Article
Culture
Digital
Identity
Music
4 min read

What Spotify Wrapped really tells us about ourselves

We listen, therefore we are.

Belle is the staff writer at Seen & Unseen and co-host of its Re-enchanting podcast.

A screengrab from Spotify reads 'your 2024 wrapped.
Spotify.

Since 2016, Spotify has offered its users an annual feature that gathers up and presents us with the details of our own usage, allowing us to look back over the year through the specific lens of our listening habits. While this may initially sound more than a little dull, it’s actually quite the piece of marketing genius. It’s the story of our 2024, as narrated by Spotify. The state of our souls, as outed by our devotion to Taylor Swift.  

Every year, ‘Spotify Wrapped’ becomes more and more of a social ritual.  

In fact, this year, people were actively waiting on it to happen, checking their app daily, longing for Spotify HQ to announce its 2024 arrival. News outlets were writing pieces on how to best engage with it – there were actual bets being placed on when the feature might drop. How crazy is that? Spotify Wrapped has become as synonymous with this time of year as advent calendars and getting Christmas decorations out of the attic. 

Bravo, Spotify. I hope whoever thought the whole thing up has enjoyed one heck of a promotion.  

Now, I’m very aware that this may be somewhat of a storm in a teacup, the teacup being Gen. Z. But it is a storm, nonetheless. And I think our ever-growing obsession with it has a lot to teach us about.. well… us.  

Because what’s even more interesting is that these deeply personal insights Spotify are offering us, initially manufactured for our eyes only, are being plastered on social media. Spotify Wrapped has become a kind of soft-launch of our own brand, a low-stakes way of putting ourselves out there. Over the past days, thousands upon thousands of people have taken the data provided by Spotify and shared it with the world, sort of as a means through which they are sharing themselves with the world. Their top artists, the songs they’ve had on repeat, the number of minutes they’ve spent in the company of their favourite albums and podcasts - their listening habits have been served to us on a lime-green plate.  

(I say ‘their’, not because I’m immune to the craving but more because my own data is too strewn with Taylor Swift and The Smiths for it to ever be something I’m eager to share with the masses). 

And, I guess I have a simple question: why? 

Why are we doing this? My instinct is telling me that the answer is an incredibly simple, albeit salient, one. My hunch is simply that we want to be known.  

I think it’s utter genius wrapped in a guise of triviality. It underhandedly nudges us to acknowledge that we want to belong.

We have a nagging need to show people who we are, in the hopes that we’ll be repaid with acceptance. Approval, even. Admiration, if we’re really lucky.  

It’s a symptom of what some (perhaps most notable, Charles Taylor) have labelled ‘expressive individualism’. We live in a cultural moment that tells us that we are tasked with discovering and defining who we are, it’s down to us. It’s the responsibility of each individual to build themselves up, from the inside out. And then we get to show the world what we have crafted – ourselves, made in our own image.  

We get to be the masterpiece and the master, the creator and the created, the poet and the poem.  

It sounds wonderfully freeing, doesn’t it? There’s just one problem, no person can actually bear the weight of such responsibility. It’s crippling.  

And so, if, once a year, we can outsource this monumental task to a Swedish streaming platform – why wouldn’t we? For a brief moment, we can put our existential-crisis-in-waiting on hold, we can put our feet up, sigh with relief, and simply declare - I listen, therefore I am.  

For one day only, we can let our music tastes define us, we can leave it to our streaming habits to imbue our lives with meaning.  

We can rest.  

I’m in no way belittling this. On the contrary, I appreciate it. I think that Spotify Wrapped shows us far more about each other (and ourselves) than how much Oasis we listened to this summer. I’m really grateful that it allows us to drop our façade for a moment, reminding us how much we long to know and be known, see and be seen, love and be loved. I think it’s utter genius wrapped in a guise of triviality. It underhandedly nudges us to acknowledge that we want to belong. And so, I’m not convinced it’s ‘individualistic’ behaviour at all - how about we call it a symptom of ‘expressive want-to-belong-ism’, instead?  

Spotify Wrapped’s success is wild.  It is a cultural moment, and its underlying heart-cry is a particularly loud one. Even louder than the three-thousand minutes’ worth of Beyonce I blared this year. Apparently.  

