Category: Music

LMAO

Adriano Ferreira da Silva Filho, a 19-year-old fan from Ilhabela, a beach town in the state of São Paulo, told Rest of World that he wanted to boost “Envolver”’s popularity as a means of paying back an artist who was influential in his life. So, Filho created a series of different playlists to play the song over 2,000 times a day using his laptop and two cellphones to be able to have them all playing simultaneously from different usernames.

“If you only play the track on repeat, Spotify doesn’t count it as a stream,” Filho explained. “They think it’s a bot. So, you have to create a playlist with different tracks and alternate them with the one you want to boost.”

All numbers on platforms are fake or fake-ish. Number of followers, likes, plays, views? All fake. Database 0s and 1s that can be edited however one is pleased. All those numbers are gamed.

I’ve seen someone with half a million followers on Twitter get 3 RTs in four hours. For something about her business. That makes no sense.

Those numbers have zero value, are constantly manipulated and far too many people OBSESS about them.

You’re obsessing about the void, a black box designed for retention, dear. No status here. Focus.

Some 177bpm bass for your senses.

“This was the dawn of a new digital-era way of experiencing time, something we’ve since become totally familiar with. And every gain in consumer-empowering convenience has come at the cost of disempowering the power of art to dominate our attention, to induce a state of aesthetic surrender. Which means that our gain is also our loss. It is also becoming very clear that the brittle temporality of networked life is not good for our psychological well-being; it makes us restless, erodes our ability to focus and be in the moment. We are always interrupting ourselves, disrupting the flow of experience.”

Simon Reynolds in Retromania.

Bro. It really explains well how ten years later we are now slugging through mountains of art and entertainment, how we are basically intellectual zombies. My good friend R was telling me last week how he downloaded a new album and listened to it without listening to it. How he didn’t understand what had changed, why he didn’t enjoy music as much as before (he’s a big music fan).

We have too much. We don’t make any choices. We are drowning.

And it feels like there is no end. It’s one of the most bizarre thing about the West today.

“It’s not that nothing happened in the music of the 2000s. In many ways, there was a manic bustle of micro-trends, subgenres and recombinant styles. But by far the most momentous transformations related to our modes of consumption and distribution, and these have encouraged the escalation of retromania. We’ve become victims of our ever-increasing capacity to store, organize, instantly access, and share vast amounts of cultural data. Not only has there never before been a society so obsessed with the cultural artifacts of its immediate past, but there has never before been a society that is able to access the immediate past so easily and so copiously.”

Reading Retromania by Simon Reynolds.

Lots to ponder here. Implications about the now, the future, how it relates to the world we’re in. It’s fascinating.

This book was written ten years ago and Bruno Mars (and so many others, including myself) is still doing 70s/80s stuff. I keep thinking that in terms of core values, those two decades are peak musicianship: from influences to straight samples, the 1970s and 1980s boast the biggest, tastiest meal of all.

We’re still eating at that table. And that’s fine. Or is it?

Screenshot taken in 2018.

Like, HWAT? I mean I just played the portion that I can’t seek backward, in a democracy. What else do you want?

It’s a bit weird to release older stuff because I don’t feel the same right now, but I enjoyed making that one.

Cheers,

Happy Valentine’s or whatever.

“Betty’s music has been on regular rotation in my life since the early 2000s.” I wrote in 2018.

I guess it’s time for me to get my hand on that documentary.