I know Marvin Gaye’s album “What’s Going On” pretty well. From the chatter and sax ushering in the opening track to Gaye’s defiant final statement and soulful, meandering outro, I have listened to the LP countless times – and always in full. It is, after all, a carefully curated musical journey intended to be listened to in one sitting, with many of the tracks bleeding into the next.
So when Spotify plays the album’s tracks out of their intended order, I am no longer lost in the music. I’m just lost. It is a problem that Adele recently addressed in requesting – successfully, as it happens – that the streaming service not randomize tracks on her latest release, “30.”
University of Florida music professor Jose Valentino Ruiz shares Adele’s point of view. As a Grammy winner and the producer of more than 90 albums himself, Ruiz knows that sequencing tracks is a crucial part of delivering an artist’s vision. By randomizing the track order, “listeners might be missing the message as well as the audio journey that has been carefully created,” he writes.
This week we also liked articles about U.S. inflation, the possible dangers of synthetic food dyes and the cross-culturalism of Cup Noodles.
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