Music

Two recent books, Liz Pelly’s Mood Machine and Andrew deWaard’s Derivative Media, explore the consequences of these technological intermediaries for the music, film, and television industries. While Pelly’s account focuses on the power of Spotify’s ever-changing playlisting practices, deWaard turns to the rise of intellectual property, as remakes, reboots, and spin-offs have come to saturate mass media markets. Both center on the changing relationship between labor and capital in the platform era.

We are near an old strain of folk utopianism, one that depicts the afterlife as a place with towers of food rising to the heavens. One of the first songs Hurley came up with was a sort of mantra he and his brother would chant aloud as children: “There’s such a thing as doughnuts / In the wide, wide world / Doughnuts! Doughnuts!”

This was how I would first understand Pavement’s music: dense bursts of esoterica punctuated here and there by mellow springs of warm pop hum, an Oasis of boredom in a desert of horror. Various forms of self-fashioning followed, and soon I became myself, a guy named Stephen who smirks and scoffs and dodges questions compulsively, who dresses preppy but never combs his hair.

Two moments are irresistible to rock biopics: the birth of a good song, and its activation in front of an audience. The scene where the initial idea strikes the songwriter, usually while tapping idly at the piano, is a virtual requirement in the genre. Malek-as-Mercury hits on the “Bohemian Rhapsody” theme while pecking at the keys lying upside down. In the truly lovely Love and Mercy, in which a mumblecore romcom slowly swallows a rock-and-roll trauma plot, Paul-Dano-as-young-Brian-Wilson pulls “God Only Knows” out of the æther in much the same way. He then plays it for his overbearing father and onetime manager, who more or less tells him it sucks.