How Spotify Made Music Disposable

“You can’t record music every three or four years and think that’s going to be enough.” That was a sentence uttered in an interview earlier this year by Spotify CEO Daniel Ek. Widely derided by musicians and fans alike, this sound bite brought the “Streaming Discussion™” back to the forefront of music circles on places like Twitter and Reddit. While very few artists are happy with the financial arrangement between themselves and Spotify, this statement breathed new life into the unrest at the heart of this agreement. This suggestion of “just release more music” also brought to the forefront a litany of problems with the current economic model that platforms like Spotify and Apple Music have used to make millions off of the backs of artists. 

It’s no secret that these services are notoriously stingy, offering up fractions of a penny per stream, but a less-discussed byproduct of this model is how it has literally devalued art and made music more disposable in the process. 

The pandemic (and general state of the world) has obviously caused irreparable damage to our collective mental health and finances alike, but musicians have been hit especially hard. Robbed of the outlet of touring, this has been an unspeakably horrible year for musical artists. Album rollouts have been disrupted, tours have been postponed, and musicians are struggling to make ends meet more than ever before. 

As creators flock to alternative sources of income to keep themselves afloat, the music industry as it stood at the beginning of the year will look very different than the one we see on the other side of this. Groups like Ratboys have taken up Twitch streaming; promoting their merch, prompting donations, and forging direct connections with fans along the way, all while promoting their (excellent) album that released in the weeks before quarantine. Bands like Mannequin Pussy, Prince Daddy, Glass Beach, and Diet Cig have taken to Patreon offering exclusive covers, merch discounts, and access to Dischord channels as benefits. On top of all this, Bandcamp has made a monthly tradition of eschewing their own cut of earnings, the end result being fans putting more than 20 million dollars directly into the pockets of artists, labels, and charities over the course of the summer. 

Then you have Spotify, where it takes 229 streams to make one dollar. Their solution to this? Silly bands, it’s so obvious: simply make more music. Fill their playlists, servers, and coffers with your art if you want to be successful in the musical landscape of 2020.

Near the beginning of quarantine, Spotify gave artists the option to add “donation” buttons to their pages, which, on the surface, seems like a nice gesture, but ultimately proved to be an unsuccessful endeavor. It’s something Spotify can point to and say, “look, see, of course we care about the bands!” Then turn around months later and say things like, “maybe if you were shoveling more coal into our content furnace, you wouldn’t be struggling so much to make ends meet.”

I’ve written before about how “disposable” streaming services have made music, but never went into detail articulating what that meant to me, and this feels like the perfect time. 

At the dawn of commercial music, you’d go to a store and buy your music in the form of a large piece of plastic that you’d bring home and listen to. As time went on, the size and shape of that plastic changed from vinyl to tape to cassette to CD, but the process always remained the same. Soon you could take your music on the go, listening in the car, on a boombox, a walkman, or a portable CD player. At this point, you might be thinking, ‘okay, yeah, thanks for mansplaining physical media to me,’ but this process actually had an impact on how we viewed and interacted with the music itself. 

Due to the financial (and physical) investment you just made, when you bought an album like this, you were going to listen to it, and you were going to listen to it a lot. At a certain point, it almost didn’t even matter if the record was bad or not, because you just sunk $20 into it, and now it’s going to be on your shelf forever. You were going to listen to it over and over and over again. 

My first collection of childhood CDs was pretty appalling. It ranged from stuff like Sum 41, Good Charlotte, and Simple Plan to Eiffel 65, Aaron Carter, and the Baha Men. Hell, I owned multiple Baha Men CDs. You can probably think of one Baha Men song off the top of your head, but I listened to the deep cuts because I had no other alternatives. If “Who Let The Dogs Out” released in 2020, it would go viral, get the band millions of streams, and then fade out in a month or two. People wouldn’t listen to that song and think, ‘Gee, I wonder what else these guys have to offer’ and then jump into the rest of their discography. 

Even in the mid-2000s, once iPods and mp3 players became widely accessible, your digital music library still had some semblance of connection to who you were as a person. The songs sitting in your iTunes library were all files that you ripped from your own CD collection, bought from Apple, were sent by friends, or obtained through more… nefarious means. It felt like every album, and sometimes even every song, had a story and a purpose. Everything was in its right place, even if it was just a 5mb file sitting somewhere deep in the tangled web of folders on your hard drive.

Now, streaming services have done a lot of good. Having a majority of this century’s auditory output one scroll away is an unspeakable achievement, but it’s a double-edged sword. The flip side of this is that it leads artists to game streaming numbers, create insanely bloated tracklists, and beg fans to fake streams. Those aren’t telltale signs of a sustainable business model. 

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The byproduct of this process for fans is that music is not held with the same reverence when viewed through this platform’s lens. If you’re a capital “M” Music Fan, you’re likely following hundreds, if not thousands of artists from different genres and backgrounds. This is rewarding because it means you have something new to listen to every Friday, probably too much in fact. When there are five to ten new releases to listen to every week, things become buried so quickly that you might not even realize it. 

An artist as big as Taylor Swift can now surprise release an album to critical acclaim and fan approval. It can break records, dominate social media feeds, and feel like a genuine event, only for it to fade from all memory not even a month later. I enjoy folklore, but it’s no longer part of the “culture” as of September 2020, so therefore I’m not thinking of it and not streaming it unless I scroll far back enough in my library to see it. 

