Authenticity
In 1983, Susan Rogers became Prince’s chief engineer for the album “Purple Rain,” which is now one of the best-selling albums of all time. Today, Rogers is a cognitive neuroscientist at the Berklee College of Music who explains how and why certain songs “move” us in her new book, “This is What it Sounds Like: What the Music You Love Says About You,” which I’m currently reading. In a chapter dedicated to explaining music “authenticity,” Rogers tells a long tale about The Shaggs, a band made up of sisters from New Hampshire who have been dismissed as “hauntingly bad” by many, but considered brilliantly weird by Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain and countless others. Check out Susan Orlean’s 1999 New Yorker profile of them and then have a listen: prepare to cringe, laugh, or applaud, maybe all at the same time. Then consider: what makes music “bad,” and when is “bad” actually good?
Rock Journalism
Rolling Stone Magazine and Creem Magazine have both been credited with producing important, fearless, unapologetic rock music journalism. The amount of truth to those claims probably has a lot to do with your age, taste, and your definition of what good music journalism is. Mark Maron recently interviewed Rolling Stone founder Jann Wenner, and the majority of the conversation seemed to revolve around Wenner’s nostalgia for late 1960s and early 1970s San Francisco rock bands. Critics say Rolling Stone’s new “scoop-hungry, Twitter-happy” editor is turning the magazine into a turbocharged Daily Beast.
Creem Magazine rebooted itself this Fall, with staff writers who previously wrote for Vice and Jackass. Creem CEO John Martin calls out the “unrelenting, ridiculous positivity” of many music sites, and says Creem intends to bring back “a tone of voice and a backbone,” in contrast to fawning no-opinion pieces. But it’s unclear who cares enough to really pay attention. Both Creem and Rolling Stone formed in the late 1960s, and the music business has changed radically since then. Industry execs say that a “deluge” of new music — and the difficulty of influencing TikTok's algorithm — has made building an audience harder than ever for new acts.
Spotify biopic
In 2010, I drank champagne and ate strawberries at a swank London bar with Daniel Ek, who had co-founded Spotify just four years prior. His right-hand man Shakil Khan had invited a small group of tech folks to hang out, and I tagged along. The atmosphere was festive, but Ek was mostly quiet and hung back from the banter. He left early. I interviewed him soon after for a tiny blurb in a 2010 TIME Magazine “10 Startups That Will Change Your Life” article. I was skeptical of the platform and asked questions about low artist payouts, but a PR exec was in the room the entire time and squashed questions she didn’t like. Ek was a bit shy, but seemed genuine about his intentions and his love of music. I’ve since become a paid subscriber and all my band’s music is up on Spotify. Spotify has more than 381 million users, and 172 million paying subscribers, and continues to compete with Apple Music for the most ears.
Now Spotify’s story has been made into a six-episode fictionalized tech bio-pic called “The Playlist,” based on a 2021 book written by two Swedish journalists that’s not just about Ek — in this portrayal, he is no Mark Zuckerberg or Steve Jobs. He’s more reasonable, more identifiably human — but about all of the key players who made Spotify successful. It’s fun to watch how rejection drove Ek to succeed, but the show doesn’t have the heightened tensions of “The Social Network,” and music takes a backseat to the management of music: how music gets cleaned up, tidied away, repackaged and remonetized.
In other biopic news: Daniel Radcliffe portrays Weird Al Yankovic in a new film on Roku called “Weird,” which stars Rainn Wilson as Dr. Demento, who began playing Weird Al songs on the radio when Yankovic was only 16.
Protest pop
When he was writing the song “Baraye,” 25-year-old singer Shervin Hajipour crowdsourced social media posts from Iranians about their incentives for protesting the government in response to the Kurdish Women’s Freedom Movement following the death of a 22-year-old Iranian woman in mid-September. Hajipour was detained the day after he posted a video for it on Instagram.
In August of last year, lawmakers in Ghana’s Parliament introduced a bill — called the Promotion of Proper Human Sexual Rights and Ghanaian Family Values — that would imprison people who identify as transgender. The openly transgender Ghanaian musician Maxine Angel Opoku responded by releasing a song called “Kill the Bill” and “Wo Fie,” which means “in your home,” in the Akan language, one of the most widely spoken in Ghana.
In other music + politics news, here’s the 2022 Democratic candidate campaign playlists — AOC likes Santigold, Ray Barretto and Lupe Fiasco, Cory Booker likes Panic! at the Disco and Raphael Saadiq — and an interesting read on the politics of country singer Loretta Lynn, who died last month.
Thanks for reading. The MUSIC NERD 19 November Noise playlist is up!