As Jay-Z once announced, “allow me to reintroduce myself.”
You may already know a little bit about this newsletter’s mission. In this first issue I’m here to clarify.
This is a place where humans recommend music to humans. Music through the grapevine. Since I’m the human (or so they tell me) who started it, I can explain how it works.
Tunegrape’s Mission to Humanize Music Discovery
Sounds grand, huh? Maybe I overdid it. Anyway, here’s the idea: Each week music recommendations from someone or some people will appear at the top.
Next I’ll toss you a few songs of my own with commentary on why I’m including them. Plus, I’ll add some words on how these disparate sets of tunes come together across themes.
As far as recommendations, I’ll go first, then all of you can take it from there.
Suggestion: Deception by Blackalicious
Courtesy of a writer named tunegrape from New Jersey.
Not ready to read all this? You can find most of the completely human-curated music recommendations in this issue on this playlist.
I’m going to sound like an old man. I don’t want to, but here I am about to sound like an old man. Some people will never know the joy of riding around in a minivan with a friend listening to a CD one of you burned.
My favorite CD, burned for cruises around Long Island in my best friend’s minivan after he got his license, was built off of “Deception” by Blackalicious. As a budding writer, the work of lyrical artists on songs like “Deception” or “Kick, Push” by Lupe Fiasco, or “Hip Hop” by Dead Prez inspired me.
Cassettes count as well. But with streaming that experience is gone. When you burn a CD, you’re making an investment. Time and, even more important, love go into a CD burned for a friend or a loved one. There’s a story in each burned CD.
Now, a playlist can feature love. And it can take time. And someone who grew up on burned CDs by no means has a more important musical experience than someone who grew up dragging songs from Spotify’s near-infinite library into the lefthand column where the playlists live. But if you’re one of those people, allow me to indulge in explaining how my ritual is different from your ritual.
Ritual and why it matters
My ritual involved deep research. There were no algorithms telling me which songs to listen to. I had websites like AllMusic, various blogs, aggregators like DatPiff, and even print magazines. Each included songs curated by humans, described by humans, and recommended by humans. These person-to-person suggestions were what I thrived on when building my music library.
And then there was the piracy. All the glorious piracy. Metallica be damned. Sailing the high seas of P2P networks, I cultivated the full discographies of rappers from The Roots to Sage Francis.
Downloading those songs took time. Waiting by the computer, praying that the downloads didn’t break. Then I would have to go through each song to make sure the file wasn’t broken or the song wasn’t glitching. Plus, of course, edit all the metadata.
Then from that ever-growing collection I would select songs. And not just any songs, but tracks that you might not expect to flow from one to the other. For example, “Sea Lion” is an exquisite preamble to The XX Gon’ Give It To Ya by The Hood Internet, a mashup of The XX and DMX.
I would go where the flow took me. Across genres, subgenres, instruments, stories, and cultures. Together the tunes curved like a river in the most natural ways from one to the next.
And when I burned a CD, I told a story about myself as a 16 year old; about what I enjoyed and what I was learning of the world and myself. The ritual is in discovering and telling the story, then experiencing it with others who are close to you.
We can further unpack this Russian nesting doll of storytelling. Because many of the songs are stories as well. And rap, with songs like “Deception” or “Kick, Push,” is a genre built for storytelling.
The stories we share with music
The aural storytelling ritual is an artifact of human evolution. It has been with us for thousands of years, according to researchers Ruth Anne Rehfeldt, Ian Tyndall, Jordan Belisle in their paper on music as cultural inheritance. We carry cultural practices and experiences through the songs we compose and perform.
There are also concept albums that tell you stories strung across a series of tracks. Some you already know, and I’ll skip for brevity’s sake cough, *cough, another brick, cough.* One favorite of mine is Rosalía’s “El Mal Querer.” Or the album that transformed me when I first heard it in a dorm room freshman year of college: “Deltron 3030” by Deltron 3030.
Among my favorite music genres are the storytelling ones, borne of specific cultural experiences. Like rebetiko music, characterized by Markos Vamvakaris’s painful working-class string plucking. Or the Mexican corridos, like songs by Los Tigres Del Norte that helped give rise to the drug balladry that is narcocorridos—an excellent modern example being Peso Pluma.
In each of these songs lives yet more rituals. The rituals that come with writing—so unique to each individual’s creative process. The rituals that birth the stories; tales of carrying drugs across the border to feed one’s family, wasting away days in Greek hashish dens, or falling in love with a village girl in the crowd at your concert.
