Sunday 8th June 2025
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The price of Citizenship: The inherent britishness of bureaucracy

Vlad Popescu
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The price of Citizenship: The inherent britishness of bureaucracy

January 19th and I’m standing outside Lambeth Town Hall in Brixton. It’s pouring with rain on us as we’re queuing outside, waiting to go in. I check I have all I need, trying not to get my documents wet. I need my Romanian passport and my invitation to the ceremony. It’s the Citizenship Ceremony, where we will swear oaths to declare our loyalty to the Queen and all her heirs to the throne. We also swear we’ll be good, lawful citizens, but my impression is that there is less emphasis on that part. We go in, and although there’s less pomp and ceremony owing to the pandemic, we do our oaths, listen to the anthem and shake hands with the Mayor of Lambeth. I am now a citizen of the United Kingdom. Or at least that’s how it was supposed to go.

In reality, this ceremony was digital. They announced this change from an in-person affair only a few days before, as the winter coronavirus surge was still going strong at that time. Even so, my citizenship saga came to a happy end. Anyhow, I’m not sure shaking hands with the Lambeth Mayor was such an occasion. I was not even aware my London Borough had its own ceremonial Mayor. Several months later, there is a British Passport in my hands. It’s blue and it’s my own. What has been a very long journey has come to an end. It’s been well over a year since I’ve started the process of becoming a British Citizen, and the total cost has been some two thousand pounds. But the price of citizenship is not just time and money – it’s submitting yourself to a strange and tiring process, the saga of immigration bureaucracy wearing you out. Along the way I’ve also learned several things about the British government and how it treats prospective citizens – I’ve also learned very few people here at Oxford seem to know anything at all about it.

There was once a time when our greatest worry was not a killer virus. During my first term at Oxford, the focus was on the 2019 General Election. A typical conversation involved being asked who I would vote for, explaining that I’m not a citizen and what followed was usually shock that I was not a member of the electorate after living in Britain for ten years. At the time I found it quite strange that the UK’s academic cream of the crop would seemingly be so unaware of what is a reality for millions of people in this country. According to a House of Commons Library report on migration statistics, in December 2019 some 9% of the UK population was recorded as having a different non-British nationality. In other words, out of a 9.5 million born-abroad population, 6.2 million were non-citizens, a group I belonged to until recently. Voting in local elections is generally allowed, but general elections not so much. For a general election, along with age and other requirements, you must be a British or Irish citizen. A common theme in 2019 was then: ‘Oh, but you’ve lived here so long you might as well be a citizen!’. But it doesn’t quite work that way. If part of the Labour Manifesto in 2019 was allowing residency rather than citizenship-based voting, the story is currently and has been for a long time,t very different. Who could apply to become a citizen, and who can actually carry it out is under very strict controls with a wide array of obstacles to go through. The reality is that millions are left without a direct say into a government whose policies have a pervasive effect on their lives. From dictating the rights to work, access to social services, designing the process around visas and acquiring an indefinite leave-to-remain, and even the potential looming threat of deportation; representation in such matters is a more fickle process. And ultimately more slippery than that is acquiring British citizenship. Considering this university produces so much of Britain’s elite, I thought it would be worthwhile to try and inform Oxonians of what it takes.

In December 2019, the number of EU nationals in the UK was estimated to be around 3.7 million, however by December 2020, there were nearly 5 million applicants to the EU Settlement Scheme, which shows the European population has been underestimated. I bring this up, because it is with the Settlement scheme that my citizenship process began, and indeed a process quite different for non-citizens with origins from elsewhere. Ever since the Brexit referendum in 2016, European migration to Britain has slowed down, and many have returned to Europe. I cannot speak for immigrants everywhere, but an enduring sense of anxiety looming in the back of my mind has been fears of a recalcitrant government revoking residency rights. What would follow would entail deportation to a country I feel rather distant from and would struggle to adjust to. A sense of dread set in on that fateful morning on June 24th 2016 as I heard the results and then set off to school to finish my GCSEs, which felt like an omen. At that point I had been living in the UK some six years, and to be sent packing would have felt like being uprooted. But this fear was alleviated when news of the Settlement Scheme came out – ‘settled status’, or an indefinite leave to remain, would be available for application providing a continuous proof of residency for at least five years could be established. My family’s application in thist was quite straightforward – filled with delays and complicated online forms, but straightforward. The scheme has been criticised in its own right, from lacking a physical certificate to prove a settled status, which produces its own problems at the borders. As part of possessing settled status, application for citizenship becomes legible for those who meet the five-year residency requirement. From there a whole other host of other conditions, tests and bureaucratic hurdles lie in the way.

According to the Home Office website, in the statistical year ending March 2020, here were 165,693 applications for British citizenship, with a marked increase in the proportion of European citizens applying at 27%, compared to 12% in 2016. It seems that Brexit served this push for citizenship, for those thousands as much as for my family. Although my actual application was submitted in August 2020, I had decided the previous summer, falling into the previous statistical year, and for good reason. Out of those 165,693 applications, 163,624 were granted. This seems a high proportion, but it’s important to give good consideration to your likelihood to succeed, because the hoops to jump through are many. In the end, my family decided only I should apply. In terms of money, this was already a high cost- for my parents to do as well would have been collectively very expensive for us. For many, the price of citizenship is prohibitively expensive. Since 2018, the naturalisation fee for adults has been £1,330. By comparison, in 2007 when Romania joined the EU, the fee was £655. Of course, this is only for the application itself – other fees, such as for booking the various exams and so on are not included, and the overall cost turns out much higher by the end. This is further aggravated by the fact that an unsuccessful application, including the costs, is thrown out the window. Re-applying carries the same price, to appeal the decision carries its own fees. Even the ceremony where monarchism is imposed upon you carries such a penalty. If you miss it, it may be re-booked, but otherwise without completing it your application is overturned – and there is a deadline to go through with it, typically three months in virus-free times. This points to a common theme already, of the hostility towards the wider groups of people not born here. And particularly, towards those lacking the thousands to spare or those filling the ranks of lower-income ‘essential workers’, which have been given so much lip-service during the pandemic. Telling a friend of the difficulties in applying, they remarked quite funnily that those migrants in occupations the economy would most require would find it very difficult to become citizens, as opposed to an Oxford undergrad like me. Reflecting on it, I find that the point is the government is happy enough to have them exploited for their labour, not to give them the vote.

Nevertheless, my journey began around autumn 2019, just before university began. One of the perks of a blue passport is not having to provide proof for your continuous residency in the UK for everything. From UCAS to other applications, I was a common fixture at my secondary school’s reception to ask for letters confirming that I had in fact been attending the school the whole of my secondary education, which fell in quite neatly with the usual five-year requirement. This is one of the requirements for naturalisation, assuming the application follows settled status. For an indefinite leave to remain granted to those from outside the EU, many of the requirements for such follow the same as for a citizenship application, with the addition that following the granting of the leave they continue to reside for a year before applying to become full-fledged citizens. I too, had to wait at least a year following my settlement under the EU scheme, but for the citizenship application I had yet again to prove my continuous residency. A letter from school could only provide for four of those years, so I had to get a letter from my College showing my years of attendance here. When I submitted my application in August 2020, I was told it could take up to six months to process it. Mine was processed within a few weeks, although my invitation to a ceremony took longer due to renewed lockdowns. I could not help but feel my being a student here helped in this – I can’t imagine many applicants come with letters from Oxford. At this moment of it being accepted, I could not help but feel that despite the costs and stress of the whole process, mine was still from a position of relative comfort. And looking back on all the other stages, I started to recognise this as well. 

