Streaming is an affront to God
The endangered pleasures of inefficiency, inconvenience, and ecstatic boredom in the Dark Digital Abbondanza Era
Welcome to a Major New Blackbird Spyplane Contemplation Event.
Our interviews with Adam Sandler, Emily Bode, Thomas Mars from Phoenix, Eckhaus Latta, Nathan Fielder, André 3000, Kim Gordon, Danielle Haim, Mac DeMarco, Jerry Seinfeld, Matty Matheson, Phoebe Bridgers, Seth Rogen, Michael Stipe, Sandy Liang, Tyler, The Creator, Maya Hawke, King Krule, Steven Yeun, John C. Reilly, Clairo, Conner O’Malley, Evan Kinori and more are here
Mach 3+ city intel for traveling the entire planet is here.
The B.L.I.S.S. List — a comprehensive index of Beautiful Life-Improving Spyplane Staples — is here.
Your boy Young Spyplane is old enough to have spent untold hours as a kid posted up in my bedroom next to my radio, with a blank cassette in the deck and my fingers poised to smash the ‘Play’ and ‘Record’ buttons — waiting for a song I’d heard & loved to come on again in the hopes that I could POUNCE, tape it, and make it mine.
Among the many ecstatically boring ways I passed time during my adolescence, this might be the one I remember most fondly. There was a borderline-mystical combination of frustration and anticipation, ennui and suspense, distraction and attention, disgust (ugh another damn injury-lawyer commercial) and transcendence: “Holy s**t, they’re finally playing Pearl Jam’s new single ‘Daughter,’ all that waiting has collapsed into a molten shimmering Now.”
The closest analogue to this experience might be surfing — floating on the water for hours, paddling here and there, ecstatically bored as you wait for a wave you might ride for 11 seconds, if you ride one at all.
By the time the song I’d been waiting for did eventually come on, I might have drifted to the other side of the room, or maybe I was walking back from the kitchen, and I’d miss the opening bars. Maybe the DJ would start talking before the fade-out, “ruining” the audio I captured.
I accepted this. These imperfections were, like the waiting, part of the deal — aura-rich artifacts of the individual life I was living in linear time. And having my own copy of the song that I could play & replay was worth it.
Talk about inflation: Circa 2024, songs are worth approximately nothing. With streaming, music is not just effectively free, but also freely available to dial up on demand, meaning that zero hours need be spent hovering beside a tape deck to build a “playlist” of cherished tracks.
Is this paradigm “good?” It’s increasingly clear that the answer is No for the vast majority of people who make music — for “a once-thriving ecosystem of middle-class musicians,” as a recent NYT Magazine essay put it, who once “survived on the old model of physical sales and mechanical royalties,” but have now been “functionally erased” from “the profit pool of the streaming economy.”
What’s coming into focus more gradually is how bad things are getting for those of us in the audience, too. Something that’s long bothered me and Erin about the hegemony of streaming is that if you do away altogether with physical media, you put yourself at the mercy of corporate accountants (who might decide there’s insufficient R.O.I. when it comes to licensing anything with dubious commercial prospects, and then you have no way to see old Mike Leigh movies because you got rid of your DVD player and the video-rental places have all closed down) or at the mercy of legal disputes (which is why you couldn’t stream any music by, e.g., Aaliyah or De La Soul for ages.)
This connects to what the writer Cory Doctorow famously calls “enshittification,” where, at a certain point of market capture, a company’s drive for ever-increasing profits translates to ever-worsening products. Spyfriend Kyle Chayka wrote a frustrated New Yorker piece about quitting Spotify because he got fed up with that platform’s mounting structural bias against tiny things like “albums” and “choice” — a textbook case of enshittification that has corollaries across the entire landscape of algorithmically sorted culture.
I’d argue that there’s an even deeper problem here, with how our relationship to art is changing as a result of all this. It’s a problem that extends beyond tech enshittification to questions about the nourishment & ennoblement of the soul itself: As DIIV’s Cole Smith put it when I interviewed him back in May, “You have the whole history of all recorded music at your fingertips for no money, and that devalues music in general. It doesn’t properly express the work that goes into it, and it certainly doesn’t express how essential music is to the human experience.”
Along similar lines, Spyfriend Clairo — who’s 14 years younger than Cole, collects vintage soul 45s, and is currently touring in support of her lovely, extremely ‘70s-singer-songwriter-vibed new album — told me “the pendulum’s swinging in terms of people craving something tactile, things that feel like a long-process-type experience.”
