Howdy folks!

Another month and another round of gratitude for your patience. I took my annual trip to the Big Ears festival in Knoxville at the end of last month and so I was slow getting back into my regular schedule. Big Ears is my favorite festival. It feels like an annual reset to open my ears and re-light my creative fires. Definitely take a trip out there if you haven’t been. Grayson Haver Currin also goes every year and if you want a better sense of what it’s like, his recap for this year’s event is spot on. Also, Big Ears provides attendees with a beautiful, printed booklet of all the artist bios and they’re all wonderful to read. Shout out to everyone that wrote those bios.

A brief moment to celebrate: Issue 024 means this is the 2 year anniversary of this newsletter. Two years already? Time flies. On that note, I’ll be taking next month off and 025 will hit your inboxes in June.

This month, I’m highlighting pieces on a marketing trend that fakes fan engagement for good and evil, a look back at Low’s debut album, and the book of the month on Alice Coltrane.

Fake fans: tool of The Man or weapon against the Algorithm?

I knew that astroturfing online engagement was a common practice in political warfare and I assumed it happed in marketing, but I never stopped to consider how this practice could be used to bolster the latest buzz band or industry plant.

Enter Eliza McLamb’s piece on the marketing agency Chaotic Good for her personal site. McLamb describes Chaotic Good’s practice of a “narrative campaign” that “promises to create virality by, among other things, manufacturing hundreds of fake fan accounts for musicians.”

What makes this piece so compelling is the murky gray are McLamb finds herself in: Assuming that only talentless hacks like Alex Warren and Sombr would rely on this only to find that her bastion of “real rock stars” Cameron Winter is also a client of Chaotic Good.

The reality is that every artist must overcome the algorithm to get in front of fans. Are Chaotic Good’s practices a necessary evil just for an artist to have a fighting chance? Are they a weapon artists can use to battle back against the attention economy? I really enjoyed reading McLamb grapple with this.

Now that songs are files and files are Godless, record sales mean nothing, and the “analog revolution” won’t change that. Records used to mean fans, which meant money; now that there are no records, it’s just the fans and the money, and fans are a renewable resource. Chaotic Good knows that you can create a fan through imitation.

Revisiting Low’s I Could Live In Hope

Whatever you feel about Pitchfork’s new paywall, one thing that’s still true is the Sunday Review produces high quality writing on the regular.

Mark Richardson takes us back to the birth of Low with his look back on their 1994 debut, I Could Live In Hope. He retells their origin in fantastic detail: I love the story about Alan and Mimi forgetting to put their contact information on their demo, requiring Mark Kramer - who would eventually produce the album - to call the local radio station in Duluth hoping that they know how to get in touch Alan and Mimi (they did!).

He also does as good of a job at describing the appeal of Low and slowcore as I’ve read. There are lines in here that just help you “get it”:

At times, you can sense your body wanting beats to come faster, and the music’s confident insistence of its pulse keeps knocking you back. The pace becomes a force in and of itself.

Book of the Month: Comic Music: The Life, Art, and Transcendence of Alice Coltrane by Andy Beta

Andy Beta’s biography of Alice Coltrane is a feat. It feels like as complete of a picture as one could write about an artist who didn’t leave a large paper trail.

The book is broken down into sections titled by the names that Alice used: Alice McLeod, Alice Coltrane, Turiya, and Swamini Turiyasangitananda. For most of her early life, there is little evidence of Alice and so Beta fills out the book with lots of details of the bop and post-bop eras of Jazz. Her story gets more detailed after her marriage to John Coltrane, and feels more fully fleshed out after his death and once Alice put out her own records.

The book covers Coltrane’s spiritual journey as much as her musical one and your mileage may vary on that. I found it interesting, but Coltrane’s self-described visions are often presented as if they were true and there’s something in me that needed a little more of a skeptical eye in some cases.

The section of the book I loved the most covered her releases starting in 1968. Beta has given a close listen to each of albums and does a fantastic job describing for a novice what makes them compelling while providing contrast with the contemporary response.

This is the kind of book that took me longer to read through because it makes you want to listen to the music. I kept putting it down to go listen to what Beta was describing.

Bonus Links

• Andy Cush’s new column at Hearing Things, In Theory, digs into Townes Van Zandt and the C# minor chord.

• Hanif Abdurraqib reviews Mitski’s new album in The New Yorker (I missed this in February)

• Michael Rancic asks “What Does Sampling Mean in An Era of Instant Music Generation?” in the new issue of New Feeling.

Thank you for reading!

If you missed it up top: I’m taking next month off! See you in June!

Justin Anderson-Weber