PositiveThe Washington PostPelly builds her tendentious but convincing case on internal Slack transcripts, anonymous interviews with disenchanted current and former employees, the company’s changing narratives of itself, and some door-knocking in Stockholm, where Spotify is headquartered, to present a bruising portrait of the company.
Peter Ames Carlin
PositiveThe Wall Street JournalCarlin’s narration is sympathetic but sometimes quietly undercuts the group’s self-presentation as \'quintessential outsiders,\' ambivalent about their own ambition.
Ann Powers
MixedThe New York Times Book ReviewPowers does spend time with obscure artists like Florence Mills and Jobriath, and fruitfully explores the colorful, gender-fluid world of early gospel music. However, her story hews to a broadly conventional narrative — the intersection of African-American expression, white curiosity and appropriation, and the dialogue between the spiritual and the secular — that begins in Congo Square ring shouts and leads with inexorable circularity back to the New Orleans of Beyoncé’s 'Lemonade' ... the centrality of eroticism in Powers’s narrative necessitates a de-emphasis on canonical artists without an obvious erotic component to their personas (Louis Armstrong, Bob Dylan), and inconclusive glosses on others (Chuck Berry, Michael Jackson) whose sexual and racial stories are more complicated ... Music has been central to the ritualized sexuality of fertility, circumcision, puberty and wedding ceremonies cross-culturally and from time immemorial. The ultimate novelty in American music is not eros and race-mixing, but technology, capital and global distribution ... Music is, indeed, a slippery and complicated force — especially for the optimistic narrative of the pop critic.
