Music

Peter Gabriel is right, if you hear the world as music, you can sing along with it, join in with it, celebrate and dance with it even while never knowing precisely what is going on.

Netflix is pioneering a genre that I’ve come to think of as ambient television. It’s “as ignorable as it is interesting,” as the musician Brian Eno wrote, when he coined the term “ambient music” in the liner notes to his 1978 album “Ambient 1: Music for Airports,” a wash of slow melodic synth compositions. Ambient denotes something that you don’t h... See more

On one hand, we have a booming Creator Economy, with an ever-expanding democratization of tools for production to anyone with an idea. So much so, that according to 1,000 surveyed Americans by ZINE, 86% of people believe there is an overwhelming amount of entertainment available today.

Yet meanwhile on the other hand, we seem to have also found ours... See more

Last year Sinéad O’Sullivan had a great piece in The New Yorker arguing that no one bothers to argue that Taylor Swift’s songs are musically innovative. But since her music connects with so many people, it must be good, and therefore, critics are on a mission to find the innovation somewhere . For Kornhaber, Swift has been “pioneering a futuristic ... See more

Once a dominant art form, theater ceded its cultural primacy a long ago. People still produce and even write excellent plays and musicals, even today, but it’s no longer the primary vehicle for cultural expression and innovation. It’s a niche. Similarly, film, fashion, literature, or even music as we once knew them are no longer the primary mediums... See more

In just under one generation, we moved from appreciating albums as cohesive works to consuming individual tracks, and then to music becoming reduced to muzak: background noise for gaming, viral videos, or endless scrolling. Disappearing is music as an art in its own right, which commands sustained attention and deep engagement. A song’s success is ... See more

Late 20th century media was a universe of legible, cohesive objects—films, books, shows, albums, people—which audiences largely experienced as complete entities, not necessarily due to anyone’s preference but because this was the most practical way to read them. Today’s media is a tangle of streams, flows, and feeds that mingle promiscuously and of... See more

Fashion and music, too, are in decay. Trends are still identifiable, but they lack the clear demarcations of previous decades. Based on clothing styles alone, a photo taken in 2013 could be mistaken for one taken in 2019, a creative stasis unthinkable even thirty years ago. Maybe it’s the rapid cycles of fast fashion, or our smartphone-first social... See more

On TikTok, new songs surge or flop based on how effectively they entice users to perform some slapdash feat: a simple dance, a costume change sourced from the bedroom closet, a cute or cringe confession. With a booming, young user base, TikTok has become a music-promotion ecosystem of extreme importance. That ecosystem thrives on calculated messine... See more