Algorithmically Generated Consent

I’ve started listening to the algorithmically generated playlist that Spotify makes for me every week -- I’m actually listening to it as I write this -- and it’s been fun! It’s a lot of music that I’ve never heard before mixed in with some that I had, but only through other sources. It’s never anything I’d really go out of my way to look for on my own and that’s a cool thing.

And yet, it worries me a little, because while I do like most of the songs that have been thrown my way, it either means I’ve let the algorithm collect enough information on me to make some pretty accurate guesses or it means I have no taste and will like so many things. I’m actually a little partial to the second reason; it means unless a song is mastered poorly, I can just let it slide into the background. But the first fear is still right there and a bit more worrisome.

One of my resolutions for this and every year was to be “out there” on the internet a bit more, and that’s meant opening myself up to these sorts of metadata collection schemes. I’m sure Google knows all about me, and not just because Blogspot is a Google-owned property. Mostly I hope to just be ignored to an extent, with billions upon billions of people using the internet, the fact that I am probably just a bit of data amongst all that is actually a little comforting to me. But that doesn’t mean I don’t notice when personalized content gets thrown at me.

Youtube’s algorithm is a bit weird, for example. I don’t have the space nor the ability to go into exact details, but the things it tends towards more “controversial” (especially politics-wise) content being rewarded, especially at a quick output. So on completely unrelated videos, I’ll see something with a headline trying to be eye-catching and a little “Recommended for you” tag under it and all I can do is say “Huh.”

Maybe that’s comforting too, that they still guess wrong. Not all the songs on Spotify’s playlists are ones I like, though I’m sure they notice when I skip over them. I do think the black-box nature of the algorithm is scary, of course, but it also makes it difficult to do more than just gesture at it.

A bit of a disclaimer, though. There are algorithms that do more than just recommend media to people or sell ads based on interests. Credit scores, for example, have started determining more than just if someone can pay back a loan, which I think is harmful and dangerous for the same reasons I find the former ones ineffectually weird at times. They could get things wrong. But also for the same reasons, all I can do, from this blog, at least, is mention it.

-F

19

Joke’s on you, I spent most of my time indoors already. That’s about the extent I’m willing to talk about that right now, though. I mean, it’s difficult to talk about anything else, but at the same time, talking about anything else is what keeps spirits up, and if someone wanted to come to this blog for news, well, I guess my only question would be: why?

My time has been spent listening to music, mostly, which is a good way to take one’s mind off things. I just found out about this long-running prog-rock band called The Legendary Pink Dots, so I’ve been going through those. They’re pretty neat, I think. I’ll link a song below.

Between that, working, and keeping social online, I think I’m doing okay. For now, at least. For now.

Stay safe out there.

-F

Blue Monday

I found out today that yesterday, in addition to being Martin Luther King Jr. Remembrance Day, it's also called "Blue Monday," which is not something I'd associated with an actual day before. I'd just always thought of it as that New Order song (or, more specifically, it's iconic bassline). I guess I can understand nobody in the US really talking about it when there's a whole other holiday with some pretty necessary themes involved.

I'm imagining somebody telling MLK, like, "Hey, when you die, they'll make a holiday after you, but it's going to be on the day that's regarded as 'the most depressing day of the year.'"

Anyway, it's never too late to reflect on the life of an important political activist and speaker or the events of or stemming from their life. At the very least, if thinking about one's own racial biases is too much self-reflection, you can ask people how it feels when they treat you like they do.

-F

Every Movie In The Entire World, Ranked (Part One)

I’m kidding, of course.

Here’s an anecdote to start us off. I listen to a weekly music stream. Think of it like a radio show, I guess would be the best way to describe it, where the host spends the first half of the show playing what she found interesting out of the week’s new releases, and the second half taking requests from the audience. Occasionally, something rather well-known will come through the filter of suggestions (I remember Yes’ Roundabout coming on the first time I tuned in), and she’ll always say the same thing whenever it comes up:

“Just think of all the songs that have ever been written, ever, and now remember that there is so much more music coming out every single day,” she says. “Nobody can listen to all that music. There are probably a bunch of songs someone thinks are must-listens that you’ve never heard of.”

I think the same can be said for every artistic medium, from food to theatre to paintings to, yes, films as well. Movies have a much larger buy-in, too, especially for the more niche or independent ones. You have to sit in a dark room for two hours, more or less, and just take in what’s being presented to you. A song is what, three or four minutes?

