The internet is reality; technology killed reality
Spotify Wrapped, Britney docs, Christmas movie guide, Lisa Marie birth chart 🎶
Hope you all had a great holiday (Britney Spears’s birthday)! Please enjoy the following documentaries, Time Out With Britney Spears (1999) and In The Zone (2004):
Today’s agenda:
🎶 The polarizing effects of Spotify Wrapped
🎄 Christmas movie guide
🛣 Exploring Lisa Marie Presley’s birth chart
📲 The latest Kellyoke tea, Britney’s long-lost conservatorship interview, Destiny’s Child reunion, Adam Brody then and now
ICYMI, last week’s issue included my fall bucket list, origin of the “Why are you dressed like that?” meme, nuanced sociopolitical context lacking from mainstream Wicked discourse, and this movie I watched about a guy who pretended to be a priest to sleep with a woman. Just another week here at Nicstalgia! Catch up on these before they enter the archive! 🔐
Huge thank you to Nicstalgia supporters who I will love forever: Janine, Marie, Liv, Mitra, CY, and Chet! 💐💐💐
🎶 The polarizing effects of Spotify Wrapped
Over the years, the general public’s reaction to Spotify Wrapped has become more polarized. We used to just say “haha wow Britney Spears is my top artist!” but Spotify has changed, and so have we. While I truly love listening to music, celebrating my taste in music, and sharing music-based moments of connection with others, it feels wicked bleak that everything in our life has been data-fied and statisticized (idk if these are words – just go with it).
Wrapped is a user-generated content marketing campaign for a big tech company, and that feels dystopian. Did Tom from MySpace talk about HTML and CSS? Obviously not. Then, we utilized the technology to reflect our identity and worldview. Now, identity has been commodified to a point where we are sold back projections of ourselves based on who an algorithm told us we are. At this point, we may very well be reaching the end of this current iteration of music distribution and consumption. What started out as an innocuous and even delightful way to show off your personal taste has turned into – like everything else on the internet – a spectacle of slop.
They’re just a big tech company
Above all else, Spotify is a big tech company with a $100 billion market cap. They had three rounds of layoffs last year, with one affecting 1500 employees (17% of its workforce). The CEO has the same goal as literally every other CEO – mine your data to make money and deliver financial value back to its shareholders. Unfortunately for us listeners, this approach clearly affected the quality of the user experience.
Even worse, Spotify will never do right by the musical artists themselves. The only people who will be compensated “fairly” (if you can call it that) are the ones at the top who have massive audiences and great lawyers. Listeners contribute to this dynamic as well; they get mad when an artist’s entire back catalog is not on Spotify instead of being mad that Spotify is only perpetuating the music industry’s exploitative nature. The music industry has been about money, not music, for a very, very long time.
Spotify took the joy out of music discovery
I used to find a lot of new artists through Spotify, and it was fun! The last few years, its newer, algorithmically-driven features have sucked the joy and any remaining semblance of authenticity out of the search and discovery process. It furthers the business necessity of having to label, hashtag, and categorize EVERYTHING for targeted promotion and consumption. Electronic music? No, that’s Hyperpop. Electroclash revival? No, that’s Indie Sleaze. There’s no way that Spotify could purposefully push Chappell Roan and make Sabrina Carpenter songs show up on random playlists! Ummm…yes…that’s literally exactly what they do. (I generally like those artists, but still, it’s weird by principle.)
The joy of digital music consumption has bottomed out. Like I’m kinda over all of it right now. I just wanna listen to music and dance around my kitchen and sing in the car. Like that’s it. A nice little caveat to this was watching my sister’s Wrapped. I enjoyed it even more than she did, because knowing people’s music taste is my true love language. I feel most human when I inherently know what songs people I love would and wouldn’t like. With someone I know as well as her, we didn’t actually need Spotify at all to know what songs she’s listened to on repeat or to have an impromptu Europop dance party.
I don’t mean to age myself here, but I really do feel bad for people who never got to discover music non-algorithmically – at the mall, at a sleepover, with your best friend, with your crush, through your dance teacher, and even in the digital age, by looking at someone’s MySpace page. I had a conversation with my friend yesterday about how 1. The word “curate” should be abolished lol 2. People used to be a part of subcultures, and the clothes they wore and the music they listened to reflected their lived experience. Now everything is cosplay.
“Online’s the new reality. The internet is reality. Technology killed reality.”
