Canon Fodder

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Nielsen’s Gracenote Uses Artificial Intelligence to Classify 90 Million Songs by Style

Nielsen-owned media data specialist Gracenote wants to help music services make better mixes with fewer outliers: The company announced a new music dataset called Sonic Style Wednesday that classif…

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Dad rock usually means music for straight, white, American dads, even though there are so many other kinds. Let’s change that.

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What Do We Mean When We Call Art ‘Necessary’?

It’s supposed to be a compliment, but it saddles the work — and its audience — with the weight of moral imperative.

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Have Algorithms Destroyed Personal Taste?

No one is original anymore, not even you.

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Opinion | ‘Bull Durham’ has always been a great movie. Now, it’s entering the canon.

One of the greatest movies about baseball, and one of the greatest romantic comedies ever made, gets the recognition it deserves.

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Who Counts as an Expert?

This is an era that rewards simple explanations, yet telling the often-complex stories of how non-superstar musicians make work while making a living is more important than ever.

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Celebrate Kendrick Lamar's Pulitzer, But There's Still a Long Way to Go

The landmark victory puts hip-hop's tumultuous relationship with the canon in focus

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I remember a time when not having heard of a great band or solo artist or record or song (or some more significant piece of history, for that matter) reflected poorly on the ignorant party. But the internet's history-of-human-endeavor-as-infinite-uncurated-landfill approach to culture has shifted the burden of proof onto the enthusiast, even to the art itself. Which is fair enough, I suppose. But despite what you may have heard, art's job is not to advocate, or fight for cultural primacy, or argue its own merits. Lucky thing all these smart writers are still around to do that work for, and with, and in spite of us.

Sean Nelson’s “The Problem with Pitchfork’s 200 Best Albums of the—Oh, Jesus Christ. Shut the Fuck Up and Read It Already.” piece for The Slog

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Not to be a reactionary utopian or anything. I know there's no time for that kind of thing anymore. But it's still my brain's default mode: the conversation about music—and canons and unjustly undiscovered artists and interesting failures and overrated successes and songs you simply can't even imagine what the point of life would be without them—is ongoing, perpetual, and necessary, regardless of what other topics might be trending.

Sean Nelson’s “The Problem with Pitchfork’s 200 Best Albums of the—Oh, Jesus Christ. Shut the Fuck Up and Read It Already.” piece for The Slog

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MTV News: The Good, the Bad, and the Contradictions of an Ill-Fated Experiment

Jessica Hopper, MTV News, and how trying to move away from empty calorie content should have been the start of something great and long lasting at MTV.

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5 things I've learned as Guardian music editor

I’m leaving the Guardian after 11 great years covering music – years during which a great deal has changed in the way music is created and sold

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At their best, critics are defenders and advancers of culture, accountable to nobody but the audience and the muse. That’s what makes them great, and it’s also what makes them difficult, like the artists they are...Without critics, culture resonates. With critics, it sings.

Elizabeth Méndez Berry’s We Are Only as Good as Our Critics: Prioritizing Cultural Critics of Color piece for Pop Culture Collab

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We are only as good as our critics: that’s the guiding principle for those of us who believe that generative discourse and dissent play an essential role in our imagination ecology, as they do in a democracy (as a former critic myself, I’m a true believer). The critic provides cultural, political, and aesthetic context, and defends that which is deeply personal—taste—with actual analysis.

Elizabeth Méndez Berry’s We Are Only as Good as Our Critics: Prioritizing Cultural Critics of Color piece for Pop Culture Collab

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How music recommendation works — and doesn’t work

When you see an automated music recommendation do you assume that some stupid computer program was trying to trick you into something? It’s often what it feels like – with what little context you g…

Echo Nest co-founder Brian Whitman’s distillation of what makes music recommendation engines work. (written pre-Spotify)

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...it’s not the listener’s fault if they miss out on something that will change their lives – these days, anyone can gain access to a library of over 15 million songs on demand for free.

Brian Whitman’s How music recommendation works — and doesn’t work piece on Variogram, his personal blog

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You can now play with Spotify’s recommendation algorithm in your browser

It’s fun if you know what "valence" means!

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Against guilty pleasures: Adorno on the crimes of pop culture

Owen Hulatt’s exploration of Theodor Adorno’s relationship with popular culture, high and low culture, and the concept of the guilty pleasure for Aeon: ”For Adorno, a large part of the harm inflicted by popular culture is harm to our ability to act freely and spontaneously. He claims that popular culture, as well as being a source of pleasure, is also a kind of training; it engages us in, and reinforces, certain patterns of thought and self-understanding that harm our ability to live as truly free people.”