Rodrigo & Roan’s “expectations”: passive listening and gender in the platformed music industry

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There is a long tradition in American women’s popular music performance of using lyrics about romantic and sexual relationships as metaphors for bigger-picture social issues. As Angela Davis writes in Blues Legacies and Black Feminism, “The expression of socially unfulfilled dreams in the language and imagery of individual sexual love is” an exceptionally common theme in African-American women’s popular music performance traditions because interpersonal romantic relationships were one of the few arenas in which Black women have been able to meaningfully experience the personal freedom and self-determination that they were supposedly granted with emancipation. Beyonce’s use of an album that’s nominally about her husband cheating on her to talk about Hurricane Katrina’s impact on Black communities in New Orleans is an example of this tradition. The hurt, anger, and disappointment one feels in response to structural phenomena like environmental racism get expressed in terms of the hurt, anger, and disappointment one can feel regarding a romantic partner. Though the lyrics may be about love & sex, the sonic and performance (video, stage show, etc.) elements help connect the emotions the lyrics express to the song’s more abstract and political message.

Olivia Rodrigo & Chappell Roan’s remix of the former’s “expectations” sits squarely within this musical tradition: it’s a song nominally about demanding more from romantic partners than basic and flaky personalities, but the video and the sounds compose a work that’s about demanding more from listeners than basic and flaky attention.

The addition of Roan’s new, sapphic verse makes it clear that the song is about more than something like heteropessimism or popular feminism: though the remix has nothing to say about the theys, it frames hes and shes as equally vacant and flaky. In the same way that the lyrics express narrators’ demands that their romantic partners make an effort, the video expects listeners to do a fair amount of interpretive labor to unlock all the references to iconic people and images past and present. 

At the most foreground level, there are references to classic TV game shows: David Byrne (himself a reference to 80s post-punk) is styled like The Price is Right’s Bob Barker (complete with the long skinny mic – I’m surprised there was no reference to spaying and neutering your pets), and sets mimic games including Jepoardy, Deal or No Deal, Family Feud, Wheel of Fortune, and Hollywood Squares. There are cameos: Byrne, Leo Reilly, producer Dan Nigro, the drag queen Aquaria, and the punk duo the Venus Twins all appear in various costumes. Rodrigo and Roan’s outfits also point to some of their musical and artistic influences. Rodrigo’s pink 60s getup with cat-eye sunglasses makes her look like she walked straight off the set of Edward Scissorhands; her leather bustier with long shag haircut gives Heart or Lita Ford vibes, and her checkerboard dress with short dress screams hardcore girlie. Roan’s sea green suit with bright red hair echoes David Bowie in the “Life on Mars” music video. Musically, though Pitchfork says the remix is somewhere between the Tubeway Army and Blondie, the instrumentals sit right between 80s game show theme music (mainly Press Your Luck) and…early Vince Clark in his Depeche Mode and Yaz era. (As the editor who published the book about composing TV game show theme music, I’d also like to point out that the main vamp in “expectations” fits its criteria for “unity, ambiguity, and flexibility”: it can be looped and varied to account for the different and sometimes aleatory events on a TV game show.) The bouncy arpeggiated synth vamp and lack of guitars or acoustic drums evokes Depeche Mode’s Speak and Spell and Yaz’s Upstairs at Eric’s. Rodrigo and Roan created a multilayered text that both requires intensive interpretation and evokes a community or public that holds these references more or less in common. Recognizing those references and understanding their significance signals that one is part of the in crowd, a member of the subculture(s) whose history the video’s references pull from. As Rodrigo told Rolling Stone, “music was the first medium where the way I felt was really accepted”; this suggests that belonging and community are typically things she associates with her practice. And community takes work; you have to show up and contribute. “Expectations” is about showing up and contributing and not being “passive” as a listener.

The idea music listeners of showing up and contributing any work or effort at all, let alone the work required to acquire and maintain a shared sensibility goes against the mainstream music industry’s contemporary focus on lean-back listening and personalization. Platforms enable frictionless listening that requires neither effort nor even attention, and offer finely-targeted, sometimes even AI-generated content designed to speak to the individual user’s unique taste profile. 

Such frictionlessness is the defining feature of slop. Markelj & Kemper define slop as content that is “not so much about ideas and meanings as it is about doing the numbers” – i.e., racking up engagement numbers on platformed media. The hermeneutical work of interpretation requires and creates friction, here in the form of labor-time; that time spent laboring is time not spent clicking, liking, or sharing the song in question. All meaning requires some degree of interpretation; slop feels like it requires no work from audiences because it plugs into their most habituated and reflexive ways of knowing, allowing pre-existing bias to automate the work of interpretation. Slop centers frictionless passivity as ideal audience behavior. 

Personalized AI-generated slop content also takes the group and interpersonal work of meaning-making and meaning-sharing out of music listening. Though there is no such thing as a private language, individually-targeted generative AI content appears to save users the same traditionally feminized relationship-building labor that AI bros typically brag about, like reading to your kid at night, while actually shoving it off to faceless workers in the Global South. 

The frictionlessness of slop and personalized listening expresses the status traditionally granted to white men: they are free of the burden of un/underpaid reproductive labor and thus able to spend their time on work that actually pays. The ideal listener of the platformed slop economy of the mid-21st century manstream music industry behaves the same way cishet white men typically do in romantic and familial relationships with women: they don’t need to put in any effort because it’s women’s work.

Even though the “expectations” remix is about more than just dating, it points to some of the ways platformization, streaming, and generative AI are reshaping the way music and music cultures express and reinforce gendered status hierarchies. The work of making and interpreting music – which are inherently collaborative practices – now counts as a kind of unwanted, feminized reproductive labor that facilitates the masculinized, value-creating labor of “doing the numbers” (i.e., engagement and chart performance). In the “post-demographic” world of psychometric user profiles, any person or style can occupy either end of this gendered (and racialized) hierarchy, so long as their image and sounds is otherwise generally aligned with the pre-existing biases of our deeply patriarchal racial capitalist world. As I wrote about earlier, Ella Langely’s “Choosin Texas” is precisely this sort of slop that scales or “does the numbers”: the white cis heterosexuality of Langley’s performance and the frictionless sounds of the song can overcome even the “I like everything but country” bias to become the longest running #1 in the history of the Billboard Hot 100. If Rodrigo and Roan are attempting to make any sort of feminist statement with their remix of “expectations”, that statement speaks to the gendering of “passive” listening and the devaluation of musical labor, critical labor, and fan labor as feminine. 

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p.s.: a reference of my own for those truly in the know – I almost titled this post Erwartung