"I don't know how or why Spotify recommended this track to me," that Ph.D student wrote, "but I sure am grateful they did." Like me, he was registering the surprise of secondary use. A YouTube video with about 10,000 views, and also a blog post about it written a few months ago by a media-studies Ph.D in Indiana. Oh, okay - she's an actor she was in the movie Diva. I'd never heard of An Luu, so I looked her up online. I put its lyrics into a translation engine: The conceit of the song is domestic abuse - one of those he-hit-me-and-it-felt-like-a-kiss songs, a complicated and disconcerting trope that also comes up in Bessie Smith, Rodgers and Hammerstein, The Crystals and Lana Del Rey. A few weeks ago, in my Discover Weekly playlist on Spotify - constructed by an algorithm for someone of my data-set – came " Pourquoi Tu Me Fous Plus des Coups?," an electro-pop love song, a good one, by the French-Vietnamese singer An Luu. A paradoxical reaction, both uninformed and connoisseur-ish. Also, I recognized that Homer Banks song, but what if I didn't? The appropriate or typical response to it in our time might not be this is part of a tradition about which I want to know more, but rather: what the hell is this? And then, maybe, at best, a half-step further: What's the footprint of this thing? How many views on YouTube? Who knew about it first? How did this escape me? How did it find me? And so on. That Blind Melon song retroactively soured the Homer Banks encounter a little. These signifiers (not just musical ones) always, in some way, have to do with history, with the past. Part of becoming an adult is learning to recognize cultural signifiers, which tell you something about where you are and who's behind the bar and what kind of time you might be having before you leave. (Not "tastelessness," but an absence of so-called taste.) The signifiers had gone haywire. The music in that place, while I was there, at first felt like a gift - and then like an encounter with an alien presence. It felt even more shallow than usual, by virtue of the depth that had preceded it.Ĭlearly, I was listening to a streaming-service algorithm. (It bothered me that I didn't.) And then, out of the blue: Blind Melon's " No Rain," a doughy song that seemed to be for some other place than this one, an early '90s MTV hit which I suspect far more people know than like. Later, I heard a few southern rock-shuffles strung together, including ZZ Top's famous " La Grange" and a more recent and more leaden one that I felt I should know and didn't. 3 on the R&B charts that year even so, you'd need to have a pretty decent grip on the history of American music to know it by ear. Ruth Brown is in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and her song was a hit, rising to No. A while after Homer Banks, Ruth Brown's " Wild, Wild Young Men," from 1953, came on. I would be paying attention anyway - but I have a feeling you'd have noticed that song too. I am a music critic, for whom all songs carry some kind of coding. You realize that you have been pointing at the ceiling more often lately.Īll right: "You" is really me. There you are, having an encounter with music's past. Now this is a song: undiluted momentum from the first beat, one satisfying jolt after another. The song is Homer Banks' " 60 Minutes of Your Love," from 1966, which was not an American hit, but became a favorite in the English mod club-dancer's canon of rediscovery called Northern Soul. Imagine you are in an averagely pleasant pub in Manhattan, talking to a couple of people, half-listening to the music being played from the ceiling speakers, until a song from the distant past makes you start listening closely. But as the terms of excavation shift, what are we losing? You've probably been surprised to hear a remarkable song you've never heard pop out of nowhere sometime recently - you're not alone.
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