Welcome to Dinner Music
Recovering from algorithmic rot
First: It’s been yet another bewildering and cruel week here in the U.S. I’ll have what I’ve been reading to make sense of all in the Subscriber-Only Links/Recs below, but it’s been an especially cruel week for trans people and trans athletes in particular. Which is why I want to draw your attention to Frankie de la Cretaz’s work over at
, particularly the post they wrote at the end of this week:Those of us who have been on this beat for a long time now have spent much of that time screaming from the rooftops about this. We’ve tried to explain that sports are a gateway issue, that making a group of people a threat in one sphere makes it easier to paint them as a threat in others. We’ve tried to point out that there is no scientific evidence to support these bans, or we’ve tried to shift the conversation away from the science altogether because really, at its heart, this is a human rights issue.
As Frankie puts it, “I am a trans journalist who has spent most of my career trying to prevent the actions we’ve seen this week….Paying subscriptions help me continue to cover my community even when mainstream media doesn’t see the value in it.” If you want to send the message that you value this work, here’s how you subscribe.
And now, a hard pivot, because life is series of those right now:
Jacqui Devaney is a writer, constitutes ½ of the DJ duo Horse Opera, and — pertinent to our focus today — sends the newsletter
, with immaculately but not intimidatingly curated playlists and album recs, every week. I first heard about Dinner Music when Jacqui linked to it in an edition of the Culture Study Classifieds, which is also when many of you also became subscribers.If you miss music in your everyday life and want a way to bring it back: this will help. If you feel like you’ve lacked the words to describe the flat feeling of an algorithmically-generated playlist: this one’s also for you. If you just really want someone else to recommend music that will make the way you felt when you were discovering music all the time, just alive to the newness, engaged in what Jacqui calls “sonic inquiry”….subscribe to Dinner Music, and keep reading.
Okay let’s start very basic: what is Dinner Music, how did you decide on the format….if we consider it a form of service journalism (which I do!) what service is it providing?
I like to think of Dinner Music as a kind of sonic inquiry into mood, or feeling. At a basic level: it’s a newsletter where I send out music recommendations, hopefully music that people either haven’t heard before, or maybe they have heard it before, but through the playlist or album list, they can engage with it in a new way. I’m very into skipping through genres, so in any given week we could go from bossa nova to Ghanaian highlife to exotica to indie rock to new wave to seventies disco to jazz, and so on. My mind works best when it’s working with juxtaposition and my hope is that a lot of other people feel similarly, which does seem to be the case based on the response I’ve gotten to the project so far.
It all stemmed from years (decades?) of being obsessive about digging. When I was a kid, I would download these playlists from LimeWire with hundreds of songs and I’d religiously comb through them, looking for songs that spoke to some part of me. I don’t know why it seemed so essential, maybe something about escapism or desire or looking to fill a void. I grew up in a small Texas town that didn’t appear to have a lot going on (as an adult, I think about my hometown differently), plus it was the late-90s and early-2000s, so I went from collecting CDs and having a walkman to buying songs on iTunes and illegally downloading songs and being able to have thousands of songs on an iPod, which probably did something interesting to my brain. I was obsessed with my collection of music but also moved into an era where I could access a lot more of it. I’ve still got that collection mentality though, I always feel like I’m collecting something when I find new music, even if that collection is simply emotional.
Format wise, Dinner Music is a constant work in progress. I try to be consistent, but not rigid, so when something about the format doesn’t feel like it’s working, I change it. Early on, I was sending three emails a week, two were albums and one was a weekend playlist, which quickly became unsustainable. Then, as now, I work full-time and am in an MFA full-time, plus weekend DJing gigs, a social life, maintaining a household, etc…
I’ve never really thought about Dinner Music as a form of service journalism, but I do think that label makes sense. I have a journalism background (masters from NYU, nearly half a decade at WSJ, a couple of years at Axios) and often feel that the habits and behaviors of people who work in that industry are embedded in the way I work in mysterious ways, even now that I don’t do that as my day job. I’ve always thought of service journalism as something based on the practical, like “how to do xyz,” but perhaps Dinner Music is the millennial version of it. We seem to be a generation obsessed with discovery. So, maybe that’s the service? A discovery tool of some sort. Though I could probably argue the opposite, that the service it’s providing is that the listener doesn’t have to do the discovering, the digging, they can enjoy the music without the labor of finding it. But they still get the pleasure of hearing a really good song or album for the first time.
