Spotify, it’s that thing what you listen to music off of, and either put up with adverts or pay a little each month so you can listen to all the music you want without actually buying the singles, EPs, and albums, but feel guilt free because you haven’t downloaded them for nothing. It’s great, it’s almost all there, apart from the odd notable exception – I’m looking at you Tool, The Beatles, and Taylor Swift.
‘Shut up! I know this!’ you scream at your screen before punching it, imagining it to be my face. Okay, I know you do, but I have to set up my ramblings with an introduction and some semblance of context, so allow me it! Anyway, if you managed to resist completely busting up your computer/laptop/tablet/phone – ‘Stop fucking waffling!’ – what I was leading to before you so rudely interrupted is that there is actually a lot more to Spotify than just the muzak.
I mean, I imagine you’re familiar with the fact that there’s stand up on there, and good stand up too; Bill Hicks, Louis C.K., Marc Maron, David Cross, Sarah Silverman, and lots more – plus there’s a song dedicated to Janeane Garofalo. However, there’s more to the wordy side of Spotify: it gets all lovely and literary. Tucked away on Spotify there’s a library-load of poetry and prose ready for your listening if you’re lazy and hate reading or, you know, need to ingest literature audibly.
There’s a lot on there, but it could do with some expanding, mind I’m newly exploring this aspect of Spotify so don’t profess to know everything that is on there. Hell, you might already know about all this, in which case this post is redundant and don’t I look an idiot? Ho hum, I’ll carry on anyway. As said, there’s plenty on there; audio books of classics by Herman Melville, Oscar Wilde, Mary Shelley, and George Orwell; readings of poetry by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, and Emily Dickinson; well known actors reading great works like Michael Sheen reading Jane Austen, Sir John Gielgud reading Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, or Richard Burton and Sir Laurence Olivier reading Charles Dickens; dramatic multi-read renditions of Edgar Allan Poe and plays aplenty, including Shakespeare obviously.
However, the real treat here is to hear the words in the voices of the writers themselves, and there are ear seducing amounts of these. There are some personal favourite voice and word combos I was already familiar with, like Sylvia Plath and her Disney evil stepmother, Dylan Thomas and his booming sermons, Vladimir Nabokov’s articulate authority of language, Allen Ginsberg’s neurotic New York intellectual, and T.S Eliot’s crackly old croak. The list goes on though; Ted Hughes, Charles Bukowski, William Carlos Williams, Elizabeth Bishop, Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, Ernest Hemingway, W.H. Auden, Philip Larkin, I could go on. It really is great to hear the poets and authors read their own words, perform, pause, flow, pronounce, and inflect emotionally.
And if you miss the music, you can always rely on Jack Kerouac to adorn his words over ultra-cool jazz, William S Burroughs to talk over all sorts of experimental noises, John Cooper Clarke to speed-rhyme atop post-punk or lounge/synth-pop, and someone’s even converted Margaret Atwood’s words into song.
Of course, it’s nothing on reading for yourself and creating a voice inside your own head; being allowed complete interpretive freedom, but it ain’t half nice to enjoy another level of intimacy with the literary geniuses you love.
Some of the coverage you find on Cultured Vultures contains affiliate links, which provide us with small commissions based on purchases made from visiting our site. We cover gaming news, movie reviews, wrestling and much more.
