#18 Celebrating Mood Machine

Happy new year to those who organize time through the Gregorian calendar! We find ourselves in January, named after the two-faced god of doors, Janus, the embodiment of beginnings and endings. My huge gratitude to everyone who reads and supports this ongoing collaborative music/thinking/living project. More info at the end of the newsletter.

Recently I chipped away at my fear of failure and joined a group workshop for “bad poets”. We were prompted to take our despair on inauguration day and turn it into a poem in the style of Tim Blunk's “What Is There To Be Done”. Mine ended up like a weaving of some of the strands I’ve been thinking and writing about over the past year.

question your righteousness 

pay close attention 

remember your neighbor’s name 

and their humanity 

cultivate an inner garden 

a spacious emptiness 

capable of holding radical futures 

and crushing defeats 

do not lose touch with the real 

observe the origin of your desires 

cycle between the personal and the systemic

differentiate between rest and escapism 

seize the means of artistic production

In MB news, I contributed a small instrumental called Temple Bells for a compilation benefiting LA mutual aid efforts. It is a piano/synth improvisation over field recordings from my visit to California last year. I hope readers in LA are holding up okay <3

The other event looming large in January has been the release of Mood Machine, my partner-in-crime Liz Pelly’s deep and perspective-shifting investigation and critique of Spotify. If you know a musician you’ve probably heard them grouse about the paltry royalty rates paid out per stream but Liz takes the reporting much further and reveals how these streaming platforms are effecting artistry and listening itself. I highly recommend her book both to music lovers but also any reader interested in the costs of letting digital corporate platforms continually encroach into the most sacred parts of our lives.

She interviews past playlist curators who were pressured to remove working musicians and add low-cost stock music onto major playlists, she highlights their “discovery mode” program where labels can enroll their artists to make 30% less in exchange for being boosted in the recommendation algorithm, a program strikingly similar to the illegal practice of payola. She shows the extent in which the major labels use their clout to push out independent and “hobbyist” musicians and how Spotify’s own political lobbyist fight against higher songwriter payments as well as opposing online privacy laws so they can sell their user’s listening habits to data brokers.

This all may sound bleak but I’ve been blown away by the positive response both from major publications like Rolling Stone, Washington Post, NPR but also listeners and musicians on all levels who feel seen and a lot less crazy. At the heart of Liz’s critique is the idea that having all music on one platform “flattens” culture. It tries to make irrelevant the whole diverse ecosystem of indie cultural and political spaces that strive for a different set of values than the nakedly capitalistic major label system. I have certainly felt that shift over the 15 years as an independent band. All of a sudden there are more people fighting over smaller scraps and feeling forced to participate in monopolistic and unregulated online platforms that aren’t made for deep engagement. It can feel like my life’s work keeps being further stripped of it’s important context. In some ways that was the motivating factor to have a more personal essay style newsletter.

As the book nears its conclusion, Liz starts looking at alternative systems like democratically run local streaming services through the library to point people back to their own community in the US and Canada, or collectives like Catalytic Sound which move away from the individual patronage model to supporting whole communities, and current legislation that would add a tax to streaming services to directly benefit performers. She stresses that the answer lies not in a single solution but in rethinking the value and function of music itself and organizing as musicians and listeners to make sure that music communities don't become homogenous reflections of the digital platforms themselves.

So that got me thinking, what does music on these platforms do? Does it help make your workday less boring and help you focus? Does it make you nostalgic for your formative years? Does the artistry stimulate you? Does a genre connect you with a worldwide community who you chat with online and at concerts? Does it touch you deeply in an almost religious way? Do you identify what you listen to as part of your identity? Does it cheer you up when you feel down? Is it played in a coffee shop to make it feel more cozy or at a party to make people feel good? Is it an individual act of the expression or a collaborative act that helps you better understand a culture? Is it meant to make you move your body? Is it in a commercial to make a car look cool or in a movie to make you cry? Was it written 400 years ago before copyright? Do you listen to a track on repeat to help you fall asleep? Is it one of 20 songs a day pumped out by a producer for a stock music company? Or 10,000 a day generated by an AI program from opaque training data? Should all these things be on the same platform, contextualized like equal products on a shelf, competing for the same slice of the pro rata payout? It seems truly absurd. How and who decides context and value?