An episode where I recognised this well was during the famous Life in the UK Test, coming with its own £50 fee for what is a very odd questionnaire. Announced in 2002 and introduced for naturalisation and eventually settlement in 2005 and 2007 respectively, the test is a very strange beast. It’s been constantly criticised again and again the newspapers as being factually incorrect, not actually providing any incentive for learning, containing questions on knowledge the average Brit would not know about, or just being plain ambiguous on the meanings of Britishness. The test is based off information in an official booklet, which is a jumble of various things from history, to cultural events, Olympics gold medallists, or the UK’s different nations structure. The questions are primarily British history, and by ‘British’ the focus is obviously on England, which meant that as a History student I found it very easy and no trouble at all, which I doubt many of the other applicants could relate to when there are such questions as who was declared Lord Protector, or just very outdated British culture such as who directed The 39 Steps. I doubt the next person on the street is well acquainted with the 1930s catalogue of Hitchcock films. But I could not help but find the history section fascinating in the narratives it created and the image of Britain it pushed onto prospective citizens that must learn the booklet inside out, people which probably lack much complex history education unlike snotty Oxford students. 

The booklet has gone through three revisions since its introduction, but it seems that regardless of whether Labour or Conservatives are in charge, there is little room for a nuanced look on Britain’s history, and even less room for its unsavoury aspects bar the occasional acknowledgement here and there. In a political atmosphere where the National Trust daring to inform visitors to country houses with historical links to Atlantic slavery causes a culture war and major backlash, Chapter Three, ‘A long and illustrious history’, fits in very well. Ireland is mentioned here and there, with some unfortunate rebellions and potato crops failing, the Ulster Plantation being glossed over, and no mention of illustrious England desolating the island in the Tudor and Stuart periods and causing famines – no mention of the laissez faire approach to famine relief during the Irish famine and maintaining grain exports from Ireland while millions hungered. Empire is treated much the same. The Boer War in South Africa gets mentioned, but for all the mentions of industrial innovations during the Victorian period, there are no references to Britain’s illustrious innovation in being the first to deploy concentration camps in the modern sense in the same war. Discussing the slave trade fares better, but the focus is on its eventual abolition from 1807 to 1833, with no mention of the plantation owners receiving major reparations for the “cost” of emancipation. Inventions, kings and queens and Empire nostalgia occupy the history section, making a clumsy but clearly triumphalist and glossy narrative with mentions of an atrocity here and there, those mentions muted enough to imply unfortunate accidents which British prowess can always overcome and otherwise don’t stain this illustrious story. I can’t help but wonder if future editions will just sing the Empire’s praise without any self-restraint at all. For historians, writing history is complicated stuff; for the government it isn’t.

An equally expensive but more amusing episode was proving I knew English. The requirement seems reasonable, but the conditions seem like another occasion for prospective citizens to be fleeced for their money. GCSEs and A Levels don’t count, and only a completed degree is proof. Instead, a certificate is required, a certificate acquired through a £65 speaking and listening exam which consists of a five minute chat with the examiner. You pick in advance what topic you would like to discuss, and deciding to liven up these bored bureaucrats’ conversations, I decided to speak about Oxford. The examiner was very surprised indeed and towards the end of those five minutes, she asked why I was having to do this test. I replied quite simply ‘Bureaucracy’. What else?

The most difficult episode in this saga was the naturalisation referees, where luck saved the day. A legal website I browsed at the time made note that the requirement for two referees seems more like being induced into a country club than the process for citizenship. Signing some forms and potentially being called by the Home Office, the referees must be British Citizens in an approved list of professions. That same website noted that this is usually the point of struggle for most applicants – the profession list. From teachers and doctors to CEOs and even MPs, the list is obviously exclusive for the professional, middle and upper-class sort. Essentially, I got lucky – one of my old teachers at school agreed to referee for me, while I discovered one of my friends’ parent fit the bill. They happily refereed for me, but it felt quite denigrating in having to bother them so they could confirm I would be a good citizen and not a terrorist. But otherwise, I would have been left in the dust, as are many with no personal acquaintance with anyone in these professions. And the point is clear in its favouring of those with connections and those with very high incomes. The citizenship process is designed to be as prohibitive as possible, to discourage and block as many applicants as possible. I can only see it as a wider extension of the Hostile Environment policy, which despite its stated aim of targeting those without leave to remain, denigrates and abuses all those with migrant origins, as the Windrush scandal has shown again and again.

As I finished my Life in the UK test, I was preparing to leave the examination hall. At the doorway I stopped and looked back around for a moment. I had finished in around ten minutes, while the other applicants were still going at it. Many were middle-aged and the only thing we seemed to have in common as we registered earlier was thick accents. I looked around and wondered what their occupations were, what were they doing with life as they lived here in Britain. And I left wondering why it was necessary they should know about Henry VIII’s wives. Would they not be worthy citizens otherwise?

Artwork by Rachel Jung 

UFOs, Space Baboons, and Masculinity

Wang Sum Luk
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UFOs, Space Baboons, and Masculinity

Somehow, “Pentagon confirms UFOs may exist” barely registers as news. It’s a shame, since our cultural obsession with the great unknown of outer space makes for fascinating fiction, such as James Gray’s Ad Astra, a film about an obsessive quest to discover alien life that meditates on themes of stoicism and masculinity. But you don’t need to just watch slow-moving (some would say boring) arthouse sci-fi for complex themes. That’s why I’m pairing Ad Astra in this article with Flash Gordon—a gaudy, silly movie about a football player fighting aliens on the planet Mongo—to show how both use space as the backdrop to dissect our assumptions about masculinity.

In Ad Astra, the protagonist Roy McBride (Brad Pitt) is a hyper-competent astronaut with a pulse rate that never goes over 80—but the first shot of him is also slowly revealed to be behind a sheet of glass, our first sign that this calm comes at the cost of some essential element of human contact. His unflinching stoicism makes the challenges he faces, from Moon pirates to an antimatter explosion, look minor in comparison. But McBride’s real obstacles are ultimately psychological ones. The film has an infamous and somewhat jarring scene where Roy fights a baboon in zero-gravity; John Axelrad, one of the film’s editors, suggests in an interview that it represents that “primal component of us”, the animal part of our minds that snap in the isolation of space. It’s a reminder that, however machine-like and mission-focused Roy tries to be, there are other facets of his psyche that he’s buried deep down. And in that way, it’s perfect foreshadowing for how Clifford McBride (Tommy Lee Jones), Roy’s father and the movie’s antagonist, has lost his mind in space, and how the same begins to happen to Roy.

Roy McBride’s professionalism and poise is a facade, and the film is about peeling back that shell. He’s good at his job, but not even he can do everything right, and Roy racks up a significant body count throughout the film, with the director calling him an “angel of death”. Each of these deaths weigh on him, a reminder that he’s not quite the steely-eyed mission man he wants to be. And as the film continues, we see where he gets it from—James Gray calls Clifford McBride an “ogre father”, a man so caught up in wanting to find alien life that he coldly admits that he never loved his son or wife. Both father and son are so obsessed by their respective missions that they become inhuman, although Roy manages to recognize this error before it destroys him. The film makes the human cost of this obsessive stoicism clear, laying out the danger of confusing these masculine archetypes for reality.