And yet, I’ve also noticed people get a lot more vocal about “the classic” movies. “You haven’t seen X? And you call yourself a cinema snob?” And my general response has been, well, first of all, a label like “cinema snob” comes with a lot of baggage that I’m not particularly interested in being associated with (nor is it something I’m willing to go over here), nor have I ever called myself that (I fashioned myself a critic once -- that didn’t go over well), and second, I guess see the above quote?

I just figure I’ll pick up the older movies by osmosis, really. The worst someone can really do in this situation would be to march me to a TV, sit me down and put the movie on, right? Done, watched the movie, you never have to bother me about it again. And hey, I’ll probably like it, too.

In the meantime, there are so many movies I’ll never get to see coming out every day. I can try and stem the flow somewhat, but it’s an impossible task. I just have to hope I catch some good ones along the way.

-F

Sick Music

I don’t know if I’m sick or under the weather or just not feeling it and suffering from some writer’s block, but I’m not in the greatest of writing moods. I did promise something positive for this week, though, so let’s talk about music for a bit. Just some quick paragraphs about songs and artists I like and maybe you readers can find something you enjoy as well?

I’ve been on a pretty big electronic kick lately, actually. It started with Justice (example song: Audio, Video, Disco) which I’ve blogged about here before, which extended into synthwave and darkwave (I think those are the genre names? Genres are confusing, but that's a topic for another blog post) with artists like Carpenter Brut (ex: Le Perv) and Perturbator (ex: Birth of the New Model). About the same time this happened, too, someone recommended The Prodigy (ex: Memphis Bells) to me, and while that’s not really any of the genres of the first three artists I mentioned, it’s still within my personal wheelhouse of “things I like”.

That doesn’t mean I don’t listen to acoustic music anymore. I’m very much on the Black Midi (ex: Talking Heads) train, and I still go back to artists like Barns Courtney (ex: Rather Die) and Poe (ex: Haunted). It’s actually a nice feeling, going back to songs you haven’t heard in a while and realizing you still know all the lyrics, or well enough that you can sing along to the chorus at least.

What else? Well, there’s The Budos Band (ex: Old Engine Oil) if you’re looking for something jazzy. Or Katzenjammer (ex: Tea With Cinnamon) if you’re looking for something a bit more indescribable (Wikipedia says Country/Balkan? I guess that works. Again, genres are hard). Or there’s-

Look, the point of this exercise was to get something on paper for this week, and I think that part worked out.I’m not saying I could throw out recommendations until the end of time, but I am still, well, I am still not feeling the greatest. I do hope you enjoy what I picked out for you all, though. I tried to stay away from a given artist’s biggest hits in an effort to try and attract you to more of their music if you like what you hear. So give them a listen!

-F

"May-Mays"

I’ve been listening to a lot of what people would call “meme music” lately. Stuff like Never Gonna Give You Up (yes that link leads exactly where you think it leads), or What’s Up? or songs similar, if that makes sense. Stuff that, for some reason, the internet has latched onto as “the paragon of funny things.” Gangnam Style is another one.

I don’t know why specifically I’ve been listening to these songs, nor do I have the best reason for why these songs became popular in the first place. The closest I can come up with is that they’re all kind of unaware of their own charm? Like that paradoxical One Direction lyric, they don’t know how charming they are.

That sort of thinking, of course, extends to other mediums as well. Tommy Wiseau, for example, managed to make The Room, but everything else he’s made has been with that paratext in mind. “From the guy that made that disaster-of-a-movie The Room” all the promotional material seems to say. This can also be exemplified in music. People don’t remember Saturday at all, even if it’s technically a better song (or so I’m told. I’m not a music critic). Did you know that Rick Astley’s still making music?

But turning to more strict definitions of the word “meme,” I’ve also been listening to what people would call “memetic genres.” Entire types of music that get relegated to the “it’s just memes” category of listening. And to be fair, some of that derision is probably well deserved. The premier Vaporwave song is called “リサフランク420 / 現代のコンピュー” (Lisa Frank 420 / Modern Computing), for example, and other songs in the genre only get more esoteric. And I like to think Eurobeat (that’s “Techno Bluegrass” for those that remember that) would be a lot better received if it didn’t have Running in the 90s as its headlining song.

But both of those genres have a sort of cheesiness to them as well. Vaporwave’s major aesthetic is in reimagining 80s pop songs, and Eurobeat lyrics are frequently so obsessed with sex and cars and sex in cars that anything else is just an outlier.