Sandra E. Trehub, Judith Becker, and Iain Morley, wrote about musical ritual in a paper titled “Cross-cultural perspectives on music and musicality. ” They said:
For members of many small communities, past and present, musical rituals have meanings that are transparent within the native community but opaque to others. There may be different levels of meaning as well, holistic meanings about particular rituals, like a call for rain or for animals to present themselves for the hunt, and specific meanings linked to individual elements.
In other words, our cultures and cultural rituals inform the narratives we identify in songs. If a culture tells its adherents that a higher force commands us to sing and dance in exchange for rain, their music will reflect that. And if a culture centers drug smugglers as heroes bringing money back to desperate families and towns, their songs will speak to those experiences.
A song contains inherited cultures stretching back generations, filtered through an artist’s own cultural encounters and individual experiences. It is imbued with new meaning when the listener imprints their perspectives. Finally, it serves as a vehicle for creating shared memories and is inherited by the next line of listeners. When we recommend a song, this is what we’re passing from one human to another.
Like many people, my ritual was burning CDs. I discovered stories built on individual experiences and inherited culture, bopped to them, burned them onto CDs, shared them with friends (in minivans cruising around Long Island, for example), and we created new memories together.
My performance of that ritual peaked with my CD that began with “Deception.” In the song Blackalicious’s Gift of Gab (R.I.P.) warns “don’t let money change ya.” It tells the story of a rapper who loses himself as his career grows.
He put in the work and rose to the top. He signed a major label contract and “lived a lavish style of life, fast money, women, cars.” But the money was a curse. And later in the song the protagonist is “broke, bumming money, drinking out the 40 bottle, living outdoors.”
There’s much more to the story than that, like the ways in which society uses then discards black artists—a theme Kendrick Lamar explored on “To Pimp a Butterfly.” But extreme wealth can isolate someone from the very experiences music is built on. In fact, research indicates that wealth may weaken empathy, “cloud moral judgement,” and fray our social bonds.
Reintroducing humans to music discovery
In “Deception,” money was the change agent. When it comes to modern music discovery, the change is being wrought by big tech companies. These corporations are run by individuals who, like the rapper in “Deception,” are cleaving themselves off from human experience by way of their own wealth accumulation.
Disconnected from the rest of us as they are, they’re turning music discovery into a corporate scheme. Our role? Serfs in the algorithmic fields, working the interface to deliver new learnings to the software.
You pay them for music. In exchange, they drain you of data, digitally encoded human experiences. Precious and valuable experiences, stolen and made grist for the algorithm mill. All so that these big tech companies can hook more users, capture more subscriptions, and increase share prices.
(I know I’m sharing music using the very software I’m attacking. It’s convenient, sue me. The point is the music is being recommended to you by a human. I encourage you to buy the music from the artists, particularly the extra-profitable medium that is CDs.)
The technology building extreme wealth for a few tech bros and their shareholding buddies isn’t destroying the human bonds that music reinforces. But using technology that vomits gamified content collections at us every time we open it can be addictive and isolating. These apps can degrade the experience that is sharing and discovering music.
In a paper titled “The lonely algorithm problem: the relationship between algorithmic personalization and social connectedness on TikTok,” researchers Samuel Hardman Taylor and Y. Anthony Chen write:
Whereas research supports the connective potential of social media algorithms (e.g., Guess et al., 2023; Wang et al., 2023), each of the same algorithms are also associated with various forms of social isolation, ostracism, or disconnection (e.g., Bucher, 2017; Simpson & Semaan, 2021; Taylor & Choi, 2024). These unacknowledged negative externalities suggest that algorithms meant to bring people closer together will also likely drive people apart.
The founders and shareholders with incomprehensible wealth? Their social bonds are fraying as their fortunes isolate them. They see the human bonds that connect us, built on generations of ritual and experiences, as market inefficiencies.
I believe their apps’ destructive effect on human connection is an extension of their wealth’s corrupting effect on their moral judgment and capacity for empathy.
As long as technology is shoehorning its way into our musical rituals, we should seek space to reclaim the humanity in our ancient aural art. When we recommend music, as humans, we’re extending thousands of years of cultural experience to each other. We shouldn’t hand that privilege in toto over to machines.
That’s why Tunegrape was founded. To play a small part in helping us stay connected with some of the musical rituals that are oh so human, like song recommendation, curation, and discussion. Plus, playlists. And you can find the playlist for today’s issue here:
See you next week with a song suggested by another human.