Take Five: Jukebox Goodbye
It feels fitting that the end of another blog is what it took to bring this one back from dormancy. A five-song goodbye to a website that changed my life.
If you’ve talked to me about music, I’ve probably talked to you about The Singles Jukebox. It’s a remarkable site and one that weathered many changes in the landscape of the internet generally and of online music criticism in particular.
The concept is incredibly simple — songs are chosen for coverage. Six or more writers volunteer to write a blurb and assign a score. The blurbs are posted, the scores are averaged. But for thirteen years (longer, if you go back to Stylus Magazine), it created a space like none other online. The diversity of coverage is remarkable right up through 2022, but when the site launched there was truly nothing else like it in online English-language music criticism. The only requirement for a song to be featured on the Jukebox was that it was a single of some kind. It could be from anywhere in the world; it could be topping the charts or have less than five thousand plays on YouTube; it could be in any language you might care to name. If the selectors’ group felt there was something worth writing about, and if enough contributors agreed, it would get on the site, and inevitably produce a thoughtful, wide-ranging set of responses both in the post proper and in the comments section.
The end of the Jukebox is not a surprise, as such. There’s a lot of reasons contributor activity slowed, with the simplest in many cases being that a person’s life changes a lot over the span of years. For many people, those changes were because of TSJ — moving on to paid work as a music critic, or in the industry.
For others, including myself, TSJ’s effect on their lives was less obvious and tangible, but no less real. I started writing for the site in 2014, after a couple of years as a reader. And I can say with 100% certainty that doing so fundamentally changed the way I think about and listen to music, and almost entirely for the better. My musical curiousity, my dedication to exploring genres and soundscapes I am unfamiliar with — that’s the Jukebox. The tools I even have for music discovery are so reliant on the site itself and the people I met through it that I truthfully have no idea what I’d be listening to had I not made the decision to apply. The site gave me a toolkit, it gave me connections, and it gave me the skills I needed to use those to profoundly deepen my relationship with music. That’s something I don’t take lightly.
TSJ winding down active updates is a loss, but our archive remains. In tribute, I wanted to take a moment to spotlight some music I love and which I would be completely unaware of if not for the site. And in true Singles Jukebox style, today we’re talking about songs, not albums. Title links are to the TSJ reviews of each track.
Javiera Mena - Luz de Piedra de Luna
(flashing lights warning)
“Luz de Piedra de Luna” is not the first Mena song I heard, but it may be the one that cemented my status as a fan. This is one of the songs that taught me to pay attention to percussion parts, because here it’s absolutely unignorable. Beyond that, I love the slow build and sinuous melody of the first verse and prechorus before the explosion of activity and jangly piano of the chorus proper. Even relistening now, after years, I can’t help moving in my seat.
“Umahlalela” is also a Sun-El Musician song, and the production is certainly part of what makes it good. Like most of what he does, it is expansive, meticulously detailed but so carefully balanced as to never feel overwhelming. But it’s Simmy who makes it sublime; she has such a beautiful voice on its own merits, but it pairs beautifully with what the music is doing (the wordless vocal/sax duet is gorgeous). Sun-El Musician knows exactly how best to highlight her strengths, and I’m so glad about their continued creative collaboration in the years since I first heard this piece.
Wednesday Campanella - The Bamboo Princess
I did listen to some Japanese music before I came to TSJ — it and Gaelic song being the two spaces I’d ventured outside of my English-language comfort zone. But “The Bamboo Princess” is so arresting in how it uses sound that I think it really opened my eyes (ears?) to the diversity of what was happening outside my bubble. And, as I mention in my original TSJ blurb, I’m always drawn to people connecting traditional instruments to modern soundscapes.
Speaking of traditional instruments paired with modern soundscapes, that’s Onuka’s raison d’être (no, literally) and it’s something they do very well. Their compositions are thoughtful, striking, and wholly distinctive. “Zenit” is frequently grating or unsettling, but just as frequently very beautiful, thanks to Nata Zhyzhchenko’s vocal delivery and to the band’s absolute control in making the many disparate elements of their sound cohere against all odds.
I don’t actually listen to de la Torre that often (certainly less than any other artist here), but there’s no way this little retrospective could have ended with anything else. “Vermillion” was one of the very first songs I wrote a blurb for on the Jukebox and my first rave review. I wasn’t alone in loving it — at the time it was the second-highest scoring song the site had ever featured, and it remains at number three even eight years later. “Vermillion” is stark, gorgeous, and very lonely, and it produced some of the best, most personal music criticism I think I’ve ever read (as well as my blurb which is, honestly, better than I remembered it being).
The magic of TSJ is that there are entries like the one for “Vermillion” scattered all across the site, people pouring their hearts out in response to a piece of music and doing so in a way that is moving, insightful, and expressive. And very often, as with “Vermillion”, it’s for artists who you won’t see covered anywhere else — even now, eight years and multiple albums later, Sofi de la Torre has less than seventy-five thousand YouTube subscribers and “Vermillion” less than two hundred thousand views. At the time, with this her debut single, very few eyes were on her. But the Jukebox wrote about “Vermillion” and by doing so brought it to the attention of a few more people than otherwise would have seen it.
It did that for all of these songs, and literally hundreds more besides. Whether raves, pans, or — sometimes more interestingly than either — songs on which contributors simply could not agree with each other, Jukebox contributors consistently treat music, including deeply unfamiliar music, as worth consideration, worth talking about. It’s no surprise so many have gone on to do so at other outlets. It’s a privilege to have been a part of the site, even as sporadically as I was, and I hope that even long after it lies fallow people still come back to it and still discover things they otherwise would have never seen.
I’m not sure if we were ever really active on the site at the same time but I’m glad that we both wrote for it — what a thing to have been a part of, and what a thing that will never leave us.