As I like to say, it’s Whose Line is it Anyway: everything’s made up and the points don’t matter. In this day and age, despite access to information, everything is hyperreal; a projection of subjective meaning onto a mere symbol of something that once was. It doesn’t matter who you are, it matters how you present. How you consume. Music has always been a way to signal taste, but now, social media and Spotify have flattened this phenomenon. Now, many effects of late-stage capitalism – neoliberal self-optimization, personal branding, the hyper-acceleration of trends, the aestheticization of everything, overconsumption culture, and the shittification of the internet – are all rearing their ugly heads at once.
An obvious example of the slop spectacle is the implicit mention of AI on Spotify and in Wrapped. It’s so icky to me. While there is no Daylist Wrapped, I screenshotted these as an artistic statement on the absurdity of identity commodification. Let’s get a holistic view of not who I am, but who Spotify thinks I am.
Wrapped exemplifies Spotify doing what it does best – harvesting user data, tying it into a lovely personalized package with a little coquettish ribbon on top, and selling it back to us as a marketing campaign for its own benefit. THAT BEING SAID, here are my Top 50 songs! No shame here lol.
🛣 I heard all roads, they lead to Memphis
After finishing Into The Sun!, a wonderful but very long book (15h) about the history of reality TV, I listened to a much shorter one (5h). Lisa Marie Presley’s posthumous memoir was released by her daughter Riley Keough. There were three familiar voices: Julia Roberts narrating parts of the book Lisa Marie had written, Riley for her parts, and sound bites from Lisa Marie interviews. It was a really interesting format, and obviously, she has a truly singular life story. I only listen to celebrity memoirs via audiobook. Regular nonfiction books are usually too cerebral or complex for me to absorb, and I like to listen to a familiar voice when I’m driving or getting ready.
I am also the kind of person who has to check Wikipedia or IMDb in the first five minutes of watching a movie and who guesses someone’s prominent astrological placements based on context clues gleaned from hearing their life story. The book mentioned her psychic abilities and premonitions, her “fire”, the prominent role religion played in her life, her continuous philosophic search for life’s meaning, and her deep, loving relationships. I knew she must have Pisces and fire in her big 3, and lo and behold! She has a Pisces stellium, an Aries (kinda) stellium in her religion/philosophy house (9th), a fire sign ascendant (Leo), planets in her money (2nd) and ‘other people’s resources’ (8th) houses (great nepo baby placement), and the sun shining right on her house of love and relationships (7th).
Of course, I had to look up Elvis’s chart as well to see the synastry. Her planet of love and values (Venus) is conjunct his Capricorn placements (sun, Mercury, Venus). They both have intuitive Pisces moons. His planet of dreams & delusions (Neptune) is in his career house (10th) and her money house (Virgo). His planet of abundance (Jupiter) is in his family house (4th) and her money house (2nd). She was certainly the financial beneficiary of his dreams, and her family was the source of her material stability. Her wounded healer (Chiron) in the ninth house, to me, represents seeking a higher power or something greater than yourself to heal what feels broken, find true meaning, live a purposeful life, forge a unique identity, and cultivate esoteric knowledge to support an intuitive knowing of the answer.
Her story was interesting, heartbreaking, and while not typical or average by any standard, it was ultimately just…human. Now, I’m onto Cher’s 15 hour memoir, narrated primarily by Tony Award-winning Stephanie J. Block, who played her in the Broadway jukebox musical, The Cher Show!
🎄 Christmas movie guide
My general rules of thumb:
Keep in mind, the scale of what constitutes a “good” Christmas movie is different than a regular movie. We have to make concessions and grade on a curve here.
A Christmas movie 7 is like a regular movie 10. A Christmas movie 5 is like a 40% on Rotten Tomatoes. If you watch anything under a 6.0 on IMDb it will be bad. If you watch anything under a 5.0, you’re just wasting your time.
Netflix movies are generally not good. They sometimes have higher production value or bigger names attached, which makes it even more disappointing. You get to know all of the Z-list actors in the Hallmark (or worse, off-brand Hallmark) movies.
Ones I loved:
Last Holiday (2005). I love Queen Latifah so much. Her character balls tf out in Europe when she finds out she only has weeks to live. Highly recommend. LL Cool J is also in it.
No Sleep 'Til Christmas (2018). This movie is so bizarre and truly unhinged. I'm obsessed. Two insomniacs can *only* fall asleep next to one another, which genuinely makes no sense, but it’s an intriguing premise. Zane from Younger is in it.
On the 12th Date of Christmas (2020). Genuinely good – probably the best – Christmas movie with a modern theme. They are app developers who fall in love on a Christmas scavenger hunt app lol.
