest again, and now Cooper’s gone from being someone with 300 monthly listeners before Poisonous to 30,000 today. Now is that money? Not really. But he now has a fan base that will get notified every time he puts something out. And that's a significant change, really. And those are high quality listeners. Cooper didn't get any mood playlists. That's why I think it took a year instead of 6 months to build that fan base. But those playlists, as much as the industry at large likes to talk about them, they matter only insofar as they matter when you're on them, and then they don’t. It's not like everything I've done is really dependent on those playlists.

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Tobias Hess: When I’m saying “mood playlists,” I’m including algorithmic playlists, even though they’re not curatorial because they function on some element of backgroundness. They’re not a curated set of 10 crazy songs that are gonna blow your mind and be totally distracting.

Tom Moore: There is an advantage to blending in now, 100%. I don't think that that makes or breaks an artist. But I do think that if you can blend in, you can maybe make a lot more money.

It wasn’t like Amiture was producing music to match an algorithm, but Amiture was early on the Discovery Mode product that Spotify launched a year and a half ago. That really changed everything. I use it a lot, but not long-term. Every time I've used it the artists have netted more than they would have otherwise. With it, Spotify takes an increased revenue share and the artist gets a reduced one. The amount of exposure given in exchange for that rate always, so far, has outweighed the cost incurred by the less friendly royalty rate—by a significant margin. 

“There is an advantage to blending in now, 100%.I don't think that that makes or breaks an artist. But I do think that if you can blend in, you can maybe make a lot more money.”

Tobias Hess: Even with these success stories, part of my worry or critique is that Spotify and streaming is so decontextualized that these discovery platforms do not lend themselves towards fandom. 

Tom Moore: Generally they do not. For a label like mine it's worked quite well. Do I think that Spotify has had a chilling effect on musical craft? I think it does on a large scale. I don't think that if you're an artist and you want to make music, you can't because of Spotify. I don't think there's any validity to that argument. Really, I think that what Spotify has done is that it's taken the incentives away from originality and creativity, and put them more towards entertainment.

In the record store days, the objective was to stand out among thousands of titles. In the streaming day, the objective is to blend in. And blending in can mean a lot of different things, you know. It doesn't mean that you're writing in order to blend in, or you're writing in order to erase one's identity. And I know this because I've worked with 6 extremely talented, extremely unusual artists that have seen success, albeit small. There has never been a  moment where I thought, “If only May had been less creative, we would have made money.” It was always more like, “this is what we're doing. This is good music. These are talented people who work extremely hard. How do we find their money?”

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Maybe the overall climate of music is less healthy today than it was in the ‘90s in the indie sector. Music overall is doing better than it's ever done, but that leaves a lot of very important people out. If you had a thousand fans in the nineties, that was a thousand people spending 10 bucks on your record, and that was $10,000. That's very straightforward. You could make money. Today, that $10,000 is spread out over the course of 40 years, and maybe it's 3 times as much money over those 40 years. But instead of seeing $10,000 in your hand at one point in time shortly after you put out an album, you're seeing $50 a month. That's when the economics don't work. It's like, Yeah, sure, this artist might be making more money in the long run, but you know, having a bird in the hand, beats two in the bush, and that's exactly what's going on in the indie sector. The label can afford to kind of wait it out and build catalog and build repertoire, and eventually increase its monthly revenue to such a point that it can have revenue that's worthwhile. But no small musician can really keep up. And that is a very serious problem.

“In the record store days, the objective was to stand out among thousands of titles. In the streaming day, the objective is to blend in.”

Tobias Hess: Now everything is decontextualized to the extent that catalog [songs that are at least two years old] stream better than new releases, so that's the model for labels. But of course, artists don't exist in catalog, they exist on what they're working on now.

Tom Moore: Yeah, let’s say there is an indie musician that has a small fan base of 10,000 monthly listeners. And they get like some pittance every month. Maybe by the time they retire it's a nice little addition to their retirement plan. But that's not good enough. That's the kind of time scale we're talking about for a small act. Like Keynes said, “in the long run we are all dead.” The current structure doesn't give an artist enough money to market a tour and rent a van and drive around and promote their music, which is what the $10,000 in your hand did 20 years ago—you could spend it and grow. And you might not ever make money from that music ever again. And in all chances you didn't.  But the fact you had the cash in a relatively short amount of time meant that you could act with it and use it. And artists don't have that ability anymore.

Tobias Hess: Right? So I guess one of the big shifts that happened is that music has shifted from a very concrete cultural product to a really vague commodity of intellectual property. 

Tom Moore: Yeah, it's always been in intellectual property, but the interesting thing is that the existing media before streaming hid that. The idea of an album really didn't even exist that much in the sixties. It really came into being in the late sixties, and then it became dogmatic through the seventies with prog rock and jam bands. Those were the bands that really were about the album as an art-object, as opposed to a collection of songs. But even the Beatles’ early albums were just very simple commercial exploitations of intellectual property law. They would release everything as a single. and then they would re-release it all together as an album, and they'd sell everything 2 or 3 times, and that was the model for the beginning of their career. This all only changed with Rubber Soul, well more than halfway through their career.

It's easy to forget that the album didn't exist, but generally all of the effort before the album was to turn this vague intellectual property, this nebulous thing into these iterative products that people could spend money on repeatedly. So in that sense, streaming is the logical conclusion of the project that was started in the 60s. The album was this grand idea in adolescence.

Music has always had to respond to the media in which it's contained. We've just had one media for so long that we began to think that that is how music exists. But it's not. The album, or music-as-object, was a very brief moment in music history. 

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One of the biggest songs on TikTok is a lullaby for anxious grown-up #weirdos.

The viral hit “If I were a fish” came to us initially via a TikTok by Tennessee-based (and Atlantic-signed) singer-song writer Corook.

In the video, Corook, full of lively whimsy and adorned with a silly-goofy frog hat, stares into the smiling eyes of her partner, Olivia, as they both croon the cheerful tune. According to the caption, the couple wrote the song in 10-minutes during a day when Corook was feeling “very emotional . . . insecure and out place.” The song, she offers, is about “the joy of being different.”

“If I were a fish and you caught me/ I’d say look at that fish, shimmering in the sun,” they begin, singing with the yelpy inflection of a hopped-up Kimiya Dawson before landing on a chorus of sorts: “Why is everyone on the internet so mean?” they ask. “Why is everyone on the internet so afraid of what they’ve never seen?”

We don’t have the time though to ponder such a query. We quickly move to a triumphant resolution: “If I was scrolling through and I saw me/flopping around and singing my song/I’d say hey they’re cute and sing along,” they end, wrapping the carol up with big and gorgeous smiles.

“Why is everyone on the internet so afraid of what they’ve never seen?”

It’s surely a valid point. But in this case, I have “seen” this sort of video many, many times. And the fact that I have witnessed the wild success of this kind of song repeatedly — songs that are straight-forward, prescriptive, childish frankly — signals to me that the song’s success is not so much a testament to its status as a brave antidote to a cruel internet culture, but rather a clear display of how musicians have been encouraged to belittle their art form for fleeting TikTok attention. If this is the kind of song, the kind of content, that assuredly does well on the TikTok, I think we can say that something is happening to music and musicians on the platform.

TikTok, I fear, has made musicians cringe.

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I started ruminating on this this weekend when I, like many others, was thinking about Frank. This was before we knew anything of his sad, maybe disastrous Coachella performance. Before that, I was thinking about the man and I was thinking about the fish song and it sort of hit me that something big has shifted.

Frank Ocean was the first artist I ever obsessed over. I bought Channel Orange on iTunes in middle school and listened to it so intently that I wore out the wire of my then graying ear buds. And I scoured the internet on a laptop I shared with my sister to find factoids about the elusive artist. I found mixtapes on strange websites and battled pornographic pop-up ads to hear discarded demos. I read, with revelry, his Tumblr post alluding to a vague yet tender male lover (well, I read that for other reason too). I sought images and stories and lore. I engaged, fervently, with his mystery.

I was, to be clear, 12, so much of this hazy nostalgia is filtered through a child’s lack of media literacy. But it’s also filtered through the joy of a child’s first somersault into the world of culture: that first album you find that opens up a world. I think though, by all accounts, we can say that Frank Ocean was cool. And this coolness was inextricably linked to his unknowability. Frank is famously not active on social media. When his private Instagram account was made public, there was a ravenous move by his fans to scour the posts for a peak inside his cave. The trivial nature of the posts — his friends, his home, him singing — felt like hit of good liquor. Potent. I had never seen him as he was. A man inside the world.

Considering Frank and his once-mystery now, I am forced though to wonder: Could Frank Ocean become Frank Ocean today? By that I mean, could an artist rise to the stature that Frank Ocean eventually would while remaining concealed? In a time where success in music essentially depends on a steadfast commitment to posting, how can an artist today achieve both widespread notoriety while remaining discrete?

This question is relevant to the extent that Frank’s (or any artist’s) appeal is dependent on their continued discretion. There is no Frank Ocean without Frank, the enigma. And thus the improbability of a 2023 Frank bums me out. Because I think we lose something when we lose the potential for the rise of the mysterious artist.

It’s undoubtable at this point that TikTok is the chief music discovery platform of our era. That is to say: if you’re an artist and you’re not on TikTok, it’s a definite choice.

My TikTok feed attests to this. It’s completely overrun by bumbling artists all trying in some way to get me to pre-save/listen to their song, or at the very least use their audio in a video.