Shout out to “long-process type experiences.” To be clear, I don’t mean to blindly romanticize the past: We compile streaming playlists here at the sletter, because they’re the easiest way to share collections of music with Spy Nation, and of course I’ll concede that sitting at a tape deck for hours is not a remotely convenient, efficient or straightforwardly pleasant use of time. But neither is sitting down as a record plays with the liner notes in front of you, looking at nothing but the lyrics, the art, and the credits until it’s over. And neither is wandering a museum for hours, pushing through waves of fatigue and disappointment in the hopes that something will stop you in your tracks, draw you in, and f**k up your whole s**t wonderfully.
Neither is schlepping to a clothing shop, flipping through the racks, trying on some clothes that look wrong in the hopes of finding one beautiful slapper, talking to the people at the store about the designers who made it, flipping it inside out to see what its seams say, copping it, and then wearing it so constantly over the next several years it comes to feel like a friend aging alongside you!
And so, when people valorize these kinds of outmoded media, and outmoded acts of endurance and devotion, I don’t think it’s just about empty nostalgia. Because these are touchstones and processes — precisely in their inefficiency — by which people can open themselves up to transformative experience, and honor the depth and fullness of what art means to us.
The dynamic here is similar to why so many people traveled hundreds if not thousands of miles to remote parts of Texas and Maine back in April for a fleeting chance of witnessing the total eclipse.
By contrast, when “everything is at our fingertips” — when art is compressed into the same omnipresent and infinite digital non-time as every random piece of internet garbage — I think that we’re left feeling incomplete on some basic human level, like we’re the practitioners of a vibey old religion whose rituals were all but erased, and whose places of worship were demolished and replaced by an invading force with wellness apps.
A full experience of art, after all, is a powerful means of communication with the eternal. And so it only follows that our era of corporatized digital plenty has fundamentally broken something in our relationship to G-d!
Take surfing again. Imagine if it somehow consisted of nothing but waves, 24 hours a day, no waiting required. So many waves you could hop from one to another to another before any of them subsided, experiencing “all” of them while experiencing none of them, because no single swell would feel particularly meaningful. That’s kind of what “surfing the web” is turning out to mean, and it f**king sucks!
Some brands and marketers sense the feelings of incompleteness created by this “dark digital abbondanza,” hence the boom in, e.g., artificially scarce physical products like limited-edition sneaker drops and deluxe 180-gram colored-vinyl reissues, and in ephemeral I.R.L. experiences like circa-2018 Instagram-bait Ice Cream Museums, “immersive art installations,” and the Sphere.
This tends to result in tons of fugazi s**t and bogosity, but sometimes it results in the creation of genuinely special things and genuinely meaningful experiences, too. For my money, the chances of encountering genuine meaning get higher when the cursed commerce cash-in vibes are at their lowest.
Along those lines, I want to close out the sletter with a story near & dear to my heart.
Erin and I were visiting Minneapolis a few years ago, and we hit the Walker Arts Center. We’d been there for an hour or two when, through a wall, we heard a slow, muffled, polyrhythmic synthesizer lullaby coming from the next gallery. It tugged us around the corner, where we discovered Bruce Conner’s beautiful and horrifying 1976 art film “Crossroads” projected on the wall.
At that point I hadn’t ever heard of “Crossroads.” It’s Conner’s edit of declassified footage of nuclear cauliflower clouds — much bigger and more fractally complex than mushroom clouds — filmed by the U.S. military during the 1946 Bikini Atoll atomic-bomb tests, just a year after the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The “Crossroads” score is split between electronic compositions by Patrick Gleeson and Blackbird Spyplane’s No. 1 Post-Minimalist Chune God himself: Terry Riley.
It was Riley’s music that had summoned me: a trippy 24-minute synthesizer swirl, made, according to Artforum, “via the use of tape delays at differing speeds” and “two separate Yamaha organ tracks,” much like Riley’s Shri Camel and Persian Surgery Dervishes, from the same period. I love those pieces, but I love this one more. The music is blissed out and searching in a way that becomes unnameably complex when set to this cataclysmic footage — not a million miles from “The Disintegration Loops,” William Basinki’s profound 9/11 elegy, which I talked about with Spyfriend Oneohtrix Point Never here.
And get this — when I tried to track down a copy of the score online later on, I discovered … nothing. No CD, no vinyl, no streaming release, no YouTube rip. There were some dead links on DailyMotion and YouTube scattered around, leading to copyright-takedown notices. According to Discogs, a tiny label called Latter-Day Quixote put out a bootleg cassette in 2015 but this too was nowhere to be found.