Ones that were pretty good:
Our Little Secret (2024) and Falling for Christmas (2022). I’m just rooting for Lindsay Lohan, okay?
The Family Stone (2005). I just love movies that have prominent iMac G3 product placement and a Gen X ensemble cast (Sarah Jessica Parker, Rachel McAdams, Luke Wilson, etc.).
Catering Christmas (2022). A struggling catering business owner unexpectedly lands New Hampshire's biggest event of the year!
The Spruces & The Pines (2017). Romeo & Juliet, but make it a Christmas movie about two feuding New England Christmas Tree lot families!
A Christmas Star (2021). A workaholic astronomer (random) goes to a small town (obviously) because she's obsessed with seeing this meteor shower (okay) and falls in love along the way.
Your Christmas or Mine? (2022) Boyfriend and girlfriend going home for Christmas accidentally swap train tickets and end up with each other's families.
Mistletoe & Menorahs (2019). Jewish guy (played by Jake Epstein, extremely important Canadian actor of Degrassi provenance) and Gentile girl need to learn about each other's holidays.
Ones I plan on seeing:
Hot Frosty (2024), where Lacey Chabert falls in love with a snowman which is the guy from Schitt’s Creek that Alexis dated. (Don’t feel like looking up his name sorry.) It has as 79% on Rotten Tomatoes. Sounds bizarre, count me in.
Meet Me Next Christmas (2024), starring Christina Milian. (In ten years, JLo will make a movie exactly like this and we’ll be like yeah, nice try.) Anyways! She meets this guy and they say they’re gonna reunite in a year at a Pentatonix concert (weird) and she ends up having to choose between her “destiny” and this other guy that comes into her life serendipitously. Wonder who she’s gonna choose :)
The Merry Gentlemen (2024). Like Magic Mike, but with Chad Michael Murray. I do not need any more convincing.
Ones I will not be rewatching:
Love Actually (2003). I saw this for the first time a couple years ago and wonder why people keep up this charade. Maybe everyone has some kind of personal fond memory associated with this movie, but for me, this ain’t it. The guy with the sign was high-key weird btw.
The Holiday (2005). These are the two highest-profile Christmas movies so people might be upset they’re in the BAD column, but I’m sorry, the power of Kate Winslet AND Cameron Diaz barely distracts me enough from how intolerable Jack Black is. HE is the leading man, the prize to be won? That is actually the least believable Christmas movie plot device.
📲 I’m just a simple girl in a high-tech digital world
Kelly Clarkson covered “Don’t You Wanna Stay” (originally her duet with country musician Jason Aldean) on Kellyoke and everyone kinda dragged him in the comments. Even she technically said she likes her solo version better ooop!!
Axed Britney Spears conservatorship interview finally unearthed 8 years later. She’d been in the conservatorship for 8 years by the time this interview came out, but when she said she’d been in it for 3 years, she meant her Vegas residency. What strikes me the most here is that she was the same age here as I am now. It’s hard to watch these interviews sometimes, but all I ever hope for is that she is at peace.
Destiny’s Child reunited as Beyoncé and Kelly went to see Michelle perform on Death Becomes Her on Broadway’s opening night. The movie is a classic. If you’ve seen the play yet, tell me your thoughts!
Everyone Wants Adam Brody (Again). As a diehard fan of The OC and an enjoyer of Nobody Wants This, I find the constant comparison between Seth and Noah boring. There are really no parallels between these characters; they’re just both played by the same actor. This article stated “Audiences swooned for Noah in ways that even The O.C. didn’t evoke,” and clearly the writer was not a teenage girl between 2003-2007. Ironically, this piece of media fascinated with asking questions about a four year stretch of his early 20s also mentioned “the media’s continued fascination with asking questions about a four-year stretch of his early 20s”. How meta. After a rewatch, is Seth Cohen’s self-absorption and neuroticism very annoying? Absolutely. Do we still love Adam Brody? Absolutely.
🦋 Social butterfly
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I would quote and clap at the entirety of the Spotify paragraphs. Entirely on point! And in fandom spaces, it's created this weird competition between fans about what percentile you're in, which just promotes extreme consumption. And it doesn't even help the artists, not really, like you say! It's also not even accurate since it stops counting around october. I always preferred last.fm but it probably also would've been co-opted and bastardized by now if it had the same profile as Spotify...
Also: Love Actually actually is awful and I don't get the charade either. It also popularized all those movies with 12 storylines that would be subpar movies on their own. Terrible.
We're rooting for Lindsay!!!!