There are a staggering amount of strategies for this and these strategies fall in and out of vogue, often rapidly.

There’s the made-up genre strategy, where a musician describes their music with a ludicrous new genre-title, the ridiculousness of which invites a flurry of comments, in turn boosting their video in the algorithm.

There’s the “hey I was just filming this” strategy, where an artist, fly-on-the-wall-style, films themself playing their song to their parents (or whoever) for the first time, inspiring understandable tears, which in turns inspires comments and also too, boosts the video in the algorithm.

There’s the long-text short video method (which I use to hock my Substack), where a musician plays their audio over a video with an inordinate amount of text, forcing a reading viewer to loop the clip. This also boosts the video in the algorithm.

And there’s the trauma dump strategy (TW: SA), where a musician details the trauma behind the writing of a particular song. The story, shocking and tragic, inspires discourse in the comments. And this discourse? Well, it boosts the video in the algorithm.

These are just a few examples of such strategies. And these can be done to varying degrees of earnestness and artifice. But the result of them all is a calculated increase in engagement that works to super-charge the spread of one’s music in an algorithmic network. This is not art, but marketing. And while it may bear fruit and is clearly a necessary facet of an artist’s life today, it does inherently expose the cards one’s holding.

You may be an “artist,” but here you are: openly selling your widgets.

I always regarded musicians with a certain parasocial awe. I always felt like I both knew my favorite artists, but also too was far, far beneath them. I think that’s because artists impart a sense of both vulnerability and mystique. The lead singer of a rock band coos a diaristic free flow while lit with the bright shine of a spotlight. We feel like we know them, yet how could we? They’re all the way up there, on stage. Our best friend and our angel. Frank.

The “coolness” of music then resides in the ability of its practitioners to remain distant and elusive, even while connecting with us deeply. They make the music. We listen. We interpret. Then we feel. We don’t have all the info, but we do have the work. And that’s enough. Maybe we found them through a blog. Maybe through a friend. The radio. At a concert. But there was a process of discovery and uncovering. And there was a filter between us and them. As we engaged with the work, we interpreted it, in turn creating a mythos.

Some remove is crucial here. If this artist were selling their CD on the street and we bought it and listened, we may be pleasantly surprised to find that this lone vendor is actually making something pretty cool. But that fleeting and ordinary exchange also means that their product would read to us as just that: the merchandise of one bustling salesperson.

It seems then that the illusion that music is not a simple commodity is necessary to the upholding of its mystique. Music — invisible, affective, resonant and deep — comes to us and changes something often unnamable inside. That’s why an overeager disposition to selling music on the part of its creators will always feel a bit craven and cringe.

What do you mean “I should stream your song?”

I thought these sounds descended from the heavens to my ears?

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Of course, music, in many crucial ways, does feel this way today: heavenly. Or at least from the cloud(s). And that’s the problem. Streaming with its infinitude and adaptability has given us the heightened illusion that music is not a product of labor, but divination. It appears for us to listen to whenever.

It’s that very fact of infinite choice though that has created a counterfactual. Today, artists must fight harder and harder for a small strip of land in the ever-expanding sonic galaxy. And they are forced to resort to ever more extreme forms of marketing. But because of this necessary act, music consumers are forced to reckon with, and in turn have shattered, the illusion of music’s heavenly creation. The artist, in their forthright marketing, reveals themselves as a seller of goods.

The tension between art and marketing, or art and commerce, is eternal; hence the mythic (and real) fight between the artist and their greedy label intent on shaping them for mass appeal. But when I scroll on TikTok, I get the unnerving sense that thousands of young musicians have become so accustomed to the strange rules of TikTok’s algorithmic logic, that they feel no need to grapple with these timeless questions. So many, it feels, are down to play the game.

And maybe the realities of the business are so tough that young artists don’t have the time or perspective to see their narrow entrapment. When there are 100,000 songs entering streaming platforms daily. When labels offer little in terms of artist development or marketing. It becomes the purview of artists to hock theirs wears and goods. But its a balancing act. Too aggressive of a TikTok strategy and you have deemed yourself a TikTok artist. Too little and you’re well, no one.

Of course, not every new artist aggressively markets on TikTok — though it’s the most obvious and clear strategy for success on the platform. Some can find TikTok notoriety by merely sharing their song in a simple video. That doesn’t mean though that their work is particularly laudable or deep. In fact, it may mean the opposite. If one’s song or “audio” is doing well on its own on TikTok, with no wider marketing push, it likely means that the song is brash and flashy enough to garner attention for its mere bombast or straightforwardness.

“If I were a fish” is a clear example of this. The song blew up on its own merit, but that merit rests on its syrupy sweet clarity. It hits you with its hammer. It works as a TikTok audio for this very reason.

Other examples of songs that have blown up via their supposed intrinsic strength are Lizzy Mcalpine’s “You Ruined the 1975” which is about a boy who, you guessed it, ruined the band the 1975 for her, and “Girls” by The Dare, which I like and have written about fondly, but that song too is deeply straight-forward. This means that yes, it works as an abrasive totalist bop, but it also means that the song works for TikTok and the platform’s cartoonish affect.

In this sense, TikTok has cornered all artists seeking to reach some sort of mainstream reach. You either brazenly self-promote, and destroy your mystique, or you make music that simply works on TikTok, which is to say music that speaks down to its audience.

All of this has led to a strange and sad result. Today, when I think of a rising artist, I no longer think of the platonic image of the lone musician singing on a dimly lit small stage committed to their craft despite the difficult path ahead. Instead, I think of a bumbling singer on TikTok, begging me to pre-save their single.

No more noble than an influencer selling CBD gummies. Bummer.

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The worst fight I ever had with a romantic partner was on the concept of cringe.

We both were haters at heart, but he was admittedly more brazen. When I say haters, I mean we both viewed culture with a critical, exacting lens. My challenge with hating though was that I am, after all, a try-hard, and every time I felt us moving into the rush of honing in on why something sucks, a strange pang of guilty empathy would kick in. The artist (be they a director, musician, or social media creator) was, after all, putting themselves out there. And as a musician and writer and person actively and publicly putting out my work, I can relate to anyone releasing their work into the cruel void.

So one evening, while were edging towards a discursive and critical peak, I wimped away from our collective point.

“Look,” I said, “I feel like we’re always cringing at people. And I feel like cringe, as an emotion, is a negative thing to give into.”

I had been thinking about this a lot recently and was definitely heavily influenced by the YouTuber Contrapoints, who had recently released a video on the topic.

“We cringe at what’s familiar,” I offered. “Like we cringe at annoying tenderqueers, right?” Most of our ire at the time was focused on the politics of young queer people who had developed a particularly moralistic, almost conservative politics. “But we focus on them and cringe because they are close to us. We were recently like them, but we’re not anymore, so they annoy us even more. They reflect our self-hate. Or the hate of our recent selves.”

This, he took, as a cop out: a chance to both participate in a bitchy critique sesh with him while making it clear that I was too good to hate all the way.

“I guess you win the good person competition!” he spat.

That pissed me all the way off. We yelled at each other for another hour, on increasingly personal themes.

This is all to say, I don’t take particular pleasure in deeming things cringe. I have long defended mega-pop. I have, in fact, deemed myself a poptomist. I am not one to admonish something for being overly-commercial or trite. I find beauty in the plastic.

And I still do relate to those putting themselves out there. You are reading this because I myself have done so. The push and pull between art and marketing is perennial, and necessary. But when I go on TikTok and see so much of what’s doing well on the platform, as well as the lengths musicians are forced to go to publicize their work, I do cringe.

My ex, during our fight, told me: “You’re being ridiculous. We cringe because something’s bad.”

And you know what? Maybe the truth is somewhere between my point and his. I do relate to the striving artist who sacrifices purity to reach an audience. But I cringe at TikTok musicians because they are doing so at the extreme expense to their artistry.

With their constant and over-the-top their marketing, they make no room for mystery. No mystique. No room for us to love them as I once loved Frank. They hit us with their sledgehammer and then boom-honk out an air horn sound effect. This is not craft but Gen Z cringey bombast. This is not craft but 2020s circus-shit.

And it would be one thing if this TikTok behavior was at the mere expense of individual artists and their work, but as this behavior becomes hegemonic, consumers are inadvertently taught to care less for craft. To regard music less as art than attentional commodity. When one only see musicians as clownish salespeople hocking their wares on the digital marketplace, why would they ever view musicians as artists dedicated to any form of pure expression? If musicians even don’t care about the purity of their form then why should we?

Everything fades then to mediocrity.

At a certain point, those of us that care, will have to collect ourselves and name what’s good and not. And to name this underlying dynamic that’s encouraging so many potentially good artists to lessen the value of their own output, be it by making bullshit or bullshitting daily with TikTok algo-hacks. This is not to say that any one artist alone can escape this dynamic — the algorithmic context that led to this feels entrenched — but if we can name it, we can shame it, and then maybe, hopefully, we can stop it. Because I miss my god damned mystqiue. I miss . . . Frank.

“Why is everyone the internet so mean?”

Maybe, it would help, if in some ways we’re all just a little bit meaner.

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Also: I’d love to know, firsthand, how you (the manager, the artist, A&R, the Spotify employee) are dealing with the algorithmic mind melt. Reach out: My email is tobiehess@gmail.com

Hey! It’s been really gorgeous getting to connect with you all over the winding course of this newsletter. So many people who work as managers, as artists, in tech, for Spotify (omg drama), have read and engaged with my work. I’m so thankful. If something I’ve written has sparked something in you, and if you would like to chat about how the themes I write about pertain to your work, drop me a line. I’d love to know, firsthand, how you (the manager, the artist, A&R, the Spotify employee) are dealing with the algorithmic mind melt.