So is “cheesy charm” what makes a song a meme? I mean, maybe. There are definitely outliers out there, of course. For example, Hurt as performed by Johnny Cash is not particularly cheesy at all (okay, maybe the shot of Cash pouring wine over everything is kind of funny). But it’s definitely a common factor for a lot of songs.

-F

Christmas Music

This is sort of a follow-up to the last post I made about music in the workplace, so the first thing I want to say is that, while it hasn’t gotten better by any stretch of the imagination, it also hasn’t really gotten any worse. I can narrow down the songs I don’t particularly enjoy down to a select few, noticed and appreciated a few more, and the rest I can easily tune out at this point.

But of course, all that gets thrown out the window once the holiday season rolls around. The Saturday after Thanksgiving, I walked into work and was immediately greeted by what I can only describe as somebody drunkenly mumbling their way through Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.

This has happened for three Christmas seasons in a row and it still catches me off guard. Like, I know our playlist is bad, but the sudden (if not unexpected) addition of holiday cheer still finds new ways to disappoint. I can’t even give a good example of the type of music they play there; just looking for it would probably make me want to one-up Van Gogh and chop off both ears.

So far, I have been able to identify two leading factors in why this is the case (that is, why not just normal-people Christmas songs?). The first is that repetition would probably breed contempt for just about anything. It hasn’t happened to the songs I do like in the playlist because they only come up so often.

The second is that, as I learned recently, the playlist is actually a Youtube Music playlist, which means it’s curated by someone, and the someone that puts together the normal music set probably also picks the Christmas songs. So really, the entire store has to suffer because of one person’s bad taste.

Well, that’s not entirely fair. There’s no Carol of the Bells on there to terrify me, for example, and some good songs do make it through. But just like the rest of the list, the ratio of good songs to bad is very lopsided.

Maybe that’s the point. Maybe our music is designed this way so that the good songs stand out more. I doubt it, but that’s one of the ways I keep hope alive in this minimum-wage world, I guess. It’s certainly a better thought than the alternative.

-F

No Accounting for Taste

I’m dropping the Raindrops on Roses label for a second because, although I’m going to be making a recommendation in this post, I’m more interested in reflecting on three different albums and the popular reaction to each of them. With that thesis out of the way:

Justice (or Jus✝ice if you’re being particularly pedantic), is a very popular French House duo, perhaps most well known for their debut album, “✝” (generally referred to as “Cross”, which even the non-pedants use). Songs from this album -- Genesis, D.A.N.C.E., and Waters of Nazareth in particular -- have been used in all sorts of media, from game soundtracks to trailers to even being heavily featured. The film The Square, winner of the 2017 Palme D’Or at Cannes Film Festival, for example, featured Genesis heavily in one of the more prominent scenes in the film (though it is erroneously referred to as “Track Five” when it has never, ever, shown up as the fifth track on any of their albums. Like, it’s not that hard to check that sort of thing, come on). They’ve also done a handful of remixes -- We Are Your Friends, a remix of Never Be Alone by Simian, being the most popular -- and a pair of live albums, but what I want to focus on more is the reaction to their two follow-up albums: “Audio, Video, Disco” and “Woman”.

A popular phrase I’ve seen used to describe the music in ✝ is a prog rock album where they forgot to add the melodies. Obviously this isn’t always true, the three songs on the album with vocals, for example, but Waters of Nazareth especially sounds like a droning baseline with drum hits. And people love it. So when Audio, Video, Disco started adding guitars and other melodious instruments, and when Woman added even more, there was a lot of push back from the people who wanted more of the same.

There’s this idea of fandom and how fandoms develop that revolves around this feeling of ownership. More specifically, people come together around a piece of media because they all like it, but when more media is produced, it naturally fractures the fandom group. Just because they all liked the first thing doesn’t mean they naturally enjoy the second, of course. But because the community exists in the first place, people desperately want the general opinion to match theirs.

So arguments happen. And gradually, as more and more media related to the fandom is released, as the fandom becomes more and more split, the arguments multiply and take over any influence the original creator might have had. I’ve noticed this especially with music, as length between new material is directly proportional to the amount of hype and subsequent backlash that can fracture a group. Audio, Video, Disco wasn’t “✝ 2.0”, so to many it was inferior and not worth even the single listen required to make that judgement.