In contrast to the grounded and oh-so-serious Ad Astra, Flash Gordon is a movie that knows how ridiculous it is. The film may be about protecting Earth from destruction, but the brief glimpse of normalcy before the film’s plot kicks in—a grey airfield where the main characters do nothing—is clearly supposed to be less interesting than the garish planets and strange creatures we see later. This rejection of the “normal” is best described as camp, a sensibility which Susan Sontag’s famous essay “Notes on Camp” defines as “a love for the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration”. Every part of the movie is over-the-top, but played with complete sincerity. Characters are moved by powerful soap-opera emotions, grand passions of love and honour, and every moment of the movie—especially the ridiculous ones—are performed with total seriousness.

This is perhaps what makes Flash Gordon such an excellent exploration of masculinity. Flash Gordon is a charming all-American jock, a himbo before the word existed to describe men like him. He’s surrounded by other outsize masculine archetypes, from Prince Barin, the Errol Flynn-esque swashbuckler, to Vultan the boisterous warrior, and Ming the Merciless, who is a perfectly flamboyant evil overlord. And yes, this sounds like it’d be a shallow, boring story at odds with a cultural climate reckoning with the flaws in male stereotypes—but the point is exactly that these characters are all stereotypes. We don’t just laugh at what the characters do, we also laugh at who they are. These characters, from the outrageously masculine heroes to the effeminate villains, are all as artificial and campy as the film’s style, impossible to confuse with something that could exist in reality.

Ad Astra takes its time showing us the darkness that the aggrandizement of male competence hides, with the search for alien life ultimately hiding flaws that start closer to home, where words like “competence” and “stoicism” are dangerous barriers to emotional honesty. While it tries to unpack stereotypes, Flash Gordon throws them in your face, a (probably unintentional) portrayal of how artificial and ultimately silly all of these visions of manhood are. These movies might seem to focus on what lies beyond in the far reaches of space, but they also explore how strange these expectations of masculinity really are, and how they’re as alien to real life as extraterrestrial tyrants and space baboons.

Asylum Welcome to host alternative Oxford tour for community leaders during Refugee Week 2021

Joshua Low and Yan Chen
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Asylum Welcome to host alternative Oxford tour for community leaders during Refugee Week 2021

Asylum Welcome, an Oxford-based charity for refugees and asylum seekers, is planning to take local councillors and community leaders on an alternative walking tour of Oxford on Friday 18th June. The tour is one of a series of events in Oxford marking Refugee Week, a UK-wide celebration of the contributions, creativity, and resilience of refugees, held from 14th June until 2021 World Refugee Day on 20th June. 

Volunteers at Asylum Welcome with refugee status will lead the guided walk, giving community and local political leaders a glimpse into ‘their Oxford’ by describing the contemporary experience and challenges of a refugee arriving in Oxford. They will also share about organisations and locations that are vital for people building new lives in Oxfordshire. 

Razan, a tour guide, hopes to use the walk to broaden the discussion about refugee status. “Granting a refugee status is the least we can give to someone who has fled war, fear, torture, and suppression,” she said, going on to state that “This is a human matter not a political one, and it should be discussed and defended all around the earth not only in parliaments.”

The walk is held in line with the main theme of Refugee Week, ‘We Cannot Walk Alone’, which is inspired by Martin Luther King Jr’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech. The theme aims to “celebrate how families and communities have come together” over the last year and to remind the public how they can support one another to ‘create inclusive and resilient communities”. 

The activities of this year’s Refugee Week take place against the backdrop of potential enormous change in the landscape for refugees in the UK, as the Home Office plans a significant overhaul of its immigration and asylum systems. Asylum Welcome has challenged the Home Office’s proposed New Plan for Immigration since it was put forward in March 2021. The organisation is against the plan’s punitive measures against ‘illegal immigration’ as the UK government proposes for the first time ever to brand an asylum-seeker ‘legal’ or ‘illegal’ based on their route of arrival. “With the Walk, we want to create a tangible link between national policy and local constituents,” said Dr Hari Reed, Policy and Advocacy Coordinator at Asylum Welcome. 

Supported by a small core staff and more than 120 volunteers, Asylum Welcome serves over 1,700 clients per year. A host of other events during Refugee Week will involve the organisation. At Gloucester Green Market on Wednesday 16th June, Asylum Welcome held a fundraiser and lent its support to the launch of a photo exhibition at the Old Fire Station, a collaboration between fellow refugee charity Refugee Resource and photographer Phillipa James. The exhibition, also titled ‘We Cannot Walk Alone’, features portraits of refugee women and explores themes of trauma, the inner and outer self, and societal expectations. 

Asylum Welcome staff and volunteers have also been carrying a giant orange heart around Oxford during the week to collect messages of support and solidarity with asylum seekers and refugees, as well as distributing orange heart stickers. The orange heart, a symbol of compassion and support for refugees, is the logo for Together with Refugees, a coalition of more than 200 national and local organisations embracing these principles which was formed in May 2021. 

Nicky Barnetson, Education and Employment Coordinator at Asylum Welcome, explains that the design takes inspiration from both the Refugee Flag, conceived by Syrian artist and refugee Yara Said, and the colour of lifejackets. “Oxford has a heart, it’s orange, and it’s growing”, Barnetson describes. “We want to tell people, ‘We want you here.'” The giant heart made an appearance at Gloucester Green Market on Wednesday and will be displayed at Headington Market on Saturday 19th June. 

Other events during Refugee Week will take diverse forms, including a music evening, a paper puppet collage workshop, presentations, and talks. 

At the University of Oxford, Mansfield College and Somerville College will also host the Oxford’s Colleges of Sanctuary Annual Event on Thursday 17th June, a conversation between Dr Reverend Inderjit Bhogal OBE, founder of the Cities of Sanctuary Movement UK, and Syrian educator and campaigner Afraa Hashem. Both colleges were recognised as University-Colleges of Sanctuary by City of Sanctuary UK earlier this year, the first colleges at the University to be so recognised. 

On the same day, Sanctuary Hosting, a charity which matches homes with spare rooms to homeless asylum seekers, refugees and vulnerable migrants, will host a book presentation with Bharti Dhir, author of memoir Worth, who will share excerpts from her book and answer questions from the audience. The memoir is about her journey growing up as a biracial female child and refugee, nurturing self-worth, and overcoming abandonment, discrimination, and adversity. 

A list of Refugee Week events hosted by organisations in Oxford can be found here. 

