Music is one of the few aspects of life where we are perfectly OK offloading our choices to others. Not only OK with it, but often prefer it. Do we know exactly what we want to listen to most of the time? Absolutely not. Have we vaguely identified a genre, decade, mood, vibe, or whatever POLLEN means as something we think we might be into right now? Totally. We like listening to and creating playlists for a variety of reasons (we’ll get it into it later), but it’s important that you know - right now - that our reliance on playlists is very troubling and deeply problematic.
The cultural alarm over playlists has been sounding for so long that it has become a kind of Silent Hill-esque background noise, so maybe it’s worth reminding ourselves of the particular perils of playlists.
The arguers argue that streaming services use playlists to render you passively reliant on their ability to curate songs you might enjoy (either algorithmically or via bona fide human person) which then diminishes and devalues your relationship with the artists and songs found on those playlists. In other words, you pay more attention to and spend more time with, say, the “Montreal Chill” playlist rather than any of the individual artists who are temporarily featured on it. In sum, we are now all playlist zombies mindlessly guided by the whims of faceless curators and proprietary algorithms. We consume bops like brains, never to be satisfied, and are doomed to shuffle cursedly along forever.
Being a playlist zombie is, the argument goes, bad for us because we are being subtly manipulated by forces outside our ken. Our taste is being engineered by tech workers and their robots. Being a playlist zombie is also, the argument insists, bad for musicians because we don’t know that individual artists are responsible for the songs on that playlist (because we are zombies) and are unable to navigate over to the artist’s profile to check out their albums, EPs, or singles (because duh we are very much zombies).
Is being a playlist zombie significantly different than being a person who used to listen to the radio (wherein faceless DJs and different corporations decided what we listened to)? Why would you ask that question? Is being subtly manipulated by algorithms and streaming services substantively different than being subtly manipulated by the marketing wings of major record labels, the editorial decisions of music publications, or anything else in this monstrous din we call a world? Why would you ask that question?! Is this another instance in which entirely justifiable individual behaviors are being blamed for much older and more intractable structural problems? Are cultural commentators mounting arguments against aspects of contemporary life based on a bad faith nostalgia for a world that never existed? How very dare you.
Anyways, we are playlists zombies now - so obviously we decided to search out some playlists. We lack critical faculties of any kind (the algorithms really got to us today!), so we looked around and searched the only word our empty minds could conjure: “Montreal.”
There are an incredible number of options.
If you are not in a coffee shop, but want to feel like you are there’s “Cafe Montrealais” by an official Spotify employee/algorithm or “Cafe Montrealais” by Flavie Courtemanche (who is either a person or an algorithm). If you are feeling kind of hockey-ish, there’s a list simply called “Montreal Canadiens” or the far more specialized “Montreal Canadiens 2017 Goal Horn.” If you aren’t particularly fussy, you could select any of the thousand playlists helpfully called “Montreal.” If you want to be low-key creepy, feel free to check out any of the dozen “Montreal Roadtrip” lists probably created by people who undertook roadtrips to Montreal. You could listen to those and pretend you’re along for the ride with total strangers. Fun!
Is that last option not creepy enough? Well, if you want to get human trafficked and/or serial killed, you could click on the playlist called “montreal-paris t’entends” [montreal-paris hears you] adorned with this image:
It features (no joke) “The Killing Moon” by Echo & The Bunnymen and “Dream a Little Dream of Me” by The Mamas and The Papas. We would link you to it, but are legit afraid of getting caught up in whatever’s going on there.
The only plus side to this horrifying playlist is that it briefly woke us up from our zombie trance for long enough to spy a series of playlists about Montreal by an account simply called Montreal.
As the blue check may have tipped you off, this is the official account of Tourisme Montreal. According to the webpage they made to go along with these lists, their aim is to give listeners “a taste of the incredible quality and variety of music made in Montréal” and, as far as we can tell, they do that. Each list has between 20 and 60 songs by different artists. They feature the usual suspects as well as some acts that we have never heard of. We have nothing disparaging or especially kind to say about these lists.
We were going to wrap things up here on a kind of positive note. Maybe listen to a little “MTLjazz,” but we knew better now. We didn’t want to revert back to our playlist zombie state! We resisted pressing play and falling into the comforting embrace of a series of songs in a list. We pulled ourselves Together. Stayed suspicious. We kept looking and, sadly, thinking. We investigated these lists top to bottom, so that we might could uncover their insidious logic and save us all from a sequence of songs bent on our destruction.
After days (our brain is broken remember), we noticed that Spotify shows you when a song is added to a playlist. It’s an odd feature, but an interesting one. It is, we suppose, meant to serve as a quick means for us playlist zombies to confirm we are being offered only the freshest bops. The Montreal brand MTL playlists are, well, not the freshest bops. They’re not the freshest bops at all. Many of these particular bops were in fact added to playlists way back in April 2020.
Yes. One week into THE VERY BAD TIMES some person or algorithm was set to work on these playlists. Listeners would have access to music from Montreal (as curated by Tourisme Montreal) while the world spasmed and contorted in untold ways and optimism towards the future collapsed in on itself like a star. YES.