This is a HUGE one, but how would you describe your music taste? What informs it, what expands it? What does a really good piece of music feel like in you? What makes you fall in love with a new piece of music?
I want to qualify my answer by saying my taste is constantly changing. The inputs that inform it are always shifting in priority. Sometimes, I value country music more because I’m home sick, or sometimes I value funk or jazz because I’m in a more intellectual state of mind. Music taste is such a nebulous thing!
But, despite that qualification, there are some things about my taste that have proved to be enduring:
I love the seventies and am generally drawn to anything influenced by that era, so disco, yacht rock, freak folk, classic rock, funk and soul, jazz fusion, early electronic, and lots more that I’m forgetting to include. I lived thirty minutes outside of that aforementioned small Texas town, so my dad would drive my sister and I to school in the mornings (otherwise, we’d have to be on the school bus at 5:30am) and we’d listen to everything he loved, lots of Queen, David Bowie, The Beatles, The B-52s. Rocky Raccoon was my very first favorite song. And actually, my favorite song now is still of that era — Goodbye to Love by the Carpenters.
I could tell you why, but Dave Hickey actually wrote an essay on it in his book Perfect Wave, and it tells you everything I never could about its specialness: “‘Goodbye to Love’ is a very sophisticated pop song —a pop song by high-art means. It gives us what we want at the expense of what we expect, thus elevating the song out of the melodrama of pop music (which confounds our desires and expectations) into the realm of pure comedy, in which our desires are improbably fulfilled.”
Growing up, I was distressingly normal, so I loved pop music and was very infected by the emo-era in middle school and then indie sleaze in high school/college. And I still love that stuff. Just like everyone, I listened to a lot of Chappell Roan last year and the year before. I also saw Blink-182 at a music festival last year and it was probably my second favorite performance of the year (the first was the Troye Sivan/Charli XCX SWEAT tour, naturally). Right now, I’m listening to this totally banging pop album from UK-artist Rose Gray. A lot of this stuff doesn’t end up in Dinner Music, because that project is an extension of my taste, but not all of it. Some things are just for me!
Then, of course, I moved to New York City at twenty-one and, as annoying as it is to say, it pushed me to become more interesting and naturally exposed me to a lot more music, so a lot of the global influence comes from that era of my life.
A really good piece of music, for me, is always about a gut reaction. Sometimes those gut reactions are wrong, but rarely, if ever, have I loved something and not immediately known right away (though an exception is coming back to a song years later).
I wasn’t sure how to answer this question, and still feel as though I’ve left out a lot, but I did make a playlist to help guide me toward an understanding.
A few mainstays: Sade, Dorothy Ashby, Mina, The Radio Dept, Weyes Blood, ELO, The Doors, Townes Van Zandt, Perfume Genius, Jess Williamson, Ronald Langestraat, Patrick Cowley
You have a very dedicated and appreciative subscriber base of Culture Study readers…..and a lot of Culture Study readers (not all! Just a lot!) are people in their 30s and 40s who are struggling to figure out new sources of music amidst life and technological shifts. What, in your experience, makes it particularly hard to discover and fall in love with new music these days — and how do you personally make it work?
My initial reaction is to say it’s the algorithms, and they are at fault to a degree (see Liz Pelly’s essay on Muzak from 2017, which is still very relevant), but to take it a step further, I think the demands of life (under capitalism, etc) are at the root of the algorithmic rot on music platforms.
More and more, people are encouraged to turn their brains off and so we seem to be at an all-time low in terms of our ability, or desire, to actively engage with music (or art or books or movies or television). I saw something recently about how Netflix is creating TV shows that are made for people to watch while they scroll on their phones. Like, what’s the point of that? Why are we here? But we also know that we’re isolated and talking to other people less, organizing around shared interests less, and so on (I know there are many, many Culture Study posts and threads about this). And, I get it, most of us are working or in school or raising children or all of those things and more. We have a limited amount of time to find music we like and an unfathomable amount of options. So, our circumstances — burn out, decision fatigue — are pushing us toward ready-made solutions that aren’t good or satisfying, but we don’t have time to find anything we actually like, so we become passive consumers of mediocre art that we don’t even like and, in turn, probably become a little bit depressed because really fucking good art is completely essential to the human experience.