Image Credit: Asylum Welcome

Live in the Opera House: A Review of 21st-Century Choreography

Patrick Gwillim Thomas
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Live in the Opera House: A Review of 21st-Century Choreography

The disjunction of leaving a street protest to go to the Royal Opera House was a lot easier to navigate than I had expected. That said, the contrast did make me more attentive to a list of qualities I would normally bungle together somewhere close, but not too close, to beauty: power, messaging, relevancy, wokeness, etc. In other words, I didn’t sit back and enjoy the show. And I ended up with a lot more opinions than I had ever expected four pieces of 21st-century choreography to evoke.
The night began with Within the Golden Hour by Christopher Wheeldon. I had been looking forward to this piece after having seen Wheeldon take my favourite part of Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland (the denouement by tapdancing Mad Hatter) and making it a major variation in his ballet adaptation. In this new work, he moves away from the excesses of Wonderland to the minimalist restraint of Ezio Bosso’s strings score. Rather than toning down, however, Wheeldon takes the minimalist score as an exercise in repetitions and centres his choreography on the unsettling inevitability of copies. Couples are joined on the stage by perfect mirrors only slightly out of sync or only a single move of their routine will repeat in the background as they dance on, unaware.

These descriptions are far from exhaustive, Abraham’s piece excels because he quickly presumes the audience’s understanding and starts exploring his characters.


Yet, when the dancers can escape from repetition, there is harmony within the dance couples themselves. The male always acting as the structure of which the female drapes—a relation clearest when all the males link arms and lock shoulders, turning into the metal bar from which the women practice their battements. This harmony peaks in the 4th section, which is dedicated entirely to one couple. The man guides the woman through her twirls to a soothing purple backdrop, he lifts her up spreads her arms, they separate, then finish in a sheltering embrace. Meanwhile copies, and their anxiety, peak in the 3rd, 5th, and final sections respectively. In all three the backdrop blares red and the strings are plucked, the patterns in the music spawning rapidly. The dancers are perfect mirrors of each other, sometimes facing one another, other times arrayed in front of the audience like leotarded space invaders.
What is bizarre though, especially given Wheeldon’s own homosexuality, is that he lets the supreme symbol of this transgressive mirroring be the gendered pairing. In other words, while the man and women are allowed to be joined in their difference when two men come on the stage in the third act they are copies, a pairing inherently unsettling because of their innate similarity. This continues into the 5th act where the red backdrop accompanies four women all mirroring each other. Then into the final act when, despite the couples themselves being the repeated signs, they are only reproducing as couples, as if there could be no sameness within the male-female couple as if their gendered dance roles will always prevent the horror of mirroring. All in all, the piece explores well the patterning of the minimalist score but lazily grafts it onto heteronormative anxiety about mirrored sexes—3 stars.
If Wheeldon played the dangerous game of universals, Kyle Abraham’s Optional Family: a divertissement was a refreshing change. Right from when the iPhone auto-reader blares out the scathing texts between the husband-and-wife duo, you know precisely the characters you are dealing with. The texts are skillfully employed. Abraham makes sure that what he loses in interpretation over the dancer’s identities and orientations, he gains by fleshing out the three distinct characters. The husband is stubborn, willing to tuck himself in the corner and stand arms crossed as if fed up of the performance. Opposite him, the wife cannot stop dancing, always twirling, always throwing herself into their back and forth even when the husband is with another man. And as for that other man, he has the same love for the game found in the wife, but there is greater independence to him—he enters the stage alone, worming his way up a jagged trail of spotlights until he twirls into a romance with the husband.
These descriptions are far from exhaustive, Abraham’s piece excels because he quickly presumes the audience’s understanding and starts exploring his characters. You see the husband pulled into the gaudiness of a ballet threesome, you see the shock as the wife finds out she cannot keep playing at romance, and you see the once independent lover collapse after the husband’s exit stage left. Abrahams clearly knows what type of show he wants to put on and delivers. I look forward to him becoming head choreographer of the Opera House next year—4 stars.
The night then ends with two pieces by Crystal Pite, which are so dumbfounding as a pair that I will just say she shows off her breadth as an artist and leave it at that. Her first, The Statement, is a cosmic horror tale of corporate scandal. It reminded me of the film The Big Short, in that it is unexpectedly funny. The board-room argument, which plays over the four dancers, is a brisk display of semantic stretching matched only by their acrobatics. Their heads jerk to the side as they ‘look at the situation from a different angle’; their arms splay on the black boardroom table as they try to dominate the conversation, and their legs jingle like a marionette’s as they desperately reposition. The effect is over the top. The widely meaningless business-speak seeming sillier with each move they make.

The first half begins tentatively with its theme of connection; solo performances get their chance to shine, and the dancers are only brought together in twos. The second half is more forceful; the dancers stay awkwardly tightknit as a human wave from which bodies will collapse only to be re-absorbed.


But what about cosmic horror? Well, it’s horrific in that the vagueness of business-speak eventually undercuts that humor. The dancers are shocked to stillness, or collapse, in the face of ‘the board’ who reside ‘upstairs.’ And though the upstairs has no dancer, its presence looms large, quite literally by the end when a booming voice accompanies a descending black pall. Against this disembodied power those moves which were funny for their excesses seem more like a sign of impotence, just a reminder that they can move anywhere but upstairs. In all honesty, their arguing would have remained comedically petty if it were not for the dancers being so utterly terrified.
All in all, the sense of unspecific foreboding comes through well and the comedy was engaging against the otherwise vague language about a ‘situation’ and ‘sorting it out’—4 stars.
I should probably explain why I have given the last two pieces 4 stars despite saying nothing negative about them. Quite simply, I don’t like voiceovers. I try to give respect to how Abrahams and Pite use them well—one grounding us in the marital drama the other tapping into the ominous hilarity of corporate-speak—but when I go to see dance, I want a break from the semantic heaviness of dialogue and, as long as it is done well, I will always prefer a vague heading, taught strings, and moving bodies to a monologue. Hence Crystal Pite’s second piece Solo Echo, with its title like a zen koan and no voices to speak of, gets five stars.
The work is a mediation on humanity’s struggle to find connections that leaves you teary-eyed, if not still ultimately optimistic about human life. The first half begins tentatively with its theme of connection; solo performances get their chance to shine, and the dancers are only brought together in twos. The second half is more forceful; the dancers stay awkwardly tightknit as a human wave from which bodies will collapse only to be re-absorbed. And as the insistence to connect increases throughout, the disconnects, the times when dancers crumple to the floor or walk off the stage, become more acute. But what really elevates Pite’s work is that she always takes time to problematize what it even means to connect: people fumble over one another’s faces, grab onto legs, sprawl together on the floor, hook ungainly legs over necks, control each other like marionettes, and, if they are lucky, perform ballet together—5 stars.
Taking the pieces together, we see the responses to the flaws with the first piece by Wheeldon. His Within the Golden Hour relied on heteronormativity when it made the rigid male-female roles the only source of harmony through difference. But Abraham’s piece counters this. It increases the rigidity of the dancing roles yet does so to outline the particular characters of the marital strife rather than break into generalities. Right after Abraham’s, Pite’s Solo Echo comes with another response. It removes dialogue and returns to generalities, but constantly problematizes what it means for humanity to be a harmonious unity in a distinctly queer fashion.
I’m trading the pieces off against each other like this, not just because it is a neat analysis, but because there is no better way to get across the variety this collection gives you. It is difficult to introduce contemporary choreography with just four pieces, but the Opera House has certainly given it a good shot. And like all worthwhile art, it will make you want to make more art—(3+4+4+5)/4=4 stars.

Could the Friends Reunion BE any more nostalgic?

Elara Oakes
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Could the Friends Reunion BE any more nostalgic?

