Spotify is the Superior Social Media
It took years for me to develop a Belief that I could curate music. It took the Internet and Poetry to do it.
As I walked Leonard a few days ago, I got a pop-up on Spotify Mobile: “Playlist-Making is Art.”
“You could stop at five or six stores— or just one”
Curated music has been a part of my life as long as I’ve known about music—choices had to be made about what to cut into a mixtape, what to burn onto a CD, or what 6 CDs to put in the 6-track of my car. Those were choices we had to make because of the limitations of the medium we chose to listen to music on — there was only so much memory on my .mp3 player, so I had to choose wisely what to offload and import. The limitations of the $10 iTunes gift card I got for Christmas are evident in the singles I bought for my iPod touch.
When I ask why those choices matter to me now, I find that the choices we made, however motivated, framed the soundtrack to my memories.
I can tell you with 90% surety that if you were to turn on my Grandma’s 8-track entertainment console, one of the Mannheim Steamroller Christmas CDs would play.
I remember clearly the twists and turns driving through the Rockies on our Trip West™️, but only by the obsession I had with Mike Mains and the Branches, which I listened to on repeat most of the trip.
I associate a LEGO set I had as a kid with Gone, by Switchfoot, and I can see myself putting the CD player on repeat as I worked on the wheels of the set on a rough, small, white carpet.
“Honey, you got a big storm comin’”
There’s a concept in media effects and literacy studies (probably borrowed from Education research) that talks about “Locus of Control” or “Self Efficacy”. It has to do with how much you can imagine doing a new thing— the belief you have in your ability to do and commit to a new behavior (Disclaimer: I’m very much generalizing here).
For as long as I’ve had music of my own, I’ve just been picking and queueing songs out of a list. For a little while, I’d just put ALL of my music on shuffle and let God, or the Algorithm, decide what I heard. After a couple of years of following and admiring the Spotify playlists of my friend Pam and my roommate Acie, it took a Twitter (and TikTok) meme for me to develop a high internal locus of control to make my own.
The Meme has been covered by many sites: essentially, you use the order and names of songs in a playlist to create a message you read from top to bottom. The subjects range from romantic (propositions and admissions of love) to intertextual (creating playlists that create transcripts of other memes and TikTok audios). My question was:
Can I make a poem out of this?
Yeah, sort of. That brings me to the first Saved-to Draft I wanted to share on this site: a poem called
How did I make it?
I set the tone for myself: “Okay, this is about 2020”
I decided my boundaries: “I can only use songs in my Liked Songs, and I have to work linearly from past (2016) to present (2020)”
I began adding songs as I scrolled: there was some word association, which was more fragmented, and sentence building, which is more flowy.
I screenshotted it and imported the photos to InDesign and added some punctuation to it.
I feel like putting this in the world is showing my cards in more ways than one: I’m showing you not just my work, but what kind of stuff I’ve saved to Spotify over my entire college experience. In that sense, it’s a bit of a time capsule. I don’t really know what the list sounds like when you listen through the playlist; I haven’t done it yet (it’s a 100 lines/songs— so it’s almost 7 hours long). Let me know if you do!
To close,
Putting this playlist together broke a metaphorical wax seal for me in terms of my ability to work with Spotify as a mode of expression. Instead of just being a media consumer, now I’m creating playlists for my own use— working through emotional experiences, bottling memories, and capturing vibes.
The goal of this work, and this newsletter, was to be that for you. Try writing a Spotify playlist poem! See what you can do with the music you already listen to! And send me the link when you’re done ;)
Soon,