I also think that the influx of data has also fundamentally changed how music is even made. Labels pressure artists to create music that the algorithm will like, not music that actual humans will. Songs are shorter, less emotional, use the same instrumentation, even keys, because the algo says to do that. But we know that’s total bullshit. The songs that really do well, that really connect with people long-term, aren’t like that.
I’ll go back to Chappell Roan here. Pink Pony Club was the first single a lot of people heard from her and it's four minutes long, which is 2x as long as a lot of songs that get funneled through the algorithm. Seriously! And sure, you can do it well, lots of songs on BRAT are short, but that album, as much as I did like it, was clearly produced for the internet. Maybe it’s some kind of meta-production and that’s why it was good, I’m not sure. I think change elements in songs are what turn good songs into great songs, bridges, key changes, etc, and when a song is short, there’s no time to incorporate those elements, or perhaps people are too lazy. And then there’s AI making music and I’m too tired to speak to that, but I encourage people to read Ted Chiang's Why AI Isn’t Going to Make Art in The New Yorker.
That being said, there are a lot of talented people who are pushing against the grain and making, producing, distributing and writing about really great music. I find music in many, many different ways, but my most successful ways are through labels that have produced or re-issued other artists I have liked, through other writers or curators or through friends with good taste. Sometimes I’ll just blind go into a record store and hope for the best, but that’s a lot more time consuming. A few websites actually have decent systems of recommendations, like Bandcamp or Discogs or Juno, which will tell you what other people have bought who have also bought a particular record, so in that sense, it mirrors the experience of a friend telling you they like something. Same thing on Spotify. Occasionally, artists will have playlists that they’ve made themselves that are very good and often include influences that an algorithm would’ve never picked up on.
One of the reasons I started Dinner Music was as a tool to shift through all of the music out there and to organize what I liked. I was creating playlists like this and sending them to friends long before I started the project. Sometimes, I feel exhausted by all of the options out there and will think I’ll never hear one more good song ever again. But, I’m always, always, always wrong and that song, or album, never fails to reveal itself and thank god.
I also want to note that there is a strong cohort of folks that are leaving streaming behind altogether, in favor of buying digital music or using CDs or records or all three in an attempt to reclaim their relationship to music and make it more intentional. While I’m not tossing streaming out of the window, I do try to be intentional about purchasing music. I have to buy music to DJ, but I also try to buy albums that I really love and listen to them on vinyl so I can create an extra connection to the music.
I’d love to hear you describe the feel of an algorithmically organized playlist. What’s lost?
So much is lost. I can start first by saying the loss begins before any consumer even listens to it. Spotify’s use of “ghost artists” is well reported at this point, but the practice persists. So, before you or I even listen to a playlist, the quality has been cut down so that money can be saved. The songs being fed to us are not based on what we want to listen to, but based on how a large corporation can save money by pushing subpar music onto us. And isn’t that how you want to consume art? By getting the cheapest possible version that is “passable”?
I have two arguments that sum up my feelings about the “algorithm” playlist (and probably anything algorithm-driven). The first is that they are boring. And the second is that they are stupid and I mean that in the sense that the algorithm is literally unintelligent.
They’re boring because all the songs sound the same or because the “curation” is entirely unimaginative. A disco playlist led by the Bee Gees? Groundbreaking. (To be clear, I like the Bee Gees fine.) There’s no cohesion or form: it’s just songs randomly placed one after the other. A good playlist, or set, should build into a feeling. There should be a beginning, middle and end that have meaning. I could talk about this idea for a very long time. There are tons of parallels to writing and storytelling. One idea that is essential to literary works is that of juxtaposition. That tension and interest and meaning is created in juxtaposition. Genres should be mixed. There are lots of songs that are not of the same place, time, era, key, genre, etc, that should be played together.
I do this in Dinner Music a lot. I’ll mix dark wave with bossa pop or indie sleaze and it seems like they shouldn’t go… but they can, right? You can play Kick in the Eye by Bauhaus into an LCD Soundsystem song. Then, you can take the indie sleaze song and play it into italo disco song and so on. In my experience, the algorithm cannot do this well. I think it tried with the daylist, but those playlists are so same-y and quickly became nonsensical. Like, today my daylist is called “that one time my daylist was called ‘jazzy classy friday evening.’” I’m writing this on a Tuesday. The AI is losing it.
