Day 55 (May 13): Mastersystem - Bird is Bored of Flying

Mastersystem – Dance Music - Record Reviews - Stomp And StammerAlgorithms have ruined music. That is what I've heard, anyway. Nobody listens to full albums anymore, and nobody really listens to music at all; it's all a big wall of auditory stimulation to tide us over between Netflixes. Infinite choice means zero choice.

I'm a tiny bit sympathetic to that argument. There's a dumb, nostalgic part of me that likes the idea of having to flip through displays in record stores to discover my new favourite band, and having to block out hours to enjoy the latest music rather than just pop it on in the background while I'm scrolling Twitter. And, okay, algorithms are at the forefront of a process of cultural dilution which stems from aggressive capitalism's total disregard for artistic value in favour of profitability. There's a good case to be made that the algorithms are evil.

Still, with all of that very sensible analysis in mind, today's song of the day comes from my Discover Weekly on Spotify, and I think that the algorithms made some points here. It's "Bird is Bored of Flying" from Mastersystem's 2018 album Dance Music. Mastersystem, by the way, was a side project from members of Frightened Rabbit, with the late, great Scott Hutchinson on vocals. Nobody does it like him.

I don't know how I would have discovered this song otherwise. There's no way to find all of this stuff on my own, and no way to be able to listen to all of it. Algorithms are droids in the Clone Wars of late capitalism, fine, but sometimes they pick out stuff from the cultural wastelands that really means something. Thanks, algorithms, up to a point.

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