I don’t really know where I’m going with this. Personally I like both Audio, Video, Disco and Woman, even if some of that appreciation is comparing them with their predecessors. I guess I just wanted to caution against this sort of fan-related groupthink that can occur. “Everyone has their own opinion” is one of those near-meaningless platitudes that people tend to hate, but I hope I explained the sort of viewpoint that leads to it well enough, and maybe in the meantime I gave you one more musical artist to listen to. Just don’t talk about it on the internet.

-F

"World" Muzzak

Muzzak isn’t universally terrible, but it is generally subpar. It’s the sound quality, I think, the small buzzing that permeates throughout the song. The quiet atonal hum that distracts the mind from the melody. The worst song I’ve ever heard was a poor-quality rendition of My Heart Will Go On by Celine Dion used as hold music for some company I can’t remember the name of.

The restaurant I work at has muzzak. I’ve been told it’s some radio station or streaming service that does the occasional updates to their playlist, but outside of the Christmas tunes added at the appropriate time (though I have learned there are some actual garbage covers of Carol of the Bells out there), I’ve yet to hear any song I haven’t heard a thousand times before.

Here are the songs that I like on our muzzak playlist: I Won’t Let You Down by OK Go, Cello Song by Nick Drake, and Booty Swing by Parov Stelar. And even then they’re ruined by either being mixed in with seemingly hundred of songs I dislike or, when they are all together, they’re still corrupted by poor speakers and just a little too soft to understand.

I’m not an audiophile by any stretch of the imagination. I buy cheap headphones and when they inevitably break six months later, I buy them again. I just wish that these songs sounded better, or, failing that, better music altogether.

We’ve actually had this discussion before, or at least those of us who are nowhere near influential enough to change anything. We’ve talked about what songs we would add if given the chance. I’m not sure how I would answer. The restaurant presents itself as a gathering together of cultures. “Dishes from all around the world, and one from Wisconsin” adorns one wall, for example. And there is some variety in cultures in the music. Parov Stelar is Austrian, for example.

But we don’t serve Austrian dishes. We don’t play music from Wisconsin. Outside of these rare example, the only memorable songs are some variant of country or hispanic (though we do serve a few spanish dishes such as an Adobo). An entire third of our menu, the Asian dishes, are entirely missing from our track selection.

I get that muzzak is meant to play in the background. That it’s supposed to go unnoticed until it isn’t there. But there has to be something we can do to create the same environment that our food does. Little things like music, I’m sure, go a long way.

-F

Anime Music

Here are a few things I don’t really keep private, even if I haven’t mentioned them yet on this blog: I played soccer in high school, and occasionally I listen to music my parents not-so-affectionately refer to as “Techno-Bluegrass.”

That’s fine, though. That’s the stereotype. Parents aren’t supposed to like their children’s music. And Eurobeat -- the actual name for Techno-Bluegrass -- certainly leans more towards the “acquired taste” side of things. It’s certainly aggressive at times, and, to my mother’s chagrin, occasionally uses the banjo as part of its melody. But through various media, from cartoons to Sonic the Hedgehog, Eurobeat has become its own little niche of “pump-up” music best used for anything from workouts to simply staying awake in the car.

This is why, whenever I got the opportunity to run the booth during Junior Varsity’s pregame warmups, I went straight to it. I didn’t get to too many times, mind you, but I did take the opportunities I got.

This story takes place in senior year of high school. Our previous soccer coach had decided to retire after just having won us our league’s championship, leaving us with high spirits, but maybe more than a little tentative energy meeting our new coach. At one point early in the season, after a particularly disjointed practice, this new coach declared that we needed to write a one-page paper on teamwork. I half-assed it like any senior would.

I apparently made him cry.

We were coming in on the final games of the season, and this was perhaps my third or fourth time in the booth. Dave Simon’s Speed Man had just wrapped up, and I was going to pick another song when the head coach entered the booth.

“Let me play a song,” he said.

He played Jason Aldean’s The Only Way I Know. Which I would be fine with. I’m not the biggest fan of where country music has gone in the past few years (even if typing that sentence makes me the biggest snob on the planet), but its lyrics were relevant to the situation. It’s a song about winning. So yes, I would have been fine with it.

If he hadn’t also said, “Enough of this anime crap.”

I get it. I get how each generation hates every other generation’s music. I’ve had discussions on the merits of a brostep creator versus a symphony. I’ve internally tried to keep track of what my friends are listening to so I can avoid playing anything we disagree on aloud. But I’m not sure what’s accomplished by, when leading a team already falling apart at the seams, already ready to get the season over with, that specific comment needed to be made.

-F