Play listless
Spotify is rubbish and doesn't understand me
Have I listened to Nicotine Stain by Siouxsie and the Banshees this century? Until this morning, the answer would be a hard no.
Yet, unbidden, it came screeching into my consciousness on the way back from yoga. Back home, I found it on Spotify and discovered it had not aged as badly as some of their repetitive and definitely-not-Autotuned oeuvre.
I have a personal rule that if a song presents itself to me, I listen to it and see where that takes me. Sometimes these flights of aural fancy are prompted by a word that comes up in conversation or in a news report. Others are so wildly random that I am frightened to figure out the source.
Nicotine Stain? Not a clue.
It might just as easily be Cod Liver Oil and the Orange Juice, a song I tracked down from a vague memory and now love so much that it’s strictly rationed. Possibly something from Badly Drawn Boy’s Have You Fed the Fish album. Last week I took a notion for The Smiths.
At least once a year it’s House Party at Boothy’s by Little Man Tate. Hey, I like narrative songs. The heart wants what it wants.
A few years ago, cycling to work along the River Clyde, it was The Bump by Kenny.
If you were born in the 1960s and want to feel every single intervening year, listen to The Bump by Kenny. It is both a banger and a reminder of more innocent times. The members of Kenny - it’s a band, not a person so famous they have dropped the surname - grim guilelessly from their publicity shots. Their collars are large enough to have their own postcode.
Why, with the whole of the world’s recorded music at my fingertips, am I listening to a badly produced number three hit single from 1974? It’s precisely because, despite having much the world’s recorded music stored in its memory, Spotify never thinks of surprising and delighting me with forgotten teen pomp-pop or the exemplary storytelling Scotland’s deceased folk masters.
I need to do that bit myself.
Spotify is boring. I know it’s a horrible platform and I don’t feel good about using it but I’m lazy and unwilling to work out how to export my playlists so I’m stuck with it. But Jesus it’s dreary. It reminds me of my students who look at me expectantly and wait to be spoon-fed bright ideas.
Once prompted, Spotify can, sometimes, pony up the goods. Left to its own devices it shrugs its shoulders and assumes I’m in the same mood I was in when I revisited Siouxsie.
Guys. I haven’t listened to The Scream since, I’m guessing, 1981. Once every four decades is plenty. Suggest something else.
And if you feel duty bound to serve me up a brittle post-punk playlist, work a bit harder at it. Your efforts are, frankly, weird.
Why, for example, is Spotify punting a band called the Sound? I know not of the Sound and I was obsessed with music in the 1980s and even wrote for a music paper (RIP) called Sounds.
Actually the Sound are not terrible, a bit pompous and whiny maybe, but I don’t want some new dudes gatecrashing a lovely nostalgic moment with the Gang of Four and the Slits. These are some of the only bands Spotify thinks go with Siouxsie, again not the worst choices but so narrow.
The algorithim also puts X-Ray Spex, outliers who made one album then crashed and burned, on heavy rotation. Poly Styrene was a top burd but a little of their music goes a long way.
The screechy sax riffs and pre-landfill indie are a constant reminder that machines are rubbish at doing a human’s job.
Spotify will never suggest anything bonkers, or unexpected. It cannot surprise and delight in the way a real playlist made by a pal might do. Its algorithm knows not of Spizz Energi and doesn’t realise that I might want to hear Where’s Captain Kirk while I type “sentences end with a full stop” for the eighth time in an evening.
Then when I ask it to play Where’s Captain Kirk, it reroutes straight back to X-Ray Spex and I’m back where I started.
Back in the olden days I used to make compilation tapes for friends, called Now That’s What Anna Calls Music. Maybe it’s time for the sequel, Music To Mark Essays To. No Germfree Adolescents allowed.
Sounds! I didn’t know you wrote for it! It was my go to music paper, from late 70s until Kerrang! appeared! It’s where I’d my first letter published, and where I first encountered Toyah, who had a habit of appearing topless at the time! Much missed!
Oh Bondage , up yours