What To Do When Bad People Make Good Music
When the music bops... it bops. So when is it okay to give into music made by the morally corrupt?
By Michael Cuby
Illustration by Luca Schenardi
Published
At the end of every year, like clockwork, social media feeds descend into a collective frenzy for the now-inescapable phenomenon known as Spotify Wrapped. An ingenious marketing ploy cooked up by the music industry’s most sinister streaming service, the campaign capitalizes on our generation’s obsession with “personalization” by gathering each user’s annual music metrics and displaying them in colorful, eye-catching graphics ready-made for ultimate shareability.
The gimmick has paid off tenfold — it’s been meme’d into oblivion thanks to its uplift of hilariously-named subgenres (like “Nerdcore,” “5th Wave Emo,” and “Escape Room”) and its thinly-veiled suggestions, through new “sound towns,” that queer people should move to random places like Berkeley, California and Burlington, Vermont. But mostly, the feature has been commodified and embraced as a way to publicly signal one’s selective music taste.
As an Apple Music user, I’m used to feeling left out of this year-end festivity. Forced to settle for the significantly less-appealing “Replay,” I’m rarely inspired to publicize my own roundup — even when, like in 2021 when Burial topped the list, it could be a boon to my perceived coolness to do so. Last December, however, I felt rather thankful that my music distributor of choice kept me out of the loop.
Confronted with the truth about my listening habits from the past 365 days, I saw the usual suspects: Yves Tumor and Sufjan Stevens had both accrued thousands of streams while NewJeans’ “Super Shy” had predictably finished as one of my most-played songs. But there, right next to it, was something I would have never chosen to reveal publicly — the type of highly sensitive intel your favorite Bushwick Twitter gay would joke “you could never waterboard out of me.” The evidence was undeniable. In 2023, one of the songs I had listened to the most was, gasp, “Keep Going Up,” the comeback single for Timbaland, which reunited the super-producer with Nelly Furtado and…unfortunately…Justin Timberlake.