It’s fair to say the Friends Reunion was a mixed bag. The best? A heavy hit of nostalgia from seeing the cast reunited. The worst? Odd celebrity cameos and James Corden as a poor choice of host. But my biggest takeaway from the reunion was the continuing affection from fans. Their stories showed how Friends has been a source of comfort and laughter – across the globe and across generations.

So, why is Friends still the ultimate comfort watch?

The show is dated in many ways: the fat jokes, the gay jokes, the whitewashed version of 90’s New York City. Yet none of these impact the core premise. Friends will be relevant as long as young people feel lost, aimless, underperforming. Its world is simple, comforting and low-stakes. No matter how neurotic the characters are or how badly they mess up, their friends will always be there for them. 

It’s these loveable flaws that make the show so special: Phoebe’s songs, Chandler’s defensive jokes, Janice’s laugh, Ross’s leather pants. The reunion was at its best when it celebrated these running jokes and revived the chemistry between the actors. Matt LeBlanc as Joey wearing all of Chandler’s clothes was glorious. 

Friends is a tribute to the time in your life when your friends are your family. The show puts that stage of life in a time capsule. For ten seasons, no amount of marriage, babies or career changes can get in the way of hanging out and drinking coffee all day at Central Perk.

Going through a breakup? Hungover? Living through a pandemic? You can enter a world where Monica and Chandler are always across the hall and everything works out in the end. No one ever moves on. That neverland bubble of supportive friendship is the key to the show’s enduring appeal. It is only burst in the final episode when the six friends get their happy endings. In the reunion, the creators, Kauffman, Bright and Crane explain that this is why there can never be another series or a movie. Instead, the reunion was a hodgepodge format of interviews, clips and even a catwalk. So, how did the Friends Reunion do? Did it meet fans’ expectations?

Seeing the cast reunited and reminiscing was lovely. It will seem odd to a Friends novice, but the highlight of the reunion was just seeing the cast together on set. The simple moments were the sweetest, like seeing Matthew Perry and Matt LeBlanc in the Barca loungers again. LeBlanc was joyful to watch, putting the others at ease. He seemed truly chilled-out and the only cast member to embrace his age and greying hair. A highlight of the reunion was a cosy table read of some iconic scenes, in which Lisa Kudrow sounds spookily similar to the original show. Gunther attended by video call, looking totally unrecognisable. Maggie Wheeler made a brief appearance to do Janice’s famous laugh and catchphrase. In the other OH. MY. GOD. moment, David Schwimmer and Jennifer Aniston admitted to a real-life romance that fuelled the Ross-and-Rachel love story. Cut to newly revealed behind the scenes footage of them cuddling on the sofa.

James Corden’s interview segment was superficial (who has the loudest laugh..? Does anyone care?) and brushed over Matthew Perry’s obviously painful experience of fame and addiction lest it spoil the mood. The result was a palpable tension: worse than if Corden had let the cast talk authentically about Friends and its success. Instead, they rushed ahead to see Justin Bieber dressed as a potato. The tangential celebrity drop-ins were continuous and a little distracting. They did make it clear that Friends fans come in many forms – from Lady Gaga to Malala Yousafzai to David Beckham.

Next came stories from Friends fans around the world about what the show means to them. There were numerous and heart-warming anecdotes of the sitcom getting fans through a hard time, forging friendships or helping them learn English. Fans of all ages look to the show when they need a laugh and some companionship. 

Above all else, the Reunion made one thing clear: the world’s love for Friends is timeless. 

Image credits: Prayitno Hadinata via Flickr (CC BY 2.0)

Common Ground holds its annual symposium, ‘Reclaiming Spaces’

Sasha Mills
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Common Ground holds its annual symposium, ‘Reclaiming Spaces’

Common Ground has been held its first ‘mini’ symposium, and first partially online symposium, over the course of last week. The group has held symposiums each year since its founding, but was unable to hold one last year due to the COVID-19 pandemic. This year’s symposium is made up of 3 panels and 1 social focused on the theme ‘reclaiming spaces.’

Common Ground is a community group that defines itself as “a movement that sets out to examine Oxford’s colonial past in the context of its present-day inequalities.” Past symposiums held by the group have included ‘Oxford, Reparations and the Global Class Struggle’ and ‘Revisiting the Past, Envisioning the Future: Race, Class, and Oxford’.

Speaking to Cherwell about the theme of the symposium, Common Ground said: “Reclaiming Spaces will interrogate our relationship to and experience of different places, whether that be historical, institutional or natural space. We hope to examine how the experience of space is mediated by legacies of colonialism, climate degradation and factors such as race, gender and class, as well as exploring ways of transforming and reimagining hostile or damaging places into more constructive and creative environments. 

“This year there hasn’t been so much opportunity to physically be within certain spaces, but the concept of space and the idea of reclaiming it will always be present.”

The first panel took place on Monday night, and was focused on the theme of ‘Reclaiming Institutional Spaces.’ It featured speakers including councillor Shaista Aziz and community activist Michelle Codrington-Rogers, who spoke on issues including their experiences growing up as women of colour in Oxford, and navigating the divide between the city and the University. 

The other two panels, hosted on Wednesday 9th June and Friday 11th June, were titled ‘Reclaiming Green Spaces’ and ‘Reclaiming Historical Spaces.’ These panels featured speakers including representatives from Rhodes Must Fall and Osney Hydro Lock Project. In the past, Common Ground has been involved in campaigns for the removal of the Cecil Rhodes statue, and it was recently announced that Oriel College would not be taking the statue down despite the recommendations of an independent commission. 

Speaking on the significance of the symposium, Common Ground told Cherwell: “It provides a great opportunity to come together at the end of the uni year and to collaborate with community activists, academics and other liberation campaigns. Maintaining links with the local community is very important to us as it helps to build institutional memory, which is often difficult within student activism. We also want to do our part to hold space for challenging conversations around the legacies of colonialism in our city.”

Image Credit: Common Ground

Student Profile: Jade Calder

Issy Kenney-Herbert
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Student Profile: Jade Calder

I open the call unaware that the student I am about to interview is actually in self isolation. Jade (she/they) appears on camera with a juice box one of her flatmates picked up – she laughs at how she feels like a kid with a packed lunch when drinking it. Jade is a second year History Student at St Peters, and Co-Chair of Class Act, the SU Campaign intended to support, represent and campaign on behalf of students from working class, low income, first generation and state comprehensive school backgrounds.

Yet, how they got involved is somewhat unconventional: “I sort of joined by accident”, Jade laughs. “I mean I was always aware of Class Act; I had seen their stall at the Freshers Fair, and was looking to support them and get involved in any way I could – I didn’t know how to. Then throughout the year, they had some drop in sessions, I messaged and they were always super friendly! I saw that the SU had campaign elections and I wasn’t quite sure how the elections worked so just put myself down for a Class LGBT intersection rep and then forgot about it. I think I meant to apply for LGBTQ Soc, because I thought it was the same thing. So, I had applied for Class Rep for Soc and Class Rep for Campaign, and no one ran against me, so I got it by default.”

