A security camera on a wall. Photo: CC BY-SA 3.0.

ESSAY

The Algorithm Is Not a Room

Eliza Rose and Interplanetary Criminal’s B.O.T.A. was released on 15 June 2022, entered the UK chart on 4 August, and reached number one on 2 September. The year-end graphic came afterwards.

format: Essay
date: Sep 16, 2022
author: CJ Archer
words: 373 words · 2 min

B.O.T.A. (Baddest Of Them All), Eliza Rose with Interplanetary Criminal, was released on 15 June 2022 on Warner and Rose’s own X One House. Official Charts gives it a first chart date of 4 August 2022. On the chart published 2 September it reached number one, the UK’s 1,400th number one, and Rose became the first female DJ to top the singles chart in more than twenty years. It stayed there a second week. The write-ups mention the festival season. They also mention 4.8 million streams in the week it topped the chart. The streams are the count. The months before August are the rooms and the shows where a UK garage record with a chant found people who would shout it.

Spotify Wrapped, which the company has run as an annual campaign since 2016, turns a year of plays into a graphic you can post. It is a real product and a good advertisement. It does not book a club, and it cannot tell you who was in the room when a record was still a 12-inch with a small label name on it. PinkPantheress’s To Hell With It, October 2021, had already shown the other half of the same sequence: songs written and sung, garage drums, a file that moved through short video, a mixtape that was the finished object. The video did not replace the song. The chart, the next year, did not replace the DJ.

The order is the part worth keeping straight. A person makes a record. Dancers and DJs test it. A chart counts what happened. A year-end graphic reprints the count in a typeface. When the graphic includes B.O.T.A., the graphic is late on purpose. Rose and Interplanetary Criminal had the number one on 2 September 2022 because the song had already worked. Wrapped can tell you that you played it. It cannot tell you the first time you heard the chant in a room.

Sources

CJ Archer