You also can just say hi :)

My email is tobiehess@gmail.com

Please though subscribe to this newsletter if you have not yet!

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Also, I do this for work free. Right now, it’s a pure passion project. If my writing has resonated with you before, please consider leaving a tip to support this work. Doing so helps me dedicate more time to this labor of love. Who knows, maybe soon it can be my full time gig? But for now, a tip jar is what I have. Thanks!

I’ve seen the greatest minds of my generation devote their waking hours to sorting through the muck and shit.

Past generations tackled such gargantuan challenges as perpetual motion and food production, but now, if you’re bushy-tailed and blessed with a top-40 college degree, there’s a good chance you have landed yourself a cushy gig working some sort of sorting project. What do we do with all of this content? What do we recommend to the individuated masses? It’s a problem as urgent as nuclear fusion.

Discovery, like “disruption,” is one of those tech-culture concepts so constantly invoked that it seems to turn to mist as soon as it’s spoken. Aw yes, discovery . . . like the channel, no! . . . like Columbus — GOD NO . . . okay, like stumbling into a whole-in-the-wall taco joint??? I mean sort of. In tech-land, “discovery” seems to invoke a low-key unearthing surprise. For example, Discover Weekly, the algorithmically-curated playlist given to Spotify users weekly, is the platform’s way of gifting each of us our very own box of chocolates. Based on an analysis of our tastes and habits, we receive these 30 gems. The limited-scope of that offering positions discovery as a discrete, describable event. We come to the playlist to discover.

But the platform more broadly displays a different exploratory ethos.

I have written ad nauseam about Spotify’s unstable, constantly-shifting listening experience, how their prioritization of background music and their constant push to “recommend” music makes it hard for any of us to develop a stable musical taste and identity. Despite such discovery-events as Discover Weekly, the notion that discovery is perpetual is baked into the Spotify experience. For years, you would open the app to a few albums you’ve “been listening to,” but also, a playlist titled “fresh new indie,” and under it: a banner titled “vibes,” under of which is a vaguely determined selection of brand new picks. The whole home page is a complex curatorial mood board.

When recommendations are basically all you see, discovery becomes less a glorious, one-off encounter and more akin to cutting through the untamed bramble. Cut. Cut. Cut.

And now, this discovery process has gotten a face lift.

A few weeks ago, Spotify launched their new TikTok-style vertical feed where users can sift through recommendations in one clean, Gen Z swipe. This will be an integration of musical recommendations, yes, but also audiobooks, podcasts, and even video.

On the top of my #NewFeed is a mosaic of 8 possible vibes-based mixes. Some are themed by era, others by genre, and some by artist. Then underneath this wall of wonders is Spotify’s new AI DJ . . . which I can’t even begin to talk about right now. Like. Watch the video and idk, stay tuned for my upcoming thoughts. And then, well, we see Tha Feed! Different from the complex assemblage that was their home screen before, this new feed is infinite, streamlined, responsive to our changing tastes and habits. And now, rather than going through the labor of sifting through a cluttered homepage, you can simply glide along their track.

On the feed, each swipe-down brings with it a new category. It could be a vibe/genre, like Indie Pop, or an artist, like Beyonce. When you swipe down to this new category, a snippet of a song plays automatically alongside a looping piece of video content. Like it? Tap to listen to more, or maybe just add it to a playlist. Or would you rather pass? Well then swipe horizontally to the next rec, which is similar yet different than the last one you listened to. This horizontal swipe function similar to an Instagram story, allowing you to pop through a flurry of content strung along like beads on a string.

In this schema: the swipe down indicates a vibe shift. The swipe across though is a vibe perfection. Recommendations come to us in perfected, XY axis, precision.

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Spotify has worked for years to make discovery and curation effortless for consumers. Since they learned in the early 2010s that news users were stressed out by choosing what music to listen to from the world’s history of recorded audio, they wanted to render themselves seamless. Discovery to these great tech-minds is a solvable problem. All it takes is some data and some nudges.

In a smart post that was partly responding to a past post of mine, writer Ock Sportello of the Never Hungover newsletter wrote, “Ask an avid TikTok user about their algorithm and ask yourself, when listening to their response, how differently they would have responded if you’d asked them to describe their personality.” It’s the kind of broad, simplistic statement I appreciate for being straightforwardly true. Our TikTok For You Page is a dialectic between algorithmic recommendations and us. The algorithm is a slab of marble, and with every like, comment, share, full-video-viewing, we shape our For You Page, if only slightly. In that sense, over time, the FYP does improve to more accurately reflect our tastes and desires.

This is not to say though that the TikTok algorithms reflects some deep insight into our vibe, though it may feel that way. I tend to watch a lot of TikTok content about reality TV, Dj’ing and queer-culture. These are not not my main interests, but I also contain multitudes and though my interests can be categorized, they cannot be encapsulated into a listicle. AI and algorithms can get pretty sophisticated and attenuated to the strange assemblage of my taste and vibe, but algorithms will always be chasing the shadow that is my own complexity. Because if the topics I engage with are new variables in a predictive algorithm, new key words in a data set, they will never fully get me, or any of us. I’m more than a series of topics. More than a codified set of affects. I pray I am at least.

Just as TikTok can reflect my interests but never my interiority with any sense of fine-grained detail, so too can Spotify’s recs never truly get me. I look at my Discovery Weekly for example and hear sounds and artists I enjoy, but like my TikTok topics, they are checking boxes. Weird-of-center experimental pop? Minimalist techno with a melodic, melodramatic bend? Nostalgic but contemporary hip hop? Indie acoustic folk with surprising electronic textures? Yup! And yawn!

Art, to use a big word, resonates not because it fulfills a need, but creates one. We find something that answers a question we hadn’t yet articulated. That’s what I turn to music for. I’m not “looking” for “chill indie acoustic rock with idm textures for some flare.” I’m looking to try and sense-make.

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Algorithmic recommendations, or discovery through this narrow prism, will always be pivoting off a faint framework, codifying the ineffable into variable components. I’m sure a computer scientist or technologist can offer a hypothetical retort, but even if an algorithmic recommendation systems becomes exponentially better, algorithmic musical recs will always lack the context or necessary framework to be anything beyond checkboxes. There is not editorializing or contextualization in an algorithmic rec. You hear it. You like it. You save it.

Maybe that’s why music writing, fallow desert she may be, is a worthwhile project. If people are “discovering” music via algorithmic recs, and will only do so more in this swiping future, then it’s imperative that we create some space to contextualize the music that plugs into those predictive equations. (Shout outs No Bells which successfully contextualizes a scene in gorgeously rendered detail.) (And shout outs to Record Store where Amaya Lim provides thoughtful, contextualized playlists). I guess, for me, I’m trying to contextualize the algorithmic infrastructure that now defines so much of our listening.

But the thing about contextualization is it requires a little time and attention. To view a thing and notice it. Tough sell in a seamless and ever-giving universe. And I don't see Spotify’s TikTok knockoff as bringing us any closer to a more engaged, slower music listening community. All it suggests is a continued future of box checks, of careless swipes.

And I dont know the solution.

But for me, I am finding myself returning to obsession.

Because I just found a new favorite song. I’m going to play it til I hate it. At least, then, I’ll kind of, maybe, know something.

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BUT, I am sooo excited to share that since my last post, I wrote PAPER mag’s digital cover. I got to interview and profile the TikTok icon Terri Joe, or rather Kelon, the mind behind it all. It was a dream to work on this, and incredibly validating. So thanks to all my readers and anyone that’s engaged with my work so far. I truly am just doing this alone and without your support, encouragement and engagement, I never would have gotten that opportunity, so a hug and a hi-5 from me!!

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In hindsight, I may have been overly deterministic. Sure, technology has an outsized influence in shaping our collective taste. But people have agency, and though they often veer along the tracks of our technological and cultural infrastructure, they can, and often do, resist the momentum of inertia.

My thesis for this newsletter has basically been this: Spotify prioritizes the continued and constant playing of music, thus making them prioritize music that works well as background in their recommendation algorithm. This broad preference has empowered the notion that music should be thought of as vibe-setter. Music, we are led to believe, is not an art form with meaning unto itself, but a thing in service of mood, context, atmosphere, affect.

Whole genres emerged as a downstream side effect.

Bedroom pop was probably the most clear example of this. One of the first genres to emerge from the new dominance of Spotify’s editorial playlists (which adopted radio’s once-ability to powerfully shape mass taste), Bedroom Pop displayed all of the preferred aesthetic qualities of streaming technology. Pleasant, non-disturbing, mood-inducing, vibey.

This gave the genre a natural advantage on Spotify. Spotify’s algorithm highly factors “skips” into their curatorial schema. The more people that skip a song, the more that song is downgraded on the platform’s recommendation algorithm. This essentially made “vibey” synonymous with “good.” We don’t skip vibes after all, we vibe with them. This is not to say there was no good or worthwhile bedroom pop — many artists from that era have sustained, and become some of our greats. But there was a lot of music too from that time that was simply successful because it filled an ambient, algorithmic need.

It was an illustrative era. And if I was a technological determinist, I would say that Bedroom Pop is our forever future. Spotify wants chill vibes, and thus chill vibes will be our perennial meal. But such is not the case.

