5 — Friday, January 18, 2019
Arts
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com

It’s practically worn out in musical discourse to 
bemoan the “three-and-a-half-minute pop song,” 
usually in comparison (as a strawman) to a more 
complicated, underrated work. That concision 
and formalism are, in and of themselves, seen 
as worthy of disdain should seem strange to 
anyone who regularly listens to popular music 
— Irving Berlin’s acknowledged mastery was 
generally constricted to an almost formulaic 
32-bar structure, as were many of George 
Gershwin’s songs 
that later became 
jazz 
standards. 
Concision 
is 
the 
rule 
in 
songcraft, not the 
exception, 
and 
for good reason. 
A 
song 
is 
a 
perfect vessel for 
clear and concise 
expression 
that 
still 
retains 
the 
ability 
to 
accommodate 
complex 
emotions and a 
wide variety of 
styles. It makes 
sense that this 
form has endured 
to 
the 
present 
day much more 
than the intricate (and often opaque to first-time 
listeners) European symphonic forms.
Songs are also useful in that people rarely 
want to hear just one at a time. Some of the 
earliest examples of short-form composition are 
the 19th century “song cycles” by composers 
who also worked in the symphonic mode. Franz 
Schubert wrote two evening-length cycles for 
a vocalist with piano accompaniment parsed 
into small songs ranging from under a minute 
to around six minutes. Trying to tell a story 
with what is essentially a set of miniatures 
is an interesting musical problem — there’s a 
dialectic between continuity and subtlety. The 

song cycle contains many-faceted impressions 
rather than a continuous arc. Schubert’s songs 
are little snapshots of the main character’s 
emotional state, and some of the most poignant 
songs cut away from the narrative arc to focus on 
nature — the wind through the trees, a creaking 
weathervane.
This approach to songs — a narrative told 
through small elements — didn’t survive entirely 
intact in the emergence of the album a century 
later, but a lot of music criticism acknowledges 
that albums need some kind of flow that both 
acknowledges the separateness of the elements 
and links them together. This discontinuous 
continuity is hard to locate in any particular 
aspect of the music, a certain je ne sais quoi. 
To pick an example at random, a review of 
LCD Soundsystem’s “Sound Of Silver”: “We’re 
besieged and stupefied enough by downloads and 
mixes and remixes and mashups and collections 
of songs masquerading as albums that an album 
that feels like an album strikes me as positively 
ideal right now.”
It’s interesting that the reviewer mentions 
mixes and mashups — the mix, whether done 
in a continuous flow by a DJ or simply ripped 
onto a cassette or a CD, is somewhere between 
album and mashup. The mix splits albums at 
their weakest components and collages their 
component parts, creating a new large-scale 
form out of pre-existing parts.
The creator of the mixtape, in essence, is 
performing a “reading” of their particular 
musical landscape. Their task is to maximize 
a particular quality of music that they value 
independent of the artists’ original intentions — 
the creation of a personal genre that brings what 
they value in music to the forefront. A mixtape 
can be a sonic memory palace, a record not only 
of listening but listening in a particular way and 
with specific priorities. The role of the listener 
becomes active — it’s a process approaching that 
of the composer or the record producer, who 
draws on their store of auditory knowledge to 
create new things.
The “playlist” of the 2010s takes this logic of 
maximization as its lowest strata, but functions 
in a different way. Playlists, in their scale (it’s 
very easy to make playlists that are hours long) 
and ability to be updated and edited over time, 
have acquired something like a furnishing or 

decorative function, that of a lamp you can 
turn on and off. Playlists are created, in part, 
to fulfill some function: opening Spotify’s front 
page presents the listener with playlists that are 
tailored to a specific activity, like “deep focus” 
or “brain food.” The writer Liz Pelly writes on 
Spotify’s Muzak-esque attitude toward music 
in general. Playlists are curated according to 
genre and, increasingly, according to mood, 
“chill” prefacing a multitude of playlists. Pelly 
writes: “Spotify loves “chill” playlists: they’re 
the purest distillation of its ambition to turn 
all music into emotional wallpaper.” Pelly 
has similar misgivings about the “discovery” 
playlists Spotify offers, writing that streaming 
“creates passive environments where listeners 
stream what they like, and more of what they 
like, and more of what they like — ad nauseam.” 
This is the afterlife of the mixtape: The ability to 
create specific pathways through music culture 
as a whole is turned into a way to maximize the 
passive aspects of music listening.
Curation retains its creative potential, even as 
it threatens to pull the listener into an effective 
undertow. Is it possible that we could have 

seen this coming? Isn’t art made from other 
art one with an already essentially narcissistic 
relationship to the work of other artists? Mixtape 
culture was initially lauded as lifting the listener 
out of passivity 
and into a small 
act of creation. 
The question then 
becomes whether 
or not a society 
where 
everyone 
is encouraged to 
have a passively 
creative 
(and 
corporate-
mediated, 
in 
Spotify’s 
case) 
relationship 
with 
other 
art 
is 
desirable. 
Mixtapes 
were 
never meant to 
be the default way to engage with music, and a 
world where everyone exists in a lonely sea of 
their own taste was never the intention.