You could argue that’s just because it’s a bad album or otherwise unmemorable, but I’ve found this happening with every band, even ones I love dearly. Earlier this year, The Wonder Years, my favorite band of all time, released an acoustic EP that I spun for weeks and weeks but haven’t listened to more than twice this summer. That would have been unthinkable in the era of physical media or iTunes. 

I think the problem here is two-fold. First, it’s platforms like Spotify who capitalize on the hype of something like folklore to generate more users, streams, and engagement for their platforms. Second, I think we’re experiencing an era of unprecedented acceleration in every facet of our lives. Perhaps a product of being sequestered in our homes for six months, our sense of time is skewed beyond repair. Things that happened mere days or weeks ago feel like months or years. How can I remember that an emo band I like put out a new EP two weeks ago when I’m busy filling my brain with social media rot, political discourse, and the horrors of the modern world. 

I’m not begging for the return of the monoculture here, we’ll never return to an era where one band dominates the hearts, charts, and minds of millions of Americans, but it’s frustrating to watch an artistic medium that I love so dearly be treated as a passing fascination. Yeah, cool album you just put out, but what’s next? Artists release one thing, and fans are immediately clamoring for what’s next. It’s harder than ever to fully-digest art as we used to, and streaming platforms like Spotify aren’t helping. 

This is the difference between sipping on a glass of finely-aged whiskey and slamming shots of bottom-shelf vodka…. Not to compare my childhood Baha Men CD to a bottle of whiskey, but you get the point. Dozens of albums came out this year that impacted me in the moment and then faded from my immediate consciousness over time simply because they became buried in the never-ending scroll of my digital streaming library. No matter how much I love an album, something will come out in the next few days that covers it up and pushes it further down the screen. I’ve learned to keep a database of new releases and a shortlist of my favorites, but that’s because I run a music blog, I am far from the average use case.

At the end of the day, most people are perfectly fine throwing on a Spotify-created playlist and vegging out to whatever the algorithm sees fit. I know active listening will never become a truly lost art, but I feel awful for artists who put hundreds of hours, thousands of dollars, and incalculable amounts of effort into their art only for it to be swallowed up by the streaming beast and fade into obscurity within weeks. This is yet another reason why vinyl and cassettes are enjoying a resurgence because people are hungry to reconnect with art. 

Try as we might with petitions, outreach, and just roasting them on twitter, Spotify isn’t going to change any time soon. This is the norm for the foreseeable future, and it kind of sucks. It sucks for artists, and it sucks for fans. In fact, it sucks for everyone involved except the people at the top making millions of dollars off the blood, sweat, and tears of every artist at the bottom of the pyramid. 

Streaming services treat music just like that; a service. Spotify will continue to exploit artists in order to fuel their machine, so as fans, we need to break out of that routine whenever possible. There’s no preciousness anymore unless you bring it, so let’s bring it. Go support an artist’s Patreon, go start a thread on twitter, go buy a shirt on Bandcamp, go post a makeup selfie inspired by a band’s album art. Those are only a few ways to connect with artists, but they go farther than you probably realize; you never know how much your support snowballs. As long as there are passionate fans supporting artists, sharing music, and spreading songs that they love, streaming services will never truly be able to make music disposable, try as they might. 

Lamenting the Death of The Hidden Track

Not to sound like a copypasta, but I listen to a lot of music. Even before quarantine, I spent most of my waking hours with something playing on my phone. Now that I’m inside all day and have very few real-world obligations, music is playing from virtually the minute I wake up until the second I fall asleep. This means, yes, I’m on my emo bullshit more than ever before, but it also means that I have the time to revisit lots of older albums from my childhood.

As someone who was born in 1993, I grew up in a time where CDs reigned supreme. My parents had hundreds, if not thousands of CDs, which was probably where my obsession with music began. We listened to music in the car, at home on our stereo, and in my room on my personal CD player. Once I got my first iPod back in 2004, I eventually just started ripping every CD that I had even a passing interest in, quickly building out an expansive library of MP3 files to satiate my voracious musical appetite. 

Now that I have more hours than ever in the day to listen to music, I’m breaking out of my typical emo/indie rock rotation and revisiting more classics from my childhood. Albums like Barenaked Ladies’ Gordon, Presidents of the United States self-titled record, and Relient K’s Two Lefts Don’t Make A Right… But Three Do. I’m not necessarily going to bat for the artistic merit of any of these records because my mind is too clouded with the pleasant glow of nostalgia to listen to them objectively. What I will say though is in revisiting all these 90’s and 2000’s albums, I was reminded of a trend that seems to have been forgotten completely: the hidden track. 

It may seem goofy to explain, but for the sake of anyone under the age of 20 reading this, “hidden tracks” were essentially bonus tracks buried at the end of an album, usually after a long period of silence. The experience of discovering these hidden treasures was almost always notable. Whether it was being jolted awake by the chuggy stoner rock riffage of “Endless, Nameless” or being blindsided by the Daniel Johnston-ey weirdness of Green Day’s “All By Myself,” the hidden track provided artists with an outlet to deliver die-hard fans some of their weirdest, most left-field easter eggs. 