Humans, I suppose, still have a say in the work of culture-shaping, and the underground, or the always dormant-weird in our culture, wanted to reclaim the foreground. Which is sort of what hyperpop was. It was music that served a punk-ish desire to be brash and sugary. And it was also music that served the ever-intesifying needs of an attentionally-challenged generation.

I could never tell if it was the scrape or the balm.

There was a partial thrill and tepid radicalism to hyperpop. It was directly opposed to streaming’s placid, background aesthetics, but what it gained in opposition to Big Streaming, it lost in other domains. It did, after all, suspiciously conform to the generally frenetic clip of the attention economy. It was TikTok music: not in an eye-rolling, kids these days way, but in that it packed the quick, loud, joyful punch of that particular platform. Everything Everywhere All in 2 Minutes of chipmunk voice. There’s much to say here. I think I already said it. But basically, other than SOPHIE and her colleagues, its cultural potency always felt partial to me.

But it did beckon me to wonder: What would a music that faces it all sound like? Something that was reacting to a deeper impulse in our culture, rather than serving a momentary swing in aesthetics? Something going against the grain of algorithmic recs, but also the whole splatter-paint shit show of our digital culture?

I think I’m beginning to see the outlines of such a music, such a vibe.

If Bedroom Pop sought to set a mood. And if hyperpop sought to capture attention. And if both did so in a sort of parodic way — too extreme to fully work as capital-A Art — then I think there’s a new crop of artists who are splitting the difference between background aura and foreground engagement with what I’ll call 2020s totalism.

It’s my newsletter, so I get to name an era.

My former professor at Bard, Kyle Gann once wrote about Totalism, which was a newly emergent movement in contemporary music in the 90s. After the great leap that was minimalist music in the post-classical world — you know, like Phillip Glass, Steve Reich — there was a sort of “where do we go??” moment for composers. Minimalism purified composition to its most basal, repetitious forms and tropes. Gann wrote of the 90s’ totalism, “The ‘total’ in totalist music implies, among other things, having your cake and eating it too: appealing to lay audiences, yet also providing enough underlying complexity to intrigue sophisticated musicians.” For such an example, see the work of John Luther Adams, whose work immerses listeners in sonic landscapes via intricately detailed ambient and repetitious orchestration.

In a way, the 2020s totalism — which I’m positioning as firmly pop rather than of the avant grade — is not dissimilar to Gann’s idea. It splits the middle between complexity and straightforwardness, as filtered through the taste of the Zoomer generation’s technological hive mind.

The 2020s totalism doesn’t seek to scratch an ever needy attentional itch like hyperpop, or relegate itself to spa music, like the worst of bedroom pop, but provide both ambiance and active experience.

Some could call it immersion. It immerses listeners not with wild swings of distraction, but a true commitment to atmosphere, to fullness, to a totalizing moment.

Take “Boy’s a Liar” by PinkPanthehress, featuring Ice Spice, which is the song is the song-of-the-summer but now. What it combines so deftly is that zoomer-need to capture attention with a deep, sumptuous musicality. PinkPantehress’s soft vocals begin on the 1, only supported by a syncopated kick. “Take a look inside your heart/Is there any room for me?” The instrumentation then veers, skipping in a perpetual 2-step between two corny electric piano chords. The song then reaches a quick catharsis just 30 seconds in. A sweetly funky baseline enters as PinkPantheress wanders out the chorus. “The boys a liar/He doesn’t see ya.” The song hugs you in. Swirls you around before Ice Spice enters the chat. “He say that I’m good enough/ grabbin’ my duh-duh-duh.”

Short songs which reach the chorus at or before the 30-second mark are a hallmark of pop in the streaming age. This has become annoying, not because God hath decreed that choruses come in at 1-minute, but because this move usually feels like a cheap attention grab. “Quick intro/Post Malone chorus-croon/and then verse” just doesn’t feel like a logical through line. “Boy’s a Liar,” though, sets a whole atmosphere, while doing the rapid-21st-century-song-structure dance. It doesn’t feel quick; it feels condensed. It’s not a thin ploy to poke your roving mind, but a short dunk in the water tank. In and out we go.

Condensed sonics. Immersive atmosphere. Mood as hammer rather than mood as mist. Engagement but not absurdity. Vibe as propulsive frequency rather than aural affect. That’s the new aesthetic. That’s what’s really good.

Once I thought about it, I began to hear it all around.

I hear it, I think, in MGNA CRRRTA’s neon fish tank rave.

I hear it in 2HOLLIS’s line goes up digital mosh pit.

In PinkPantheress’s 2 minute pink swirl saunters.

In Two Shell’s 2-bit chaos.

In The Dare’s Indie Sleaze soak.

Even in Ethel Cain’s farm house gothic.

Sometimes, when it works, in RAYE’s cinematic overdose.

I recognize I’m talking about a lot of different music. Not much connects these examples but that they’re relatively new and increasingly popular. Some in this quick list are reaching mainstream appeal, while others are gaining underground terrain. But something real, if vague, connects them.

If the past few years have been defined by a relatively thin attempt to capture our attention, be it through kooky hyperpop or cheap-thrills-TikTok hits, then this vibe shift is defined by an attempt to freeze us in place and feel something. Maybe, even, to pay attention to music with earnest ears.

Maybe we’re moshing to The Dare or drifting to Ethel Cain’s amish reverie. We’re there, inside the sonics: a familiar, if strange home to return to. Like the Hipster revival, we are experiencing an immersive revival.

I dunk myself in the water tank and try to hold my breath.

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What we fear about A.I. is not our eventual subjugation to robot overlords, but rather our own quiet obsolescence.

One day you’re a copy writer for “Paramount +,” and the next day you get the fateful email: you’ve been automated. It turns out that the key to crafting the perfect ad or slogan does not reside in the complex and clever psyche. Maybe all of it is a game: linguistic and cultural puzzles waiting to be solved. Today, Stacey in sales can simply type the words “Please write a tag line for Yellowstone: 2055” into an AI platform and out comes the copy: “Family is Future.”

ChatGPT, the wildly useful and often wildly impressive AI system from OpenAI, has recently made a beta version of its chat bot available for the public. With an easily typed prompt, one can ask the bot to write copy, articles, songs and tweets about any subject and in any style. For example, I asked ChatGPT to “Write about the rise of neoliberalism in the style of Mother Goose” and it responded: “Government restrictions she’d spurn/Austerity would be the concern/Privatization was her desire/Taxes cut and regulations higher.”

Okay, some factual inconsistencies, but not bad. I mean, I couldn’t do much better. Could many other writers? Maybe this all spells trouble and, idk, #YangGang.

The things is though, I’m not particularly worried for my future as a writer. What I do here on this Substack is inherently tied to me, my persona, my vibe. You could read an AI-written Gen Zero Substack Post, but even if it successfully calibrated my jen ne sais quoi, what good would that writing do for you? Criticism, in all its forms, is subjective. Objectively derived criticism is quite literally an oxymoron and thus the validity of AI-written culture criticism gets us right to the center of questions of consciousness a la “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sleep?” Maybe someone could use AI for the text behind this Substack, but they would still need to craft a profile and persona around the writer. Because who, for example, would really want to read a NewYorker review by HiltonAlsBot1000??? It seems to me no more interesting than a party trick.

This is not to say though that all creatives are protected from their future automation. The areas where creatives should be getting worried in regards to their future is areas where the final product is completely disentangled from its source. And for music, that spells real trouble. In our current era, more and more music is immediately decontextualized and absorbed into the Great Big Stream.

So much of this newsletter is about the ways that our current modes of listening have morphed music from artform to vibe-setter.

This happened because of an active choice made by Spotify in the early 2010’s. With so much music that can be listened to at any time, users became overwhelmed and found themselves listening to nothing rather than sorting through the muck to find something. The goal then was to make Spotify into a seamless listening experience. And the seams here were the strain one feels when deciding what to put on.

It was through this that playlists, and specially mood/situation/vibe playlists, became the guiding infrastructure of Spotify and thus the major listening platform of our generation. Rather than searching for music, you are recommended it. The morning begins with morning music, the evening winds down with night time anthems.

In this context, much of the music users listen to is not selected by them, but by an algorithm or rather Spotify’s (algorithmically-informed) editorial playlists that are selecting songs to suit a discrete purpose (driving, being sad, the vibes).

Even the pretentious among us find ourselves enmeshed in this listening dynamic.

In an insightful piece for WIRED, Shiva Rajaraman, who served as Vice President of Product during crucial years in Spotify’s development, offered the key thrust to much of Spotify’s product development in 2015: “Instead of orienting around this idea of having music which you put in a library,” he said, “we orient more around your life.”

According to Rajaraman, the whole notion of music for “moments,” began with an assessment of users’ workout playlists. These playlists were played and altered (meaning songs were added, taken away and re-ordered) with a notable intensity, piquing the interest of Spotify’s product team who thought to take this “to its logical conclusion.” The WIRED article reads:

Spotify is beginning to read your context—your location, the time of day, and more—to make deeply educated guesses about what you might want to listen to. You always run at 7 am, before work; Spotify's going to start showing you running playlists at 7 am. In the morning, Rajaraman says they've found most people like uplifting music, so they're starting to show users playlists like "Have a Great Day!" End of the day, you're heading home, maybe you want "Evening Chill" to mellow you out a bit. It's 2 am and you're still listening to Spotify? You're probably drunk, so here comes Avicii.

