Tuesday, December 19g

ONE IS SPOTIFY MAKING MUSIC MUZAK?
I’ve always had issues with Spotify. This article by Lizz Pelly at The Baffler illuminates the subject brilliantly. “Spotify loves “chill” playlists: they’re the purest distillation of its ambition to turn all music into emotional wallpaper. They’re also tied to what its algorithm manipulates best: mood and affect. Note how the generically designed, nearly stock photo images attached to these playlists rely on the selfsame clickbait-y tactics of content farms, which are famous for attacking a reader’s basest human moods and instincts. Only here the goal is to fit music snugly into an emotional regulation capsule optimized for maximum clicks: “chill.out.brain,” “Ambient Chill,” “Chill Covers.” “Piano in the Background” is one of the most aptly titled; “in the background” could be added to the majority of Spotify playlists.”

TWO SOMEBODY HAD TO…

Turns out that Swedemason was the man who stepped up…

THREE ROOTS & TOOTS!
I’d really recommend a terrific Sky Arts documentary, Toots and the Maytals: From the Roots, about reggae’s beginnings and the intertwined career of “Toots” Hibbert. Beautifully made, it contrasts excellent interviews and documentary footage with his current band performing his greatest songs (I liked that the drummer had his setlist written on his snare drum head).

FOUR A THEORBO? REALLY?
In an early music review in The Guardian there was a tantalising picture of Alex McCartney playing a lute-like instrument that looked ten feet long. It’s a theorbo.

Wikepedia: “The theorbo is a plucked string instrument of the lute family, with an extended neck and a second pegbox. Like a lute, a theorbo has a curved-back sound box [a hollow box] with a wooden top, typically with a sound hole, and a neck extending out from the soundbox. As with the lute, the player plucks or strums the strings with one hand while fretting the strings with the other hand; pressing the strings in different places on the neck produces different pitches, thus enabling the performer to play chords, basslines and melodies.” Alex plays it rather beautifully.

FIVE FROM BERLIN, HOLLYWOOD
While I was in Berlin I came across the Camera Work gallery, a beautiful space showing a really well put together show of Matthew Rolston’s photographs from the eighties and nineties. He was bringing back the kind of portraiture that Hollywood studios made popular in the thirties and forties, the work of men like George Hurrell and Clarence Bull. Strong lighting, rich shadows and mysterious expressions made this really well-curated show fascinating. They’ve aged better than I thought they would – I remember being rather wary of their glamour at the time. [Click on the picture to enlarge. It features George Michael on the left and Sade, Tom Waits and Joni Mitchell on the right].

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If you’re receiving the email out, please click on the Date Headline of the page for the full 5 Things experience. It will bring you to the site (which allows you to see the Music Player) and all the links will open in another tab or window in your browser.