Of Note 010: Wu Tang, Ethel Cain, Lost Wave, and Mood Machine
Howdy folks,
I hope you’re hanging in there. They can’t kill us ‘til they kill us. I hope you can take a break and read some wonderful music writing.
I noticed many of the pieces I’m featuring this month deal with definition. Who gets to define the music we listen to? How do those definitions change over time? What is the power of that definition and why does it matter?
These questions permeate writing about Wu Tang’s Once Upon A Time In Shaolin, Ethel Cain’s Perverts, old music lost and found, and Liz Pelly’s Mood Machine: The Rise Of Spotify And The Cost Of The Perfect Playlist, the first book I’m featuring in the newsletter.
“How Do You Write About A Record None Of Us Have Heard?”
This is the catalyst for Elmattic’s magnum opus “What We Think About When We Think About Once Upon A Time In Shaolin”, detailing the history and the cultural fall out of Wu Tang’s mysterious single-copy album.
I can’t begin describe this staggering piece, but I’ll try: over 7,500+ words, Elmattic recaps the experiment and its consequences, places it in historical context, and assesses the impact of racism and capitalism among it all. And they go all David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, jumping around in time (denoted as +/- years before or after OUATIS), and going some really unexpected places (one section is titled “[-530,000 OUATIS]: (Ghost voice): NEANDERTHAL BONE FLUTE, AW SHIT, THE BITCH HAD THREE KILOS OF CZECHOSLOVAKIAN COCAINE BANANAS”).
I devoured this piece and I can’t recommend it enough.
Meeting Ethel Cain’s Perverts On Its Own Terms
Most writing about Ethel Cain’s new experimental record, Perverts, doesn’t get past the “she’s rebelling against fame!” framing. As a fan of experimental music, I found the reviews of Perverts that met the record on its own terms much more compelling.
Emma Garland’s review for The Quietus acknowledges the departure this record will be for fans, but she doesn’t let the review hang on it as she assesses its place among Southern Gothic traditions. She listens deeply and pulls out some great descriptions.
Sitting somewhere between the earthy minimalism of Grouper, the slow gloom of Duster, and David Lynch’s fascination with the strange murmur of power lines, radio static and ceiling fans, Perverts starts with the most inaccessible aspects of Ethel Cain’s aesthetic and strays further to the left from there.
At Defector, Kelsey McKinney explores the deep religious connections with the album and how Perverts makes its listeners feel the weight of faith abused. Writing about experimental music is hard, but she nails it by focusing the feelings.
I too have felt the brightness of faith and the gaping emptiness of its departure. I too have walked round and round inside the stations of the cross, and felt the exhaustion that repetition can create. To me, Perverts is not so much an act of defiance, but the sound of something clicking into place. There's an expanse within Perverts that beckons the sublime.
Music Lost and Found
There were two great pieces in January about music in danger of never seeing the light of day again.
Reid Blakley does an overview of “Lostwave”, a genre and subreddit dedicated to identifying music with currently unknown origins, for Stereogum. If you’re a fan of the National Treasure movies or just love a good mystery, this is a fun one to dive into.
Similarly, for Bandcamp Daily Marc Masters tells the story of a lost and found set of meditation music. A label owner found Agartha: Personal Meditation Music, with its cheesy new age cover, at a thrift store and found some magic in the music. He tracked down the composer, Meredith Young-Sowers, and re-released the music. I always love stories of artists seeing their art find admirers, especially long after it was made.
Book of the Month: Mood Machine by Liz Pelly
Based on what I see across my own Bluesky feed, Liz Pelly’s book about Spotify is one of the most anticipated music industry books in a long time. I’m far from the first to write about it and recommend it. You may have already read the except on ghost musicians in Harper’s.
First things first: This book is fastidiously research and sourced, down to internal chat messages between Spotify employees and interviews with current and former employees. It’s meticulous, but written in an absorbing and digestible way.
If you’re looking for bigger revelations than the ghost musicians, you won’t find it. Much of the bad behavior described is unethical, not illegal. And if you’ve ever worked for a tech company or ad agency, you will recognize how mundane decisions, made with profits as incentive, can spiral into unintended consequences. As an ad agency vet myself, I kept nodding my head and questioning moments in my own career. While Pelly’s point of view and values are pretty clear, there are several moments where she gives Spotify the benefit of the doubt and maintains a fair hand (often only for Spotify to later show that, yes, they were being terrible).
What I think is really powerful about this book - something I didn’t expect - is the philosophical questions that Pelly dives into, particularly around how Spotify categorizes musicians and stifles musical innovation as it pushes “profitable” and “artful” further and further apart. This expands the book from a deep dive into Spotify’s business practices to a must-read for musicologists and those who listen deeply and care deeply about art and who makes it.
One More Thing
Julianne Escobedo Shepherd asks the important question: “Does Bruno Mars Know “Fat Juicy & Wet” Is Not About a Hamburger?”
Thank you for reading! See you next month!
Justin Anderson-Weber
