What Have They Been Smoking at Apple Music?

The company’s streaming service as well as its entertainment software has come under fire. But the saving grace is its artisanal playlists

I’ve become obsessed with the playlists on Apple Music. Even so, I was not prepared for one that greeted me some weeks ago, when I hit the “For You” tab on the app and came across a list called “Songs About Mary.” These were not odes to a woman with that first name, but something else entirely, which is legal only in certain states, not including mine.

Another quirk in Apple Music playlists! And there are many. In almost every one, there’s something a bit off, in a good way, hinting of a subversive strain in the eat-off-the-floor meticulousness in the corridors in Cupertino. And it’s a sign that, for at least a little while, algorithms don’t rule everything.

It is those playlists, not anything else in particular in the streaming service that keeps me paying for Apple Music. (I also like Beats One and its other radio stations, but they seem perfect for driving, and we in New York City seldom get behind the wheel.) It is certainly not the way Apple Music dovetails with iTunes, where I have painstakingly accumulated a library of 14,000 songs. Once a triumph of orderliness, iTunes now is the digital equivalent of the Jenga-like chaos of a secondary-market indie station’s studio, replete with last month’s pizza boxes, Gehry-esque structures of stacked CDs, and crumpled up traffic reports from the eighties.

On the phone, Apple Music leaves that iTunes webbiness behind, and unless I’m seeking out a specific artist, I simply hang out on the “For You” section. That’s where the playlists live. Some are fairly straightforward, focusing, say, on a single artist: Intro to Arcade Fire; Wilco: Deep Cuts: Eric Clapton: The Early Years; Under Cover: Neil Young; Inspired by Jimmy Reed; The Kinks: B-Sides and Singles; The Sinatra Sound: Billy May Arrangements; and Waking Up to the Beatles. (Sometimes this treatment is given to more marginal artists — is there really a huge constituency for songs that influenced the Afghan Whigs?) Other playlists aid in discovery of new artists, and change as new music appears.

The most interesting ones are “themes,” where someone — who? — picks a topic and compiles an artisanal playlist, the kind that you used to make on cassette tapes for your buddies or your squeeze. These have titles like Songs Where the Singer Stutters; Rock Artists Embracing Dance; Getting Parents to Like Noise; and You Are So Beautiful (“bombastic and heartfelt classic rock ballads”).

And that’s what leads us to Songs about Mary. I present this list as the prime exhibit in this brief, which well might be dubbed “Apple Music: Deep Cuts” if it weren’t such a horrible Internet headline. In the brief description of the list, the anonymous curator eschews coyness, declaring that these tunes are not about women named after the Holy Virgin, but, to put it bluntly, weed. To quote: “There’s just something about Mary Jane — an enduring inspiration for generations of rock and rollers.” Could it be more explicit? Grass! It’s a burst of anti-corporate-within-the-corporation not seen since Columbia’s famous ad proclaiming “The Man Can’t Bust Our Music”. It’s like Putin’s stoned nephew flashing a peace sign.

The genius in this particular list of “ambiguously titled tracks” is that some of them are directly about getting fried, while others seem to have been chosen because of references to feeling high that may or not be chemically induced. And there are a couple that arguably, are simply about someone named Mary. The masked compiler clearly took pains to welcome a few that were notorious for what may or not have been marijuana references, engendering late-night debates among the wasted. A must-include was Peter Paul and Mary’s (Mary!) childhood fable “Puff the Magic Dragon”. The song’s authors and performers have spent decades denying that “Puff” was code for a drag on a doobie, and snopes.com believes them. Co-writer Peter Yarrow once said, “It’s easier to interpret ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ as a drug song than ‘Puff, the Magic Dragon’.” (Still: Jackie Paper.) But the ongoing controversy, which admittedly has cooled a bit since the sixties, made this a slam-dunk selection.

Another no-brainer choice: “Along Came Mary”. I remember this song, by a group called the Association. They came off like a clean-cut bunch, but the rap on them was that they were secretly total heads, and this hit in particular was indeed rumored to be about the drug. (Apparently, in this case, the rumors were correct.) The Association was like the polite fellow who charms your parents when he picks you up for your date and, once out of the house, instantly fires up a joint. No surprise this tune makes the list.

Like any great playlist, “Songs About Mary” betrays the cognitive fingerprints of a real human being. As I savored its flow I wondered: Who did this? I would love to meet the musical mixologist who conjured this collection. Maybe I’d drive up to Apple HQ and we could go out back and share a…thought? (Dude, do you know this loop is infinite?)

I could not make this happen, but managed to wheedle some insight. In the company’s most recent public statement on the matter (buried in a Daring Fireball podcast), Apple Music now has 11 million paying subscribers and millions more in the trial version. Despite some bumps around launch — including an undetermined number of users whose cloud music collections suffered losses in the transition, the company believes that everything works fine now, and has been working to improve and evolve the system since launch.