While vinyl records and cassettes had their own novelties, the hidden track was a unique byproduct of the compact disc format. The expansion from a vinyl’s 44-minute running time to CD’s 74-minute running time meant that artists had nearly double the amount of time to play with. This was even an increase from cassette tape’s roughly 60-minute running time. While some artists utilized CD’s entire time allotment, the average running time of an album still hovered somewhere between the 40-60 minute range. That meant a large chunk of extra time at the end of the CD for literally anything else. 

The experience of listening to an album, reaching the end, and sitting in silence for a few minutes is a near-lost art. The surprise of an additional piece of music that wasn’t listed on the back of the album is all but dead. 

The hidden track began to mean less as soon as iTunes and other music digitization meant all the raw MP3s and their running times were exposed. This meant that the final track with a suspicious 10-minute running time was a little less sneaky than the artist originally intended. It also meant you could just skip straight ahead by clicking on the timeline in your music player of choice. Sure, you could do this on a CD too, but that “first listen” surprise is gone forever. 

Even now, most of these songs exist on streaming services, but they’re just listed as their own song without any pause or gap in between the album’s intended closer. This is especially frustrating because it’s not the true “ending” of the album as the artist intended. For the most part, hidden tracks were meant to be throwaway jokes, weird little callbacks, or fun bits of studio chatter, they were not real songs, but now streaming services treat them as such.

Sometimes there are legitimately great tracks hidden at the end of records that, for whatever reason, the band just didn’t feel like highlighting on the tracklist proper. Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ Fever To Tell is a landmark album for many reasons, but why something as great as “Poor Song” was tucked away unlabeled at the end of “Modern Romance” will forever be a mystery to me. 

Tracks like “Poor Song” were the exception rather than the rule, and if you need evidence, look no further than practically any one of Blink 182’s albums. It’s hard to accurately articulate the strange mixture of shock and confusion of being nine years old and hearing “When You Fucked Grandpa” while listening to Take Off Your Pants and Jacket for the first time… hell, I still get blindsided by that one. 

The digitization of music has arguably brought more good than bad. It’s easier than ever to discover a new artist, share songs with your friends, and even get your own music out into the world on a massive scale. On the flip side, losing physical media means the average listener views music as more disposable and less unique. This is all on top of the fact that there are now even fewer opportunities for format-based easter eggs like hidden tracks.

I’m not going to pretend that the death of hidden tracks is as terrible as artists being paid fractions of a penny per stream, but it’s something that still hurts as a lifelong music nerd. Things like this are why vinyl had a resurgence because it gave artists the opportunity to go above and beyond with their art. Same thing with cassettes… that’s more of an affordability thing, but there’s no denying how cool it is to fold out a new J-Card for the first time. Hell, I’ve even seen people getting back into VHS in 2020, so who knows what the future holds. Hidden tracks may have become a forgotten art form, but I have faith that the next generation of musicians will find something even cooler to replace them with. 

Apropos of nothing but being stoned, I recently watched 2002’s Scooby-Doo and was struck by the movie’s depiction of early-2000’s cool. It was all radio-sanitized pop-punk, spiked hair, and frosted tips. I remember thinking, “these college kids are so cool” when I watched the movie back in 2002, but now it’s just a hilariously-dated time capsule. In other words, hidden tracks had their time, and that time has passed. Much like frosted tips and chain wallets, maybe it’s for best that we leave them in the past. 

On Running Times: The Importance of Album Length

Perhaps unsurprisingly, one of my favorite parts of meeting new people is learning what kind of music they’re into. Usually, I’ll wait for it to come up in conversation naturally (so as not to overwhelm them with the firehose-like pressure of my own nerdiness), but it’s still something I look forward to whenever I’m getting to know someone. Not only is music one of the few things I feel confident in talking about endlessly, but it’s also a fantastic way to learn about who someone is as a person. Sometimes you meet someone who isn’t “into music,” and it’s fun because you get to slowly immerse them in your favorite records and reveal a part of yourself to them. Sometimes you meet someone for the first time and you both share a love for so many bands that it’s almost eerie. Those latter cases are fun just because you just get to geek out about cringy high school music that was somehow omnipresent enough for both parties to have separate nostalgia for it. 

Those weird cases of shared musical backgrounds are so rewarding because it feels like some cosmic affirmation of my (mostly questionable) high school music choices. I made a friend like this in early 2019 who shared a nearly-identical background with me of pop-punk, hardcore, and emo. We were kind of at different points in that triangle of genres, but he got me deeper into pop-punk, I got him deeper into emo, and it was a rewarding friendship from that perspective. 

At some point after a few weeks of knowing each other, my friend asked me what my favorite album of 2018 was, and I started going on about Fiddlehead’s Springtime and Blind. I talked about the hard-hitting Title Fight-esque delivery, the guilt-ridden emotional lyricism, and the well-placed world-building interludes. I tied a bow on (what I thought was) a compelling argument in favor of the record by emphasizing its running time of just 24 minutes. My friend paused for a second, thought to himself, then replied with “man, you really love talking about album lengths.” I was taken aback. 

Here I thought I’d made a passionate argument for this album that I adored, and my friend just pointed out how often I bring up running times. But then I thought about it, and he was right. I realized over the course of knowing each other for just a few weeks I’d used that as a selling point in favor of an album more than once. More than that, it also shocked me that the length of an album wasn’t something he particularly cared about. 

