what are you listening to right now?

2022-09-07 13:34:13

#7251

uziq: Member; +545|3978

you’re a product of the youtube algorithm. everyone had a city pop phase seemingly after a period when 2-3 ‘buried’ city pop artists got promoted into everyone’s side bar. it’s really bizarre.

it came on the back of another youtube-driven trend of ‘vaporwave’ music too, which essentially takes lots of retro 80s and 90s signifiers and makes a sort of postmodern pastiche out of it. mall music, corporate jingles, elevator muzak, chopped and screwed vocal samples from fleetwood mac or chris de burgh …

you nailed the whole phenomenon in your first description. ‘nostalgia for something you never experienced’. there’s something very Internet about that.

2022-09-07 13:41:16

#7252

unnamednewbie13: Moderator; +2,091|7298|PNW

I got my surprise nostalgia for music I haven't experienced out of the way when I played Mafia.

Youtube recommendations stay off. I prefer it getting confused and digging up some video from 2007.

2022-09-07 13:50:32

#7253

pirana6: Go Cougs!; +699|6817|Washington St.

I have youtube recommendations off, as well as google suggestions, internet history, web and app activity, and don't even use Chrome (FF ftw), or listen to that much music on youtube (I'm the dinosaur without a spotify account and instead use an mp3 program). Yet youtube still suggests things similar to whatever random video/music I last watched. You can't escape it. I'm pretty sure Youtube/Google can just about read our minds now. They sure as fuck are reading what we type into browsers.

2022-09-07 13:56:01

#7254

SuperJail Warden: Gone Forever; +671|4246

uziq wrote:
you’re a product of the youtube algorithm.

keep on running up that hill

2022-09-07 13:57:22

#7255

unnamednewbie13: Moderator; +2,091|7298|PNW

I'm not convinced that Google can fully read mine yet. Multiple birthdates, multiple locations across various other throw-away accounts. Even my facebook placeholder is half-fib.

When I get suggestions for stuff anywhere, it's such a random selection.

2022-09-07 13:59:07

#7256

uziq: Member; +545|3978

i think they’ve tweaked the algorithm successively over the years and it’s just produced some weird results for a surprisingly broad swathe of people.

there’s that classic city pop album with the japanese schoolgirl on the cover that hung around in the recommended sidebar for years. relatively unknown to western listeners in its time and suddenly it has like 50 million+ views and 10,000s of comments. you’d need some serious insider knowledge of their algorithm to ever figure out the reason why that got rescued from eternity.

japanese citypop and rare 1980s japanese ambient music have had two huge revivals cause of this. there’s no way that people would have spontaneously discovered this stuff on spotify or whatever. it’s a weird glitch of our time.

2022-09-07 14:01:54

#7257

uziq: Member; +545|3978

SuperJail Warden wrote:
uziq wrote:
you’re a product of the youtube algorithm.
keep on running up that hill

stranger things is definitely the TV equivalent of vaporwave lol. similarly an extremely shallow and stylised form of retro nostalgia.

a famous music critic called simon reynolds wrote a book on this cultural phenomenon over 10 years ago. pretty prescient. gen-Z’ers listening to kate bush. the weeknd scoring no. 1 singles using a producer from the experimental avant-garde who came up making hauntological synth music. tiktok teens memeing a 12-hour album project based around the concept of dementia/alzheimer’s and the infinite repeat of scratchy old ballroom shellac records. etc etc.

2022-09-07 14:15:45