Jade reflects, “It was one of the best accidents that has ever happened to me at Oxford, because I found a group of people I could relate to and talk to honestly about our experiences. For me, this was being part of both Class Act and LGBTQ Campaign. And we were actually getting involved with the issues, getting on with things and it’s a group of people who aren’t doing things for their own CV. It was like, alright we have got some issues at this university, let’s work on it and actually fight for something better.”

Jade’s passion shines through as we delve deeper into some of the projects that Class Act is currently working on: “There are quite a few! Class Act are really keen to do a report or investigation into the realities of lived experiences of Oxford students from the broad under-privileged social-economic class umbrella. It gets parroted so much at open days and in access literature that ‘it doesn’t matter which college you go to’ – I think there is a lot of reasons why that is a myth. If you are a low-income student or an independent student, it can have a significant effect on the cost of living, the state school to private ratio, hardship funds, the general atmosphere and whether you feel supported coming from a particular background. When I was applying to Oxford, I was told to apply to Mansfield where there is a lot of state-school students; instead I went to St Peters which is 50% private school and it doesn’t have a lot of money to support people financially. There is a lack of information and transparency, and the experience of applying for the hardship fund is different at each college. So, this is something that we really want to tackle.”

Jade pauses for a moment, before going on to articulately voice a wider issue they think this speaks to, “Personally speaking, a lot of people have a two minded opinion of access. On the one hand you want to make sure Oxford is open to everyone, regardless of background, ensuring the people who would get something out of it, have the chance to come here. My concern is once you are at Oxford, is there support in place? Is there a healthy, supportive environment for you once you are here, and can I honestly say that is true? For some students, if they find the right people or are at the right college, they will really enjoy their time here and will encourage people to apply. Other people have had really nasty experiences, and therefore well-reasoned reservations as to why they may think ‘am I just leading lambs to the slaughter here when I tell them to apply to Oxford’ even though they are capable of the work. So when I think about access, I think about access as in improving the accessibility and experience of students when they are actually here. And that’s what Class Act is all about, we are not about outreach but about improving the experience of students who are here.”

“On top of the report, I have been working with a friend to create a working-class magazine for creatives, featuring poetry, art and essays, which has been a long time coming,” Jade continues. “I think the creative scene at Oxford can feel a bit impenetrable, private school London dominated, and it doesn’t speak much to my experiences. It appeals to a certain type of person, and often doesn’t involve many people from the class umbrella background. And that cycle is perpetuated in the real world, where so much attention is given to the middle class creative world in London, and more provincial creative institutions outside of London are not given as much of a look in or funding.”

They laugh as they say, “Of course, us putting out a little magazine isn’t going to fix all of that. But hopefully in some small way, it will give people a bit of confidence. I think that is something that is really lacking in people, they’ll think ‘oh this isn’t for me’ but if you give someone a platform, help someone gain confidence by saying ‘you are really good – maybe no one has said you are really good before but you are, and maybe you should pursue this? you might not have gone to a private school with a really top of the range creative faculty and your own school arts magazine, but that doesn’t mean you can’t create and that doesn’t mean you aren’t worth listening to, or it’s not worth exhibiting your work.’ You need diverse voices.”

As the interview draws to a close, Jade reflects on the discussions of class at Oxford: “I think more broadly, class as a topic, as a discussion point, is something that people should be aware of. I don’t think it is on minds of the student population as much as it ought to be.” They continue, “which is interesting because when a lot of people think of Oxbridge, in the media and the wider general public’s view of the institutions, they often think of it as elitist, with the image of the Bullingdon Club coming to mind. Yet when you get to oxford, people don’t necessarily show a nuanced awareness beyond one off comments about Eton or private schools.”

“Talking to privileged people about class, and their ideas of what a working class person is are so far removed from my own experiences,” Jade continues, “and they mean well, a lot of people mean well, but there are still people who have said to me ‘I have never met people from your background before’ and that concerns me. That concerns me because I don’t view myself as some sort of street urchin from some Dickensian novel. I am not some outlier, but to these people I’m the lowest of the low they’ve ever met in terms of wealth – which is just bizarre. I don’t view myself as particularly underprivileged at home, I’m just a normal person, but when i get here, these are the people who have aspirations to be MPs, policy advisors, involved in powerful institutions, to run the country… but they’ve never met a person who comes from a family in the North, whose family income is less than the national average. That’s what scares me.”

“And if I’m the first person who they meet, the first interaction, someone that has to educate them … how do I educate someone about that? How do I respond to that, how do I act? I have my own perspective, my own experiences, my experiences aren’t typical because I am an ethnic minority, and from the LGBTQ+ community, alongside other things – all those nuanced, unique things that everyone has. But I have made it to Oxford and the postcode where I’m from, 50% of the people don’t have five good GCSEs, yet I’m at what is ranked as one of the best universities in the world.”

“I sometimes feel like I have a sort of responsibility that I didn’t ask for and I also don’t know how to navigate it. Before Oxford, I have never had to be the ‘token poor person’.”

To get involved with any of the projects mentioned above, or Class Act more generally, you can go to the SU website. You can also contact them via email [email protected], or visit their Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram.

“Rotterdam is anywhere, anywhere alone…”: A Literary Pilgrimage

Lily Down
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“Rotterdam is anywhere, anywhere alone…”: A Literary Pilgrimage

When I read a book, I like to imagine that I’m in the place the author describes. Once I lose myself in a book, that’s pretty easy. I’m not in my room or the park anymore – I’m gone, I’m there, I’m lost in the place the writer has taken me to. I’m in New York with Addie LaRue, or in Ketterdam with the Crows. Looking up from my book always comes as a surprise. Coming back to my own thoughts and life is disorienting, and realising I’m back in my own space is sometimes a disappointment. I like to imagine what it would be like to really live in the worlds I read about. The closest it’s possible to get to this, though, is to go to the place where a book was set or written, to try to glean some secret information from the walls and stone and trees that reveal something new, something special, about the books we love so much. 

I love the gothic, so going on holiday to Whitby, where Bram Stoker has Dracula’s ship crash against English shores to terrorise the reading public, seemed pretty exciting to me. Sleeping in a Whitby hotel, I was half-convinced that a vampire or ghost would burst out from behind the curtain at any moment and eat me. But walking around the little seaside town, there was nothing there to remind me of the bloody horror of the novel. I was surrounded by tourist traps, happy families, fish and chips. The only thing to remind me of the book was the Dracula Experience, an incredibly cheesy and mildly cringey tourist trap that has been there since at least the 1980s, and which was, whilst hands down the best thing in Whitby, pretty unrelated to the book itself. 

Even walking up to the Abbey, which Whitby’s tourism website claims inspired Stoker’s whole novel, I didn’t feel that spark of connection. The breeze was cool coming off the ocean, the sun shone bright in the sky, but there was no Gothic darkness or moody rain. This wasn’t Stoker’s Dracula – this was a nice day out with my family. Staring out at the coastline could tell me nothing about the book. Being in Whitby was wonderful, but it didn’t make any difference to my reading experience at all. 