Earlier this year, I was listening to the new Beach Bunny record and (half) jokingly tweeted that “any LP that's less than 26 minutes is an automatic 9/10 in my mind.” That’s obviously a slight exaggeration, but I do think that shorter albums are generally better and harder to pull off than longer ones. While I realize the running time of a record may seem like an esoteric piece of trivia, I believe it’s actually a vital component of what makes an album good. Sure, I love long-winded double albums, 20-minute songs, and concept albums as much as the next guy, but by and large most of my favorite records, especially recently, are ones that tend to be leaner and more economical with their time. Hell, my favorite album of last year was a 6-track EP, so this post is a long time coming. Truthfully I think shorter records are harder to make and therefore are not the norm. I also think they can be stronger, more creative, and more impactful than a “traditional”-length album for many reasons.

In my mind, an album’s running time is as essential as it’s tracklist or sequencing. Many artists don’t take those things into consideration, but the ones that do often end up crafting a more compelling piece of art. The new Ratboys album is a perfect example of a masterfully-sequenced record; each side opens with a fast-paced single, side one closes with a banger, and the back half of the album works up to a beautifully meditative title track made all the more poignant by the flow of the songs that come before it. Part of what makes Printer’s Devil great is, yes, the songs themselves, but also how the band decided to order those songs and walk the listener through them. You could take those same 11 tracks, rearrange them, and the album would be flat-out worse. 

When an artist releases an album, generally, it has a point. The musician sets out to capture a feeling, depict a time in their life, or make a statement on something in the world. If you can get your point across in less time, that only makes your message all the more compelling. One of the first times I consciously began to think about album running times was when Japanese Breakfast released Psychompmp back in 2016. Admittedly enamored with the (now) infamous long-form indieheads shitpost about the album, I went into the record with almost-non-existent expectations and came out the other side 25-minutes later blown away. 

Essentially a concept album about her mother’s death, Michelle Zauner set out to capture her grief, experiences, and feelings that surrounded this major event in her life. The album opens poppy enough with the mystifying “In Heaven,” the soaring “Rugged Country,” and the immensely danceable “Everybody Wants to Love You.” Things take a turn halfway through where the titular “Psychopomp” stops the listener in their tracks with a spacy instrumental containing a voicemail of Michelle’s mom. From there, “Jane Cum” bowls the listener over with a wordless explosion of grief, pain, and sharp feelings. Not only is “Jane Cum” one of the most authentic expressions of loss ever captured in music, but it’s made stronger thanks to the songs that surround it. The record is so well-paced, and it’s conscious build-up to that pivotal moment of loss makes the feelings Michelle’s depicting all the more raw and impactful. After that heaviness “Heft,” “Moon on the Bath,” and “Triple 7” act as a sort of post-script to death that sends the listener off on a (slightly) more hopeful note, though not by much. The fact that Michelle was able to fit all of those feelings into an album that’s shorter than most episodes of TV is nothing short of spectacular.

One of the reasons I love music is because it’s the only medium with the ability to make such a compelling depiction in such a short amount of time. TV shows and movies are great, but at best they take 2 hours to create a similar effect. I suppose you could make the argument that shorter-form art house movies broach a similar level of impact, but even then the two mediums don’t exist in the same quantities. There’s a more compelling narrative in the four and a half minutes of “Born to Run” than there was in whatever new teen drama Netflix shat out this weekend. There’s no comparison.

This feels like a good place to say that I’m not against long albums, one of my favorite records of all time is The Monitor by Titus Andronicus; a 65-minute punk epic that’s loaded with 8-minute songs and capped off by a blistering 14-minute coda. The same thing goes for Sufjan’s Michigan, and Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp A Butterfly, sure I’m cherry-picking some of the greatest albums of all time, but they’re all examples of artists using their hour-plus running times to craft a compelling story that could not have been told any other way. Those records are still economical in that sense, it’s just that they take a little bit longer to arrive at their final conclusion.

On the opposite end of the cultural spectrum, you have records like Migos’ Culture II, which is admittedly a bloated 24-track 2-hour mess, but it’s a bloated mess I don’t have a problem with because it’s just a glorified playlist that you put on while doing anything else. Drake literally did this when he released More Life, a mixtape that he marketed as a “playlist.” That’s code for “don’t think about this too much and just give me 22 streams.” I’ll admit I like More Life alright, but then you see the same thing happening on Scorpion, which is 90 minutes of some of the blandest, most mind-numbing, lobotomy-inducing hip-hop that I’ve ever heard in one place. That album just feels like Drake gaming the streaming system to get as many plays as possible while offering nothing of artistic substance. 

Another thing worth bringing up here is the history of the physical album. The fact that records used to be based solely on two 23-minute sides of a vinyl record meant that 40-ish minutes became the default. Then once CDs became prominent enough, their 80-minute capacity meant that hour-length albums could become the norm. Once iTunes, Pandora, and digital music paved the way for streaming services an album could be literally anything. Artists are no longer restricted by the realities of a physical format, and that’s a good thing.

I know there are plenty of people out there who just listen to an album, click the “heart” button on their favorite songs, and then craft their daily music experience around a playlist of those cherry-picked favorites. That’s fine, but I believe that the album format is still a viable medium and an essential piece of the music creation process. I feel that “The Album” is the barometer under which all music should be measured. You can have a couple of great tracks, but if the rest of the songs surrounding it don’t measure up, then you don’t have a great album. That’s part of the problem with albums like Scorpion where you have a few objectively fire songs like “Nonstop” and “Nice For What” surrounded by utter nonsense like “Ratchet Happy Birthday.” Truth be told, I can’t even name any of the other “bad” songs on that album because there’s so much fat that record that it all blurs into one incoherent mess of sleepy pop-rap. It makes me like the entire thing less, and therein lies the problem. 

