Thank You, Lorde
Nathaniel Krenkel
Nat drops Roxy off at quarter to six. The dinner reservation is for 7pm, so we have an hour to kill, which means a trip to the comic book store on Congress which both has late-ish hours, pinball, and is rad. We each get a little something in case we want part of the meal to be a “reading dinner.” We arrive at the new Westend eatery right on time and are shown to our table. It’s tucked away in a corner. Within a minute I’m noticing two things: the music is loud, and the music is guitar music. Specifically, modern era guitar music, lots of post-Strokes with a few classics tossed in for superficial cred. It’s got some jangle and it’s got plenty of distortion and because of its volume, it’s doing what it was intended to do, that is, blast off the stage and into the faces of fans in the crowd. But we’re not in a crowd, and we’re certainly not fans. In here, it’s simply pushing a ton of unwanted frequencies into our ears, it’s filling void with high decibel white noise and it’s a bummer. Also, the table’s light mostly comes from a single fake candle between us so, at least for me, reading is out of the picture. But that’s fine, I enjoy talking to my daughter. She is interesting and enjoys conversation, so I start to lowkey rant and theorize about the playlist we’re stuck listening to.
“It’s obviously a playlist generated by an AI, predictive matching, dots to dots, an algorithm do-hickey.”
Roxy looks up from her manga book and nods.
“You can tell because we’ve heard about seven songs, and every single one has had a white male vocalist: Pavement, something terrible, Undertones, Soundgarden, Sonic Youth, Thin Lizard Dawn, Strokes, Death Cab, The Gobbypoohs, something sounding like Artic Monkeys, the VU, something very dire that had to be Beck…have I told you how much I hate Beck?”
“Maybe,” Roxy offers.
I pause and frown. Am I boring my daughter? Or is she lightly amused? I have no idea. I do know that I have too few years left on this earth to waste any of it listening to bloody Beck.
“The point is Rox, either the bartender is a total moron and he made a playlist for a public space thinking it wise, in a city with all its diversity, to only include music made by white dudes with guitars, or this playlist has been generated from a music platform, Spotify’s Alternative Modern Indie Bollocks Midtempo Blerg…”
Roxy snorts.
“Or Apple’s Contemporary Modern Rock CockpunchDogshit…”
“Dad. Language.”
“Sorry Rox. My bad.” But my mind continues to rant, a damn robot brain built this thing and the person that built the robot brain figured if you like Sonic Youth and Vampire Weekend then you must like any-and-all white-dudes-with-guitars. The bias is even more dumbfounding when you consider that all other parameters: distorted guitar, muddied production, sloggy tempos, bright choruses, compressed everything, very little empty space, all these things can be had with a female vocal (see Throwing Muses, Hole, Babes In Toyland, a third of Sonic Youth songs, a smaller percentage of VU songs, Concrete Blonde, The Beths, Wednesday, Breeders, Tsunami, All Dogs, Bully, PJ Harvey, Hop Along, The Muffs, The Linda Lindas, and plenty-plenty-plenty more) so the algorithm is actually filtering them out because it’s only seeking male vocals, like that’s its design, the point on the graph marked essential.
I tap the top of Roxy’s book. “Thoughts?”
Roxy looks up at the speaker. “Well, all these songs definitely sound the same, like they are not very good, I mean, parts, but overall.”
“Exactly!” I say. “Also, consider this. This biased and boring playlist is switching artists every song, right?”
“Dad, that’s what playlists do.”
“So think about the fact that every 3-4 minutes, we’re forced to mentally look up as a new song comes on. I have to ask myself, do I know this artist, what is this song, is this so-and-so, or is this the thingy-thingies, and then you have to wait until you have an answer. Maybe the wait is short: Oh, it’s that song I like—Enjoy The Silence, for example—or, it's a song I don’t like—like something by Beck or Weezer—or, it’s a song I would like in a different circumstance, but tonight, in this restaurant where I’m hoping to have a conversation with my lovely daughter, I find to be intrusive and silly. Like that Sonic Youth song they played a minute ago.
“Sonic Youth? That’s a band?”
“Next time we’re at the shop, remind me to get you a copy of Sister, or Confusion Is Sex.”
“Ew.”
“The question I want answered dear daughter is this. Why am I being interrupted? Like, imagine if the bartender just put on a Sade album, or a Miles Davis album, or certain Tindesticks albums, or Screamadelica, or any number of albums by Marvin Gaye, Orbital, The Spinners, Ruth Brown, Gordon Lightfoot, Roy Wood, Jazmine Sullivan, Gerry Rafferty, Briget St. John, Saint Etienne, George Benson, Jamie Saft, or The Kinks…”
“Alright Dad, I get it.”