The vision described above should seem recognizable to most of us. We don’t even think about it, but we awake to dozens of little nudges to what we listen to. Nudges, that push us towards some algorithmically derived vision of recommended chill, or trendy. Many of us resist, and say: “you know what, I’m gonna play some jazz this fine weekday morning,” but we can feel that we’re swimming upstream (no pun).

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Within this, certain songs that fit Spotify’s preferred yet varied vibe naturally rise to the top. We all have the songs that haunt us, and though we may feel particularly put upon by these tunes, we should know that we’re not really special. Spotify has algorithmically determined that certain songs set the vibe. These songs may be huge hits, like “As it Was,” which to me represents the auditory Goliath of Spotify-music, or they could be from unknown or lesser known artists. And these selected bops may have, despite their relative cultural anonymity, tens of millions of streams.

This divergent dynamic, between music that’s popular on Spotify and popular in culture can be thought of as what Liz Pelly once deemed “stream bait pop,” pop music suited for the strange and specific incentives of the streaming economy. When Pelly wrote of that in 2018, there was a growing list of songs that were performing extraordinarily well on Spotify playlists but had essentially no cultural foot print. The music that Pelly filed under this banner, she argued, did so well because it was the “type of music that could easily fit on mood- and affect-oriented playlists.”

Today, the TikTok age has both shifted and reinscribed this dynamic. If we can expand the term “stream bait pop” to now encompass music that also thrives on the primary music discovery platform of our time, TikTok, we’d see that there is a specific sound and vibe of music that does well on TikTok, but not necessarily elsewhere. But different than Spotify, which is only a music/audio platform, we couldn’t necessarily claim so boldly that the music that thrives on TikTok has no real cultural impact. The most viral TikTok songs do have an impact in that they become the background or means by which the collective does discourse. And yet still the artists that make such a mark on TikTok rarely translate the stunning success that they find on the app into lasting statuses as cultural icons. In this way, there is a clear divergence between a TikTok music career and a music career. Though many make the leap (pinkpantheress my QUEEN).

I chatted about this in June with Scott Cohen who was then the Chief Innovation Officer of Warner Music, in charge of how the major label utilized emerging technologies such as Blockchain and the Metaverse. I offered to Cohen the following analysis about about one of Warner’s biggest artists, GAYLE, who succeeded in making the biggest song in the world through TikTok machinations. I said:

“I think creating culture-changing stars is more difficult today. So to take an example, GAYLE, who’s signed to Warner, had the biggest song in the world for a period of time with “abcdefu”. You would think that GAYLE would be more culture-driving, similar to Alanis Morisette with Jagged Little Pill, than she currently is.”

Though GAYLE of course has a career, the fact that she once had the biggest song in the world would lead one to think she’d be at least more culturally omnipresent than Julia Fox for example.

To this, Cohen responded in a roundabout way, saying:

“My personal belief is that I wish more artists would push culture a little further. And some are, [but] our job is to help them make the best music and reach audiences. If we need to tell you what to do, we wouldn’t sign you in the first place . . . People pour their hearts out into their music and people are just going on a jog. I get it, but in many ways it’s soul crushing. But you know, we’ve always optimized for certain things. If it’s album sales, we had to optimize around top 40 radio to get it to the top of the charts so that when the album drops people run to the stores. It even meant you have to change your songs to get on the radio. Was that good or bad? Regardless, that’s what we do, we optimize. So today, we’re optimizing for where people are.”

In this sense, the Music Industry can be thought of as the liquid that forms around the solid that is technology. Slimey snake it is, it shapes to, but does not shape. And thus, in a context where the two major listening/discovery platforms of our day incentivize artists to make music that suits moods or works well as TikTok memes, the artists that supply us with our auditory vibes have taken on less and less importance themselves. To put it simply, our relationship to this Spotify /TikTok-music is, by and large, not a proxy for a relationship with the musicians behind it. If our needs/vibes have been met, who cares who’s behind the curtain?

Now maybe many artists are content to supply mood-content for the masses (though that’s unlikely to provide a solid income), but artists who seek to make that devil’s bargain should be aware that when you consign yourself to background status, so too are you paving the way for your future obsolescence.

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ChatGPT will never take my Substack job, because if you are reading this, you are engaging with me as a human author and mind. You are, to put it bluntly, obsessed. Kidding. But if a robot had made your favorite tune in a vibes-summer Spotify playlists, would learning that fact compel you to skip the song? Every other artist on it was anonymous to you. It was all just background. Why then, would you care, if a robot took that one artist’s job?

Right now, Chat GPT cannot make music, but it can write lyrics, and why wouldn’t it, in the future, be able to analyze the billions of bits of musical data and produce a “120 electro-dance song in the style of MUNA about a future where crickets have colonized Bulgaria.” I see the future, even if its slightly off.

The solution, I believe, is for the musicians of the world to refuse supplying mood content for the great vibes machine. Try, no matter how hard, to build a brand and persona. Making TikTok viral hits and songs that do well on algorithms may feed the sugar rush, but you’ll soon be automated out.

It’s a good thing though, that a few artists seem to be attempting, against the odds, to do so. And consumers are vibing with their humanity. Next week, I’m going to write about the urgent return of pop persona. But for now, resist the vibe, young readers. It turns out that stanning is praxis. Low key.

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Hey, thanks so much for being here! I write this newsletter because I believe it’s vital we engage with the technology that’s shaping our taste and culture. Plus, I love being in dialogue with all of you. This newsletter is free, but if you have ever read my work and appreciated it, consider leaving a small tip here. It means a lot.

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Happy Spotify Wrapped!

It’s our favorite corporate holiday, that special time of the year when every Spotify user receives a package of highly stylized factoids and blurbs revealing what they’ve been listening to.

I have to admit: it’s well done. Wrapped is probably one of the most successful marketing campaigns of the century. Almost no other brand could galvanize its customers to provide this amount of free advertising. I mean, in 2021 over 60 million people shared their Spotify Wrapped results with their friends and followers.

But for me, as a Spotify critic, Wrapped is a real opportunity. The overwhelmingly public nature of the Wrapped campaign makes it an especially fertile moment to interrogate the tech behemoth. And while I toil away at this here Substack all year long lobbing discursive stones at the Swedish Goliath, it’s on this fateful day that it seems like the entire world joins me in engaging with the odd nature of Spotify and the streaming economy. With the awkward fact that the app is tracking your every listen and repackaging that data as a gift. With the strange and creepy nature of Spotify’s Big Brother ad copy. Even if you anticipate Spotify Wrapped with glee, there surely is a moment during the Wrapped experience when some vague thought of “this is kind of weird, right?” crosses your mind.

And I feel like that’s especially true this year. Spotify has gone sort of kooky, creepy mask-off this Wrapped season, adding a few key features to their campaign which beckon some surprisingly deep questions about the nature of taste in the algorithmic age.

Audio Day

The viral boondoggle that Spotify Wrapped threw at us this year was their mood/time-of-day feature. This new feature tells us what kinds of moods we musically engage with at different points in the day.

The moods they offer are not merely chill, sad, happy, etc. but rather Gen Z copy pasta like “Cottagecore Pumpkin Spice Comforting,” which is what I apparently listen to in the morning or “Confident Energetic Euphoric,” which allegedly was my nighttime vibe. There were many, many more mood descriptors that others users got though, meme-able ones like “Clown-core” and “Goblin-core” and “tender” and “city-pop.”

According to Spotify, the purpose of this feature is to “give you a peek into how your music taste evolved throughout the day, showcas[ing] the niche moods and aesthetic descriptors of the music you listened to during morning, midday, and evening time periods.” And man, what is life but a series of “niche moods?”

I actually don’t know for sure if these “niche moods” are purely random, but my guess is that they do have some real correlation with the music we listen to. But to whatever extent these moods do relate to how our favorite music sounds, it’s only so these mood-descriptors can strike enough of a nerve as to compel each of us to share our results on social media. They want us to feel both confused and exposed. And they want to inspire us to ask our networks to help us decode the nature of our reported being. Their intended vibe is “haha WTF but also meeee low key . . .”

And why not? We all need content for our emergent brands. So thankfully Spotify has made each of us a personalized meme. And we are in turn able to give the digital Gods their required daily post.

Your Listening Personality

Measuring our momentary moods is fun, but this year, Spotify wants to go even deeper. The corporation has taken it upon themselves to make a new Myers-Brigss. And thank God! I needed a new pseudoscientific way of measuring my essence.

As Spotify says, “It’s not only about what you listened to—but what that says about your music taste. This year during Wrapped, we’re showcasing 16 different Listening Personality types that Spotify created for 2022 Wrapped. Your Wrapped will showcase your Listening Personality based on how you listened to music throughout the year.”

To calculate this, Spotify has 4 metrics.

You may have not realized until just now, but this whole time you’ve been reading the words of an . . . . ENVU! Sorry if you haaaate ENVU’s (also a gemini btw)! Anyways, being an ENVU means that the traits I hold are “Exploration, Newness, Variety and Uniqueness.”

All of this makes me “An Adventurer.” See below:

And like, for sure! I do love finding new music and my taste is very eclectic and changing all the time. But how can I look at my listening habits on Spotify as anything close to a pure metric? Spotify is not some austere platform where my favorite songs exist in one sleek, white interface untouched by algorithms or manipulative design. Far from it. Spotify is not an iPod, but Times Square, flashing recommendations and playlists and new releases and mood mixes at every digital turn.

