The Complete Playlist
Being a Discourse of Play & Playlists
To play is to enter into an activity that invites surprise. This is why play is considered the domain of Children, who should always be surprised for the world is new to them, and sneered at by adults because an adult should not be surprised by what they must surely have experienced before.
To remove the element of play, and to miss surprise is the true stamp of adulthood and its immediate segue into irrelevance, old age, and failing of the mental apparatus that follows.
But the playlist is itself, as commonly used, not a tool for surprise but one for comfort.
The common playlist has the following disadvantages — it has a limited number of songs which means that there is a limited number of combinations even if you shuffle the playlist.
Often people make playlists of music they know well, therefore there can be no surprise in music that shows up.
Often people segregate playlists by emotion, genre or feeling that the music inspires in them, thus there can be no surprising juxtapositions of moving from high energy heavy metal to morose jazzy piano tunes.
In almost every way that playlists are used the element of surprise, of play, is removed.
Mana and Music
In our earlier condensation of the collected Illuminati Ganga wisdom regarding Mana and its relation to the Arts
We made the following observations, which will be important in relation to Music and playlists:
The object that possesses Mana produces a form of mesmerizing allure to those who experience it. They are drawn to it and feel that it has some power
This has a negative effect on the experience of any individual songs in the playlist; when songs no longer offer any surprise whatever force of Mana they have for the person hearing the song gets depleted.
Mana, as we know is “a spiritual force or energy permeating the universe, a force that can be cultivated in people and objects,” it is the force of Mana that provides the experiential value of Art. One of the primary properties that an object needs to have Mana is uniqueness and surprise is a result of perceiving uniqueness.
Playlists destroy or at least deplete slowly the Mana of the songs in them.
What can be done to fight this
First, before I go any further describing the antidotes, and tools to improve the playfulness of music in your life, I will make some quotes from this interview with Henry Rollins of Black Flag
The choice of Rollins here is somewhat arbitrary, I happened to encounter this interview as I was working on this, and found that our views aligned on some things.
I have two basic food groups of music: protein and carbohydrate.
The protein listening is new music, where it’s unfamiliar to me so I’m listening, sometimes taking notes, researching the band while the music is playing. I do quite a bit of this, usually during the week.
On the weekends, I will allow for some carbohydrate listening, which would be records I’m familiar with, that I’ve been playing for years. This music is not exactly background, but more of an environmental asset for elevation of mood.
Rollins sees the protein listening as something that strengthens the musical sense, and the carboyhydrate listening as comforting, which as already pointed out is what most people use playlists for.
He then says something else that really gets very close to the heart of Mana as it exists in music
This is one of my favorite aspects of recorded music. The songs on a record do not change. People come and go but the music remains. There are records you can play where there’s not a single person on it that’s alive, yet, there they are. John Coltrane is in your room with you when you put the record on. There is something really powerful about that to me.
Hidden Benefits of Short, Time-Based Media
This is one of the more powerful aspects of short time based media, like most poetry and music. Before describing it though, consider this argument about Soulmates from the movie Good Will Hunting
Will lists a number of people that ‘challenge’ him
Shakespeare, Nietzsche, Frost, O’Connor, Chaucer, Pope, Kant…
Obviously we shouldn’t put too much into this movie here, as the choice is hilarious on several levels, but there are still some points to make here…
Three of these people are poets but I get the feeling that he does not care for Shakespeare’s or Pope’s poetry (just a personal opinion), funny enough I do think I can see the character caring for Frost and maybe William Carlos Williams, but really not much of a guy for poetry all in all.
And so when the psychiatrist says “They’re dead” that is correct. They’re dead and he cannot have a conversation with them, he cannot really get anything new from them based on anything other than reading them again and again and hoping to gain some insight in what they have written that he did not glean before.
Now you might think that John Coltrane is also dead, and Henry Rollins can’t really get anything new from him. But that is wrong, it is in fact the power of short time-based media like music and poetry that new things can be derived from them despite their individual creators being dead.
This ability is mostly found nowadays in Music, for most people, because of the technological ways we have of consuming music.
The Past Becomes New In Music
Because most music takes up a very short time the mind is able to move between music quickly, this is different than longer time based media like reading a novel in which the sensations and experiences of the novel are in one set continuum.
Music that is followed by other music that is randomly selected creates a new continuum. As such the experience of hearing John Coltrane in one piece may be changed by the following piece by Dur-Dur band may be altering the feel of the next track of Elvis Costello’s Man Out of Time
Reading Kant takes so long that the ability to change meaning and get new feels from that commitment is very limited.
Besides this Music, like the graphic arts, has the concept of people remaking things in their own style. Covers, samples, and mashups — in conjunction with the original can reflect back and add new meaning to what would otherwise be the dead past.
Fragments of literary works can be mashed up into others, remixed and combined in new ways, but not with the ease of music, which also has the benefit of being combined with visual imagery in surprising ways.
While Shakespeare, Nietzsche, Frost, O’Connor, Chaucer, Pope, and Kant may be dead, John Lennon, George Harrison, Mozart, Coltrane, Duke Ellington, Cobain, and Jimi Hendrix still live.
Music — more than other media — is manipulated via technology
Most media is presented via technology — for example a book is presented in an ebook — but there are not technical possibilities for manipulating the media widely known and easily available. These technical possibilities give you other way in which music can be made anew.
Some widely known technical capabilities
- Recorded music can be altered in speed and pitch.
- Tracks can be extracted
These are of course generally not used by anyone that is not intensely studying the music, but then this is really the point of the “soulmates” quote — no one cares about using most of these tools for just listening — people care because they have a deeper investment in music and must derive something new from the past that was not seen before.
Other technical capabilities
- Because music is a temporal media, and because sounds are repeated and have natural relations to other sounds, one can artificially lengthen or shorten songs based on intermusic relations, creating different versions from the same base https://mofi.loud.red/ — this relates to the Infinite Jukebox https://musicmachinery.substack.com/p/the-infinite-jukebox-10-years-later which takes songs and extends them into infinity by finding natural spots to loop in the song. obviously this can be used to identify parts of other songs that mesh in with these songs very well
- Because music is a temporal media focused on sound it can be integrated easily with video media which is a visually oriented temporal media. This allows for new interpretation and meaning to accrue by jumping back and forth between the two interplaying media forms.
Stop Doing Playlists Wrong
All this leads us to conclusion that the normal limiting of playlists to play only certain tracks that the user has chosen before hand in a particular order is problematic and will lead to atrophy and lessening of the intelligence one experiences in the aural sense.
The playlist should be as close to containing everything as you can make it, if there is a song that you will only like sometimes put that in. Try to be open in your musical affection.
The following is Illuminati Ganga’s complete playlist, the secret to using it is shuffle play and to not skip something just because it is not fitting your mood at the moment — skipping should only be done if the level of aversion is akin to that of Steve Albini for Steely Dan otherwise try to get some protein out of hearing things you might not have heard before juxtaposed with things you have.
You might also like to set track transitions https://support.spotify.com/us/article/tracks-transitions/ if you go to the direct link of the playlist.
Make the playlist a source of surprise and playfulness again.
This story was written by IG Agent 19, past articles of interest by Agent 19