Realizing I had to dig for it, and might not find it, was ecstatically frustrating, in a way I hadn’t felt in ages. After a bit, I turned up an archived 2018 WFMU broadcast containing Riley’s “Crossroads” score, but with an “untranslated Cambodian artist” mixed in over the start, and with the DJ coughing over the middle of the track. This struck me as better than nothing — charming, in its own way, like my childhood radio tapes. I ripped it to MP3.
Some time later, I found a years-old post from a total stranger on social media who’d asked into the ether whether anyone had a copy of “Crossroads.” I figured it wouldn’t hurt to message this dude cold: Did he ever find a copy? Nearly a week went by. No response. And then, thanks to this stranger’s kindness, not only was a clean recording mine, but I had the full video of “Crossroads” itself, too, ripped from a 2004 DVD release that Conner’s L.A. gallery put out. It originally cost $35, and a shrinkwrapped copy asking $250 just sold at Specific Object.
Here’s the thing: Conner’s “Crossroads” is one of the most incredible works of art I’ve seen, thanks in no small part to the music, by one of my favorite composers. And some non-negligible part of what makes it incredible is my specific saga of stumbling on to it unaware; seeing it fill an entire wall; hearing it on a high-quality sound system; waiting for it to finish and start again; then trying and failing to find more than breadcrumbs online until — O baby — there it was on my laptop.
If I were to just embed the video here, A) I’d be risking legal SHENANIGANS with the Conner Estate, but more to the point, B) I wouldn’t be doing justice to the piece itself, and it would very probably mean much less to you as a result. This is what a lot of people who reflexively complain about gatekeeping online don’t understand: Getting something on-demand, whether it’s a piece of “content” or an “ID on the pants,” is not ultimately the same as enjoying it.
On the other hand, if I didn’t post “Crossroads” at all, after this build-up? That would obviously be wack. So, how about this? I encourage you to keep an eye open for a proper “Crossroads” screening at a gallery because you haven’t truly seen this until you’ve seen it the way Conner intended. I’ll see if I can make a screening happen with the Spyfriends at SFMOMA, who own a print.
And in the meantime, I’m going to link to the Terry Riley score as it appears on that archived WFMU show I found. You can listen to the full broadcast, or go straight to “Crossroads” here, complete with the other song played over the beginning and the coughing DJ partway through — artifacts that might actually help to restore some godliness to the stream??
If you want a clean rip, you’ll have to put in a little sleuthing. Less than I did, at the moment, because FYI the video is currently way easier to find online than it was for me back in 2019. Who knows how long the upload I’m talking about will be live, of course. If it gets harder to find, I hope that any and all boredom & frustration you feel along the way is as ecstatic as possible.
P🌊E🎹A🌊C🎹E🌊
— Jonah & Erin
This is a such a thoughtful, incisive post, in particular for a 1980's kid who would call radio stations and ask for songs to be played.
What it gets at is the idea from cognitive science that pleasure is primarily found in the 'anticipation' of something rather than in the acquisition of that thing, and it's f'd up and counter-intuitive (could we live in a permanent-state of almost-having something?). But your mention of the sort of euphoric journey you went on to find the Riley song speaks to that directly: it was, as the old chestnut goes, the journey and not the destination that was so meaningful. I once got back from a trip to Jamaica in 1999, and after hearing so many of the same bangers over and over, came back and drove 30 minutes to a local record store, where I went through a print catalog and found the CD that had the Wayne Wonder song, and then I placed an order with the record store and the CD didn't arrive for 6 weeks. For one song. The anticipation was incredible.
So appreciate your writing Jonah.
Thank you so much for this post! We need more music fans thinking about the ways they consume music because Spotify is ruining both the music making and the music listening ecosystems. (check out UMAW & their campaign “Make Streaming Pay” for more on this)
For anyone who wants to stream stuff in a more ethical & joyful way, I would recommend Qobuz for the following reasons:
- pays musicians ~10x Spotify rates
- higher audio quality
- nice clean UI
- doesn’t constantly try to foist new “features” and “updates” that keep you eternally engaging with the app
- doesn’t show play counts, very bare bones algorithm, & has a great blog/magazine.
This paradigm encourages you to educate yourself, ask for recc’s from your friends, seek out newsletters like BBSP, and generally be more proactive in your musical life.
If there’s more demand for real people to recommend good music instead of pay-for-play algorithms, more people will write cool newsletters like this one. I’d love to get back to an internet landscape with more of the 00’s / 10’s music blog energy.