The variety of music I listen to is surely impacted by this constant onslaught. And like yes, I have chosen to listen to Spotify’s recommendations and I do truly like to listen to a wide variety of music. And I suppose the existence of all of these traits’ opposites does show that some people do remain “familiar, loyal,” etc despite the recommendation-onslaught. But whatever wisdom is to be taken from this has nothing to do with musical taste. If anything, it has to do with our behavior on Spotify. I’m an ENVU in my usage . . . Deep.

And maybe that’s meaningful. Maybe that could be thought of as a stand-in for taste in the streaming age. We do, after all, listen to almost all of our music on the app, so maybe then our behavior on the platform is as valid a measure as any in discerning our taste.

Crunching Numbers

While Spotify’s new Wrapped feature may confound us, they still give us our raw listening data. And this is the crown jewel of the Wrapped Experience: a straight-up list of your most-listened to artists and songs. If any insight is to be gained, it’s from this feature.

But even these raw numbers are dubious.

I am committed to not sharing my Spotify wrapped (it’s basic!!!!!), but I will say that my second most streamed song is “American Girl,” a fun pop anthem by LA-based indie artist Kilo Kish. I like this song. It’s fun. And I did add it to some of my playlists. I even listened to it intently a few times. Now though, whenever an album ends, “American Girl” comes on due to Spotify’s autoplay system. (If you’re curious to learn more about that, I discussed this at length in another recent piece.)

Does this song then say anything about my taste? I mean I liked it, but it was streamed so many times because of Spotify’s code. What then do my raw streaming numbers mean if they are illustrative of my own behavior and that of Spotify’s queue algorithm?

And in addition to this fudging of the data, what if the songs I streamed the most don’t necessarily represent my own sense of taste? Taste must mean something beyond what we listen to the most, right? What if my most-listened-to song was representative of a specific period of sadness and anxiety? Or of a particular era of sociability? What if that time was a blip, and yet my cumulative data shows me a picture of myself I find unrecognizable?

Taste Making

In all of these features, Spotify is offering a few different definitions of what it means to have a taste. Be it our changing vibes throughout the day, or the behavior of our listening, or the hard data of our yearly rotation.

But we have to remind ourselves that none of the answers Spotify seeks to cheekily provide mean much. Ultimately, Spotify Wrapped should be thought of as no more than a social media content product that exploits our anxiously vague sense of self. In the frazzled business of digital life, none of us have the time or energy to truly know who we are or understand how we feel throughout the day. Spotify provides some data, some answers, and some content-food for our digital-fodder.

And we take the bait. We engage and share. And throughout the process, we sort of validate their ideas about what taste is. From their silly mood feature to even their raw streaming data reports, we don’t question the structures of surveillance and algorithmic manipulation that undergird it all. Instead we wait eagerly for Spotify to tell us who we are. And abide their wishes and share, share, share.

I can’t help but wonder if Spotify does not want us to be able to self-define our taste. Because when we wait for Spotify to spill the beans, and accept their analysis and data as anything deep and valid, we turn away from engaging with our own taste ourselves. And we let them define our taste for us.

More power to them, but I call that market capture. We can though, resist the monopoly.

What do I like and why? What do I like and why?

Say it a few times like a soothing mantra. Then try to answer it in the dark.

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Did you hear? Indie Sleaze is back. You know, like, being indie. Like the platonic Brooklyn. Like Hipster. Like Tumblr-Core-vibes. Like the Arctic Monkeys, LCD Soundsystem, Sleigh Bells. Like flash photography and sexy looks. Like American Apparel. The early 2010s mainstream-underground. It’s back. There’s been a bunch of articles on it. It’s a vibe shift. But isn’t that what people were saying last spring? That we were going through a vibe shift? Did the vibe shift already? Did we change? Am I me? Where do we go when we die?

The trend-cycle can be a strange, destabilizing thing if you choose to believe in it.

Indie Sleaze is a catchall term for a certain subset of aesthetic signifiers that were most prominent from the years 2006 to 2012 and it has come to define a certain concretized idea of mid-aughts “indie-ness” and “hipsterdom.” As Harper’s reports, purveyors of the Indie Sleaze look are harkening back to those who wore “American Apparel gold lamé leggings, sideswept bangs, Richie Tenenbaum headbands, and tank tops with craterous armholes that dipped all the way to the hip bones.” And musically, Indie Sleaze is evoking the time when the young and hip “[listened to] bloghaus, an obscure music genre that mashed up indie, disco, [and] danced the night away to electro-pop bands with perplexing names like New Young Pony Club and Simian Mobile Disco.”

Given that none of these trends happened that long ago, I am very sympathetic to anyone that rolls their eyes at a few choice trends from a recent era being so quickly refashioned into a coherent and referable-to aesthetic movement. Usually, we let time do it’s thing a bit longer before we allow a decade to be compressed into such a sellable package. Yes, these were all tropes that were popular 10+ years ago, but lumping them under a singular banner seems revisionist and sort of corny to me. And noting that a few stray components from that time have made their way back to street style TikToks seems rather insignificant.

But even with my qualms, I do have to say: a certain vibe from 10 + years ago does feel as if it has returned. It’s not so much that a certain style and musical aesthetic has come back, as much as the fact that a certain, stereotypical hipster affect has, maybe, possibly, probably, returned.

My wheels started turning when I read a piece about Perfectly Imperfect’s recent anniversary party in the New York Times. For the uninitiated, Perfectly Imperfect is a Substack newsletter that publishes weekly interviews where an alleged “cool person” recommends the various works of culture and products they enjoy. It’s sort of cute and interesting and maybe marginally useful if one buys into the premise that “cool people like cool things,” as every one of Perfectly Imperfect’s posts begin. Regardless of any skeptical weariness, Perfectly Imperfect is undoubtably a thing and the paper of record covering their big celebratory party was a clear confirmation of that. “I don’t want to seem full of myself or anything,” said Tyler Bainbridge, the newsletter’s founder, “but Perfectly Imperfect will probably be the most sprawling cultural document of who and what was cool during the time we’re in right now.”

While this story of a chic subculture convinced of its own importance may be fairly timeless and thus unremarkable, I found the whole thing to be oddly refreshing. It’s sort of nice, I thought, to see some people be self-assured in their own taste. To see the hipster taste-based warrior back again. They know more than you. They were into X before you were. Their taste is a prized and special thing. Maybe then, Indie Sleaze, or some stereotypical hipsterdom, is back! And thank God. I was craving somebody, anybody, who cared about curation.

Algorithms don’t curate. They recommend.

The two modes are differentiated by the crucial fact that recommendation exists to optimize your consumption. If a music journalist shares a new album with you because it’s cool and interesting, Spotify recommends you a song because it suits your taste and matches an algorithmic prediction of you current mood. So today, you need not seek out the perfect music magazine for your own burgeoning taste. Instead, that magazine will form around you and show up on your Spotify homepage with out any individual mental struggle of your own. And the algorithmic recommendations will probably give you music you “like” in a straight forward way, with no context or story. All simply fed straight to your ears.

And it’s not just music. We get our clothes through targeted ads on Instagram. Even jokes, discourse, ideas arrive to us via the unknowable force of TikTok. In this sense, we are almost never the curators, but the curated. Forces beyond most of our awareness calculate digital signals which stealthily shape our tastes and most of us don’t complain because the calculation usually resonates. But in the process, we lose a sense of what we like and why.

The shift from curation to recommendation happened steadily, but the “Indie Sleaze” era was a time defined by institutions that revolved around some form of human curation. Getting Pitchfork’s “best new music” was the closest thing to making it in music for a certain period, and those that worked at Pitchfork, and were part of the music blog scene in general, spent a whole lot of time, you know, curating and having subjective taste-based opinions etc.

Budding music consumers in an era run by human curators had to contend with others’ perspectives, to negotiate if a music magazine/blog reflected or differed from their own taste. But today, absent a clear curator to point to and deal with, music consumers are left with their own vague algorithm. And that’s a hard thing to wrap your mind around. The code that gives me music recommendation has no name, face or identity. I can complain about how lame and small-minded a given journalist is, but contending with my Spotify algorithm is like screaming at a cloud. In that fuzzy indistinction comes a lessened awareness of my own taste.

And it forces a lessened awareness of what other people are contending with too. We can smoke cigarettes and argue about Pitchfork etc., but when each of us are on our own curatorial island, we have no common vocabulary. We are alone. In an era that operates via recommendation and not curation, we are all our most optimized selves, finding *exactly* what we like, but we are not an optimized culture. We are floating individuals. And maybe not even floating at that. The internet has flooded the zone with content and we’re all just trying not to drown amidst the deluge. One can’t find the shore and catch their sea legs long enough to sneer at their friend. It’s only algorithms that can help us sort through the wreckage, but there’s a cost to that gifted sanity.

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Maybe then, 10 years ago feels so retro (and ripe for reappraisal), because the simple curatorial ethos that defined the era’s institutions, feels as if it’s from another lifetime. Blogs, vintage stores, indie labels, magazines, were all led by fallible human curators and gatekeepers. These spaces though have been replaced by a newer internet where we are all the content creators and algorithms are the editors that pick and choose what will be spotlighted. And huzzah, someone like me for example can show up on your FYP on TikTok and suddenly I have a subscriber to my Substack. But the whole process of me reaching you is so inscrutable and singular (surely your friends are not here as well), that the whole process of expanding my artistic network or being part of any somewhat communal conversation is so hopelessly individualized and lonely.