EMILY YANG
Daily Arts Writer

MUSIC NOTEBOOK
Albums, mixtapes, playlists and the craft of concision

DFA RECORDS

‘Mars Room,’ in portrait

I have a crush on Rachel 
Kushner — everything about 
her. 
I 
was 
initially 
turned 
on by her debut novel “The 
Flamethrowers,” a smart and 
stylish sojourn from the dirty art 
hoes of 1970s Soho to the political 
underground of Italy, complete 
with glamorous touches of DMT 
churches, performance art and 
street violence. Swoon.
“The Flamethrowers” is so 
vivid, so bitingly electric and 
feminist-without-the-word that 
I got curious about the woman 
behind the pen and slipped into 
a 
forty 
minute 
biographical 
research bender. Rachel Kushner 
is 
a 
San 
Francisco 
native, 
the certain spawn of beatnik 
scientists that lands a gig at a 
feminist bookstore at the ripe 
age of five, does the Berkeley 
thing and bools around the SF 
nightclub scene on her Moto 
Guzzi before casually saucing 
over to Columbia for her MFA. 
In author imagery, she often 
appears in front of cars, behind 
Wayfarers 
and/or 
clad 
in 
leather. She’s got three critically 
acclaimed blockbuster novels, a 
Guggenheim, an honorary PhD 
from Kalamazoo and now a spot 
on the Man Booker shortlist 
with her latest book, “The Mars 
Room.” I repeat: swoon.
“The Mars Room” reads much 

like “The Flamethrowers” in 
its grunge-glamor. Our femme 
fatale, Romy Hall, grew up 
hard and fast in San Francisco, 
getting into catfights and PCP 
on the weekends before working 
at The Mars Room, a low-fi
 
but high-cred strip club in the 
gritty Tenderloin district. It’s 
not a stereotypically secure gig, 
but Romy enjoys the power she 
wields at the club and a steady 
source of income to support 
herself and her son. She’s smart, 
pragmatic and tough (“Every 
stripper I know is clever. Some 
are practically geniuses.”), but 
she doesn’t have the ability to 
prevent or outrun a customer-
turned-stalker, and she really 
doesn’t 
have 
the 
cultural 
capital 
or 
capital-capital 
to 
defend herself at court when an 
encounter with the creep turns 
violent. But this is all delivered to 
us through sporadic flashbacks. 
The novel opens in the thick of 
consequence: 
Romy 
shackled 
chattel-style to a prison bus, 
careening nebulously into two 
consecutive life sentences in the 
Central Valley.
“The Mars Room” unfolds 
like 
this, 
unsticking 
and 
resticking in time between its 
present (2003 at the Stanville 
Women’s Correctional Facility) 
and Romy’s shrouded past on 
the streets of SF. Structurally, 
this can be unpopular territory: 
Novels that nix the frameworks 
of time and place run the risk of 

bleeding out into disorganized 
and 
disorienting 
masses 
of 
detail. Kushner, however, is a 
seasoned rebel. She manipulates 
the timeline so deftly that these 
scenes slide into each other 
with a dreamlike logic. Romy’s 
GED prep session at Stanville 
summons an anecdote of teaching 
her son to count, a memory that 
morphs into musing on how 
counting functions “like prison, 
from a name to a number.” This 
brings us back to Stanville where 
the women on death row are 
sewing sandbags for “five cents 
an hour, minus fifty-five percent 
restitution.” 
The narrative is a ride on 
Romy’s train of thought, a 
psychological portrait made vivid 
by its very meandering. Between 
the hustle for shampoo and 
tampons, hazy recollections of 
bad lap dances and dehumanizing 
treatment from prison guards 
and 
public 
defenders 
alike, 
Kushner captures the indefinite 
restlessness of a mind pinned 
between past and future, time 
and place, hope and regret. 
That being said, “The Mars 
Room” sprawls. Those who value 
plot will be frustrated with the 
way this one constantly wavers 
between 
absent 
and 
forced. 
Those who enjoy form and detail 
will revel in Kushner’s obsession 
with it, a highly visual approach 
to storytelling singular enough 
to land her on the Man Booker 
shortlist.