Meanwhile, take a look a the new Beach Bunny album; a 9 track 25-minute debut that ranges from catchy sing-along love songs, confessional tales of heartbreak, and masterful builds of unrequited love. Truth be told, Honeymoon is not really making any grand artistic statement on love and relationships, but it set out to offer a collection of saccharin poppy love songs, and it did just that. It didn’t need an hour, it didn’t need interludes, it’s just nine tight tracks of well-written indie-pop and that alone elevates it above other albums of its ilk.

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The minute an album has worn on long enough for you to check the tracklist to see how much is left, then the artist has failed. Every preceding song may be great, but the longer an album is, the more chances there are for lulls like that. The shorter a record is, the less room there is for error.

I’m not saying artists should limit themselves; musicians should take as much time as they need to craft their work and get their point across, it’s just that the less time they manage to do it in, the more impactful the message feels. Much like you’re probably reading this, 1900 words deep and wondering when it will end. 

The “album” is a fluid concept in 2020, more fluid than it’s ever been in fact. There are artists breaking barriers every day, and album length is only one small piece of that. It just feels notable to me when an artist manages to create something so compelling and get it across in such a short amount of time. After all, if you love it and want more, you can always just start it all over again from the top.

Streaming Culture, Platinum Hits, and The Art of the Tracklist

Full disclaimer: this article was initially written in early 2018. While it sat as a draft for nearly one year, I recently revisited it and felt like the sentiment is still relevant and worth sharing. Please excuse how firmly-rooted in 2018 this is. 

Let me get one thing out of the way at the top: defending Migos is not the hill I want to die on. Don’t get me wrong, the Atlanta rap trio has brought me incalculable joy throughout the years (along with love for the adlib), but I’m not sure I can defend the artistic integrity of anyone that talks about Pateks this much. 

When Migos dropped their long-awaited sequel to Culture in early 2018 the release was met with… mixed reception. Typically churning out anywhere from two to six mixtapes per year, Culture II felt like an anomaly for the Atlanta natives in that fans had to wait a full year between releases for new music. While various features and a collab album between Offset, 21 Savage, and Metro Boomin helped to tide listeners over, the one-year wait for Culture II had fans anticipating the group’s next moves like never before. 

After the landmark “Bad and Boujee,” Migos had finally achieved the mainstream success that longtime fans always knew they were capable of. As most people saw it, the problem with Culture II wasn’t that the songs didn’t stack up, or that the group waited too long to release it, but rather that it was too damn long. 

Comprised of 24 tracks that collectively clock in at one hour and 45 minutes, many fans found the release a slog to get through, especially in contrast to the original album’s much more traditional 13 track running time. 

In addition to fan outcry, select publications also called out the group, accusing them of gaming the streaming system for sales, and even going as far as to call the release a data dump. While these are valid criticisms, Culture II is merely the symptom of a long-emerging trend. Ever since Drake discovered that ten songs equal an album sale, it’s been a race to the bottom. This album-loading strategy worked for Drake on Views, but he failed to recreate this success on More Life which (despite being longer) was quickly eclipsed by Kendrick Lamar’s DAMN. 

Since then every artist from Lil Yachty to Post Malone has seemed happy to embrace this album-packing approach by dropping 20-plus-songs at once. As a result, they boost their streaming numbers while simultaneously overwhelming radio stations, playlists, and digital airwaves with a glut of new music… and you know what? That’s not necessarily a bad thing. 

While there are obviously some outliers like Chris Brown (who blatantly asked fans to fudge his streaming numbers), these rappers are entirely within their right to unleash a deluge of music if they want to. Any artist should be free to release whatever they want, but one thing you’ll notice about this streaming scandal is that it’s primarily hip-hop acts who are carrying it out. 

Fans were mad that Culture II wasn’t as concise as its predecessor, yet from my point of view, the songs are of the exact same quality. There was no significant change in sound, lyrical content, or musical approach. The only thing that really changed was the number of songs the group delivered at once. 

On top of the sheer size of Culture II, most people preferred its predecessor because they’d been able to enjoy it for a year. They knew the choruses and had a year’s worth of nostalgia built into those 13 tracks. Removing myself of all those feelings, Culture II is a nearly-identical album that simply gave us twice as many songs. 

Setting aside the fact that they used to release multiple mixtapes a year (each of which would range anywhere from five to twenty-seven songs) Culture II was dinged primarily because it was viewed as oversaturation, especially when compared to the first. 

Now there’s something to be said for a concise album, but that’s not what I’m arguing. Migos should be able to release any number of songs they want because they can. 

Do you know why albums are usually under an hour? Because they used to be printed. On physical media. With restrictions. The whole concept of an “album side” was practically dead until vinyl’s resurgence in the mid-2010s, why should we expect any modern group to be beholden to this archaic structure? Why should that be a factor or an expectation for anyone releasing music in the streaming age? Sure, that was the standard for a long time, but there’s no reason for that in 2018. If Migos want to release 100 songs on Spotify tomorrow they can, and there’s something awesome about that. 

