Bajo quinto player Mario Quintera Lara leads Los Tucanes de Tijuana at Coachella, April 19, 2019.
(Kevin Winter/Getty Images)
Bajo quinto player Mario Quintera Lara leads Los Tucanes de Tijuana at Coachella, April 19, 2019.
(Kevin Winter/Getty Images)
MUSICREDEF PICKS
Spotify Moralifies Again, Dance Music During Apartheid, Lizzo, Luke Combs, Sublime Frequencies...
Matty Karas, curator April 24, 2019
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A year after fumbling through an attempt to punish R. KELLY and XXXTENTACION for their alleged criminal behavior (and for being awful people), SPOTIFY is back in the morality policing business, and this time it's going further. Kelly and XXX were briefly banned from Spotify playlists and other official promotions last spring under a policy that sanctioned them for "hateful conduct," but their music remained on the platform for anyone who chose to search for it. While the company quickly reversed course on the hateful-conduct policy under pressure from record companies who said a handful of artists had been unfairly singled out, it left in place a ban on "hate content." The service defines that as "content that expressly and principally promotes, advocates, or incites hatred or violence" based on race, religion, ethnicity or other characteristics. Which is easy to say you don't want. No one should want that. But what, exactly, *is* that? EMINEM? GUNS N' ROSES? The entire 11-album catalog of electronic group BLOOD ON THE DANCE FLOOR? No, no and yes, according to Spotify, which in the past few days has removed all of Blood on the Dance Floor's music, citing the hate-content policy. The group's frontman and only full-time member is DAHVIE VANITY, who was accused of sexual assault and rape by more than 20 women in stories published last year by METALSUCKS and earlier this month by HUFFPOST. The stories are hard to read. Vanity is accused of abhorrent behavior. (He isn't facing any criminal charges, and he has repeatedly declined to publicly comment.) HuffPost noted, deep in its story, that Vanity's songs have dark themes including "humiliating women, killing women, ejaculating on women." Those songs have been hidden in plain sight on Spotify and all other major services for years. BOTDF isn't competing with XXXTentacion at the top of the pop charts, but it's had three top-10 dance albums in BILLBOARD and was getting 80,000 plays a month on Spotify. Maybe Spotify gave the music a fresh listen and found it to be legitimately hateful, but it's hard to believe this isn't more a case of banning a heinous human for hateful *conduct* under the cover of a hateful *content* policy. Does every song on every BOTDF album promote hatred? Is all of the content more offensive than any of Eminem's content? HuffPost reported Tuesday that it had reached out to both Spotify and APPLE MUSIC to make them aware of the allegations. Apple didn't respond, and Vanity's band's music remained available there and at several other streaming sites as of Tuesday night. What would you do—not as a listener, not as a label or distributor, but as a platform for all music. Would you try to separate conduct from content? Is that possible? What would your tolerance for intolerance be? What should everyone else's tolerance be? I'm not here to defend Vanity or his band. I have no more interest in playing his music than I have in playing R. Kelly's music, and I don't want to put money, even pennies, into his bank account. And I'm not here to attack either Spotify or Apple, who are trying to thread a moral needle that's a lot trickier, and way more fraught, than it might seem. I am, really, just asking... Speaking of Eminem, the word "stan" has been added to the MERRIAM-WEBSTER DICTIONARY as both noun and verb. The OXFORD ENGLISH DICTIONARY did the same in 2017. URBAN DICTIONARY beat both of them by more than a decade... The AP STYLEBOOK now says diacritical marks should be used in names, which means it's BEYONCÉ forever, not BEYONCE... And speaking of Beyoncé, yes, you can now apply the phrase "catalog marketing" to three-year-old records. Soon, no doubt, you'll be able to do the same for three-week-old records... RIP MIKE "MUFF WIGGLER" MCGRATH.

Matty Karas, curator

April 24, 2019