For some books, though, there isn’t even the option to travel to the place that they’re set. Fans of Wuthering Heights can go to the Yorkshire moors, but if your favourite book is Game of Thrones, chances are you won’t be able to book a flight to King’s Landing any time soon. But, knowing full well that I’m setting myself up for the disappointment of reading an escapist book and then remembering I can never actually exist in that universe, I read fantasy books anyway. I know I’ll fall in love with the setting and spend the next day on TikTok watching cosplayers act out scenes from Leigh Bardugo’s Six of Crows duology, wishing I could go there and live such a high-stakes existence. There’s a sort of accidental masochism that comes with this disappointment. But the thing that makes me connect to fantasy books isn’t really the places. The place doesn’t make me love the book – it’s an interesting aspect, but detached from the reading experience. I don’t read to be in Ketterdam, I read to spend time with Kaz and Inej. What makes me love Six of Crows is my connection to the characters – how I recognise myself in them, how I love them and care about what happens to them. City streets are the same whether it’s modern New York or 18th century Paris or the totally fictional Kribirsk; they’re just the backdrop of a book. But people change from the beginning to the end, and seeing how they do is the reason why I read stories. 

When I think about going on holiday to Whitby, I don’t think about Bram Stoker’s seminal Gothic novel. I think about going through the hilariously awful Dracula Experience. I think of how we climbed up all the steps to Whitby Abbey and how the most exciting thing about it was probably getting chips afterwards. I think of the beautiful necklace I bought there, that I still wear now. I think about how odd it is that my family’s incredibly southern history is so connected to this part of the Yorkshire coast: my mum going there for the folk festival as a kid in the 80s; how my gran, as a kid herself in the 50s, used to go just up the coast to Runswick. The place stopped being Stoker’s, and became mine, a part of my own life and memory. 

This isn’t to say that there’s no point in a literary pilgrimage – my friend and I are desperate to go to Bath and Chatsworth because of our mutual love of Jane Austen. We plan trips and think of all the places we want to go to, laughing because we know, as true Austen fans, that the author herself disliked Bath immensely. And yet we still think about our weekend getaway to the city that we can’t help but associate with the Regency era, and with her. Maybe when we finally get there, it will stop being hers and become ours, as Whitby has already. There’s no way to know whether Bath will be a place where I think of good food and better friends, or my favourite books, until I go there and find out. 

A book can make me want to go to a place more – reading Dash and Lily’s Book of Dares and the Goldfinch nearly made me drop out of university and move to New York, and reading Six of Crows, even though it’s a fantasy book, makes me desperate to visit to the Netherlands. I want to sit in the New York Public Library and the MoMA, or read a book sitting by a canal in Amsterdam with a bunch of tulips beside me. But what I really want is to live a life that would be written about in these stories; I don’t even want to go to the MoMA, I want to sit in a museum and fall in love. I don’t need to go to Amsterdam, or even Ketterdam, I just want to pull off a fun, elaborate heist with my friends. We read to experience something different, and also to feel something familiar – to feel love, but in a different world, where things are more magical or beautiful than they feel in our own world. If I never visit all of these places, books still matter because of their magic. And if I do go to these places, I won’t need to be transported to a fictional world for them to be magic. They’ll be wonderful because I went there, and had fun, and lived a life that is far less exciting than those of the characters, but was good all the same. 

Image credit: wwwuppertal on Flickr, licensed via CC BY 2.0.

When streaming becomes scrolling

Lucy Kelly
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When streaming becomes scrolling

‘Your design is clean, elegant, tight, and fast. While it’s clearly lacking some important features (the social stuff you alluded to, etc), I think you’ve done a great job with sequencing. You nailed the core experience around which everything else can later be built.’

Such was Napster founder Sean Parker’s first reaction to Spotify in 2009. Parker was so impressed by Spotify, he penned a ‘1700-word love letter’ to the music streaming service’s founder, Daniel Ek, in which he praised the product’s ‘core experience’. He considered Spotify the first and only digital music service to ‘meet and exceed the bar set by Napster’ before the latter’s untimely collapse in 2001.

12 years after Parker’s love letter, another functionality lies at the ‘core’ of Spotify’s product: the ‘social stuff’ which Parker only parenthetically mentions. Though it’s early days, there are already tell-tale signs that Spotify is morphing into a social media platform which causes users to fall into the same addictive, repetitive patterns associated with Instagram, TikTok, and the other usual suspects.

Social media platforms typically start out with noble(ish) intentions. Namely, making it easy for people to connect and share content with others. That this capability goes too far and the platform metamorphoses into an uncontrollable beast, ensnaring its users worldwide, is a tale as old as time (or as old as Facebook). Though we may think of it as ‘just’ a music streaming service, Spotify could be heading in the same direction.

Spotify’s 2018 integration with Instagram is an overt example: for the first time, Instagram users could post what they were listening to on their Instagram Stories. As a result, the same harmful habits which Instagram is frequently accused of cultivating crossed over from the visual realm and into the audio. Now it wasn’t just our peers’ appearances, social lives, and material affluence we could judge; it was their music taste, too. There’s also the capability to link your Spotify account to your Facebook profile. Upon doing so, you automatically follow dozens of ‘friends’ – another instance of Spotify’s services going beyond just ‘streaming’, and spilling into the ‘social’. Last month, Spotify and Facebook developed their partnership further by announcing ‘Project Boombox’, which will enable users to share what they’re listening to on Spotify directly via their Facebook News Feed. Whilst Spotify is notorious for failing to pay artists fairly, it is ensuring that non-artist users get more than their fair share of cross-platform social capabilities. It’s perhaps unsurprising that Spotify is so cosy with social media’s biggest conglomerate, given that when Zuck himself first used Spotify in 2009, he took to Facebook to express his admiration, setting his status to ‘Spotify is so good’.

So, there are clear signs that Spotify is shifting its focus to prioritise the ‘social stuff’. Why is this a problem? Does it impede our ability to just enjoy the music? It certainly could. Aside from its integrations with Facebook and Instagram, stranger still are the covert ways in which Spotify is affecting how we listen to music and share our listening habits. We are told time and time again that nobody’s life is how it appears on Instagram. We may continue to use them, but we are to some extent aware that social media platforms provide an inauthentic snapshot into others’ lives. The same can’t be said for Spotify. Spotify works on the premise that music, that deeply personal entity, is a true reflection of ourselves, our state of mind as we listen. For me, ‘authentic’ listening is selecting the music you listen to based solely on your own emotion and volition – your mood, a recommendation you want to investigate, a memory you want to re-stir. It’s personal and should not be fabricated.

You can, in nine out of ten cases, have a good guess at how someone is feeling based on the music they’re listening to. To draw on anecdotal evidence, I have met with friends and been able to predict what mood they’ll be in based on what they were listening to before we meet, which is shown in real-time in Spotify’s ‘Friend Activity’ sidebar. Your friends’ digital activity correlates to their real, present emotion.

Though this ‘Big Brother is watching’ sensation could be considered unnerving, I wouldn’t say it’s what worries me primarily. In many ways, this is how Spotify fulfils its core ‘social’ purpose: to let people share what they enjoy listening to with others who are interested. Soundcloud allows you to do the same when you ‘repost’ tracks. But in this case, ‘sharing’ music via Soundcloud is a conscious act, whereas on Spotify, the mode of sharing is automatic. Provided you haven’t turned ‘Share my listening activity’ off, you are broadcasting your listening habits to the world, in real-time. That you can then try and decipher someone’s frame of mind based on their listening habits is more insidious. Because, when this is the case, it’s no longer that you’re sharing what you ‘enjoy’ listening to; you’re sharing what you want others to see that you’re listening to. This becomes a slippery slope, heading towards an inauthentic representation of yourself, the kind typically associated with Instagram. We can select the music we listen to as a means of sending messages to our followers about what we’re doing, how we’re feeling, instead of selecting the music because we truly want to listen to it. In the process, we also risk commodifying the music which provides the soundtrack to our most personal and raw moments. Music enables us to channel our authentic emotion. The moment we start using it for performativity and exhibitionism, we jeopardize authentic listening.

