Music Notes
By 
Might as well have a short musical discussion here. Not much going on in the music world right now with the holidays, but we are here.
Jimmy Carter probably had the best musical taste of any modern president. Maybe Obama, but his playlists sound like they are curated by someone at Spin. Carter really enjoyed the music and musicians liked Carter. Here’s the entirety of the White House Jazz Festival Jimmy Carter held in 1978. Carter hanging with Cecil Taylor!
I took that picture above at the Allman Brothers House in Macon. They still had Berry Gordy’s bed. I don’t care if it’s been 50 years, I wasn’t getting close to whatever social diseases remain in that bed!
Here’s a some other articles about Carter and musicians, at Variety, focusing on rock and roll, and at the Tennesseean, focusing on country. Jon Pareles had a nice NYT op-ed on Carter opening the White House to modern music.
So I was watching the horror that was the Oregon-Ohio State game. The second most horrible thing on that broadcast was hearing Rhiannon Giddens do a JPMorgan Chase commercial directed by Gus Van Sant. Look, I don’t really believe in the old “selling out” thing. I get it, we all need money and if someone wants to pay me for what is a pretty harmless thing like singing a song, whatever. But….when I read Giddens about how capitalism warped country music, just as an example, what I am supposed to take from that now? I mean, there’s companies one can work for and then there’s one of the biggest companies in the history of capitalism that has done a whole lot of evil things. I just dunno……Can I take the critique of capitalism seriously from someone singing for the global banking industry?
This story about saving the children of Nairobi through exposure to classical music reeks of colonialism. Maybe I’m being too harsh, but there’s a certain kind of person who really loves to read shit like this.
You will be glad to know that Slipknot has no rules when it comes to writing new music. In case you couldn’t tell….
New Year’s Eve is the 44th anniversary of the closure of Armadillo World Headquarters in Austin.
We lost Rodessa Barrett Porter, gospel legend.She was 94.
Took the Times awhile to get an obit up for Stanley Booth, but they did a pretty good job with it.
I first heard about ghost artists in the summer of 2017. At the time, I was new to the music-streaming beat. I had been researching the influence of major labels on Spotify playlists since the previous year, and my first report had just been published. Within a few days, the owner of an independent record label in New York dropped me a line to let me know about a mysterious phenomenon that was “in the air” and of growing concern to those in the indie music scene: Spotify, the rumor had it, was filling its most popular playlists with stock music attributed to pseudonymous musicians—variously called ghost or fake artists—presumably in an effort to reduce its royalty payouts. Some even speculated that Spotify might be making the tracks itself. At a time when playlists created by the company were becoming crucial sources of revenue for independent artists and labels, this was a troubling allegation.
At first, it sounded to me like a conspiracy theory. Surely, I thought, these artists were just DIY hustlers trying to game the system. But the tips kept coming. Over the next few months, I received more notes from readers, musicians, and label owners about the so-called fake-artist issue than about anything else. One digital strategist at an independent record label worried that the problem could soon grow more insidious. “So far it’s happening within a genre that mostly affects artists at labels like the one I work for, or Kranky, or Constellation,” the strategist said, referring to two long-running indie labels.* “But I doubt that it’ll be unique to our corner of the music world for long.”
By July, the story had burst into public view, after a Vulture article resurfaced a year-old item from the trade press claiming that Spotify was filling some of its popular and relaxing mood playlists—such as those for “jazz,” “chill,” and “peaceful piano” music—with cheap fake-artist offerings created by the company. A Spotify spokesperson, in turn, told the music press that these reports were “categorically untrue, full stop”: the company was not creating its own fake-artist tracks. But while Spotify may not have created them, it stopped short of denying that it had added them to its playlists. The spokesperson’s rebuttal only stoked the interest of the media, and by the end of the summer, articles on the matter appeared from NPR and the Guardian, among other outlets. Journalists scrutinized the music of some of the artists they suspected to be fake and speculated about how they had become so popular on Spotify. Before the year was out, the music writer David Turner had used analytics data to illustrate how Spotify’s “Ambient Chill” playlist had largely been wiped of well-known artists like Brian Eno, Bibio, and Jon Hopkins, whose music was replaced by tracks from Epidemic Sound, a Swedish company that offers a subscription-based library of production music—the kind of stock material often used in the background of advertisements, TV programs, and assorted video content.
For years, I referred to the names that would pop up on these playlists simply as “mystery viral artists.” Such artists often had millions of streams on Spotify and pride of place on the company’s own mood-themed playlists, which were compiled by a team of in-house curators. And they often had Spotify’s verified-artist badge. But they were clearly fake. Their “labels” were frequently listed as stock-music companies like Epidemic, and their profiles included generic, possibly AI-generated imagery, often with no artist biographies or links to websites. Google searches came up empty.
….
