It's Not You, It's Us

How a student DJ made me cry into my breakfast

I’ve been on a college radio streaming kick this last week, more consistently than is usual, and due in large part to a recent (and very terrific) essay collab on ghosting Spotify by

kate ellen

and

Seth Werkheiser

.

Kate and Seth together examine our zombie-like patronage of Spotify, as well as the financial model—Spotify and others’—that has literally enslaved the music industry. Musicians included.

They also provided what read like a technical manual for executing a prison break, from Algorithm Alcatraz and by building your own boat. Alternatives to Spotify in particular are available, but it takes commitment, a substantial amount of energy, and perhaps just as much ingenuity.

I’m not easily scared off by complicated projects, but it wasn’t actually the unimpeachable reasons for quitting Spotify that encouraged me to change some of my evil ways. What I noticed, through the process gifted of all successful persuasive writing, was that those darker, deeper neural grooves contained some very unintended programming.

Curiosity too here…why is quitting an app so frigging complicated?

I listen to a shit ton of music. All day. Every day. I financially support my local NPR stations (WDET, WEMU, WCBN), buy vinyl, go to live shows¹ when I can. And still, I’ve been nagged by the dull headache of denial.

I thought the feeling was exclusively connected with my complicity, of being manipulated by yet another media behemoth, slowly gateway-drugged into a full blown convenience addiction. And while this is absolutely true, there’s something even more incongruent at work here.

I’ve become consequentially spoiled by abundance. A lazy listener, disconnected from most of the music I want to enjoy because my every preference is constantly catered to.

I’ve become, primarily, a consumer of music. Marketed, sold, bought, and routinely discarded—the background soundtrack to my own life fed straight to my gullet like a fattened duck.

Because that’s how it goes, doesn’t it… we relegate our decisions to a computational middle man and lose our relationship to the human source in the process. It becomes a one-way street, both for the artist and the listener, dark and lonely and trash-strewn.

It’s an insidious slight of hand, giving us what feels like autonomy over what we listen to, what we watch, what we pay attention to.

But availability isn’t at all the same as choice; just because we have access doesn’t mean we have connection.

It’s not just the connection with the source we lose through these intermediary ‘services’ either, it’s also the complex tapestry of context, the interactions with other listeners, other connections to the same origin material. The same magic.

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I cried cringey tears into my almond butter yesterday, listening to to the radio.

We’re in the final days of the semester here in our college-run town, so most shows on our local student-run station have been studded with wrap-ups, goodbyes and HAGS² in various forms. It’s been sweet and buzzy, a nostalgic energy and a signal to the townies that we’re about to have our streets back.

This particular undergrad host though, after a set that included The Band, Dylan and some Mississippi Delta blues, took a break to… thank his dad.

He told a quick story, about how he grew up listening to college radio because his dad loved it, before giving him the shout-out that every parent listening shed tears to—thanking him for what’s clearly a healthy obsession with music.

Kid went on to explain how Dad introduced him to The Cure, which led to them seeing a live show together. Same with Meat Puppets, though the local show they had tickets for was cancelled because COVID, so Dad flew them both out to San Francisco for a do-over.

And here Kid is, with his own radio show, queuing up Amy Winehouse because he and his crew ‘blast her stuff all the time back home’ and telling his dad on-air that hosting his show would never have happened without him.

I cried into my breakfast not only because I’m a mom and often daydream about such flagrant and public gratitude from my own kids, or because my parents were just as insistent and generous, or because of the faith in humanity it restored for me. All apply.

But I cried too from recognition. I saw myself, reflected in the primacy of this young man’s love affair with music—me, but behind a patina of years.

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Jonathan Small

’s recent piece about picking the quintessential Gen X anthem added another layer to all this, riffing on the melody repeating in my own head.

As a Gen X-er myself (quick to claim, just as quick to dismiss, in true X form… like, totally… but, whatever), I was hooked into the process and ultimately in agreement with the winner.

Not that it’s the main criteria, but I remember exactly the moment I heard ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ for the first time—in my teenage bedroom, listening to the local alternative radio station broadcast into SE Michigan from Windsor, Ontario.

I stopped whatever non-thing I was doing at the age of 15, stood at the edge of my bed, turned up the volume on my Sharp QT-40 boombox, and stared into the sound… slack-jawed, unmoving, slightly panicked.

I was completely in the moment, and can conjure it up exactly now: It was as if my farmhouse bedroom was the cabin of a passenger plane, the emergency exit pulled mid-flight, everything not belted into a seat sucked into oblivion.

The only living things remaining, me, the music, and the eerie evidence of the people that made it. The rest, void and completely immaterial.

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I knew on that day in September, 1991, that I wasn’t going to hear that song again anytime soon, maybe ever. The spell broke at four minutes and some seconds, and I pivoted immediately to state of hyper-vigilance, praying the DJ would announce the track.

But we often didn’t catch the name, did we? We’d have to call the station, call our friends, keep the dial locked in the event our listening and their queuing aligned. And even if and when they did, we’d still have to buy the album if we wanted to hear that song with any regularity… ie. on-demand.

There was commitment involved, the expending of energy, and, a delayed gratification that streaming not only inhibits, but strategically prevents. Art on demand completely divorces us from the need to pay attention.

What platforms like Spotify are ultimately perpetrating, along with disallowing artists’ reasonable compensation for their work, is a crime of indulgence.

When we hear a new song on a streaming platform, come across a new show, video, whatever the media, what’s the exact next thing we do? We listen again, watch again. Like eating a Dorito, scientifically engineered to make us crave another, we repeat the pleasure. Because we can, because the profit-driven bounty of a never-ending supply of Doritos.

And it’s a short trip to the binge. Because that’s the model. The more we listen, watch and rewatch, the more ad dollars. The more ad dollars, the more profit. For the Dorito producers of the world, obv, not for the artist.

The tragedy is that we lose more than the intention of our attention in those moments. … we lose our appetite for creative connection.

There is no hunger where there’s constant satiation. And it’s the hunger that not only drives our art, but also our connection to the art of others.

Why is quitting an app so hard? Because it’s not actually about the app, or the quitting. It’s about prioritizing, and for most of us, reprioritizing, that truly inexplicable feeling of soulful assimilation with something created—with artistry and some level of mastery, even genius—by another human.

RELATED READING:

Are We Really This Spineless?

AND ICYMI:

Your Art Changes Everything

Let's Be Famous

1. When next you’re in SE Michigan (the Ann Arbor > Detroit corridor), consider this shortlist: Blue Llama Jazz Club, Blind Pig, Kerrytown Concert House, The Ark, El Club, Third Man Records, Detroit Symphony Orchestra, Magic Bag Theater

2. For anyone born pre-Millennium: Have a Great Summer!