Are these playlists merely the innocuous and empty labor of a bureaucratic enterprise that found itself in an unprecedented historical moment and had no earthly idea how to respond? Absolutely not. Recall that playlists are an engine of manipulation, a nefarious device meant to turn you (like us) into playlist zombies servile only to the streaming necro-lords.
The masterplan in April 2020, obviously, was to convert a listener’s desire to visit Montreal into a desire to have Tourisme Montreal curate their listening habits in such a way that you felt as if you were always-already within the very spirit of the Montreal music scene, past and present! Once you were entirely under the spell of these playlists, Tourisme Montreal (and Spotify) would finally have the chance to divest our attention from Men Without Hats (featured on the “MTLdanse” playlist) and invest that attention directly into Tourisme Montreal and Spotify. It’s all so simple and so clear. The real decline in Montreal tourism since 2019 is merely an indicator of the real success of Tourisme Montreal’s utilization of streaming playlists.
OK. Enough.
It is - hopefully - very clear that large corporations (like Spotify) and faceless bureaucracies (like Tourisme Montreal) do not have your particular best interests at heart. They serve themselves. Their indifference to you - or any of us - though is not some remarkable or new facet of culture or society. The problem of corporations mining some domain such that said domain is forever altered and potentially destroyed is old and everywhere. The problem of business exploiting facets of individual and group psychology to motivate behaviors that benefit them is old and everywhere. Algorithms, AI, or whatever else the networked world has to offer in the future is, ultimately, just a technique of doing the same old thing in the hopes of eventually reduced labor costs. Spotify - don’t worry - probably wishes you and all musicians harm, but only as much harm as you’re willing to bear while still using their services and no more actual harm than any public or private company valued in the tens or hundreds of millions. [Is this actionable language? Guess we’ll find out.]
Regarding playlists in specific, whether they are heartlessly concocted by a robot or lovingly crafted by a honest-to-goodness human shouldn’t really matter. If you are largely indifferent to what you’re listening to then the precise agent behind the selection is trivial. If you are invested in what you are listening to then the precise agent behind the selection is meaningful only insofar as that agent might merit and appreciate a thank you of some kind. The paranoia we are being taught to adopt in regards to technology (broadly put) serves no one much good. Yes, the algorithms are out to get you - but so is everyone else (including the publications owned by conglomerates or corporations that publish breathlessly doomerist articles about tech companies that extract your data while also using these same extractavist tactics to better target advertisements in your general direction).
This is terrible, yes, but it isn’t scary. Interacting with the world means being pushed and pulled by competing and conflicting motivations (both your own and those of others). As such, the world is just as vexing as it always was and very likely always will be. If one of the ways that you deal with that vexation is through playlists (either listening or creating), then that seems to us like something to be grateful for rather than suspicious of. And - if possible - it likely makes sense to ensure that the folks who participate in easing your vexation (i.e. the musicians who make music that you listen to and/or put on playlists) are encouraged to continue easing it (i.e. with money, attention, thank yous, whatever).
There is always the chance that we are being duped, played, or otherwise messed with by powers greater than ourselves. It might even be likely. We are fairly convinced that ethical and meaningful engagement with the world means making deliberate and imperfect choices in the face of the possibility that we are being duped, played, or otherwise messed with. Sometimes - and we’re just speaking for us here - we choose to offload our choice in music to others because - amongst other things - it exposes us to new music, it allows us to learn about a genre or era about which we’re ignorant, it helps us focus on tasks we don’t really enjoy, and a number of other reasons. We also try, when possible, to engage meaningfully with the artists we love and admire in some fashion outside of playlists (by buying merch, attending shows, streaming things directly, telling friends about them, creating a playlist featuring them to share with others, etc.).
We are certain that Spotify and all the other streaming necro-lords have designs on us, but we also knew that our high school crush didn’t make us a mixtape for no reason.
But what do we know - we’re just a playlist zombie.
As we said, we really enjoy playlists, so we created one for you. It’s really good. It’s entirely unmotivated by any ulterior desire and definitely created by a real human. It’s definitely not a complex assemblage of perfectly chosen songs that will subconsciously inspire you to subscribe to this newsletter and forward it to no fewer than three of your favorite people. It is just good music. Honest. Oh, and it works in any sequence! You can suffle through it or listen from start to finish. Both work! Who are we to tell you how to live your life? Do whatever!
If you don’t use Spotify, good for you (really, truly, sincerely). Here’s the track list:
“Hooligan 69” - Ragga Twins
“Graffiti” - Digible Planets
“Spontaneous - 13 MC’s Deep” - Leaders of the New School
“Stutter (Feat. Mystikal) (Double Take Remix)” - Joe
“Oops (Oh My) (feat. Missy Elliot)” - Tweet
“My Leather, My Fur, My Nails” - Stepdad
“SOS” - ABBA
“Nice” - Kleenex (aka LiLiPut)
“Drop-Out” - Times New Viking
“Unconscious Melody” - Preoccupations
“Never Mind” - The Replacements
“Million Miles of Fun” - Drug Church
“If You Can’t Do It Good, Do It Hard (feat Lydia Lunch)” - Against All Logic
“So Scared” - Loraine James
“Rollin’ & Scratchin’” - Daft Punk