“We Have Seen That You Like Metal Music”
Is this meant as a tribal salutation? A Big Brother warning? A phishing scam gambit?
The all-seeing eye of Spotify has been upon me. And I’m not sure what I should make of it. Checking my emails over mid-morning coffee, I was greeted by the somewhat ominous titular subject line.
When it comes to unsolicited messages I’m as paranoid as everyone else (including metal pioneers Black Sabbath), and as far as I recall, I never checked a box on the Spotify interface that said:
[·] Yes, please monitor my listening habits, amateurishly categorise my tastes, then pester me with your dumb conclusions.
But then in the fast-paced tapestry of today’s digital life, it’s so easy to lose track of all the dumb things we stupidly or accidentally sign up for. Maybe I did ask to join their lab rat surveillance programme. Hell, we all do that simply by breathing these days, don’t we?
So with a blend of suspicion, distaste and curiosity, I prodded at the mystery missive with my cursor, and opened it.
“Plunge into the depths of Metal music,” it invited (threatened?) me. I should point out here that in fact all this is the translated version, as Spotify addresses me in Spanish. Another box I must have unknowingly checked. Or more likely it simply defaults to that because of my billing address.
Though you’d think that if they were so sure about my listening habits, they’d have clocked that 90% of my music is in English, and should have switched accordingly.
Or sent me an email saying “We have seen that you like English language”, which I would instinctively read to myself in the voice of the old guy in Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade who pronounces as to the choice of cups. Maybe you have to include enough songs by The Carpenters on your playlists to get that option.
Anyway, back to the smoke, lightning and heavy metal thunder.
“You spend a lot of time listening to content,” the All-Seeing Eye continues. Is this a good thing or a bad thing? Are they happy it’s a lot of time, or are they about to slap a surcharge on me for overstaying my welcome on their servers? What if I fall asleep with my earphones in? Will I have to pay extra for my ‘content’ looping unheard while I dream? Do they know I’m asleep? Are they watching me as I dribble saliva onto my pillow?
I really am starting to get paranoid now.
“People think I’m insane because I am frowning all the time,” Ozzy sang, in between on-stage batsnacks. The truth is, we have plenty to be frowning about, not least faceless corporations sneaking into our bedrooms and monitoring our alpha wave patterns while we lie unconscious.
I’m so edgy I’m starting to see that ‘content’ as a snidely dismissive slur as well. Oh, my exquisite musical taste is just ‘content’, is it? Muzak? Bubblegum? Elevator pap? OK, I do have a couple of Ed Sheerans and some Katy Perry in there. Guilty as charged, m’lud.
What my playlists don’t contain, though, is much in the way of the claimed ‘metal’. Clearly the content delivery platform spyware will have a far better idea than I do as to what lies in the forgotten ‘depths’ of my account, but off the top of my head, I reckon there are between one and three tracks each by Metallica, Iron Maiden, Black Sabbath, Motörhead… and that’s about it.
I guess The Cult’s Electric album was kind of metally, and there are a couple off that. But enough to warrant this weird “We Have Seen That You Like Metal Music” pronouncement? I’ve never had the same charges levelled against me for any other genres, like ‘shoegazer’, ‘folk punk’, ‘disco’ or ‘synthpop’, for which there is surely far more evidence on file.
Maybe their tracking algorithm is easily confused. There’s some Mercury Rev, and with a density of 13.6g/cm3 mercury’s a pretty heavy metal. The Stone Roses’ Fools Gold, or Neil Young’s Heart of Gold, perhaps? No Spandau Ballet, before anyone starts suspecting me of such metallurgical crimes. Or is there a live version of something recorded at the Palladium in there?
In any event, it seems like their idea is I should be listening to more metal, as they’ve offered me a smorgasbord (there’s probably a Norwegian proto-hardcore band called Satan’s Smorgasbord) of shinily weighty baubles to delve into.
Kicking off, appropriately enough, with the Kickass Metal playlist, which is liked by 1,487,341 people. And 1,487,341 metal fans can’t be wrong, I suppose. Let’s see what delights it contains.
This playlist’s poster boys are a band by the name of Alpha Wolf, and my paranoia is twitching to the redline now as I watched the film Alpha, about a wolf, just four days ago, which kind of suggests Netflix and Spotify are joining forces in this intrusive domestic content consumption spying cabal.
But this Alpha Wolf don’t look much like my idea of metal. They’re wearing what look like those dumb US high school jackets with sleeves that don’t match the rest of the garment, only one has hair anywhere near his shoulders, and one of them’s wearing glasses, FFS. Maybe he’s the drummer, in which case he gets a pass for now.
Whenever You’re Ready is the wolf boys’ Kickass Metal opener — no time like the present, huh? I imagine myself lifting a stylus onto a revolving slab of hell-black vinyl, adopt a wide-footed air guitar stance, and get ready to rock…
[4:13 later…]
Errm… Right. Seriously, if that’s what the kool kidz are listening to these days when it comes to ‘metal’, I’m quite happy to leave my own collection at the few odds and ends of old-timer headbangers I already know and love.
You remember that song with the video of the woman stepping out onto the balcony of a building? Evanescence, or something? It kind of sounds like that, but with a gruff-voiced bloke (in a crappy high school jacket) shouting over it, simultaneously sounding both deadly serious and ineffably silly.
I should perhaps persevere, in a belated attempt to update my musical tastes. But next up is The Summoning by Sleep Token. Spotify will presumably just inject that directly into my cerebral cortex as it implements the next stage of its mind control programme tonight.
Watch this space for a catatonic review tomorrow.