Can Music Escape The Tyranny Of Streaming?
Last week, I yammered on about pop’s displacement behind the ‘enemy lines’ (wink, wink, nudge nudge) of noise. Former viral pop bombshells Billie Eilish and now Clairo have released pop records that are pretty much the antithesis of your everyday algorithm-driven dullness. Melody, discordant noise, Musique Concrete, and out-of-whack fidelity give their songs the illusion that they exist in a tangible environment instead of a hermetically-sealed vacuum.
Whether that’s a natural defense mechanism against the way music is consumed in the age of streams, that’s something I can but hypothesize. I do know that said vacuum is more present than ever: the data-driven fashion Spotify and most other streaming services determine what we hear is keeping us from developing new impulses and tastes. As music journalist Liz Pelly righteously points out in this article for The Baffler: “It all appears limitless, a function of the platform’s infinite supply, but in reality, it is tightly controlled by Spotify’s staff and dictated by the interests of major labels, brands, and other cash-rich businesses who have gamed the system.”
It begs the question of how this system can possibly be overridden. Music within the context of art has an undeniable power to shatter bonds, but even people whose opinions I hold in high regard are wondering if there’s anything looming beyond streaming purgatory. What kind of entity could generate a big enough glitch to pull a Truman Burbank, untether from capitalism’s domestication of music?
Norwegian artist and musician Jenny Hval — no stranger to letting space conform to art instead of vice versa — has made bold attempts to clamber up these seemingly insurmountable walls. “A lot of an artist’s work these days in the music world is about constant engagement with the audience and social media,” she told me last year in an interview for Drowned In Sound. “Which for me, well — it’s not that I hate all of it, but it’s not the platform I want to speak in a personal tone to. Through my music, I can respond better to both criticism and appreciation of the actual music itself.”
Hval rebels in an inverse way, actively seeking out the big themes (“love, life, death, the ocean”) she bristled against in the past, hoping to reach the listener through the void. On her EP ‘The Long Sleep’, she imagines Spotify as this tangible universe. “But it’s a very personal outer space, the phone and computer world of our daily interactions — so I was imagining I could create a situation where I get to speak directly, where I could break the fourth wall, or at least the wall between album and listener.”
Berlin-based artist Holly Herndon takes on a different approach on her latest album PROTO, juxtaposing organic sound sources with those that only exist within the digital vacuum. On her track ‘Godmother’ — a collaboration with Indiana’s beat wizard Jlin — they actually force-fed the album’s AI musician Spawn glitchy soundscapes, essentially teaching it to improvise out of it own volition. This could basically be considered the modern-day equivalent to John Cage’s ‘I Ching’, allowing happenstance to take the wheel from human intent. Imagine an artist like Herndon trying that with Spotify’s intricate algorithms — and all those neatly contrived playlists — suddenly become randomly overridden with Merzbow, The Body, and Prurient tracks. That’s the type of cyber-attack I could get behind.
The great thing about the delightfully shrewd meta-ways Jenny Hval and Holly Herndon are trying to leave a mark, is that it channels the notion of possibility over futility. It’s a wholly positive way of using music as a language to disrupt people out of their inertia. It also highlights music’s ability to trigger something deeper than just the bland upholding of specific moods or activities: it can unnerve, second-guess or derail you to an unexpected train of thought.
And since we’re talking about language, let’s examine author Gretchen McCulloch’s bold assertion that the internet hasn’t dumbed down language, but actually changed it for the better. I just ordered her new book Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language, and I’m very eager to find out if her findings on written language also apply to the language of music. Just like Spotify has seemingly dumbed down how we hear and experience music, popular opinion suggests ‘internetspeak’ is devolving our way of communicating, both orally and written.
Truth be told, it’s easy to give in to that assumption. Right now I’m reading The White Goddess by Robert Graves, a book that was published four decades before I was even born, and I marvel at the vivid language that’s derived from myth and poetry. The intricate storytelling that has shaped this commonly held belief of those big themes Jenny Hval also addresses is so deliciously crackpot and strange, you start to think we’ve been neglecting the full potential of our own vocabulary. Animals, for instance, are all tethered to some kind of wild totemic symbolism that goes far beyond the anthropomorphizing of cats on YouTube.
But maybe that whole ‘internet is making us dumb’-medley is a complete misconception. Could the tendency to express ourselves through GIFs and emoticons hold an equal spiritual and emotional merit? The difference is, maybe, is that we can access it so easily now, that we hardly need to think about it. The prismatic meaning of the Distracted Boyfriend-meme is all intricately wired by its history of use, revealing another dimension to human expression, beyond the verbal.
You could argue that the use of digital avatars becomes a proxy for expressing ourselves outwardly in the real world, and I do agree with that assessment. But a symbol or image seems less a binary than words, which hold a limited sense of meanings and contexts (even if those rules are never cut and dry, not to mention changing rapidly). In some ways, we might be going back the way of ancient Egypt, and emoticons are simply our modern hieroglyphics. Artists like Aphex Twin, Dedekind Cut (Lee Bannon) and Moon Relay have certainly shied away from attaching words to song titles, and congruently, not attaching a certain mood or meaning to the listener.
Personally, yeah, I do hope music — as both language and artform — finds a way to circumvent the tyranny of streaming, and find some kind of wormhole to a higher-level of experiencing music. It concerns me that many assume that streaming is the glass ceiling of listening in that respect, especially because it seems humbling and unfathomable to picture what could be next. If it somehow does align with the inquisitive spirit of Jenny Hval and Holly Herndon, it would be a small victory, even if it gets usurped again by the powers that be. In the end, we can always choose to experience music in the physical space, with artists like Moor Mother finding innovative ways to unshackle from oppression.
Who knows, maybe the next Cher-tweet will inadvertently open a dimensional portal to a place where we’ve figured it all out.