Conversely, we saw half a dozen albums from the G.O.O.D. Music camp throughout the summer, each of which weighs in at seven tracks and under half an hour. There’s no real precedent for that, but I think it’s incredible that if an artist wants to release art in this EP/album hybrid then they’re free to. Migos shouldn’t be condemned for releasing a 2-hour album, because they could be pioneers. 

This running time could be the new hip-hop standard for all we know, and the only thing that’s made that possible is the ubiquity of products like Spotify and Apple Music. I’m not even arguing the quality of Culture II (because it’s mostly by-the-numbers), but it’s nowhere near as bad as some fans and critics seem to think it is.

There are certainly more artistic ways to “frame” a long-form release like Rae Sremmurd’s triple album or Drake’s half hip-hop/half RnB release, but at the end of the day, those are only small distinctions.

When I read criticism of Culture II, I feel like people are expecting more from Migos than they really should. These are three dudes from Atlanta who got famous for rapping about the same thing for ten years. They are personable, pick good beats, pull solid features, and have an uncanny influence on pop culture…. but album-crafting artisans they are not. Migos make great trap music, but their efforts are far from high art. 

Most people listening to this album will be putting it on in the background of a party, letting it play, and not thinking twice of it. Nobody expected Culture II to make some grand artistic statement, so why should the release be judged on those merits? Migos make music for clubs, for dancing, for driving, and for partying. If they give you two hours of competently-made party music at once, it should have no impact on the enjoyment of your party nor the group itself. 

In the end, this discussion doesn’t matter because people will stream this album, it will be successful, and the group will continue to release more music. These songs will be played at parties and rack up millions of plays on every hip-hop station. Expecting Migos to follow traditional running times or some arbitrary “artistic” frame is beyond the group’s scope. 

Culture II may be unwieldy, but the songs themselves are of the exact same quality of those that came before. I love short albums as much as the next person, but it’s clear to me that hip-hop can exist in a different format than a 10-track album with a standard running time, and Migos should be celebrated for that. 

Justin Vernon’s Ascent Into The Artificial

How A Winding Career Led One Man From Folk Hero to Electronic Mastermind

The story of Bon Iver is almost cliched to recite at this point. Heartbroken over a breakup and frustrated with his unsuccessful music career, 25-year-old Justin Vernon embraced his inner-Thoreau and recoiled from civilization in a remote Wisconsin cabin. Over the course of a 2006 winter, Vernon spent his days in isolation hunting for his own food, contemplating his relationships, and recording his thoughts to music in a process that would eventually form his breakthrough album.

Released the name Bon Iver, For Emma, Forever Ago would come out in the summer of 2007 to widespread critical acclaim and unexpected crossover success. Led by the undeniable indie hit “Skinny Love,” Vernon’s unveiling as Bon Iver put him on the map, solidifying him almost instantly as a bona fide folk superstar. This record, along with Fleet Foxes self-titled debut, would serve as an entry point to the indie and folk genres for an entire generation of budding music fans. Despite his humble origins as a soft-spoken folk singer, Vernon has gone on have one of the most interesting, unexpected, and diverse careers in his field… but it didn’t get that way overnight. 

For Emma, Forever Ago contains lots of things you would expect on a folk album: acoustic guitar, heartfelt vocals, and even some expressive brass instruments on a few tracks. It’s a choral journey through the frigid darkness of heartbreak and depression, but the greatest trick Justin Vernon ever pulled was what came next: a series of albums that grew in size, scope, and influence where each was more diverse and masterful than the last. But to fully appreciate the steps he took to get there, we have to start at the beginning. 

What Might Have Been Lost

Even a cursory listen of For Emma, Forever Ago will reveal why the record became a gateway to the folk genre for a generation of fans. While music from this genre can easily become “folksy background noise” that’s pushed to the back of millennial’s campfire and bedtime playlists, Emma is anything but. Thanks to varied instrumentation, full-hearted emotion, and Vernon’s “melody-first” approach, the record reaches out and demands your attention. It’s a cozy-sounding album that you can sink into and lose yourself in. 

Despite its rustic, folksy sound, one song in particular sticks out as the album’s most complicated and heart-wrenching tracks: “Wolves (Act I and II).” Coming in at track number four of nine, “Wolves” finds itself exactly halfway through For Emma, essentially acting as its emotional low-point. It’s a breakup song, yes, but after dozens of repeated listens, one moment in the song has stuck with me more than any other on the record.

The song starts just as straightforward as any other on the album, however, it’s deceptively-simple beginning quickly makes way for the densest track on the album. Opening with a single acoustic guitar, the song features a multi-layered vocal that finds Vernon harmonizing with himself. The most striking moment in the song comes halfway through the track where the bridge enters and (presumably) the second “act” begins. Vernon sings “What might have been lost” repeatedly, and the most telling moment comes at 2:50 where the third repetition bears a twinge of autotune on the word “lost.”

What might have been lost
What might have been lost
What might have been lost

Vernon goes on to repeat that phrase a total of fourteen times throughout the song, eventually interrupting himself with pained cries of “Don't bother me” that gradually build until a clatter of instruments brings the song crashing to an end. 

“Wolves” is a heartbreaking song, and it’s weird to get hung up on the delivery of one word, but that single use of auto-tune planted the seeds for the rest of Vernon’s discography. They forecast what was coming next. They offered a one-word hint toward Vernon’s future, one that he may not have even been conscious of at the time, but we can point to now that we have all the pieces. 

