Against my best efforts, I have gotten addicted to playlists. At the end of this blog post email I have embedded one for you (link here), if you’re like me and you begrudgingly use Spotify after a tenuous decade-plus relationship with the platform. Scroll to the bottom if you just want to hear a good collection of songs based on a weird topic. It’s only 6 songs, with a runtime of ~25 minutes, designed for you to put on while doing a pomodoro. If you don’t know what a pomodoro is it means you do 25 minutes of uninterrupted work, then take a 2 min break. Then do 25 minutes more, then take a 2 min break. Then after four of those you take an hour break. I do it sometimes to focus on getting whatever I need accomplished without the distraction of a social platform whose name I don’t know anymore. Usually I set a timer, but you can just put on my 25 minute playlist, take a break when it’s done and run it back.
You have to use Spotify to do that though.
Spotify is, like most popular tech platforms, a a gift and a curse to humanity. It gives us convenient access to what we want, but influences our behavior and sells us junk like any good cog in the capitalist machine. When the service debuted the company pitched itself as a savior for a dying industry. In that narrow-minded regard, it succeeded. People don’t illegally download music, really.
Over the years Spotify has also redefined listener habits based on its own profit-hungry whims. Don’t get me started on the negative impact it’s had on podcasts. You can read more about that—in an article I wrote about Black Star’s album coming out on Luminary—here. For this blog post email I’m sticking to music. As a consequence of having every song ever* available, we’ve also accepted the constraints that the platform that gives us that provides.
I wrote an article last year about how Lil Baby’s new album is not good if you judge it by the constraints of the “album” as a form. I argued that it is great if you judge it by the new definition of an “album,” which is basically a playlist. Streaming services cause artists to adapt to the products they’re pushing. Apple Music is better at suggesting albums to listen to, whereas Spotify favors playlists and sometimes makes it incredibly difficult to find a specific album from an artist with a lengthy discography or a lot of singles. So if you make a long album with at least one hit and a lot of filler, your stream numbers will go up. It’s data all the way down.
I’m a classic man like Jidenna, though, so this new playlist format does not gel well with my boomerish consumption tendencies. Except now it does. After getting into playlists, I’ve had a more enjoyable time with music discovery than I have since I was scouring blogs and downloading mp3s onto an iPod. I’m sure most normal people reading this are thinking, ‘really, this guy just sent me an email to tell me he’s using playlists in 2023? tiktok injects music directly into our brains now in augmented and virtual and multiple unreal realities. why do i care about this?’
At the risk of seeming like a sponsored content spammer, I just want to share that my gateway drug into playlists has been this cool app called Music League. A group of friends (with whom I don’t quite share 100% music taste) have all gotten hooked on it, some to an obsessive degree considering its fantasy-football-esque gamified point system. But the general gist is: each week, everyone submits two songs based on a theme, like “desert road trip” or “rainy day coffee shop.” The songs are all anonymously combined into one public Spotify playlist, for users to listen to and upvote their favorites and downvote the snoozers. It’s fun to pick out songs you want others to hear and hopefully upvote, and I’ve found joy in digging for songs based on a particular theme and discovering gems I’ve never heard before. It’s also great when someone else suggests something perfect to be added into your own rotation. If you don’t have any friends there are plenty of public leagues you can join.
The “rainy day coffee shop” theme my Music League used this past week is what inspired me to make today’s Pomodoro Playlist. One of the songs I submitted for it was the new Jeff Rosenstock single “HEALMODE.” It is the most accurate encapsulation of this past LA winter/spring/early summer I’ve heard. Those months of constant rain were grueling, and not just because every stranger you ran into thought they were an original genius for commenting “We live in Seattle now.” The roads were flooded. The serotonin was depleted. When Midwestern, Southern, and Northeastern IG stories showed people jumping into lakes and pools, the clouds hung over the studios as the strikes began. Jeff Rosenstock, known more for screaming over loud and chaotic DIY punk and (formerly) ska, plays a gentle guitar and sings some good ass lyrics about the California rain dropping paradiddles onto leaves, pinecones sticking to his car, and urban coyotes who may or may not have a place to take cover. If that’s not your thing though don’t worry, Young Dolph and Key Glock immediately follow.
It was hard to get into the rainy day Music League theme because as soon as the rain cleared it got hot as shit and shows no signs of cooling anytime soon. The rain is like an inaccessible memory that only “HEALMODE” can reopen. So the playlist is split into two. You start with the rain and you end on a happy sunny day. And then you take a two minute break.
*not really every song ever, but for those who are lazy and addicted like me, we tend to think whatever platform we favor is really all there is.