 

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Review
Culture
Film & TV
Hospitality
Romance
4 min read

From wheatfield to vineyard, can an ancient love story survive a replanting?

Ruth & Boaz finds new soil in rural Tennessee but struggles to grow

Giles Gough is a writer and creative who hosts the God in Film podcast.

A couple hold each others hands as they face each other.
Tyler Lepley and Serayah.

Ruth & Boaz is a contemporary version of the most memorable love story in the Bible. The film tells the story of Ruth, a young woman who escapes the Atlanta music scene to care for an elderly widowed woman. Not only does Ruth gain the mother she never had, she also finds the love of her life in the process. 

The story of Ruth and Boaz is a straight up love story, and it serves as a much-needed respite from the biblical levels of violence in the books that precede and follow it in the Bible. So a modern update of the Ruth and Boaz story serves as good material for a heartfelt, sincere romance.

As part of Atlanta pop duo 404, Ruth Moabley (Serayah) is a talented singer who, after the death of her boyfriend and his father, is desperate to escape her menacing manager.  Ruth makes the impulsive decision to join her late boyfriend's mother Naomi, (Phylicia Rashad) as they both leave Atlanta for a small town in Tennessee to start over from scratch. The only job she can find involves labouring at a local vineyard, leading her to owner Bo "Boaz" Azra, (Tyler Lepley) who falls for Ruth the moment he lays eyes on her. Ruth holds tight to her faith and slowly begins to accept love, but her past is soon to catch up with her.

One of the joys of adapting a Bible story is often the characterisation. Phylicia Rashad’s Naomi is a complex, contradictory figure whose manifestations of grief are not always that sympathetic, pushing away all but the most insistent of helpers like Ruth. As the titular character, we spend a lot of time with Serayah’s Ruth. Making her a singer helps to flesh out the character to an extent, but the scenes where her individuality gets to shine are notable by their infrequency.  

Tyler Lepley’s turn as Bo Azra is perfectly serviceable. He’s essentially an idealised, handsome and muscled 40-year-old. Bo has a wealth of backstory; we’re told he served two tours in Afghanistan, then worked on Wall Street, and finally returned to his family business of the Azra Vineyard & Winery. Despite this, none of it really shows up in his characterisation. He spends his time being a generous boss, and an all-round basic good guy. All of which is great in real-life but can be a little staid in fiction. There’s very little about him to intrigue us, although questions have to be asked about how, if he’s so dedicated to making his business succeed, he managed to find the time to work on a truly magnificent set of abs. 

In a departure from the original Bible story, Ruth begins as a casual worker on Boaz’s vineyard. This is a reasonable change, as the practice of leaving grain after the harvest for widows and orphans to collect just doesn’t fit in a modern context. But in a post #MeToo world, this does create a power imbalance. They attempt to address this power imbalance of employer and employee when Ruth refuses to let Boaz buy her a drink. However, Ruth’s resistance quickly recedes when Boaz introduces her to Rn’B legend, Babyface. In this world, if you want to date one of your employees, all you have to do is introduce her to a Grammy-winning super producer to break down her inhibitions.

All of these shortcomings suggest that the script needed a few more passes, and the saccharine voiceover feels like it’s trying to make up for that. Credibility at times takes a back seat to the gloss of the high production value as almost every other shot looks like it’s promoting a tourist destination. There are moments where it feels like the story is contorting itself in order to be a vehicle for Serayah’s singing talents; which, to be fair, are considerable. Nonetheless, a lot of the tension in the plot hinges on characters not telling each other incredibly important details because of convoluted reasons. It’s a trope that feels a little bit tired. On top of that, the pacing drags until it remembers it has to have a dramatic resolution, which it awkwardly rushes, making the ending feel somewhat unfulfilling.

Ultimately, Ruth & Boaz feels like a romance film made by committee, a Hallmark film with added Bible references and RnB cameos. One could argue that it shines a spotlight on African-American communities in rural America, but the brisk run-time prevents it from revealing anything new, and the light touch characterisation means we don’t really get anything original.

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