Firmament
Whose expectations: unions, Laurie Spiegel, and the 9th most popular fast food chain in the world
I don’t always have the energy to write longer pieces at the moment, but excerpts and juxtapositions probably better capture the ongoing debates in my head than my own words, and are often more generative for the reader, anyway.
The theme this week: whose expectations?
Flipping the script on flexibility:
[There isn’t a timeline.] My problem with all of the [Digital Audio Workstation] software is that you open it up, and it shows you a picture of the space you’re going to fill. It shows you your expectations. This software’s main purpose is for you to make a linear MP3 file that then Daniel Ek won’t give you any money for.
Laurie Spiegel’s essays are remarkable.1 I’ve been meaning to write about her 1996 essay ‘That Was Then—This is Now’ for ages. She talks about the process of new technologies being developed, commercialized, resisted, and accepted, and of the different assumptions technology developers had then, and technology users have now. It’s only 3 pages long, so just read it.
Critics in 2004 demanded that we take pop music seriously — i.e. deploy the advanced tools of critical inquiry to find positive value in manufactured pop music. The reviews of Addison suggest that something else happened: a soft bigotry of pop expectations. In 2004, Jody Rosen’s ballot for the Village Voice Pazz & Jop poll endorsed Ashlee Simpson’s “Pieces of Me” for being “very well written & recorded & ably performed.” Is it possible that any major release today fails to meet this standard? Are there any major performers who don’t work with seasoned songwriters? Is there a way for someone not to sound good with the latest digital technology? Would recording engineers not tweak a bad performance into a good one? There are perhaps uninspired songs, but almost everything is ably written, recorded, and performed. Even the laziest production is celebrated. The producer of Sabrina Carpenter’s “Espresso” built the song around a few obvious Splice loops, which was cast as a democratic triumph: “Everyone can make this tune.”
The real sin is when pop artists try to make something other than unabashed pop. In the same review that Kornhaber gushes over Addison’s shallowness, he gives Miley Cyrus’s new album a very hard time for having artistic pretensions.
This is the actual legacy of Sanneh linking his anti-rock ideology to an acceptance of commercialism: We live under an enduring critical contrarianism that is quick to find depth in shallowness, authenticity in artificiality, and true affirmations of life in cynical pursuit of profit. For all the demands for critics to pay attention to “popular” music, Addison’s “breakout” single “Diet Pepsi” only peaked at #54 on the Billboard charts. Whether her album connects with audiences or not, critics are fully invested in the question of whether Addison can land the triumphant Harvard Business School market entry case study of using Scandinavian outsourcing to set up American TikTokers as a vehicle for future franchising across the entire media mix.
Kornhaber ends his review of Addison with the declarative axiom “Good pop is good music” — as if we’re fighting the same battle against rock music from 20 years ago. Pop already won! In fact, the pro-pop view is so hegemonic that few seem to remember the older aesthetic dispositions that would be much less kind to Addison. Certainly it would be real hater shit to disqualify her music just because it was made as part of a broader business strategy. On her third track, Addison at least admits to what she’s up to: “Money Is Everything.”
As of July 12, 2025, the most popular restaurants in the world by number of outlets are Mixue Ice Cream & Tea, McDonald’s, Starbucks, Subway, and KFC. By number of monthly listeners on Spotify (which isn’t officially available in several countries, including China), the most popular musical artists in the world are Bruno Mars, The Weeknd, Lady Gaga, Ed Sheeran, and Billie Eilish.
I do love me some Taylor Swift, so, in her honour, I suppose I shall have to visit Wallace, the 9th most popular fast food chain in the world. In the meantime, I eagerly await the critical consensus on the new Ranch Snack Wrap.
“I love electronic music but it’s super boring if nothing breaks out, when you can predict when the bass comes in and out, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1…[but] I’m a little bit allergic to experimental music – it’s really hard to experiment and make experimental music. Everything is so easy to generate.2
Electronics aren’t a style or a kind of music any more than a piano is. They’re a way of making sounds.
I went dancing yesterday, and was struck by the bleeding obvious. Which is to say that like fifty percent of what matters in a club is the relationship between the kick and the bass. Or drums and bass if we’re being more generous. If it’s groovy, mostly predictable, and mostly repetitive, people find it fun. It was, and I had a lot of fun.3 Time-tested patterns such as an off-beat bass, disco ‘pony’ 16ths, and the like, tend to garner the best responses. As my friend Ruby once said when I was moaning about something or other being a cliche, “But the cliches are fun.”
“It’s the most stupid signal,” Kozalla says about the pounding kick drums he hears at almost every big event he visits. “I don’t know how people are still fascinated by this thing.”
I once visited the Musical Instrument Museum in Phoenix, Arizona. I swear about 90 percent of the instruments were drums.
What is a live performance? Which bit is necessary? My friend Luke [Abbott, I assume] had his Ableton Live setup, and he showed me a new controller he got and goes, “look, I can program hi-hat patterns with these buttons and just put them in.” “Oh that’s nice, Luke, which patterns are you gonna do, the 16ths? And the 8ths? Any others?” No, of course not. So he’d brought a performance element that wasn’t actually meaningful to the show…Are you doing something that means something?
We’ll finish with more Laurie. In this piece from 1981, she’s so prescient that it’s hard to pick out small sections to quote from. It contains fragments foreseeing technologies like streaming and blockchain, the rise of Spotify-esque monthly listener counts, and the dawning of artists as ‘solo-preneurs’—though perhaps even she couldn’t imagine Live Nation’s aggressive takeover of venues turning performance into forms of equity, nor songwriting catalogs being sold to investment groups.
Performance’s transience and non-objectness have all along prevented music from functioning as a means of exchange or form of equity.
A most crucial question, with great political, economic, aesthetic, and cultural impact, is that of how to let people know that something new has been entered into the public info facility and what it is. Whether entries are carefully selected or whether absolutely everything is accepted, people who wish to access entries will be completely dependent on how works are categorized, described, and organized.4 Another question concerns what kind of credit, royalty, or bookkeeping system will ensure that creators get something out of the use of their work.
Already, creation and distribution, traditionally divided between different specialists, are beginning to be done by the same individuals.
If distribution falls more to the taker than to the maker, if replication can be more cheaply done by those who seek out and want to acquire the work (copying onto reusable objects as opposed to buying pre-manufactured new single-use ones) than by companies that inflate prices with budgets to convince others to buy them (advertising), the way aesthetic works are economically valued will change. Works may be measured more referendum-style in the future, by how many people are interested enough to make copies.
But the hard problems of artistry, as it were, shall persist:
Other problems that creative artists have will not be so transformed, though, such as spending time alone making someting that nobody else may ever want or understand, or of the temptation to make something more popular (remunerative or “commercial”) instead of something more personally meaningful to oneself, nor will other difficulties inherent in art and creative thought be likely to diminish.
As was the institution that funded much of her work, Bell Labs.
I feel this way about (most) ambient music.
Although I was surprised to hear Flying Lotus’s Do the Astral Plane in a club, and it ripped.
And, I’d add, publicized.