Culture
VICE Publishes Exhaustive Guide To Pressing Play A Second Time
By Bruno Von Falken, . BSN Network. Satire.
VICE, once the publication that sent correspondents to report from active conflict zones while their competitors were still filing restaurant reviews, published a piece this week under the headline "Double Features: These 3 Album Pairs Are Perfect for Back-To-Back Listening." The central finding of the piece is that some albums, when played consecutively, produce a satisfying combined listening experience. This has been confirmed.
The article is structured as a listicle, because everything is structured as a listicle, and it pairs albums the way a hotel minibar pairs a Toblerone with a twelve dollar bottle of still water: with great confidence and no explanation of how the price was arrived at.
The journalistic logic here is worth pausing on. Someone, at some point, sat down, opened a document, and typed the words "double features aren't just for movies anymore." They pressed send. An editor read those words, presumably nodded, and the piece entered the content pipeline, which is a real phrase that real people use to describe the industrial production of sentences.
Phillip Malone, a 29-year-old in Denver who clicked the article, said he read the whole thing before realising he could have simply pressed play on two albums without any editorial guidance. "I didn't feel tricked exactly," he said. "It was more like finding out the directions I'd been given were to a place I was already standing."
The three album pairs themselves are presented with the solemn authority of a sommelier recommending a wine pairing at a restaurant where you cannot afford the wine. Each pair comes with a short explanation of why the two albums belong together, using words like "sonic" and "emotional throughline" and "tonal cohesion," which are the words music writers use when they want you to understand that listening to things has affected them personally and they need you to take that seriously.
Billboard senior contributing editor Marcus Trill, reached for comment, said: "There is an incredible craft to contextualising the listening experience. What VICE is doing here is essentially emotional cartography. They are drawing a map of feeling. That map has three locations on it, yes, but those are three more locations than most people have mapped this week." He then asked if this would appear in print.
For its part, VICE has not responded to questions about whether the editorial team considered pairing a fourth set of albums and what caused them to stop at three. Sources familiar with the publication suggest the number three was selected because it is the number that produces a listicle without requiring a conclusion.
What is actually interesting, and the piece does not mention this because the piece is not interested in it, is that the albums chosen are genuinely good. Pairing records is something people have done quietly and privately for decades, putting on one thing after another in a bedroom or a car or a kitchen, building an accidental architecture of mood without needing to file eight hundred words about it afterward. The practice predates VICE by roughly sixty years and has so far not required a publication to make it official.
Malone said he went ahead and listened to one of the recommended pairs after reading the article. "It was fine," he said. "They went together. But I think anything goes together if you just let it."
That observation, delivered by a 29-year-old standing in his kitchen in Denver, is the only music criticism in this entire story that required no editorial oversight.
The piece is still up.
The story we are making fun of: https://www.vice.com/en/article/double-features-these-3-album-pairs-are-perfect-for-back-to-back-listening/