BOOK REVIEW

The first week of every 
semester is always a haze of 
casual inquiry. Why are you in 
this class? What do you do in 
your free time? Share a funny 
story with the person sitting 
next to you. It goes on and on. 
But in my Comm 102 class this 
week, the GSI asked a topically 
relevant question: What is your 
media guilty pleasure? The 
answers from my discussion 
full of sorority girls and frat 
boys was pretty similar across 
the board, from Instagram 
to Netflix to a minor FIFA 
addiction that made everyone 
laugh. For me, I realized that it 
was YouTube. And not just the 
classical version of YouTube, 
full of late-night clips and fail 
videos, but almost exclusively 
skincare and makeup taught by 
beautiful French (or similarly 
nonchalant) women. They’re 
calming in a way that I’ve never 
been able to put my finger 
on, and I definitely watch too 
much for it to be good on my 
eyes late at night. But there’s 
something 
indescribably 
soothing 
about 
applying 
serums and moisturizers in 
pace with a lilting European 
accent in the morning and 
before bed. I think it does the 
same thing for me that praying 
might do for someone else. 
Going through the motions of 
my skincare routine is a sort of 
ritual, an excuse to reflect on 
the day that has passed and the 
one ahead of me while keeping 
myself occupied.
Nonetheless, my love for 
beauty 
videos 
(specifically 
ones 
like 
those 
made 
by 
Violette, Into the Gloss and 
Christine Nguyen) is still a 
guilty pleasure. My friends 
make fun of me for the amount 
of products I have lined up 
hidden in drawers and on my 
desk, for the hours I probably 
spend watching these women 
meticulously 
apply 
their 
favorite creams and lipsticks 
every 
year. 
As 
I 
jokingly 
answered my instructor during 
discussion, I began to realize 
how much my little ritual really 
meant to me. When I look at my 
skincare habits fiscally, I am 

shocked and horrified by the 
potential hundreds of dollars 
that I’ve spent on product. 
But as a realist, there is some 
part of this spending that is 
an investment in myself that 
pays off. Not only is my skin 
fantastic (bar one very fun 
week every month), but I am 
also genuinely excited to do my 
routine twice a day. As a self-
declared workaholic, my ritual 
of beauty video play-alongs is 
sometimes the only thing I do 
outside of writing or reading 
all day. Everyone has their 
own little things that make 
them happy, and for me it’s 

the feeling of a fresh face, the 
stinging satisfaction of a peel 
or the faint taste of menthol as 
my lip balm sinks in.
In 
the 
morning, 
I 
roll 
out 
of 
bed 
to 
my 
birds-
and-piano 
alarm 
of 
Aphex 
Twin’s 
“aisatsana 
[102]” 
and subsequently settle into 
my desk chair, laying out 
the things I’ll need for the 
day. It’s a little “American 
Psycho” 
Patrick 
Bateman, 
but first; there are serums, 
then 
moisturizers 
mixed 
together to thwart pollution 
and 
dryness, 
sunscreen, 
makeup, highlighter and gel 
and hairspray. All the while, 
I love to throw on a video 
in 
the 
background 
there’s 
something uncanny about the 
effect of someone else making 
themselves up while you do, 
like a very chic friend sharing 
secrets before a night out. It 
doesn’t even have to be related 
what I’m doing, but knowing 
that by osmosis I might pick up 
a tip or two. Even a hint of the 
calm and collected demeanor 
of these women is enough 
to 
make 
these 
ten-minute 
intervals of peace and self-care 
in my busy life worth it.
The famed burlesque dancer 
and general beauty icon Dita 
Von Teese consistently brings 
up these moments in every 
interview I’ve ever seen her 
give. To Von Teese, the thrill of 
making yourself into something 
beautiful, something different 
than yourself and full of joyful 
glamour. Like her, I find my 
own joy in going through the 
steps of my preparations for 
the day, in making myself 
into whatever I want to be 
at any given moment. The 
consolation of other women 
in that process via YouTube or 
a podcast or even in real life 
makes those moments even 
more powerful and effective 
than they would be alone. It 
may be a guilty pleasure, but it 
is pleasure nonetheless, a small 
happiness in an oft-stressful 
and clustered world. If I spend 
80 dollars on Vitamin C, so be 
it: There is no price to comfort 
and confidence.

DAILY GENDER & MEDIA COLUMN

CLARA 
SCOTT

FINANCIAL TIMES

VERITY STURM
Book Review Editor

Choosing to treat myself 
like all the best beauty vids

I find my own joy 
in going through 
the steps of my 
preparations for 
the day, in making 
myself into 
whatever I want 
to be at any given 
moment

Concision is 
the rule in 
songcraft, not 
the exception, 
and for good 
reason

Mixtapes were 
never meant to 
be the default 
way to engage 
with music

