Katherine Cross’s essay collection Log Off is one of the most thought-provoking books I have read all year.
Jude Ellison S. Doyle wrote of the book:
“Clear, funny, humane and game-changing. The internet brings out the worst of humanity, but Cross might be the best person on it. With razor-sharp logic and empathetic vision, she guides us away from posing and posting toward the work of building a better world.”
In her own words, here is Katherine Cross’s Book Notes music playlist for her essay collection Log Off:
Log Off is a pearl necklace of essays that will, hopefully give you the strength to do as the title urges. Its subtitle, Why Posting and Politics (Almost) Never Mix, gets at the reasons I wrote the book. I’ve watched so many whorls of pointless e-drama churn through the sanity of countless people, many of whom believed that they were changing the world by driving themselves batty, arguing with people, participating in call-out brigades, or otherwise engaging in The Discourse du jour. It was, as such things must be, written late at night, often in bars, and listening to my beloved playlists. This is what social media sounds like to me:
Bo Burnham — Welcome to the Internet
Bo Burnham sings this song as if he were the personification of the Internet, and his version of Internet is a Disney villain with a catchy theme song. Though I’d contend that what Burnham is lyrically railing against here is less “the Internet” than social media. Consider:
Welcome to the internet
What would you prefer?
Would you like to fight for civil rights or tweet a racial slur?
Be happy
Be horny
Be bursting with rage
We got a million different ways to engage
Welcome to the internet
Put your cares aside
Here’s a tip for straining pasta
Here’s a nine-year-old who died.
In my book, I talk at length about the “doomscroll” and its cataclysmic effect on people’s psyches; always new outrage bait that induces you to rage against the dying light of your screen in the hours before bed, and yet something that you increasingly despair you can do nothing about. Outraged and hopeless all at once, bombarded by events that move you but you can’t shape in return. That’s not really “the internet,” you need social media for that.
Severija – Zu Asche, Zu Staub
This hypnotic song came out in 2017, but is meant to evoke the era of the German detective drama Babylon Berlin, which is set in the inauspicious time and place of late 1920s Berlin. The heartbeat of cabaret you hear in this song is at once soothing and foreboding, and the seductively genderbent crooning of Severija Janušauskaitė evokes Marlene Dietrich; a voice filled with hope and smoke and Jovian gravity. It’s what collapse sounds like. It’s what dancing against the apocalypse sounds like. And damn if it didn’t inspire me in writing a book whose purpose is trying to get people to feel hopeful when everything on social media is telling them not to be.
She sings in German:
Is this a dream we’re in?
Always tossed and torn by the wind
Who could know for sure?
Social media is one such dream that I hope and pray we can wake up from.
Nena – 99 Luftballons
When I think of the darkness that seems to surround us in this day and age, I find a perverse comfort in history. As I’m fond of telling people, climate change is not even the first existential crisis humanity has faced (yes, I’m fun at parties). But when I listen to the upbeat anti-nuke anthem of Neunundneunzig Luftballons–we don’t talk about the English version–I’m reminded of what hope looks like in dark times, another lesson from history, another parade of lyrics in a bottle that says “We made it, and you can too.” The song’s eloquent middle finger to self-important militarism is as relevant today as it ever has been. And the need to dance athwart the darkness is as well.
Dusty Springfield — The Windmills of Your Mind
I prefer this cover to the somewhat more famous original by Noel Harrison. I listened to this one a lot when I was struggling with what to write or–more precisely–how to get it right. The fantasia of its psychedelic lyrics seem like a strange thing for me to empathise with given that I don’t even do weed, but the meandering hyperstimulation of everything she sings about makes me think of both the perpetually distracted way my mind works and, in some ways, the film-negative version of Burnham’s description of the “scroll.” The half-remembered fragments of names, faces, songs, images that parade past on the timeline. Like a circle in a spiral/ like a wheel within a wheel/ never ending or beginning/ on an everspinning reel… I always figured out what I needed to write, thankfully.