“Imagine pausing mentally, mid-sentence and saying to yourself, oh okay this is the Kinks, got it. Let me resume my conversation. Then maybe on the next song, the next pause, you start to go through the motion again, but immediately you’re like, oh, still the Kinks, in fact, if I’m not mistaken, these are the first two songs on Village Green. So by song three, you’ve settled in, and life is good, no need to pause again, you’re sorted, they are playing Village Green and you can kick back, have a glass of wine and not have to give a fu…”
Roxy shoots me a look.
“…not have to concern yourself with trying to figure out what song is playing. But instead, we have this freakin’ machine brain and its sidekick, the bearded young man bartender there, and he’s like, yes let’s go with that playlist that’s all dudes with guitars and plenty of hissy white noise to mask mediocre guitar playing, and no one stops him, no one tells him hey man, bad idea.
“Is it that hard? I mean, just put on Pretzel Logic and walk away, right? And the thing is Roxy, somehow, this jackass convinced the people in charge to not only let him treat the entire establishment like it’s a bar on Ave B, but he’s also picking a playlist that is borderline pernicious in the way it reinforces mediocrity and rigidity in terms of gender, influence, corporate priority, sexuality, and race.”
I’m telling Roxy all of this because she needs to know, she’s stuck growing up in a world where lazy programmers are filling the heads of capitalism’s new digital children with guidelines in which their goal, in predicting stupid-people-needs, is to keep ears and eyeballs glued, and not challenge anyone’s preconceived notions of what they like, what they enjoy, and what they find tolerable. It’s a fucking nightmare, watching this sonic pollution fill more and more space, and yet here we are, spending a hundred bucks on beets, meat, and the privilege to be interrupted every three minutes by another shitty song…
“Sorry Rox, I’ll stop. What’s your book about?”
“A princess that kills people.”
“Cool. Have you ever seen Pretty In Pink?”
“Is that a movie?”
“Yeah. You’d like it. We should watch it, next time your mother and brother have a thing, remind me to order us takeout and…”
“Did you hear about the 8th grade dance?” Roxy asks.
“No. When was that? Did your brother go?”
“The whole class went, except Jackson.”
‘They kid that opts out of sex-ed?”
“Yup.”
“Did Luke have fun?”
“I think so, but a bunch of them brought their phones.”
“No! Who allowed that to happen?”
“No idea. But get this, and try not to freak out.”
“Okay…?”
“Someone figured out how to hijack the Bluetooth sound system and play any song they wanted, so basically a huge war broke out among all the phone kids once they figured out how to take over the speakers. Like the song was switching every thirty seconds, first it’s Olivia Rodrigo, then it’s Post Malone, then Black Pink, then Taylor, then it’s well who the heck knows, Maroon 5.”
“NO!”
Roxy is laughing. “Yup, you would have died Dad. It’s just like what you were saying, but like, way worse. Every thirty seconds, the song cuts off, a new song starts up, anyone trying to actually dance was having to pause and like, adjust.”
My mind is awhirl. The level of pure fuckery being described by my lovely daughter is making me twist my napkin until I’ve cut the blood off to my thumb. What horrific DISRUPTION, going from annoyance to parody to assault in a five minute span, and all of it stemming from that machine in your pocket. It was meant to make life easier, make it so you never got lost, never went hungry, never had to worry about a ride home, never had to be without your favorite song, never wish you had your camera so you could snap this amazing bird / car crash, never not be able to check in and see what your friend is up to, if he is having a good time or is about to toss himself off a pier. But these machines, instead of making life easier, they make it so a bunch of thirteen-year-olds can effortlessly fuck up their dance, turning it from fun memory to un-cherished nightmare. I only hope the kids that felt the need to stomp on the night realize someday that it’s not about playing your music, it’s about dancing to music that sucks, that’s the point of prom, that’s the point of a dance, you dance to the stupid pop song even though you’re thinking oh man my classmates have no idea I listen to Lana and Black Thought and The Cure and Kendrick my classmates have no idea but yet here I am with dancing feet, moving hips, swaying, and that person I like is making his/her/their way over here. And what if they come closer? What if it ends up being just me and her? What if he puts his hand on my shoulder? What if they lean over and rest their head on my shoulder then suddenly it doesn’t matter if the song is Taylor Swift or James Taylor or James Brown or Ruth Brown or Ruth Ginsburg you don’t care because the memory being made at that moment will last until the day you die. When you’re lying in that ditch gasping for air, the sky above you exploding in fire and burnt Bible pages, you’ll think back to that night in the barn, dancing, that moment when she came closer, put her hand on your hip, and together you swayed to a cheesy pop song. And you’ll realize, that song isn’t cheesy at all, it’s a goddamn miracle, a human offering, birthed in a cold indifferent universe, yet still, it persists. Thank you, Lorde.
