Lean Back

Soundtracking the inattention economy with Robert Glasper

Presumably late in the photo session, when someone asks for “air piano.”

Did you know Robert Glasper dropped a new album last Friday?

If it escaped your notice, maybe that’s because it’s an Apple Music exclusive, and you do your listening elsewhere. Maybe you’ve been distracted by geopolitical horrors, or busy puzzling over whether Glenn Powell really is our Next Movie Star.

There’s another contributing factor, one intrinsic to the sound of the album. Glasper — a pianist-composer-bandleader of rare stature in his jazz generation, and a prime alchemist in artisanal hip-hop and R&B, which formed the locus for four of his five Grammy awards — crafted his new release to be practically unnoticeable. Frictionless if not featureless, the album is all vibe, impeccably stylish but more or less inert.

In that sense, Let Go, as Glasper aptly titled it, belongs to a booming subgenre I’m finally beginning to see clearly. For lack of a better term, I’ll call it music for the inattention economy. We’re seeing more and more of this sort of thing, a direct reflection of our listening ecology. Sniff around YouTube and you’ll soon encounter videos like “Cozy Jazz Music with Bookstore Cafe Ambience & Crackling Fireplace for Study, Relaxing or Sleeping,” which is streaming live as I type this, or “Rainy Jazz Cafe - Slow Jazz Music in Coffee Shop Ambience for Work, Study and Relaxation,” which has racked up 34 million views since going up two years ago.

These atmospherically anonymous streams often get lumped in with Lo-Fi, which used to be a term you’d associate with DIY post-punk but now connotes something more like ambient beat music. A few years ago, Blue Note Records — Glasper’s former label home — struck a partnership with Astralwerks to release Bluewerks, a Lo-Fi series “where downtempo electronica meets jazz-infused sounds.” I haven’t been following it closely, so imagine my surprise when I just looked up the Bluewerks discography and learned that it’s now up to Volume 14.

You could shrug this off as just the latest manifestation of “easy listening,” an opt-in yet intently passive format that harbors few pretenses and makes fewer demands. But as was once the case with smooth jazz, which percolated from the same aquifer, I think it’s in our best interest to try and understand the phenomenon, because it’s one twist in a larger turn. Last fall, as you may remember, the imminent drop of André 3000’s New Blue Sun provoked some reflection at The Gig along these lines.

Then as now, I’m suspending my judgment about music made for low engagement, if only to learn something about our current state of affairs. For starters, I’m sure there are people in your life who have music playing almost constantly, without a passing understanding of who made it, or even what it is. I’m not sure whether the rise of a Spotify playlist like Jazz in the Background — which has over 1.5 million likes, a running time of more than 24 hours, and scarcely a single act or artist I can endorse — is more of a symptom or a cause. I’m sure it can be both.

You may have heard that Spotify CEO Daniel Ek recently estimated the cost of creating content in this day and age as “close to zero,” provoking an artist backlash. But judging by what passes for musical content on Spotify, his assessment feels like simple truth. Fwiw, the Apple Music playlist Jazz Chill is decently stocked with music by actual artists — from Melissa Aldana to Julian Lage to… y’know, This Guy.

Robert Glasper is far from the only artist to meet our uncertain moment with flexible pragmatism, but he’s surely one of the more quotable. “My whole career, everybody’s been saying my music is meditative,” he says in a press release for Let Go. “People say they study to my music, they pray to my music, they do yoga to my music, they just zone out. People have wanted me to do this for a long time. I wouldn’t call it the ‘meditation project’ or nothing like that, but it’s something that helps you find your center. It’s just something that quiets the world and allows you to see what’s within.”

I’ve listened several times to Let Go, through varying degrees of distraction. If you’re a paid subscriber to The Gig, read on for a more detailed appraisal of the album — and some thoughts about how well it actually slots into Glasper’s career. You’ll also find my best attempt to answer the question: Why is he doing this? (besides the obvious reason). There’s a cynical way to hear this music, and there’s a way to accept it on good faith; I’m inclined to try both on for size, and see which one fits.

(Before I) Let (You) Go

• I came up with “the inattention economy” as I started writing this post, but it seemed unlikely that no one had already committed the phrase to print. Sure enough, Fast Company published “The Rise of the Inattention Economy” in 2010, though their coinage has more to do with unobtrusive corporate marketing.

• Robert Glasper is on the road: he just played The Roots Picnic here in Philly, and will be at the Hollywood Bowl Jazz Festival this weekend. I look forward to seeing him at Newport Jazz. Then The Black Radio Experience will unfold over Labor Day Weekend at the Blue Note Napa. (More on that after the jump.)

• One of Glasper’s longest-running and most fruitful musical relationships has been with the Philly-reared R&B shapeshifter Bilal. This Friday, they’ll drop an album titled Live at Glasshaus, also featuring Burniss Travis on bass and Questlove on drums. Here’s footage of a track from that album, “All For Love.”

• Also relevant to our discussion: in 2019, I joined NPR Music’s Rodney Carmichael and Robin Hilton for an episode of the All Songs podcast reflecting on Glasper’s album Black Radio, and what it meant for the evolution of jazz and R&B.

• Glasper recently shared news of Black Radio Backstage, a forthcoming podcast that he’ll co-host with his go-to DJ, Jahi Sundance. If this is your stop, I’ll leave you with the announcement, which seems promising.

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