Up In The Woods

Two years after the initial release of For Emma, Vernon published an update: a four-track EP by the name of Blood Bank. Clocking in at 17-minutes, Blood Bank was only a bite-sized follow-up, but one that was eagerly devoured by Bon Iver fans who were hungry for new music. 

Bearing snow-covered album art, Blood Bank seemed to rekindle the same type of tender wintery feeling as Emma, and sure enough, the release starts off just as you would expect. Opener “Blood Bank” is a frostbitten love song of candy bars, a waning moon, and, of course, a fateful trip to the blood bank. “Beach Baby” is a post-breakup song that features a spiritual lap-steel guitar outro that personifies loss and contemplation. “Babys” is centered around an ever-mounting piano line with lyrics that bear almost as many exclamation points as a Sufjan Stevens song title. And finally, the EP’s fourth track “Woods” closes out the release and signals the first time Justin Vernon fully stakes his claim on the electronic embrace. 

“Woods” is lyrically-straightforward, containing one verse repeated eleven times:

I'm up in the woods
I'm down on my mind
I'm building a still
To slow down the time 

It’s interesting (and worth noting here) because the song contains almost no traditional instrumentation whatsoever. Initially singing straightforwardly, Vernon croons the first verse with a voice that’s dripping in autotune. 

The second verse finds Vernon harmonizing with himself, singing the same words in two different styles with two different emotions. The third verse adds an additional take, and so on until a multitude of different vocalizations are all flowing and emoting simultaneously. By the time the song reaches the halfway point, ghastly echoes reverberate through the background of the track, and the vocals at the front of the song are singing with even more passion, pain, and expression. As the end of the song nears, the momentum has built to a fever pitch and the autotuned cries all fade out into total silence. 

It’s a haunting and goosebump-inducing track. While “Woods” initially came across to me as the musical equivalent of a thought experiment (“let’s see how many times I can layer myself singing the same thing”), it ends up becoming a gut-wrenching and transformative piece of art. That’s probably why Kanye West tapped Vernon to close out his 2010 masterpiece My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. 

Using the same lyrics as the original song, Kanye and Vernon use a similar emotional build on “Lost In The World” as a gateway to an explosive hip-hop beat laid over Vernon’s autotuned crooning and bombastic drums. This song paved the way for future hip-hop collaborations with Kanye, but also Vernon’s later electronic work. 

“Woods” acted as a proof of concept that Vernon need not be tied to acoustic guitars, folk instrumentation, or even traditional song structures. Emotion and technology were enough.

Shifting Layers

While Emma and Blood Bank are insular and inward-looking, Bon Iver’s 2011 self-titled record is the complete opposite. Massive, arid, and expansive, Bon Iver is a pivot from Vernon’s snow-covered origins, yet in retrospect feels like a completely logical stepping stone. 

Featuring swelling arrangements, atmospheric instrumentals, and sweeping vocals, my first listen of Bon Iver initially left me underwhelmed. As did my second listen. In fact, it took me around five years to fully-realize the brilliance contained within this record, all because it didn’t sound exactly like its folky predecessor. Now I hear the opening cascade of “Perth” and receive instant goosebumps. I see the brilliance of “Holocene” and recognize the sadness contained on songs like “Beth/Rest” are just as valid as anything on Emma… they’re just packaged differently.

Overall, Bon Iver might use less overt electronics than anything else in the rest of the band’s discography. Instead, it sees Vernon enlisting the help of his friends for a fuller and richer-sounding record that leans even harder into the choral flavors only briefly touched upon in Emma. 

While there may be less overt electronics, Bon Iver is a record of layers. Vocals are layered, instruments are layers, ideas are layered. There are airy horns and explosive drums. Background vocals echo far off in the distance as ornamental swirls overwhelm the senses. It’s a feast for the ears and ends up being a complicated record that’s dense yet emotionally bare. 

The album benefits from an obviously-improved budget when compared to Emma, but it finds Vernon exploring the possibilities that a studio brings. The different shapes his ideas can take outside of a traditional folk song, the different ways ideas can be transferred yet still be used to the same effect. The way melodies can be muddled, shifted, and played with until they’re nearly unrecognizable but still manage to come through… which leads to his next release.

The Arrival

On August 12th of 2016, the Bon Iver YouTube account unleashed two lyric videos onto the internet: “22 (OVER S∞∞N) [Bob Moose Extended Cab Version]” and “10 d E A T h b R E a s T ⚄ ⚄ (Extended Version).” If the names alone didn’t give it away, these songs represented a massive departure from everything that came before them. The former was a flame-engulfed crooner accompanied by dueling English and Spanish subtitles, and the later was a glitched-out beatbox spitting out distorted lines and stuttering forward endlessly. 

The two songs represented the first new Bon Iver material in over five years, and fans consumed them voraciously, if not a little hesitantly. Drawing early comparisons to Sufjan Stevens’ Age of Adz, Radiohead’s Kid A, and Kanye West’s Yeezus, the two tracks were electronic, dissonant, and wholly unexpected. A left-field creation for which there was seemingly no precedent… But there was. 

The day these songs were uploaded, Bon Iver’s site was completely revamped. Mostly bare, but sporting a new “bio” section written not by Vernon, but Trever Hagen, a Bon Iver collaborator and one of Vernon’s childhood friends. This new page was a long-form update captured in a TextEdit screengrab that attempted to update fans on what had happened over the intervening years. It also framed the two new singles better than any traditional press release ever could:

So, in short, 22 A Million isn’t as simple as a change in sound; it was a spiritual inevitability.  

