We are just old enough to know how to burn a CD. When your hand-me-down first car only had a CD player, burning CDs became an essential skill. Those CDs were our first experiments in custom playlists. It was thrilling when a trusted friend gave you a silver disc with “Great Songs” sloppily sharpied on the front. Inevitably, those songs were great—all the greater because they had been shared by a friend.
Theologian and musician Jeremy Begbie, perhaps the contemporary scholar most responsible for bringing the worlds of theology and music together, says that modern habits of listening to music have less to do with listening and more to do with “mood management.” Such a critique is crucial, and echoed well in Elizabeth Stice’s recent review of Liz Pelly’s new book Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist.
We have no qualms with Stice’s review (which is excellent, particularly as a critique of “the background noise model of music.”) Her review makes us want to sit down with Mood Machine, which is the sign of great review. However, we felt like readers would appreciate some hope after a rather dismal assessment of the modern music experience. We absolutely share a disdain for the kinds of playlists Stice describes—glittering background music that is no music at all, listening that is no listening at all. We want to offer our quiet practice of protest against the “mood machine” of Spotify and its algorithmic, AI-infested playlists.
We also want to name upfront that, perhaps, our voices are too idiosyncratic to be helpful. We are each hobby instrumentalists and amateur musicians, playing in various church contexts, local bands, and off and on together as friends for many years. Some of us even have music on Spotify, and if the statistics which Spotify reports are correct, then we are in the “top 1% of listeners”—whatever that means.
But we love playlists. For nearly a decade, the three of us have shared what has become for us an almost sacred tradition, one we look forward to each January, and one which occupies a surprising amount of our shared lives. Each year we simply search, curate, and build a proverbial “top 25 playlist.” Then, at the close of each year, the three of us share these playlists with each other, which in turn becomes the music we listen through in the early months of the next year. Indeed, we often see in each other’s playlists songs from our own prior years. This is interlocking evidence of how each of our influences and tastes have been lovingly shaped by our friends.
There have been rules to our playlists since this exchange began—the kind of schoolyard rules that are contingent and inscrutable because they have to be. (As Bluey says, “The rules make it fun!”) One must have discovered or fallen in love with the song during the year for it to fit into the playlist. One cannot simply go back in time and fill the playlist with old haunts (though, in some cases, exceptions are made if a song was known about in the past but not really listened to until the year at hand). Additionally, one has to be faithful to the songs that you actually fell in love with—no trying to make yourself seem cooler than you are by kowtowing to the winds of taste and popularity. In general, we discourage repeats from the same album (but every now and then some albums are just too good). And lastly, it must be exactly 25 songs. No more, no less. Culling the list down to the absolute best is a process that is both grueling and terrifically enjoyable.
There are other examples of this kind of curation: Ryan Hollingsworth’s Good Medicine playlists (now in their 46th iteration), the bewildering collection Goodbye, Babylon, or “The Deepest Cuts” offered by the critic and writer John Jeremiah Sullivan—a treasury of the earliest Black recordings also captured in his masterful essay “Unknown bards.” We also are reminded of how James K. A. Smith will sometimes end his books with playlists, which we wish more authors would do, to give us a sense of how their imaginations may have been tended and moved during the writing of their books. One of our mutual friends, psychiatrist and author Abraham Nussbaum, curates playlists he calls “The Listening Cure,” writing, “In the peculiar enclosures of the hospital, when your ears are ringing with alarm fatigue, a practitioner needs music.” Similarly, when our ears are numb from the mood machine, we need music to cure our listening.
We have been building these “top 25” playlists now for 9 years, and we are pondering how to celebrate the upcoming ten-year anniversary. Between the three of us, that is close to 700 songs. These playlists are far from “background music”; they are the songs that show what we were lamenting and longing for each year—songs that represent children born, joys shared, valleys endured. These playlists are not just lists, they are time capsules—records of walking with God through the sounds and silences of our lives.
The playlists follow the moods of our lives, and in some sense reflect back to us painful moments over prior years. They therefore do not “manage” our moods; they mirror them. We are trying to pluck an imperative from Ephesians 5: “Instead, be filled with the Spirit, speaking to one another with psalms, hymns, and songs from the Spirit. Sing and make music from your heart to the Lord.” These playlists are, at their best, the three of us speaking to one another from our hearts to the Lord and to each other. There is a particular delight and comfort when a song appears on all three of our playlists without prior discussion. It’s as if the state lines (and, in one case, ocean) that separate us disappear in that moment.
Frankly, there is a tremendous amount of “play” in these playlists. In a world of task lists and checklists and to-do lists, we need playlists. At their best they are about play, about the “list less”-ness of Sabbath. For the three of us, this practice has been a source of great joy, pressing each other to listen deeply and closely, helping us become better musicians, and forcing us to interact with music we otherwise never would’ve listened to. We trust each other as friends more than the AI or algorithms.
This is “PFC” (“Perfect Fit Content”), but in the opposite way that Spotify uses the term. As Stice describes, Spotify’s PFC playlists do not challenge the listener and are filled with Ghost Artists. In contrast, our “top 25 playlists” are challenging, idiosyncratic, and sparking. Though we have similar tastes in music, we are not a hive-mind. Sometimes a 12-minutes jazz-fusion track is on the playlist. Sometimes a song in a language the other two do not understand. Sometimes a song so painfully tragic that one is tempted to hit skip. These songs and all the rest make these playlists “perfect fits” for us, precisely because they grow us. We do not want to live in a musical bubble. We want to hear new beauty.
We hope these small acts of creating and sharing, including our practice, can be a form of resistance to the kind of passive playlisting of life which Stice and Pelly so wonderfully critique. We find ourselves longing for other witnesses of generative, outward-facing practices of music-listening that dismantle the mood machine. Perhaps the main problem with our argument is that it depends on the machine to resist the machine. (We are, in fact, sending Spotify and Apple Music links back and forth.) And we are well aware there are albums and artists that do not exist on Spotify, for which we can only listen in awe and gratitude—literally turning to old CDs.
When it comes to sharing music, it is a tragedy that we have allowed AI to take over the role of the best friend. Burning CDs was a bit of a pain, but seeing your friend light up with delight over your song curation made the process worth it. Streaming services made the process of creating and sharing playlists laughably easy. So easy, that we outsourced the position to the robots, robots who serve their masters’ interests, not ours. But it is easy to fire the robot and take your role back. Friends don’t let friends listen to AI-curated music.
Happily, the “top 25 playlist” has already spread. As we have shared our tradition, other friend-groups have begun to do it amongst themselves. We are not re-inventing the wheel with this practice, we are simply asking everyone to start “burning CDs” again—that is, start intentionally curating music with your friends again. Stice laments that we are not really “listening” anymore, but every year come January, we sit down and just listen. What we hear is not only great, niche, weird, and wonderful new music, we also hear the love of our friends.