For more than a year, I devoted myself to answering these questions. I spoke with former employees, reviewed internal Spotify records and company Slack messages, and interviewed and corresponded with numerous musicians. What I uncovered was an elaborate internal program. Spotify, I discovered, not only has partnerships with a web of production companies, which, as one former employee put it, provide Spotify with “music we benefited from financially,” but also a team of employees working to seed these tracks on playlists across the platform. In doing so, they are effectively working to grow the percentage of total streams of music that is cheaper for the platform. The program’s name: Perfect Fit Content (PFC). The PFC program raises troubling prospects for working musicians. Some face the possibility of losing out on crucial income by having their tracks passed over for playlist placement or replaced in favor of PFC; others, who record PFC music themselves, must often give up control of certain royalty rights that, if a track becomes popular, could be highly lucrative. But it also raises worrying questions for all of us who listen to music. It puts forth an image of a future in which—as streaming services push music further into the background, and normalize anonymous, low-cost playlist filler—the relationship between listener and artist might be severed completely.
Folks, get off the goddamn algorithms in your life. I was recently reading a Zadie Smith piece in The New York Review of Books and she noted that the greatest propaganda tool in human history is the algorithm and that liberals are just as susceptible to this as everyone else. Let me quote her a bit:
Perhaps the biggest difference between the right and the left in the past fifteen years has been in their understanding of Gleichschaltung. In place of the megaphone, the radio, and the printing press, antiprogressive forces are now making excellent use of the greatest propaganda tool ever invented: the algorithm. For while the elites on the right have understood from the outset the ways in which algorithms can be used to “impose mandatory conformity” on a population, the hubristic elites on the left apparently really believed that although they, too, were participating in the exact same global behavior modification experiment, only those other people, the “deplorables,” had been truly affected by it. Other people had been converted to the dark side. Other people had brain-rot or were red-pilled. We meanwhile were just expressing our sincere political opinions. At least red-pilling contributes to the vote count. The dark comedy of it all is that large sections of the left only really successfully applied Gleichschaltung to themselves.
….
Recently, in Barcelona, I found myself in a hall addressing four hundred fourteen-year-olds. I was meant to be talking to them about fiction, but every question they asked was about social media. Every single question. And they were in earnest. It surprised me! The tone was urgent. Feeling myself to be in a safe space with walls, I tried something out on them, an idea I normally never say out loud because of how cringe it is. The sort of idea that reeks of utopian optimism and that nobody serious has gone anywhere near in the past fifteen years. And to speak in such a way in front of a hall full of teens? Truly like something from a waking nightmare. But there they all were, sitting in front of me, filled with this surprising and unexpected urgency, so I just said it.
I began as follows: in a hypercapitalist economy—one that has found a way to monetize human attention itself—we are the product. Well, sure, everybody knows that by now, even the fourteen-year-olds. But within this fact does there not lurk the not-so-hidden possibility of a radical and thrillingly simple act of resistance? Think about it (I said, to the fourteen-year-olds). With every other extractive and exploitative industry of the past four hundred years, the process of unraveling and resistance was far more complicated. To end the racialized system of capital called “slavery,” for example, you had to violently revolt, riot, petition, boycott, change minds, change laws, all in order to end one of the most lucrative gravy trains the Western world has ever known. To rein in the unprecedented wealth of the robber baron industrialists at the turn of the twentieth century, you had to regulate their businesses, the banks, and the labor laws themselves, and create the electoral majorities needed to do so. But to seriously damage the billionaire empires that have been built on your attention and are now manipulating your democracies? To achieve that right now? All you guys would need to do is look away. And thus give a new meaning to the word woke.
Maybe Spotify is not the most evil of the algorithms, but then maybe it is not since it is eviscerating one key component of art in American life. Just get off it! Choose your own music! It’s not hard!!!! Don’t let corporations control you!
This week’s playlist:
- Mon Laferte, 1940 Carmen
- Damu the Fudgemunk, Raw Poetic, and Archie Shepp, Ocean Bridges
- Ray Price, The Other Woman
- Bas Jan, Back to the Swamp
- Laura Veirs, The Lookout
- Speedy Ortiz, Foil Deer
- John Prine, self-titled
- Merle Haggard, A Portrait of Merle Haggard
- Thumbscrew, Multicolored Midnight
- Fred Moten/Brandon Lopez/Gerald Cleaver, Moten
- Jason Isbell, Sirens from the Ditch
- Jason Isbell, Weathervanes
- John Moreland, Big Bad Luv
- Bomba Estereo, Deja
- Sonny Sharrock, Black Woman
- Pink Floyd, Animals
- Alejandro Escovedo, More Miles than Money
- Johnny Cash, American II: Unchained
- Sunflower Bean, Twenty Two in Blue
- Wednesday, Rat Saw God
- Dim Lights, Thick Smoke: Country Music Hit Parade, 1948
- Frank Ocean, Channel Orange
- The Beths, Expert in a Dying Field
- Bob Dylan, Desire
- Drive By Truckers, American Band
- Jason Isbell, The Nashville Sound
- Tom T. Hall, New Train Same Rider
- Sonny Rollins/McCoy Tyner/Ron Carter/Al Foster, Milestone Jazz Stars in Concert
- Willie Nelson, Sings Kristofferson
- Chuck Cleaver, Send Aid
- Ray Charles, At Newport
- Conway Twitty, 25 Number Ones
Album Reviews:
Halo Maud, Celebrate
In French and English but usually boring and sometimes silly. A little poppy, a little psychedelic, but largely a lot blah.