“It’s obviously a playlist generated by an AI, predictive matching, dots to dots, an algorithm do-hickey.”
Roxy looks up from her manga book and nods.
“You can tell because we’ve heard about seven songs, and every single one has had a white male vocalist: Pavement, something terrible, Undertones, Soundgarden, Sonic Youth, Thin Lizard Dawn, Strokes, Death Cab, The Gobbypoohs, something sounding like Artic Monkeys, the VU, something very dire that had to be Beck…have I told you how much I hate Beck?”
“Maybe,” Roxy offers.
I pause and frown. Am I boring my daughter? Or is she lightly amused? I have no idea. I do know that I have too few years left on this earth to waste any of it listening to bloody Beck.
“The point is Rox, either the bartender is a total moron and he made a playlist for a public space thinking it wise, in a city with all its diversity, to only include music made by white dudes with guitars, or this playlist has been generated from a music platform, Spotify’s Alternative Modern Indie Bollocks Midtempo Blerg…”
Roxy snorts.
“Or Apple’s Contemporary Modern Rock CockpunchDogshit…”
“Dad. Language.”
“Sorry Rox. My bad.” But my mind continues to rant, a damn robot brain built this thing and the person that built the robot brain figured if you like Sonic Youth and Vampire Weekend then you must like any-and-all white-dudes-with-guitars. The bias is even more dumbfounding when you consider that all other parameters: distorted guitar, muddied production, sloggy tempos, bright choruses, compressed everything, very little empty space, all these things can be had with a female vocal (see Throwing Muses, Hole, Babes In Toyland, a third of Sonic Youth songs, a smaller percentage of VU songs, Concrete Blonde, The Beths, Wednesday, Breeders, Tsunami, All Dogs, Bully, PJ Harvey, Hop Along, The Muffs, The Linda Lindas, and plenty-plenty-plenty more) so the algorithm is actually filtering them out because it’s only seeking male vocals, like that’s its design, the point on the graph marked essential.
I tap the top of Roxy’s book. “Thoughts?”
Roxy looks up at the speaker. “Well, all these songs definitely sound the same, like they are not very good, I mean, parts, but overall.”
“Exactly!” I say. “Also, consider this. This biased and boring playlist is switching artists every song, right?”
“Dad, that’s what playlists do.”
“So think about the fact that every 3-4 minutes, we’re forced to mentally look up as a new song comes on. I have to ask myself, do I know this artist, what is this song, is this so-and-so, or is this the thingy-thingies, and then you have to wait until you have an answer. Maybe the wait is short: Oh, it’s that song I like—Enjoy The Silence, for example—or, it's a song I don’t like—like something by Beck or Weezer—or, it’s a song I would like in a different circumstance, but tonight, in this restaurant where I’m hoping to have a conversation with my lovely daughter, I find to be intrusive and silly. Like that Sonic Youth song they played a minute ago.
“Sonic Youth? That’s a band?”
“Next time we’re at the shop, remind me to get you a copy of Sister, or Confusion Is Sex.”
“Ew.”
“The question I want answered dear daughter is this. Why am I being interrupted? Like, imagine if the bartender just put on a Sade album, or a Miles Davis album, or certain Tindesticks albums, or Screamadelica, or any number of albums by Marvin Gaye, Orbital, The Spinners, Ruth Brown, Gordon Lightfoot, Roy Wood, Jazmine Sullivan, Gerry Rafferty, Briget St. John, Saint Etienne, George Benson, Jamie Saft, or The Kinks…”
“Alright Dad, I get it.”
“Imagine pausing mentally, mid-sentence and saying to yourself, oh okay this is the Kinks, got it. Let me resume my conversation. Then maybe on the next song, the next pause, you start to go through the motion again, but immediately you’re like, oh, still the Kinks, in fact, if I’m not mistaken, these are the first two songs on Village Green. So by song three, you’ve settled in, and life is good, no need to pause again, you’re sorted, they are playing Village Green and you can kick back, have a glass of wine and not have to give a fu…”
Roxy shoots me a look.