The rise of the ‘playlist’ facilitates our communication via Spotify, and in turn, is partly responsible for the shift from streaming to social. The way we consume music has changed thanks to music streaming services: 40% of us prefer listening to playlists than albums. The reasons for this are manifold, but the trend is certainly in part connected to our increased use of social media and our obsession with user-generated content. Not everyone can readily create an album; musical talent and technical ability restrict us. But we can all create a Spotify playlist. We can gather an assortment of tracks, group them under a fitting title, even give it a 300×300 image, reminiscent of an Instagram square. Again, the customisable playlist is a great feature made possible by digital listening and is not overtly problematic. We should be allowed to create them and share the ones we’re proud of. The problems arise when the need to circulate these playlists via Stories, News Feeds and Friend Activity sidebars eclipses the reason for us creating them in the first place. Are we creating playlists which we truly want to listen to, or are we subconsciously pandering to a social audience?

In our collective defence, Spotify deliberately blurs the lines between social and personal listening to the extent that it’s tricky to tell the two apart. The Spotify algorithm is ensuring that its users listen to the same music as their friends, whilst the individual user is under the impression that they have made a ‘discovery’ all on their own. Comparing my ‘Discover Weekly’ playlist to my friends’ confirmed this. Why were we all suddenly listening to Caribou, Khruangbin, Men I Trust, Maribou State? All great artists, but not ones I’d ever heard of before, and I was surprised to learn that my friends also knew them. The user thinks that they have unearthed a hidden gem in their Discovery Weekly. Except these tracks aren’t ‘hidden’ at all: chances are, your friends are also just ‘discovering’ them. Spotify generates your Discover Weekly based on the content of every playlist created on its platform. This means that every playlist you create, personal or private, is fuelling the algorithm which creates Discover Weeklys for over 150 million Spotify users. We operate under the guise that we’re making these playlists for ourselves, but Spotify is also capitalising on our content to improve its own product. It’s an intrusion we permit to continue getting spot-on recommendations from Spotify, but it’s a phenomenon which makes me feel like we’re being duped. The unique pleasure of ‘discovering’ a new artist is abruptly curtailed once we realise that we are not alone in this discovery. The ‘deep cuts picked for you’ which Spotify promises us with Discover Weekly are part of a charcuterie board we have to share with the world.

Spotify’s shift from a music streaming service to social network platform is fully underway. And this brings some astounding possibilities for its users. Spotify has undoubtedly made it easier for audiophiles to access and share the music they love. But this comes at a cost, and not just for the artists whose salaries are side-lined by Spotify in favour of engineering-intensive integrations with social media giants. The individual user also suffers as Spotify becomes an increasingly social platform. Parker may have only made throwaway reference to it, but Spotify’s ‘social stuff’ could see us fall victim to the same dangers of ‘conventional’ social media sites: compulsive usage, false depictions of reality, and an inability to say whether our digital behaviour is truly for ourselves, or for our followers. Spotify promises to ‘soundtrack your life’. We must be wary of how it’s shaping it.

Image credit: Jay Kogami via Flickr/ CC BY-SA 2.0

Out of the Frame: Botticelli’s La Primavera

Kate O'Sullivan
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Out of the Frame: Botticelli’s La Primavera

Approaching the end of term and after a period of delay, spring has finally sprung. It is a time of the year which is universally related to themes of rebirth, freedom, and vitality. This week I have chosen a painting which I think encapsulates these concerns perfectly: Botticelli’s ‘La Primavera’ (Spring) is a tempera painting (a process involving the mixing of egg and pigment to create paint), completed around the late 1470s to early 1480s, depicting a scene of mythological frivolity and laissez-faire attitude. One can only look at the painting in envy as we await our eventual release from national restrictions, which makes this painting for me all the more tantalising as it celebrates the joy of dance, festivity and freedom, its characters intermingled in a setting far beyond the reach of social distancing rules.

The composition of the painting is complex and crowded, resonating strongly with the hustle and bustle of eager Brits trying to mingle in the outside world. The overall aesthetic confronts us with a mix of reality and fiction, speaking particularly to us as an audience who for the last few months have done nothing but fantasize. The silvan environment in which the scene is situated boasts a number of accurately depicted plants, with at least 138 species identifiable, such as orange and laurel trees. While such painstaking attention has been paid to the accurate representation of these plants, the overall effect is fairly flat, almost like the set of a play. Furthermore, the arrangement of the trees appears to form an archway framing the central character, Venus. This helps to draw the eye directly to her, as does her position being slightly higher up than the rest, but the archway is reminiscent of other paintings where the characters are situated in a rather more architectural setting, like a niche, inside a building. This provides somewhat of a perfect parallel to our situation for the last few months, where our surroundings, both interior and exterior seemed to blend into one: restricted travel meant we could only travel so far from our homes, transforming the nearby vicinity into an extension of our own homes. Venus looks out to the viewer, almost inviting them to join in with the festivities as she points her hand towards the twirling Graces to the left. These three women, for me, embody the feeling of freedom, their hands interlocked gently, dancing at close proximity, their clothing like clouds resting above their skin. Beside them, Mercury, dressed in red, raises his caduceus, a small staff adorned with two intertwining serpents, to banish a small storm in the sky. Not only is he banishing the bad weather, he is banishing the bad times that came with it.

You may still be somewhat confused about why you are reading an article drawing parallels between a 21st century pandemic and a 15th century painting and you would be totally justified in sustaining this opinion. But the important point I am trying to make here is that an approach to art is not always something that can be taught, nor is there a right way to think about it. To read in our own interpretation, to make our connections, is part of what art is all about. Even today, the true meaning of this piece, with its complex composition, eludes scholars today. Our personal close engagement with individual artworks can make such interaction that much more enjoyable. Of course, I am not suggesting that this piece has anything to do with Covid, but the themes and emotional responses it inspires are just as relevant to our current situation as they were to concerns in 15th century Florence. As the last piece in my column, my hope is that my readers will come away from this feeling less intimidated by art and realise that no one should feel unable to interact with it for fear that they will not understand or interpret it correctly. Our art is one of the key pieces of evidence for the emotions of the past and with it, we can see that through the millennia, many aspects of life remain quite the same. It accompanies or human development not only by reflecting our primary focus, but by documenting our technical advancements. For so long, the world of art was purely one of pigments, stones and bases, but with the rise of technology, we are still redefining our perception of what constitutes an artwork. In a few decades or centuries time, I am sure we will look back on the first NFTs and draw parallels encapsulating our contemporary concerns and the concerns of the future. Cultures may rise and fall, fashions may change, as may aesthetic values, but the fact remains the same that art will stay with us and will keep recording our development as a species. Who should not feel entitled to explore our human nature in a form so readily available to us? The only tools you need are your eyes and your imagination.

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