“There is no society” as Margaret Thatcher said.

“Bring back hegemonic tastemakers for us to either agree with or hate, because at least we’d all be talking,” is something I just said.

So if cultural movements rise and fall as basic oppositional forces to the consensus of the mainstream, it makes sense then why an era defined by curation/exclusivity has come back to correct for the over-excess of an era defined by algorithmic sorting. It’s not merely that the trend cycle has quickened and quickened to a dizzying degree, it may simply be that the current cultural subconscious is yearning for some return to pretension, some sort of “cool/uncool” binary. Because in the unclear space that is all of our algorithmic worlds, we may want to construct, however loosely, some new culturally “cool” status quo that we can either opt into or revile.

I think we will see a return of more cultural platforms like Perfectly Imperfect. The hatred of the hipster will return with renewed force as certain subsets try to claim their tastes as distinct and better than the ones shaped by algorithms. And these Neo-hipsters probably will be annoying. And cringey. And pretentious.

But at this point in my life I think there are worse things that being pretentious. You could be basic. For example.

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We made plans to meet in the park, but it was raining so I suggested we go to Starbucks. I usually prefer to #SupportSmallBusinesses but there was something apt about the venue for my interview with MGNA Crrrta (pronounced Magna Carta), a brand-new pop duo composed of Ginger and Farheen, two nineteen year-old creatives based in downtown Manhattan.

Starbucks has all the markings of Americana trash: overpriced, deeply unethical, surprisingly delicious, and completely and terrifying sterile. It gives one the same in-between feeling as MGNA Crrrta’s aesthetic, which I would deem loosely as Americana Landfill. Almost all of their album art or intently executed photo shoots feature the duo posing in front of some liminal, industrial locale with their faces hidden or partially veiled. The photos reminds me of a polaroid or scrap you find dirtied on the street but decide take home because you find the image oddly compelling. There’s often beauty in the garbage.

As we walked into the Starbucks, Farheen smiled: “Let’s get a PSL.” I had totally forgotten the acronym for Pumpkin Spice Latte. It seemed like a good idea though so I got mine tall with oat. It was 7 dollars and tasted like decadent pumpkin chemistry. Even trash in America is chicly expensive.

I first heard MGNA Crrrta through my Spotify Discover Weekly playlist. The song was “Girl Party” and I was so taken by the song’s addicting chaos and by the duo’s low-key mystery that I did something very rare for a Spotify user: I became a true and genuine fan via an algorithmic rec.

“Girl Party” harkens back to the digital rave of Crystal Castles or early Grimes, but it has an undeniable novelty. It’s not defined so much by a progression, then it is a sense of architecture. There’s barely a verse, chorus, or even expansion. Once the song begins, you’re inside it. Pulsing synth chords blanket the beat. The drums are buried under a wash of noise. And the vocals, autotuned, simple and barely audible, still project an earnest sweetness. You can feel them floating in the small shared space.

I reached out to MGNA Crrrta, not just because I want to put more people on to their music, but because I believe they represent the chapter that comes after hyperpop. Hyperpop has, in recent years, grown stale and self-parodying. The queer ecstasy of SOPHIE and PC music felt rooted in ethereal overwhelm; if that music sounded “crazy,” it’s because it was buckling under the lofty weight of all that it carried. 100 Gecs, on the other hand, felt crazy in the sense that they’re a bull in a china shop slipping on banana peels and landing on whoopee cushions. Gecs has defined the predominant and current wave of hyperpop, and in their wake we have legions of other artists who take thrill in making some form meme-music, in the deep-fried stuff of the internet brain. But MGNA Crrrta feels more like a return to form, back to the ecstasy of SOPHIE, but for a younger, even more-online generation.

“[Our music] is a melting pot of everything good,” Farheen told me. “Like you have your hyperpop influences like SOPHIE, and then you have Crystal Castles and then you have Kesha, which is like pop, fun girl-music. That’s just us.”

When I asked if they considered themselves part of the hyperpop scene, Ginger confirmed my hunch that they’re doing something different. “We do categorize ourselves within hyperpop to some extent, but we don’t fit in the bounds of it at the same time. We’re inspired by a lot of the same stuff that hyperpop is inspired by, but we go in sort of a different direction with it.”

I agree. If so much of hyperpop today is winking at its listeners, then MGNA Crrrta has their eyes closed, moshing.

Ginger is from rural New Jersey and Farheen is from Seattle, but they met and became best friends when they were 11 in a (and this is real) Hunger Games Roleplay Minecraft Server. For the uninitiated, that means a server on the online world-building game Minecraft that was specifically dedicated to the role playing of The Hunger Games’s world of teen violence spectacle.

“It wasn’t even just survival games on Minecraft,” Ginger explained. “It was like real role-playing. Every Saturday we would have these hours-long re-enactments of the Hunger Games. We would log on, create our characters and go through the whole process. We would role play dying and shit.”

Farheen interjected, “It was emotional.”

Over the years, they played the game, developed shared beefs with the same online enemies and bonded, eventually seeing each other’s online profiles and becoming best friends via facetime. They didn’t even meet IRL until the November of 2020 (which Ginger made sure to add is “low key controversial”), when Ginger was visiting Seattle to see a very sick relative. Given the rare opportunity to be physically close to each other, they decided to finally link. The online bond translated seamlessly to the complicated world of reality.

While the story of their online meeting somewhat amazed me, it also made perfect sense. They formed their friendship in a space of world building and fantasy. This helps explain the specificity and immersion of the MGNA Crrrta project, and why their work feels so much more expansive than so many other new music projects I encounter today. MGNA Crrrta is still building worlds

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When they both moved to New York and decided to start a band, all of it unfurled naturally. Ginger produces. They both write the songs. They both work tirelessly to make sure it’s cool and singular and never contrived.

“We don’t come from families that are connected in the industry at all,” Ginger shared. “We’ve worked so hard for our music presence.”

They both loathe the nepotism that defines so much of the industry, as well as the over-eagerness of many young “better connected” artists to brand themselves in clearly legible terms. MGNA Crrrta doesn’t need to be relatable. They just need to be felt.

Their approach is already paying off. The duo just played their first out-of-NYC show at a formidable rave in Los Angeles. They were flown out. They met fans.

Farheen described the experience. “It did not feel real. Growing up, trips were a big deal. The fact that I was getting on a plane from my own work was crazy.” She continued, “It’s really important for us that we don’t stop. We’re the most omnipresent girls.”

They just put out their first video for the pop ode “Right.” It’s a highly impressive production featuring the two as glamorous yet starved vampires performing on the screen of a shlubby dude’s TV. They sing, “ I know how to do you right, right, right,” the last word repeating like an unstoppable glitch. Towards the end of the video, the song abruptly stops and we find ourselves in a stock-footage informercial for “Rite” water. A soothing voice-over shares the benefits of the product over pristine images of white picket suburbia. “It feels so wrong but it tastes so . . .” and then we return to the chorus, “Right, right, right,” as Ginger and Farheen mosh in some liminal dystopia.

Today, they’re releasing their new single, “$ome Drugzzz,” which they describe as “pure parody.” The track centers around a largely atonal baseline and melody. The vocals are pitched up, squealey and side-chained to near oblivion. Everything scatters atop a glitched-out jungle beat until finally Ginger’s voice comes in clearly, sounding off with a certain sloppy attitude: “You must think I’m addicted to some drugs/ That I’m snorting up your dumb love.”

It feels and tastes good even if it hits you with a sticky-sweet sugar rush. Two pumps of pumpkin spice syrup go right into my oat milk latte. I prance around the room and feel fancy, like an American icon. It’s a big, weird world and we get to build it. If only we can survive the Hunger Games.

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Follow MGNA Crrrta on Instagram and listen to their latest track, “$ome Drugzzz” streaming now.

Hey, thanks for reading! If you’re interested in algorithms and how they shape our culture and relationship to music, please subscribe. Every other week, I’m writing a new piece about all things Spotify, the vibe economy and pop.

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I believe in ghosts.

When I was young, I refused to sleep unless I was sure my parents were near me for fear that a ghost would sweep me up and take me off. I often stayed wide awake through the early morning until I was positive that they were a simple screams-distance away.

My fear and worry over haunting spirits has dissipated with time. Now, the main ghosts I contend with are unfortunate memories and sometimes people, who make their spectral return to my life at certain, ominous moments.

But a sense of haunting also follows me digitally. Algorithms, with their looming watchfulness notice what we do, what we search, what we listen to, and like phantoms, make themselves known in symbols and markings. A suggested ad. A recommended account to follow. A newly overwhelming barrage of a certain type of content suddenly haunts my TikTok feed. These ghostly signs can range from the silent and subtle, to the crude and crass. Sometimes ghosts misplace your pen, but other times they squeal throughout your hallways.

On the spectrum of subtlety to abject obviousness, Spotify’s musical recommendations lean towards the latter. Their recommendations for me are often laughably ham handed and basic. Basic, not in the sense that I’m getting the same Calvin-Harris, major-pop hits that I expect everyone is also getting, but in the sense that I am getting what is the most obvious, crude sorts of recommendations for someone of my demographic: 22, gay, boy, big city, etc. I doubt fathers in their 40’s are being recommended the “Etheral” or “hyperpop” playlist as much as I am. And my daily mixes are assemblages of pop girls and techno. And yes, these are genres and vibes of which I engage, but they are also the most stereotypical recommendations for someone like me. Like yes, but . . . I contain multitudes???