C
Andile Khumalo, Tracing Hollow Traces
Khumalo is a South African composer who came to Boston to study under George Lewis. Wet Ink Ensemble–always reliable for a good interpretation–handles most of the playing here, but with plenty of help. This is very much a work rooted in contemporary classical music, but one where Khumalo is trying to pick through the music of South Africa, jazz, and all the other influences he’s heard over the years. It’s a challenging work, but one that really rewards the listener with ideas you probably haven’t conceptualized before.
A
Ches Smith, Laugh Ash
I’ve become such a huge Ches Smith fan over the years and his new Laugh Ash only reinforces that. He brought this work to Big Ears last year, but I did not get a chance to see it, or I guess I chose something else. Well, you live with the choices you make at a festival like that. It consists of Shara Lunon – voice and vocal processing
Anna Webber – flute
Oscar Noriega – clarinets
James Brandon Lewis – tenor saxophone
Nate Wooley – trumpet
Jennifer Choi – violin
Kyle Armbrust – viola
Michael Nicolas – cello
Shahzad Ismaily – bass and keyboards
Ches Smith – electronics, programming, vibes, drums, tubular bells, glockenspiel, timpani, tam tam, metal percussion
Lunon is in some ways the star of the show here, with her striking vocals. But it’s all Smith. Like so much of the great jazz of today, it takes the forms and traditions of jazz and mixes them with almost everything else in the world–in this case a lot of electronics, some hip hop, some chamber music, some punk, the avant garde from about everywhere. What a band and what an album. I wonder what I did see instead of this in Knoxville………
A
La Luz, News of the Universe
Solid work here by this always worthy west coast band. They’ve undergone a lot of changes–people in and people out, but it remains an all-female band of indie stars. It’s dreamy as always, but it’s also kind of art-rockish, if a bunch of sounds inspired by the surf of southern California can go there and it can, in the way that Brazilian bands can. The lyrics move darker here–cancer has entered the picture. They’ve been reading a lot of Octavia Butler and the lyrics are sci-fiesque as well. In any case, it’s a solid if not astounding work.
B+
Evan Parker/Barry Guy, So It Goes
This sax and bass duet album from two guys who have played together for approximately forever doesn’t really break new ground for them–Parker and Guy have long been on the outer fringe of the jazz world and their music reflects that life. But it is a great example of two masters who know everything about each other figuring out how to expand their universe even more. At the very least, it’s a worthy recording.
B+
Doesn’t seem to be anything from this album on YouTube, so here’s Parker and Guy playing with their frequent partner in crime Paul Lytton back in 1996.
Mitski, The Land is Inhospitable and So Are We
I didn’t get to this in 2023, despite being a huge Mitski fan, so I finally am getting to it at the beginning of 2025. I don’t know that this quite has the punch of some of the earlier albums; there’s no “nobody fucks me like me” lines here. But Mitski remains the queen of emotive indie pop. She also seems a lot more relaxed here, which might explain the slightly chiller sense of the album. Fame did get to her to some extent and she talked about not working anymore, but then decided to do this album. She also got the modern master of orchestral arrangements in indie music, Drew Erickson who did Father John Misty’s Chloe and the Next 20th Century among other albums, to provide a rich palate here. At the very least, another solid album in an incredibly impressive career that one hopes has another few albums in it at least. Also, excellent title.
A-
Cory Hanson, Western Cum
An, um, interestingly titled album from 2023. But whatever, this is good if you like throwback 70s guitar rock that manages to be something more than nostalgic for Crazy Horse. The way I’d describe this is deeply pleasant in that 70s vibe. This is what it sets out to be–something to throw on when driving across the Great Plains. Remember the glory days when people identified music for road trips instead of New York Times podcasts? This album is for you if you still value that. And, well, I do. I’ll probably pick up a copy.
B+
Bret McKenzie, Songs without Jokes
McKenzie is one of the guys from Flight of the Conchords, so this a title to warn the listeners–this is a serious album from a comedy guy. And the songs are definitely not very happy. But he’s such a damned peppy singer that it’s hard for him to make anyone feel depressed. That’s not such a bad thing. In the end, this is a completely decent set of songs in a pretty straight-forward singer/songwriter/rock format. Basically, he’s listened to a lot of Steely Dan. Now he just needs to pick up the keytar and he’s gold.
B
As always, this is an open thread for all things music and art and none things politics. Except Carter and music. Or the goddamn algorithms ruling your lives.