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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Article
Character
Culture
Idolatry
Psychology
6 min read

Jacob Elordi wants more shame, Zadie Smith says it’s useful—what if they’re both wrong?

Shame may be necessary, but only if it can be defeated

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

Frankstein stares our from his covered face.
Jacob Elordi plays Frankenstein's monster
Netflix.

I’ve been thinking about the nature of shame a lot recently. Both professionally and personally, it’s a topic that is demanding my attention. It’s following me around, insisting that I look it in the eye, shoving and nudging me – taunting and tempting me to finally snap and wrestle it to the ground. I guess that is the very nature of shame, isn’t it? It’s always so stubbornly there.  

I’ve also noticed that it seems to have elbowed its way into cultural conversations; it’s been putting a real PR shift in, seeking rehabilitation in public discourse.  

The actor, Jacob Elordi, was recently interviewed by the Wall Street Journal. Kind of interesting, kind of not. The sliver of it that really caught my attention was when the interviewer asked Jacob,  

‘What’s one lost art that you wish would come back in style?’  

To which Elordi replied,  

‘The art of shame. I wish people could experience shame a little heavier’.  

Gosh.  

It makes sense that this was Jacob’s answer; the interview was conducted to promote Frankenstein, Guillermo Del Toro’s new movie in which Jacob Elordi plays Frankenstein’s monster. So, I get it. He’s been consumed with what components make up a monster, endeavouring to literally turn himself into one. He’s been ruminating on the recipe of evil, and perhaps he’s found one key ingredient – shamelessness. Maybe Jacob, having dwelt on such, has subsequently looked out at the not-so-fictional ‘monsters’ wreaking havoc and has diagnosed the same thing, a distinct lack of shame.  

It's a solid thesis.  

It reminded me of another recent interview, this one with the acclaimed author, Zadie Smith. She said,  

‘Shame gets a bad rap these days. I think it’s quite a useful emotion, corrective on certain kinds of behaviour… I assume people – including myself – are just deeply, deeply flawed. And so, shame is usually quite appropriate on a day-to-day level… shame is a kind of productive thing to create change. I guess I do believe that. I know it’s definitely a Christian emotion, that’s why it’s so out of fashion. But I always thought it quite productive in the gospels, that idea that you assume that you are entirely in sin. I always assume that.’  

I half agree with both Jacob and Zadie. In a way, I’d be a fool not to. Not to mention, proof of their thesis. 

I cannot deny that I am, as Zadie points out, deeply, deeply flawed. There is a crack in everything I do, a fracture in all my best intentions. And yours, too, I’m afraid (but I have a feeling you know that). There is a brokenness to us, a breaking-things-ness. To each and every one of us, ‘hurt’ is both an adjective and a verb – something we feel and something we do. The things I want to do, I never manage. The things I don’t want to do, I seem to manage every day. I am falling short, missing the mark – I am so fallibly human.  

To acknowledge such is not only obvious, nor is it simply ‘useful’, as Zadie suggests. It’s inherently spiritual, it’s paradigmatic. 

Last summer, I hosted an event at which Francis Spufford, one of my most cherished wordsmiths, playfully quipped, ‘I’ve heard original sin (the notion that we are, as Zadie notes ‘entirely in sin’) described as one of the few theological propositions which you can actually confirm with the naked eye’. ‘Sin’, Tyler Staton similarly writes, ‘is simultaneously the most controversial idea in Christianity and the one most universally agreed upon’.  

There’s something deeply wrong with the world. We all know that.  

Which, presumably, is what Jacob Elordi is getting at – he’s observing bad people not feeling bad enough about the bad that they do, or worse still, the bad that they are. A healthy dose of shame is the medicine that this world needs, he suggests. 

Oh Jacob, I sympathise with that. The thing is, I have a hunch that the presence of shame makes as many monsters as the absence of it.  

And Zadie, I wonder if shame births as much destruction as it does ‘correction’.  

While I agree with you both that, in a world as broken as ours, shame needs to exist in some form or another, it also needs an antidote. It’s a dangerous substance; toxic and destructive. Don’t let it fool you, don’t be over-generous to it – shame may (in its most moderate and appropriate forms) be an acknowledgment of the disease, but it is not the medicine. It could only ever be ‘useful’ if it is, ultimately, defeatable.  

At least, that’s my – admittedly very Christian – conviction. That’s my take. I can’t pretend that it’s not as theological as it is sociological in its underpinnings. 

I’m relatively new to the liturgical aspects of my own faith tradition (that is, the formalised scripts, actions and rituals that have long fuelled religious experience) , so I have the pleasure of not being numb to them. When I read the ancient words of ancient prayers, they shoot right through me, particularly these ones:  

‘Almighty God, our heavenly Father, we have sinned against you and against our neighbour in thought and word and deed, through negligence, through weakness, through our own deliberate fault...’ 

Ouch.  

As I read those words, week in and week out, my brain creates a helpful montage for me – whirring through the countless ways in which I have failed – in what I think, what I say, what I do. I’m confronted with the ways that my breaking-things-ness has leaked out of me through my negligence, it’s spilled out of my weakness, the force of it directed at others through my own deliberate fault.  

Oh yes, I’m well acquainted with the emotion of shame.  

But the only thing productive/appropriate/corrective about falling on my face in shame, is that there is a mercy that can scoop me up. It’s not hopeless, you see? There’s a mend-ability. There’s an antidote to shame; there’s a balm for its burn. There’s a bewildering love that banishes shame from within me – there’s a rescue route from its toxic spiral.  

The moment that shame is acknowledged, its presence verbalised, its power felt – is the very moment it needs to be neutralised. It cannot fester, it cannot be afforded the loudest, nor the last, say.  

And so, to Jacob Elordi’s interesting wish – that ‘people could experience shame a little heavier’, and to Zadie Smith’s fascinating thesis that ‘shame is a kind of productive thing to create change’- I hear you. I see what you’re getting at. But I can only ever wish people to experience the heaviness of shame if it means that they are more sensitive to the feeling of it being undeservedly lifted off them. That’s where change happens. That’s the medicine.  

So, Jacob and Zadie, let’s agree to half-agree on this one, shall we?  

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