No sign of the algorithm’s haunting is more obvious, blood-on-the-walls, glass-shattering than Spotify’s autoplay though. Different from direct recommendations, autoplay functions as a model of what the algorithm expects you to want to listen to when you no longer are in control of what is playing. Once the album you’ve put on is done, Spotify keeps the vibes vibing by queuing up something they expect you want to hear.

There’s a kink in their system though. At least for me. My auto-play suggestions are suspiciously consistent. Actually, consistent is too generous a word. On my Spotify, the algorithm is playing the same song every singe time it reverts to autoplay. Like no matter what I’m playing, it haunts me.

That song it plays, I hate to say, is “Bunny Is A Rider” by Caroline Polachek. I hate to say it because I do love this song. But Bunny is a Haunting me!

No matter if I’m playing Beyonce, or Frank Ocean, or two shell, or Kendrick, or Charli, or Phoebe Bridgers, I swear to God . . Spotify queues “Bunny is A Rider” without fail. It’s a problem I find maddeningly specific.

Damon Krukowski, of the band Galaxie500 and one of our great chroniclers of streaming culture’s injustice and malaise, wrote an insightful piece exploring the nature of Spotify’s crude autoplay system. Krukowski noticed that his bands song “Strange” was getting considerably more plays than other songs from Galaxie500’s catalog. There was no particular reason why this song should so clearly outperform the band’s other songs, so after some conversation with folks at Spotify, he learned that the reason was because “the algorithm aims to select music that matches in some manner the music that just finished playing. How it makes that match is a trade secret. But the simple goal is a resemblance – a familiarity - to whatever the user had initially chosen to hear.” It’s that sort of cold, analytical surveillance of music that has led to other streaming hits from days past, such as Pavement’s B-Side track “Harness Your Hope” netting over 50 million more streams on Spotify than even their most beloved tracks. In essence, music that shares a resemblance to popular sonics, is boosted in Spotify’s eco-system.

So surely, an element of familiarity is at work with my haunting. “Bunny Is A Rider” is nearly a parody of contemporary pop form. The lyrics are nonsensical and exist more to represent the rhythmic, phonetic candy that is major pop. It’s almost like Cocteau Twins for the streaming age. The music itself is an assemblage of modern pop styles as well; it’s underscored by an off-kilter funk bass line, tethered by a whistling lead melody, and the drama is brought by a sweeping chord progression that rises at optimized, almost lab-perfected moments. It’s a musical pu pu platter.

In this sense, I can see how the dumb code can see similarities in everything from the more experimental end of my electronic music listening, to the sonics of my pop and hip hop go-to’s. But this only explains half of why this song is so stubborn in my feed.

Spotify’s algorithm functions off an analysis of musical data, but it also engages with how music fans react to certain songs — what they like, skip, and add to playlists. It also has an attenuation to each of us as individuals. “Bunny Is A Rider” seems to speak to all pillars of their recommendations when it comes to the business of Tobias. It’s a genre-bending anthem that traverses through all the sorts of sounds I like. It’s likable and an easy song to listen to and probably has a relatively low skip-rate, and thus is favored in their system. And demographically, Polachek and her brand of pop experimentation, notably appeals to those of my . . . ilk. Just take my word for it. Gay boys really like her. And as such, the algorithm has set its sights on me and decided to recommend this song by her every chance it can.

Did I break the algorithm? Maybe in a way I did, because Spotify surely does not intend to recommend users the same song ad infinitum. But more than break it, I think I revealed its ghostly markings. Made it dumb enough to reveal itself in its crude and demeaning gaze.

“Gay boy . . . listen to this!” it squeals at me in it’s shrill and wretched voice. Too bad that ghosts usually thrive in subtle secrecy. And when they make themselves too obviously known, those that share spaces with them tend to light some sage and rest. Be gone cruel spirit!!!!!!!

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In the dizzying whirl of culture and technology, it can be easy to lose track of an eminently simple truth: more and more popular music today is purposefully funny. A brief jaunt through today’s top playlists and trending TikTok audios makes this clear: choruses with farty synth drops, meme-bait lyrics, concepts so absurd they beckon our ironic shares of them. What this trend reveals is not just that humor is curiously central in today’s music industry, but that there’s a specific type of humor that’s becoming more and more central as well. Funny music, if it’s the sort to go viral on TikTok, tends to veer towards the whoopee cushion rather than the comedic pontification. It’s usually funny in a boorish, absurd and caffeinated way.

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The guiding critique of this newsletter, I suppose, revolves around the question of music and its purpose. Technology, namely streaming and recommendation algorithms, have turned music from an art form to instrument. Music today sets the vibe. It provides the backgrounds. Some of this is inherent in the form itself. Music is different than other art forms, say visual art or film, in the sense that listening can be done as a secondary activity. For example we can listen to music while cooking, but cannot advisably analyze a painting while doing so. Thus, there will always be a more diverse range of uses for music than other forms of expression. Background, vibe, tone-setting: go crazy culture, use it all. But what I have become concerned with is that streaming and algorithms have made the balance between thinking of music as an art form and a mere tool, disproportionate. In this context, music has become thought of by many as a pure vibe-setter, not a complex cultural product with meaning unto itself.

If turning music into a mood has been the domain (fault) of Spotify, then turning music into a joke has been the clear work of TikTok. And look, I love TikTok. Most of you who are reading this are probably doing so because you found me there. But its utility and addictive quality is also its dangerous side-effect. Going on TikTok is like turning up the saturation of life. It’s like railing caffeine pills and reading an Us Weekly, Reddit forum and watching CNN on 3x speed. In this dizzying array, the loudest, brashest, and most absurd piece of content makes the biggest splash.

This has meant some interesting developments for audio on the platform. TikTok knows better than any brand or company that listening is a secondary activity. On just about any video, you can disagregate the audio from its original context and use it for your own purposes. For example, a video of a woman saying “mmmm this is definitely fruity” in regards to a fresh candle has become a sonic meme used by thousands of users to indicate when someone/something seems gay. On TikTok, audio can become a meme, just as a visual gag, gimmick or symbol can become one on Instagram or Twitter.

Within this context, more and more music is either contorting itself to fit the incentives of funny TikTok audio, or is being re-purposed or marketed in a way that primes it for mass use on the platform. A few recent trending songs have put this dynamic in stark terms.

One is the rising popularity of BIZCOHCITO by Spanish pop superstar Rosalía. Now I am on record as LOVING Rosalía latest album “MOTOMAMI.” In many ways, the album takes the risks necessary to disentangle itself from Spotify’s overbearing music-as-vibes atmosphere. It’s hard, disjointed, playful and varied. And one of the peaks of its varied approach is BIZCOHCITO, an under-2-minute hyper-sped sprint that’s equal parts bratty and joyful. Rosalía, on tour and in videos, has perfected a masterful performance with the song. She begins by slumping to the side, uninterested and rude, with a hand on her hip as she chews imaginary gum. The dance that transpires after is ironic, wild, childish as she flops around like some wiggly sort of jump rope. This dance has made the song go extremely viral, but its the combination of the kooky, hyperfied sonics and her disafeccted gum-chewing stance that has turned the song into a true viral joke. Thousands of TikTokers have used the song and the general whatever-vibe of her pose to express their own ideas. And largely because of this, the song is currently her most popular song off MOTOMAMI according to Spotify.

Another song that set off my thinking is the meow-core EDM track Cbat by Hudson Mohawk. The song was released in 2011 but has seen a wild surge in popularity in the past week. It currently sits atop Spotify’s Viral 50 playlist. In a wild turn of events that can only be possible on the dizzying web, Cbat has re-entered the cultural lexicon because a reddit user made a viral TikTok about how he prefers to have sex to Cbat because he can mirror its rhythm. Now, a quick listen to the track, which centers around a synthesized cat meow moving in a strange, off-kilter see-saw rhythm and melody, will instantly give one the sense of why this is insane and prime fodder for internet- intrigue. And it helps that this obviously funny story is paired with a song so silly and stupid. Mohawke is definitely a legend, but his earlier trap-EDM had the potential to border on the campy absurdism that was early 2010s rave EDM. Cbat is not his best. But now, this old song and its re-contextualization in this absurd schema, will make it so it may become one of Mohawke’s most lucrative.

What both Mohawke’s Cbat and Rosalía’s BIZCOHCITO share is a silly garishness. A humor that suits itself to the ham-handed mode of internet jokes. The fact that these two, truly genius artists are seeing some of their biggest success through sort of musical gags strikes me as a stark example of the strange incentives of music in the attention economy. Though I’ve spilled much ink on the ways in which Spotify, TikTok, etc. have encouraged musicians to make music that suits the background/sets the vibe, I realize that TikTok in particular is creating an alternative, almost-contradictory incentive. These two songs are not music as vibes. They are, rather, music as vibe killers. Insane, distracting, wacky pieces of sonic splatter paint that maybe don’t work as background, but surely do as a meme-audio for TikTok.

Now just as music-as-vibes is not an inherently bad thing, music-as-gag is not either. But like vibes, when the incentive to make them becomes overbearingly alluring, we end up in a cultural ecosystems whose underlying workings are out of balance. Because if making a meme or making a vibe are the two tickets to streaming success right now, then we have found ourselves in a strange bi-polar reality. Either slip on the musical banana peel or become a spa soundtrack.

And you know, I’ll take option 3, whatever that may be.

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