This book has been a huge part of my life for the past couple years as I gave feedback on early drafts and helped record the audiobook version in our apartment. It has been simmering in the back of my mind as I’ve been writing new songs and essays and consider how I want to move forward as a musician. Art can seem frivolous compared to war or food and housing insecurity but I think that is the wrong way to look it. Creating thoughtful work (as a professional or hobbyist!) and being part of a caring, ethical community opens up a new way of existing where it is easier to consider yourself as not a passive consumer or someone without the ability to do anything except accept the status quo. I believe the type of deep engagement that thoughtful art asks of us makes culture more fertile for collective action, a way forward for tackling systemic issues within economics and politics that are impossible to change as atomized individuals.

Although individual action is only partially effective, I did finally unsubscribe from Spotify and will be using a hodgepodge of services to listen to music from youtube, to domestic radio broadcasts to international radio through radio garden, to our massive backlog of LP’s and tapes that have barely been touched. I am hoping to take the energy I used to put into my Spotify Playlists and attempt a more freeform radio show that can incorporate more types of media and experimentation. Please let me know if you have a favorite way of finding curated music! I’m especially interested in finding more online radio shows of all genres. Or always feel free to drop a line with a comment or recommendation of any type. It makes writing these more fun!

My heart is broken by the first few days of our new president's brazen executive orders but I can only hope we can use this moment to keep “walking and thinking at the same time” to do the small actions available in our lives but also connect with national and global solidarity movements, and make an engaged, collective, and ethical life fun, open, and irresistible to those who might otherwise let their alienation and despair lead them down a destructive path. 

Thank you for everything you are doing.

j+

Notable Sounds

Original Spring by Adelyn Strei (intricate and raw atmospheric folk songs from pal and collaborator Addie)

Night Palace by Mount Eerie (I was moved by this massive minimalist work of Phil Elverum and I'm especially enamored by the line "recorded music is a statue of a waterfall")

Russian Classical Music station on Radio Garden (I love this station, I've had it on the whole time I've been writing this newsletter, it has a lot of interesting choral stuff)

Notable Reading

Mood Machine by Liz Pelly (duh)

n+1 article about Netflix by Will Tavlin (this is similar to Liz's arguments but about the Netflix algorithm shaping film, very interesting!)

The Poetry Foundation on Hannah Arendt's poetry practice by Daegan Miller (an article about her career as a theorist who still valued the way poetry could go beyond the limits of language)

Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto by Kohei Saito (a very convincing book about learning from the global South, limiting consumption, and ceasing the pursuit of a constant growth economy for the sake of the planet)

The Years of Theory: Postwar French Thought To The Present by Frederic Jameson (this is a collection of the late Jameson's Duke lectures on French philosophers. The way they questioned the hidden structures of everyday life from the formation of political power down to the syntax of sentences themselves was mind-blowing when not incomprehensible to me)

Notable Viewing

Soundtrack to a Coup d'Etat (incredible and heartbreaking documentary about the cross section of the African decolonization movement and American jazz and the CIA)

Grand Theft Hamlet (Yes, this is a documentary about a staging of Hamlet inside the violent video game world of Grand Theft Auto during lockdown, it was absolutely hilarious in a slapstick way and unexpectedly poignant)

Bread and Puppet (I was so happy to finally catch a show from long-running Vermont countercultural freaks Bread and Puppet. The puppets were great and the whole show was a wonderful spectacle. We bought a lot of their cheap art)

Growing at the Edges is a place for me to reflect and freestyle on ideas found throughout the year as part of my music-writing + existing process. This letter and full archive are available for free to subscribers (like you!) of the Mutual Benefit band mailing list. If you wish to support the band for $1 or more a month, future letters will simply be sent directly to your inbox. This can be done on the "account" settings on our website.