This leads me into my thoughts about the algorithm being stupid. It does not know how to give anything interesting to you. I don't like Phoebe Bridgers anymore because for something like a year, the Spotify algorithm was desperate to serve me the song Kyoto. Almost anytime I was on a playlist that had Kyoto, it would play it second or third. Shuffle isn’t real anymore. The great irony of all of the computing power going into these algorithms is that pure, random shuffle would do a better job. I think there was a period of time, maybe like 6 months, where I felt like algorithms were kind of getting it. That period of instagram ads that really felt like they knew what I wanted, etc. But now there are so many inputs that have nothing to do with the actual consumer that it feels like you’re being force fed garbage at worst, and mediocre, unsatisfying experiences at best.
So basically, what’s lost is any real creativity or intentionality. There is no better feeling than hearing a song you didn’t know you needed to hear and the algorithm is pretty bad at delivering that experience. On the other hand, humans can be really good at it, because we can make those creative, left-field associations that are surprising, but work at a level beyond basic association (like genre, region, etc). Taste is notoriously hard to define but I think that may be the biggest differentiator here. The algorithm is tasteless!
One thing that really kills me about all of this effort is that a lot of people do work like this, curate playlists, make good music, write about it, etc, for not very much money (though of course they should be paid more). How much money have these companies wasted by chasing a non-human workforce? Wouldn’t it have been cheaper to hire smart, creative people to make these things good? It just feels like AI is “solving” the wrong problems.
What’s your playlist philosophy? And what value do *you* get in putting together these playlists for readers?
I think playlists, and DJ sets for that matter, function best when they follow the same logic as a narrative. There should be some kind of beginning, intro, that hooks you, followed by some tracks that root a person in the experience, then a steady, but jagged, climb upward, with ups and downs, then the apex, or climax, ending with a nice turn or cool down.
For Dinner Music, the philosophy is simple. I want people to listen to and discover good music while they’re winding down at the end of the day. One or two songs can turn an entire day around. Citta’ Vuota by Mina has come to my rescue time and time again, especially if I’m sitting in traffic, trying to get somewhere, totally pissed about work or life or everything. Same with Love and Money by Tag. It’s important to me to be open-minded about the sound and to try not to be too much of one thing. Sometimes it’s a dancing week, lots of disco and global groove, sometimes it’s a brooding week, lots of dark wave or bossa pop, sometimes it’s a listening week, lots of lounge or jazz. Sometimes, oftentimes, it’s all of those things.
I started Dinner Music as a project for myself. I was already digging all the time for DJing (and because I just naturally end up in these long rabbit holes when I’m listening to music) and then I met the person who started and runs Flow State, who gave me some earlier pointers. I truthfully never considered that other people would like it, though of course, I always thought what I was doing was good. I’m not naturally a person who expects to be recognized for good or creative work while also wanting that recognition. So, when that recognition does come, I don’t know what to do with it!
That being said, I think the biggest value has been the people I’ve met and people commenting or emailing me about music they’ve discovered through it that they’ve loved. I have a friend who has been doing a date night every Sunday with their partner where they cook dinner, drink wine and listen to the playlist. It’s really an incredible feeling to be a part of people’s lives and rituals like that. There is so much garbage in the world, I’m grateful to (hopefully) be giving people something that is consistently not garbage.
This is again very broad, but I look forward to seeing where you take it — what’s the case for having *more* music in your life?
For me, the biggest thing is that you never know where and how and when you’ll find a song that changes your life. Life change doesn’t have to be this huge thing, sometimes it’s a small internal shift. Your perspective changes. You feel more able to tackle something. You feel nourished creatively and are willing to start a new project. Your day gets a little better. There are really so few things we have control over these days and music can be one of them. I’m sure there is science around the way new things or experiences can be beneficial. For example, I heard this psych folk pop song from a Moroccan group recently and was totally floored. It sounds like just all of the American sixties pop groups that I’ve loved. It feels good to hear it. There is so much goodness lurking underneath the darkness.
To answer this another way, I also think that more music doesn’t even have to mean listening to more. In Austin, there’s a hi-fidelity listening bar called Equipment Room that plays really great records. It’s small, very intimate. You can go with a friend and drink a glass of wine. You could go by yourself and just listen. I know there’s tons of places like this all over the US (and Japan, where the concept originated). Like Public Records in New York or Jolene in Miami. Or maybe it’s going over to a friend's house and putting on a record or a new album with the intention of listening to it. Remember driving around with friends in high school just to listen to a new CD? We should do more of that. More aimless wandering. More intentionality. ●
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