A Pathway to Understanding

I’ve built this narrative of Vernon’s increasingly-electronic career in my head for some time now. The pieces were all there from the first twinge of autotune on “Wolves” to the ever-mounting brilliance of “Woods,” but I didn’t know what to make of these disparate pieces until that summer day in 2016. When Bon Iver’s third album finally released that fall, it wasn’t just a new record from a band I already loved; it was the missing piece of a puzzle and the actualization everything that came before it. 

Despite some early comparisons to genre-shifting albums of greats like Sufjan Stevens and Radiohead, I also remember reading speculation that 22, A Million wouldn’t be as good as his previous work. Of course anyone attracted to Emma’s soft-spoken folk music will find themselves lost in 22, A Million, but at that point, I had come around to Bon Iver after years of doubt and now knew to trust in Vernon completely. 

What Trever Hagen was saying is that 22, A Million isn’t actually that different from the records that came before it. If there’s any trend to Bon Iver’s discography, it’s that every Bon Iver project is an album without precedent. For Emma, Forever Ago sounded nothing like Bon Iver, and 22, A Million sounds nothing like either of its predecessors. The difference here is that 22 is a complete dismantling. The first two records at least existed in the same sonic realm. Songs used familiar structures, familiar sounds, and familiar language. They were different but still comparable. Emma was a folky and intimate snow-covered cabin. Bon Iver was a wide-open sun-drenched field. 22, A Million is a meteorite. 

Where previous Bon Iver songs were built around simple guitar lines, mounting drums, and easy-to-grasp melodies, 22, A Million strips songs of everything but the melody and reconstructs them from the ground up. The instruments that that are present are twisted and distorted until they’re alien and unfamiliar. There are horns, and guitars, and percussion, but they’re scratched up and broken. There are vocal melodies, but they’re chopped up and shifted around. 

In fact, Vernon and his engineer Chris Messina invented a new instrument just for this record: The Messina. Better journalists than me have detailed the creation of this instrument, so I’ll just link them here along with this quote from its creator:

“Normally, you record something first and then add harmonies later. But Justin wanted to not only harmonize in real time, but also be able to do it with another person and another instrument. The result is one thing sounding like a lot of things. It creates this huge, choral sound.”

For the purposes of this article, the invention of the Messina was a major step in Vernon’s career. The Messina allowed not only for the creation of 22, A Million, but some of Vernon’s most beautiful songs. The instrument’s effect is felt all over the album, but one song in particular stands out as 22, A Million’s most breathtaking creation. A song that takes the stripped-back dichotomy of “Woods” one step further. A song that Vernon’s entire career feels like it was leading up to: “715 - CRΣΣKS.”

Lost in the Reeds

While  “22 (OVER S∞∞N)” and “10 d E A T h b R E a s T ⚄ ⚄” are great songs on their own, they also had to serve double-duty and act as a primer to what 22, A Million stood for. Once those two tracks are out of the way, the record throws listeners into the proverbial deep end with “CRΣΣKS” which, Messina aside, is done entirely acapella. 

As most Bon Iver songs do, “Creeks” opens pointedly. 

Down along the creek
I remember something

These lines are sung straightforwardly, but set the scene for the song and introduce the recurring phrase “I remember something.” With each following line more and more of the Messenia leaks into the vocals until the third verse where Vernon reaches a near-yell as the song explodes with passion.

Toiling with your blood
I remember something
In B, un—rationed kissing on a night second to last
Finding both your hands as second sun came past the glass
And oh, I know it felt right and I had you in my grasp

Put simply, “715 - CRΣΣKS” is sublime. The song is a beautiful and one-of-a-kind creation that represents millions of branching paths all converging to create something practically too beautiful for this world. If Vernon hadn’t shown the propensity for electronics, his path wouldn’t have led to this song. If the Messina hadn’t been invented, this song wouldn’t have been possible. If Vernon hadn’t stowed himself away in that cabin over a decade ago, these feelings would not have been realized. 

“CRΣΣKS” is the ultimate marriage of humanity and technology. The entire time you’re witnessing Vernon’s emotion breaking through with each word and waiting to see what comes next. He leads the listener with each line, forcing them to lean in closer and closer until he violently breaks through the cold, indifferent wall of technology. It’s explosive, fragile, and heartbreaking. It’s a song that never fails to make me feel, and there’s something to be said for that. 

Never-Ending

Vernon’s journey from folk hero to electronic mastermind was a long and winding multi-year-long process. It’s a journey that continues to this day as he tours, performs the songs live, and even on side projects like Big Red Machine where Vernon and The National’s Aaron Dessner both encourage each other along their respective increasingly-electronic journeys. 

The saga of Bon Iver has been a thrilling story to watch over the past decade. From the first wintery guitar strums of Emma to the final piano notes of 22, A Million, Vernon has weaved a multi-part epic on heartache and the human condition. Each song peeled back another layer, revealing the human behind the music, and that unfolding has been a fascinating, touching, and rewarding thing to witness.

While I hope we have many more years of music from Vernon, 22, A Million is undeniably an incredible third-act in the discography of Bon Iver. It’s more than folk music. It’s more than indie music. It’s more than electronic music, art pop, or any other label you can place on it. 22, A Million is human music.