“…not have to concern yourself with trying to figure out what song is playing. But instead, we have this freakin’ machine brain and its sidekick, the bearded young man bartender there, and he’s like, yes let’s go with that playlist that’s all dudes with guitars and plenty of hissy white noise to mask mediocre guitar playing, and no one stops him, no one tells him hey man, bad idea.
“Is it that hard? I mean, just put on Pretzel Logic and walk away, right? And the thing is Roxy, somehow, this jackass convinced the people in charge to not only let him treat the entire establishment like it’s a bar on Ave B, but he’s also picking a playlist that is borderline pernicious in the way it reinforces mediocrity and rigidity in terms of gender, influence, corporate priority, sexuality, and race.”
I’m telling Roxy all of this because she needs to know, she’s stuck growing up in a world where lazy programmers are filling the heads of capitalism’s new digital children with guidelines in which their goal, in predicting stupid-people-needs, is to keep ears and eyeballs glued, and not challenge anyone’s preconceived notions of what they like, what they enjoy, and what they find tolerable. It’s a fucking nightmare, watching this sonic pollution fill more and more space, and yet here we are, spending a hundred bucks on beets, meat, and the privilege to be interrupted every three minutes by another shitty song…
“Sorry Rox, I’ll stop. What’s your book about?”
“A princess that kills people.”
“Cool. Have you ever seen Pretty In Pink?”
“Is that a movie?”
“Yeah. You’d like it. We should watch it, next time your mother and brother have a thing, remind me to order us takeout and…”
“Did you hear about the 8th grade dance?” Roxy asks.
“No. When was that? Did your brother go?”
“The whole class went, except Jackson.”
‘They kid that opts out of sex-ed?”
“Yup.”
“Did Luke have fun?”
“I think so, but a bunch of them brought their phones.”
“No! Who allowed that to happen?”
“No idea. But get this, and try not to freak out.”
“Okay…?”
“Someone figured out how to hijack the Bluetooth sound system and play any song they wanted, so basically a huge war broke out among all the phone kids once they figured out how to take over the speakers. Like the song was switching every thirty seconds, first it’s Olivia Rodrigo, then it’s Post Malone, then Black Pink, then Taylor, then it’s well who the heck knows, Maroon 5.”
“NO!”
Roxy is laughing. “Yup, you would have died Dad. It’s just like what you were saying, but like, way worse. Every thirty seconds, the song cuts off, a new song starts up, anyone trying to actually dance was having to pause and like, adjust.”
My mind is awhirl. The level of pure fuckery being described by my lovely daughter is making me twist my napkin until I’ve cut the blood off to my thumb. What horrific DISRUPTION, going from annoyance to parody to assault in a five minute span, and all of it stemming from that machine in your pocket. It was meant to make life easier, make it so you never got lost, never went hungry, never had to worry about a ride home, never had to be without your favorite song, never wish you had your camera so you could snap this amazing bird / car crash, never not be able to check in and see what your friend is up to, if he is having a good time or is about to toss himself off a pier. But these machines, instead of making life easier, they make it so a bunch of thirteen-year-olds can effortlessly fuck up their dance, turning it from fun memory to un-cherished nightmare. I only hope the kids that felt the need to stomp on the night realize someday that it’s not about playing your music, it’s about dancing to music that sucks, that’s the point of prom, that’s the point of a dance, you dance to the stupid pop song even though you’re thinking oh man my classmates have no idea I listen to Lana and Black Thought and The Cure and Kendrick my classmates have no idea but yet here I am with dancing feet, moving hips, swaying, and that person I like is making his/her/their way over here. And what if they come closer? What if it ends up being just me and her? What if he puts his hand on my shoulder? What if they lean over and rest their head on my shoulder then suddenly it doesn’t matter if the song is Taylor Swift or James Taylor or James Brown or Ruth Brown or Ruth Ginsburg you don’t care because the memory being made at that moment will last until the day you die. When you’re lying in that ditch gasping for air, the sky above you exploding in fire and burnt Bible pages, you’ll think back to that night in the barn, dancing, that moment when she came closer, put her hand on your hip, and together you swayed to a cheesy pop song. And you’ll realize, that song isn’t cheesy at all, it’s a goddamn miracle, a human offering, birthed in a cold indifferent universe, yet still, it persists. Thank you, Lorde.
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Nathaniel Krenkel lives in Portland, Maine. He is the host of Rhizome Radio at WMPG, and runs the record labels Team Love and Oystertones.
SOCIAL MEDIA: https://bsky.app/profile/krenkel.bsky.social WEBSITE: nathanielkrenkel.com |
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