Deep Life Reflections: Friday Five
Issue 122 - Shuffle
Welcome to Issue 122 of Deep Life Reflections.
This week, an essay on music and meaning in an age of algorithms.
What do you like to listen to on a long drive?
Writer Ian Bogost tells a recent story of a mundane drive from Chicago to Madison, Wisconsin, in a rental car. Like one does on such a trip, he turned to music to pass the time. In this case, Spotify—streamed from his phone. A track came on, a laid-back psychedelic-rock tune by the name of Dust on the Wind by a band called The Velvet Sundown. They released two albums in June and currently have 1.4 million listeners on the platform.
As Bogost writes:
“When the lyrics came, delivered in a folksy vibrato, they matched my mood.”
Dust on the wind / Boots on the ground
Smoke in the sky / No peace found
Out of curiosity, I gave the song a listen (here’s the link if you’re also curious). It’s not bad. It’s got something of a Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young feel. But something felt a bit off. Hollow. Turns out there’s a reason.
The band doesn’t exist.
The music, the lyrics, the backstory, and even the four male members are all AI creations.
Rumours had been circling for some time about the band’s authenticity. Their social media accounts were cagey: “They said we’re not real. Maybe you aren’t either,” one post read. Then came the reveal. The group admitted it was an AI creation. “Not quite human. Not quite machine, living somewhere in between.”
The Velvet Sundown - Promotional Image
Beyond the novelty, this raised serious concerns about transparency, ethics, authorship and consent. For listeners. And for artists. If AI-generated music is trained on human work, who gets credited? Who gets paid?
But there’s a deeper question here. One that touches culture itself.
Bogost listened to the band’s two full albums. His verdict: while they’re not bad, they’re not particularly good either.
“More like nothing,” he wrote “Disturbingly innocuous”. And in that way, perfectly suited to modern streaming. Music as background. Something to play while we drive, cook, exercise, work. “A vehicle for vibes, not for active listening.”
Music, like all art forms, doesn’t exist in a vacuum; it bends and expands and evolves around the prevailing culture and times. Long before AI, streaming had already started to move us away from intention. Napster made music free in the early part of this century. The iPod—may it rest in peace—made it portable. Then Spotify made it infinite.
Now the biggest music-streaming service in the world, Spotify didn’t just organise your music, it slowly began choosing it for you through its algorithmically generated playlists and suggestions. Whatever it offers is always “good enough” because we can always skip ahead or prompt again. Or just let it play. Playlists became predictive.
Algorithms prioritise easy and endless consumption, but art—and life—require a little friction sometimes.
Does trading intention for convenience come at a cost of meaning?
There was a time when music was identity. What you listened to said something about who you were. In the 80s and 90s, when I grew up, you had music subcultures: New Romantics, Goths, Grunge, Indie Kids. Before then it was Punks, Mods, and Rockers. Finding your music meant finding your people. It meant effort, locating the right venue, record shop, and crowd. In that era, music was tribal. Now those tribal energies have shifted. Music is no longer the battleground. Politics is. Mods vs Rockers has become Left vs Right.
As Bogost argues, the internet has fragmented and flattened subcultures:
“The Velvet Sundown present the band’s soft pastiches of genres as sophisticated fusion, but of course it’s nothing more than a careless smear of stylistic averages.”
Psychedelia, folk, indie rock each once stood for something. Musically, politically, spiritually. I agree with Bogost when he says The Velvet Sundown doesn’t seem to care about any of those things. And maybe that’s why it works. Their palatable nature—their inoffensiveness—are appealing. Their lyrics are short, generic, and ambiguous enough so that it’s easy for the listener to hear whatever they want to hear. Contrast this with the white-hot noise and seething injustice of a 90s band like Rage Against The Machine who were unequivocal in their disdain for the establishment.
“Anonymous and mild sensibilities have currency because today’s music is so often used to make people feel nothing instead of something,” Bogost writes. “This music is not meant to be listened to directly; it’s used to drown out everything else.”
He calls it “second-order” listening. Not hated. Not loved. Just tolerated. He was even embarrassed to admit that some of The Velvet Sundown’s songs had stayed in his head.
“Did I like their music? No, but my aesthetic judgment had given over to its vibes, that contemporary euphemism for ultra-processed atmosphere. I simply hoped to think and feel as little as possible while piloting my big car through the empty evening of America.”
This is music as noise-cancelling for thought. Music for the void.
It’s easy to slip into pretension here. Music can be a high art for some. I’m reminded of John Cusack’s character, Rob Gordon, in High Fidelity whose judgement of character was based on their taste in music. But Bogost has hit on something. When we stop caring who makes art, why they made it, and how it should be experienced, something is lost.
I’ve made playlists my whole life. Right back to days of recording film soundtracks off the television with a cassette player. An eclectic, weird, and wonderful collection of pieces of music painstakingly put together over the past thirty years reflecting distinct memories, moods, and moments in time. Today’s playlist culture is different. It’s algorithmic. No human hand involved. Music you didn’t find—it found you.
And yes, sometimes that’s a nice surprise. But this shift towards a packaged, passive convenience mirrors our wider algorithmic living, and we lose a little of something.
An album gives you a beginning, middle, and end—and a memory
Recently, I went through my old CD collection—over 300 albums. It’s been a long time since I played any of them, more than a decade. My music runs through Spotify now. I’m a heavy user and it’s a great product, but I’m often playing the same playlists and songs.
So, I made a change. I spent two days replicating all my CDs in Spotify under my ‘Albums’ section. One by one. Full albums. Intact. No shuffle. Now, when I play Rumours by Fleetwood Mac, I hear the album as it was meant to be heard by the artist. Likewise for the debut album by The Stone Roses or Jeff Buckley’s Grace. All albums that have a strong emotional pull for me.
I don’t want to skim, swipe, or move on. And I’ve switched off auto-play as well. When an album finishes, the silence is notable—and deliberate. An album gives you a beginning, middle, and end—and most importantly, a memory. An emotion. A connection.
Passive music consumption severs that connection between our past, present, and future.
As Derek Thompson writes, “Our smallest actions create norms. Our norms create values. Our values drive behaviour. And our behaviours cascade.”
A small act of resistance in an increasingly algorithmic world.
The Velvet Sundown didn’t make the cut for my albums. But I doubt they’d notice. That’s the thing with algorithms— they don’t care if you’re listening. They’re already building your next playlist.
That’s Dust on the Wind.
A Question for you
How do you engage with music today—and how do you feel about the way you do?
Thanks for reading and supporting Deep Life Journey. If you have any reflections on this issue, please leave a comment.
Have a great weekend. Stay intentional.
James
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