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- Photos Courtesy Of Sophia-Matinazad and Chantal Anderson
- From left: Caamp, Sylvan Esso and Fruit Bats
It's been a weird couple of weeks in Burlington, right?
Obviously, a music column isn't the place to go into detail about the shooting of three Palestinian American students that took place in Burlington on November 25. But suffice it to say, it's not what a city wants to be in the headlines for.
As I watched Hari Kondabolu's Wait Wait Stand-Up Tour set last week at the Flynn, I was taken aback when he mentioned the shooting and conveyed his sympathies toward the Queen City. He had only just finished a riff on dirty cops and seeing ACAB (All Cops Are Bastards) spray-painted all over town — with current Burlington Police Chief Jon Murad sitting in the front row with his family.
It's not like all those things are connected somehow, but I had this moment when I had to turn to my partner and say, "Burlington is getting too weird, right? Like, not good weird, either."
Spotify's algorithm might disagree. Not content to continue its aggressive demonetization of the music industry, the Sweden-based streaming giant released its annual year-end feature last week. Called Wrapped, it regurgitates all the music you streamed through the service, packages it up with a nice bow and tells you, um, what you like? Even though you obviously already know what you like, which is how it gets all that sweet data on you. It's a strange way for the company to show off just how closely it's tracking you, but I get it: It's fun to share and compare playlists.
I was ready to ignore my Wrapped this year. (As a music critic who goes through multiple albums a week of various genres, I'm impervious to its puny algorithm.) But then I started getting the phone calls: first from Slate, then the Washington Post, and on and on. "Why is Burlington so fucking cool?" and "Exactly how gay is it up there?" were actual questions I answered as my phone seemed to ring every few minutes. Suddenly the national press was fixated on Burlington for a different reason than the shootings.
Spotify's new Sound Town feature matches each user's listening habits to a supposedly like-minded city. This year, it assigned "Burlington, USA" to a huge number of people, insinuating that the Queen City might be a mecca for a certain type of indie music. The currently prevailing notion on social media is that if you like gay music or are yourself gay, Spotify thinks Burlington is for you. And hey, maybe that's kind of awesome, considering what they could have chosen to represent the city. Phish are great, but we don't need any more clones, thank you very much.
Some expressed suspicion that Burlington was getting shouted out because of the meteoric rise of singer-songwriter Noah Kahan. Between getting nominated for a Best New Artist Grammy and releasing an entire album about Vermont, Kahan could understandably have been designated to fly the green flag. (And yes, I know our flag is actually blue. Just go with it, OK?) As I watched him perform over the weekend on "Saturday Night Live," I couldn't help but say to myself, "Yeah, this is Vermont AF."
At the end of the day, Spotify Wrapped matters not at all. A corporation says, essentially, "Hey, we studied all your data, and people who like what you like live here." Which is sort of the whole problem with the echo chambers that entities like Spotify establish: Why would you only want to be around like-minded music fans?
People absolutely should be exposing themselves to music they don't know and new sounds and fresh faces. One of the best parts of this job is that I'm continually pushed to reckon with styles of music I didn't previously understand or even like. And it's only been a positive thing for me as a listener.
Anyway, it was an odd but fun distraction for our city to be trending for not-terrible things for a bit. Charli XCX posting about Burlington will always be a little surreal, but I don't think we have to worry about floods of hipsters trying to move to town. I mean, it's not like they could find housing! (Rim shot.) And — to put on rose-tinted glasses here — if we can peel back the surreal silliness from this weird incident, maybe we can see it as a celebration of the really cool music coming out of this tiny city.