Alexa, Lorde, and the magic of serendipity
Are smart speakers stupid and useless? As someone whose job it is to develop apps for the Google Home, it feels like an admission of failure for me to say ‘yes’. Nevertheless, I do. I’ve been wrong about technology trends before (“why would you need your iPod Touch to also be a phone?” — me, circa 2007, on hearing about the first iPhone), and yet I still don’t feel any confidence that I’ll ever use a smart speaker for…anything. It’s not that I haven’t tried — I even own a Google Home, which someone at work gave to me for free. One night when I couldn’t fall asleep, I plugged it in to start setting it up. But I gave up when I realized that to use it, I had to also download an app on my phone. Every now and then I’ll think to myself, “I should really set up that Google Home,” but as of now I still haven’t brought myself to actually do it.
But recently, I discovered one powerful capability of the smart speaker as a social lubricant, capable of generating delightful serendipities. It’s not an exaggeration to say that my entire view of smart speakers was changed. To set the scene, I was visiting my friend Jennifer, who lives in Baltimore. We were playing The Settlers of Catan with two of her med school classmates, whom I hadn’t met before. What kind of players were they? One of them tried to start trade talks on all of her turns, but never followed through unless she was absolutely gouging her trade partner. The other was her boyfriend, and the two of them developed a nice economy where he helped trade in all of her surplus wheat at his wheat port. Because of a lack of brick, the pace of the game was excruciatingly slow. Even though I dominated the game through a textbook ore-and-wheat meta and a statistically anomalous run of ‘5’s, none of us had very much fun. But that’s not important, except for the fact that I won. What is important is that in the middle of the game, my friend Jennifer suggested that we put some music on. She pointed at the Alexa on the other side of the room.
“Alexa! Play Lorde,” I said.
I asked everyone if they liked Lorde’s last album, to check the temperature of the room and make sure I wasn’t imposing my music tastes on anyone. Jennifer’s friends hadn’t listened to it, but Jennifer had. Alexa shuffled Melodrama, occasionally throwing in some Pure Heroine as well. After a few dull rounds of lots of dev cards and zero building, I asked Jennifer if she liked Melodrama. Then, I asked what her favorite song on Melodrama was.
Malcolm Gladwell writes about ‘thin-slicing’, a sense of intuition so fast and powerful that it feels like magical precognition. Well, in the instant before Jennifer answered, I suddenly felt completely certain that she was going to say that her favorite song from Melodrama was ‘Liability’. And that’s exactly what happened. The reason I thought that is that ‘Liability’ is also my favorite song from Melodrama.
Some backstory — about two months ago, I was in a somewhat unhealthy state of mind. I had set myself a bunch of aggressive New Year’s Resolutions, and become unintentionally OCD about keeping them up. For example, I weighed myself every day, and tried to make sure that I was losing weight every week. I also kept a running total of calories eaten each day, and if I went too far over the prescribed limit of 2,200, I’d make up for it by fasting until 2pm the next day so I could go back into ketosis. I had other habits relating to my other resolutions, but the ones about my weight and diet were the most omnipresent, because I thought about them several times per day.
It was hard to get through the work day because I was anxious all the time. In particular, I had developed a bad habit of swearing at my computer when my developer tools weren’t working, and even though my coworkers probably just thought it was funny, I was always worried that they’d start thinking I was an angry person. It was around then that I happened to listen to Melodrama all the way through.
I’m an emotional person, and music tends to make a strong emotional impression on me. And Melodrama is like a perfect storm of my musical weak spots. It has ‘Supercut’, an ultra-catchy dance anthem with a drop that gets right into your bloodstream. It has ‘The Louvre’, which has a stirringly cinematic central image (“megaphone to my chest, broadcast the boom boom boom and make ’em all dance to it”) and ends on a lovely guitar fadeout that reminds me of Bruce Springstreen.
And it has ‘Liability’, which is kind of a power ballad about being yourself. Here’s the first verse:
Baby really hurt me
Crying in the taxi
He don’t wanna know me, says he made the big mistake of dancing in my storm
Says it was poison
So I guess I’ll go home, into the arms of the girl that I love
The only love I haven’t screwed up
She’s so hard to please, but she’s a forest fire
I do my best to meet her demands, play at romance, we slow dance
In the living room, but all that a stranger would see
Is one girl swaying alone
Stroking her cheek
So basically, you start off feeling like the song is about feeling rejected and sad. Lorde retreats into the one relationship she can count on. But wait — with whom? Oh, right — with the girl in the mirror. The surprise is simple, but nice, the kind of thing that works in a pop song. Two lyrical moments elevate this song to ‘all-time favorite’ status for me. “I do my best to meet her demands” reminded me of the way my life had become structured around a set of arbitrary goals. There was a hint of self-pity in the ‘I do my best’, which I felt was well-deserved considering how hard Lorde and I were pushing ourselves. And then, there’s, “The only love I haven’t screwed up”. When you’re feeling doubts about yourself, and wondering what other people are thinking of you, that’s like exactly what you want to hear. When I heard that part, I felt like Lorde had written this song just for me.
All of this was completely private. I felt some strong emotions, but other than occasionally telling people “hey, you should check out that new Lorde album, it got me through some things”, I never shared them. So finding out that my friend also liked this song was like finding out she had the same Myers-Briggs personality type, or that we’d gone to the same preschool — so obscure and specific as to suggest fate. Why did Jennifer like this song? We didn’t really talk about it. All of the trade talk and the complaining about the ‘5’s I was getting made it hard to carry on a conversation. I’d really like to know, so I’ll probably bring it up the next time I see her, if I remember. But for now, I like to think it’s because we both experienced the same connection to this song, to the picture Lorde paints, and the feeling of self-love that it evokes.
So, in conclusion, I think that smart speakers might just have the power to bring people closer together. The ability to pick out songs using just your voice can deliver the extra push that allows you to discover connections to people that you wouldn’t otherwise have felt. Of course, you can do that without having a smart speaker that passively listens to your conversations, activates itself when it’s called, transcribes your speech into text, computes which part is the command to play and which part is the song or artist name, sends the info into the airwaves, gets the mp3 back from spotify, and beams clear, beautiful pop music into your living room. But would you?
Thanks for reading, and let me know if any song has ever made a strong impression on you!