One of those improvements, it turns out, is the one I wanted most, allowing users to shuffle their entire music library. This used to be my favorite activity and I was disappointed when Apple launched its music service without this feature. It seemed to me typical of Apple Music’s almost willful refusal to neatly intertwine with my existing music collection. As it turns out, the company belatedly implemented this superpower in September, but failed to send me a postcard notifying me of the change. And it’s not like it’s easy to find: in order to access it, you must select “My Music” and then pull down the screen to reveal the command, which is otherwise hidden. (That’s right… Apple hides it.) Nonetheless, it’s there and it works. Evolution is marvelous.

So — who are those editors putting the playlists together? It turns out they are music nerds who might have otherwise been displaced by technology. People from radio; people who used to work at publications; people who used to work at record companies — hard core passionate music people. They check in to work at offices in Cupertino or LA (though a few work remotely) and perform curation tasks that include making those playlists, which they draft and discuss in meetings that must be more fun than the ones at your job. The important thing is that they are human beings. Apple believes that only flesh-and-blood music lovers can properly select and format these lists, artfully making the segues from one tune to the next.

Apple has made a point of emphasizing this human touch after it purchased Beats, led by outsized personalities from the music industry, insisting that machines, whose clock rates do not accelerate when Springsteen or Beyonce takes the stage, cannot connect with an audience the way actual people do.

This stance synchs with a more general unease in an age where algorithms dominate our social feeds and news delivery. You might say that we began going down this path when Google’s unnervingly effective math upended the early Yahoo’s human-driven directories as a way to find things on the web. Now it’s almost out of control. Almost everything we see now depends on the processing of machine-perceived signals, be they personal, geographical, or sponsored. Even Father Time has been upstaged, as chronological timelines get replaced by algorithms. It happened long ago in Facebook News Feed, it’s starting at Twitter, and now we hear it will happen with Instagram.

Yes, Apple Music does use recommendation algorithms — it watches the way we behave when we use the app, and so it can determine what kind playlists we like, what new music it surfaces for us, and, I assume, what albums show up in the “For You” section between those playlists. (I really like the selection, which often surfaces beloved LP’s locked in vinyl in my basement storage room. And every so often, it throws in a Kendrick Lamar, just to acknowledge that it’s the 21st Century.)

But Apple does not trust the playlists themselves to algorithms. It’s important that listeners know that there’s a living breathing person on the other end. They are very much like those cosmic deejays in the early days or FM, or today’s superstar spinners at Las Vegas casinos and high end clubs everywhere. But without a direct channel to communicate with the audience — no microphone to explain yourself between blocks of song — it’s a weird kind of communication they have with their audience.

No one sees the face of these curators. They connect with their public only through song choices and segues. But that can be enough. A knowledgable choice — like a non-obvious version of a song — can provide a virtual rib to the elbows, an acknowledgement that this person is on your wavelength. After listening to a lot of these playlists, I feel I almost know whoever it is at Apple who specializes in Americana, Blues, and 60s rock. From his or her music choices, there is critical commentary, inside jokes, and an expression of what deserves to survive from the otherwise undifferentiated mass of millions of tracks.

And that is my segue to a final word about the Songs About Mary playlist.

The real coup de cannabis comes in the final track — and here is where the wicked craziness of the Apple editor comes to play. The song is “You Light Up My Life.” Okay, any tune with that name might indeed be a sly wink to weed. But this is the inexplicably popular confection by Debby Boone, daughter of Pat, the aggressively Christian crooner who spent the fifties and early sixties wearing pastel sweaters and covering de-fanged versions of rock and roll originals. “You Light Up My Life” defines sappiness. Originally in the soundtrack of an epically awful movie with the same name, the song was covered by Ms. Boone, an icon of white-bread purity, and to the dismay of all who rock, topped the 1977 Billboard charts for a record ten weeks that forever after dwelled in infamy. It takes a truly diabolical mind to close out a set devoted to the doobie with this number. No way that song had anything to do with dope. Right?

Well, hold on. Google now tells me that in 2001, 24 years after the song was recorded, the Boone family suffered a tragedy. The son of Debby’s sister, Lindy Boone Michaelis, was on the roof of his apartment building, intending to sunbathe, when he stepped onto a skylight which immediately shattered. He took a three-story fall, went into a coma and was on life support. Whether or not through the instrument of intense weeks of prayer beamed to the heavens by the Boones and their many fans, the young man regained consciousness, and began a long recovery. Years later, he still suffers after effects, which include a fierce psychological reaction when he sees unfamiliar men. (By the way, I’m not making this up.)

The only salve for this odd and persistent panic has turned out to be…medical marijuana. In 2013, Lindy, Pat and Debby herself appeared on the Today Show to thank California and the Lord for legalizing prescription cannabis. “I’m very grateful that this is available legally for Ryan right now,” said Michaelis as Pat and Debby reverently nodded.

In other words, the inclusion of “You Light Up My Life” on a list of songs about getting stoned is not a cheap joke but a selection of near-cosmic heavitude. Put that in your bong and smoke it! Another victory for Apple Music!

No one spins disks like human beings do. At least until AlphaGo turns its attention to playlists.

Photograph by Weegee via Getty Images.