Gustav Mahler — Symphony No. 5
Lydia Tár, our beloved problematic orchestra mommy, was a woman after my own heart in how she pursued an orchestral recording of this symphony like her very own white whale. I adored that movie, but I loved Mahler’s Fifth before it was cool–even before the romantic Adagietto was poignantly used in another popular 2022 movie, Park Chan-wook’s Decision to Leave. I always loved this piece because it’s what history sounds like to me, most especially its propulsive first movement, the “Trauermarsch”–a funeral march, in other words. But such a title betrays only some of the melody at play here. The first movement lives, it sounds like the lightning strikes of history crashing down; sheets of string music wash through you. To perceive history requires more than a little reverence and humility, I always thought, and this symphony commands the kind of reverence I feel when I look back over the past–”with its changing empires that rose and fell,” as Marcus Aurelius wrote to himself. That sentiment inspired large parts of Log Off: history beckons us, we can learn from it, and we always have agency, even as those tides wash over us.
The Buggles — Video Killed the Radio Star
I love songs about technology; one of my favourite assignments to give my students asks them to go find a work of modern art that seems to be commenting on or using technology, and make an argument about what the work of art says. This cheeky pop standard is one such song, sprinkled with the pixie dust of being dated and timeless all at once. We can’t rewind/ We’ve gone too far is another of those little echoes about history and the nature of technological “progress.” This poppy lament is so well suited to all the ructions brought about by social media, which in some ways definitively ended the age that this song, which christened MTV, began.
King Crimson — In The Court of the Crimson King
And now it’s time for some prog rock. I think of music in terms of images, if it isn’t obvious already. Songs that sound like something not expressly musical. “Crimson King” feels like what social media Discourse sounds like. Self-important pseudo-activism leading you nowhere but deeper into depression and despair. The lyrics are magical and speak of fantasies, vistas in verse, and yet it’s all desperately sad and endlessly foreboding. An album cover for a King Crimson compilation is made up of people reading newspapers from all over the world, siloed from one another by the broadsheet pages. When I think of the so-called firehose of content that comprises most social media timelines, that’s what I think of. The 2006 movie Children of Men, about a dying Britain years deep into a plague that’s rendered all humans infertile, uses this song to great effect. The contrast between the desperation on the streets of an endlessly grieving London and upbeat animated adverts with smiling women makes me think of TikTok.
Aigel — Пыяла
This Tartar trance song carries with it some of the same vibes as “In the Court of the Crimson King,” but with the added benefit of having, ironically, learned it from TikTok. Yulvanna, or @Yuliavvanne, in many ways embodies what’s best and most hopeful about social media, using her phone as a window into her world as a Sakha immigrant–and a bridge between her home in New Zealand and the one she left behind in Siberia, where she hands it over to her younger sister. “Пыяла” is the backing track to a TikTok of her sister thriving in -50 degree weather, weather so cold the distinction between Fahrenheit and Celsius no longer matters. For all the song’s gloom, it has that same deceptive tone that many others on my list do. Sounding like one mood yet easily set to its opposite. Once again, beauty in darkness. Like one woman’s charming TikTok.
k.d. Lang — Surrender (Tomorrow Never Dies)
The James Bond franchise has many sins, but one of them, surely, was the decision to not use this song as the title theme for 1997’s Tomorrow Never Dies. With its smoky brass and steamier, villainous lyrics that conjure the image of a succubus-cum-newspaper editor, it is a curiously Bondian lesson in informatics. The truth is now what I say/ I’ve taken care of yesterday, lang croons, somehow making sense of the otherwise self-parodying title of Tomorrow Never Dies. It makes sense in lang’s voice, with her lyrics. This is what the news sounds like, pulsing through the veins of the internet. And it sounds, at times, like the monomania of journalists (or would-be journalists) who spend far too much time on Twitter, some of the people I most desperately hope log off now and again.
Johnny Boy — You Are the Generation that Bought More Shoes and You Get What You Deserve
Continuing the theme of delirious dreams, this song is the sound of a thousand screens flickering; the music video is a drunken symphony of mid-2000s London at night, all flickering CRTs and Piccadilly jumbotrons. It’s thudding information, strangely senseless, and yet as coherent as neon light:
I just can’t help believing
Though believing sees me cursed
For belief ignores the heathen’s
Day by day sigh: “Even worse”
At the risk of sounding painfully Goth, that opening stanza spoke to me. It’s why I wrote not just this book, but why I write in general.
Katherine Alejandra Cross’s writings have appeared in Time, Rolling Stone, WIRED, The Baffler, The Verge, and numerous other publications. She is a PhD candidate at the University of Washington School of Information, where she’s studying online harassment and social media (for her sins).