SCALES #20: entr'acte
Hello!
This marks the end of the first season of SCALES. A handful of inspirations come to mind for wrapping these first twenty (20!) newsletters up in a bow like this: in the newsletter realm, Pome (with 2 seasons under its belt!) and, going further back, Tabs; No More Forever Projects; Aziz Ansari talking about Master of None. As someone with strong maximizer tendencies—always feeling like more improvement is required—acknowledging it's time to call each issue of SCALES finished and good enough to move on, without a lot of polishing, has been a healthy exercise, and I think the same is true for calling it a season. It feels like a good place to pause: twenty is a nice round number, realistically I'd be going on semi-hiatus anyway to make more time for other projects, and I think some time off will help me come up with new ideas about where I can take this. Thanks, as always, for reading.
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One of those other projects is writing up a paper based on the lab work I've fitfully described in this space. One very good piece of advice I first learned as an undergraduate is Always Start With The Figures, so: figures are in pretty good shape; I've spent more than enough time setting up a folder in which a single make command (you don't need to know) gobbles up my plaintext manuscript, figure-generating scripts, and bibliography files and spits out a paper; and now all that remains is, you know, just writing the rest of the words.
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Finding myself midway upon our journey through this shadowy two-thousand-and-seventeenth (-eighteenth?) year of the common era, I thought I'd share my streaming-service "go-to 2017" playlist that's been slowly accumulating. I'm deliberately dancing around questions of bests or rankings; instead, it reflects what I'll listen to time and time again when I just need some music during an interstitial moment, or in transit, or in lab, or at my computer, without too much thinking (but with sufficient willingness to endure advertising breaks). The rules have been simple: only music with a 2017 release date, always appending songs to the bottom of the list. It's largely Anglophone, largely pop songs (pop taken in the broad "not concert music or jazz" sense), though I couldn't resist adding a Chris Thile/Brad Mehldau track.
It also reflects a deliberate attempt to live in the experience of listening to music in 2017: the sounds, the streaming platform, the playlist as fundamental mode of listening. Conversely, at danger of sounding too crotchety, I think there's a lot of value in older modes of listening: the public radio or college radio station, the cheap second-hand CD, the (gasp) purchased mp3. It's funny to me that it's an old-fashioned pose to think, at the end of the year I'd rather buy digital downloads of everything on my "go-to" playlist than to have bought a year-long ad-free subscription. (And I would end up financially ahead!)
Oh, and parents: Parental Advisory Warning. For better or for worse, I've been trained to separate my appreciation for musically interesting things from objectionable lyrics.
So, after a lot of defensive self-justification and qualifications, here's the playlist. (One last apology-in-advance: I'm sorry it's in Spotify's walled garden.) You've been warned.
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It's fun to trace in contemporary songs a through-line of unabashed portrayals of of-the-moment social media technologies. Of course, there's nothing new in writing songs that are self-consciously about new technology, and there's a parallel tradition of songs tying nostalgia to newly outmoded technology, but it's exciting to spot the songs in their moment. Most recently: "WeChat" by Chengdu-dialect-verse-spitting Higher Brothers (via Noisey). I can't comment on the majority of the lyrics, but I am charmed by the English-language opening. (See also: "Erase Your Social", "iSpy".)
The "Global Jukebox" offers samples of vernacular music from around the world, as well as grouping into "Cantometric"-derived clusters, as a continuation of an unfinished Alan Lomax project. (via Times coverage)
Carl Wilson's review of the new HAIM album spirals out into more general criticism on family pop bands as well as the interaction of the 2017 pop music and political landscapes.
A detailed accounting of all the new weird music-generating behavior of the streaming era. (New to me: Spotify, in true Netflix style, padding out popular playlists with "fake" artists they pay upfront.)
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Quick non-music hits: Two responses to the "worst-case climate change scenarios" piece in New York. The erosion of Boston shadow laws. "In the wake of these terrible events, pretty much all of my colleagues have discovered the renewed importance of whatever it is we were working on in the first place. … I think we should be suspicious about this." (h/t A Working Letter) I'm deeply unqualified to give a good smell test, but this Mail & Guardian piece sure paints Rwanda in 2017 as a "huge development gains"/"at what cost to human rights and civil society?" kind of place. Masha Gessen: "The existence of a conspiracy is not an excuse for conspiracy thinking." Naomi Fry spins gold out of a profile of a mid-aughts "second-wave" reality TV star. (Confirmed: he is in fact a Snapchat maestro.)
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Ended up closing out the season with The Music Issue! No complaints here.
—Adam