Sounds good.

• When Huey Lewis sang, in 1983, that he wanted a new drug, someone should’ve told him to look in the mirror. He was the drug all along! His soft, edgeless sound … his narcotic, synthetic, placid distance … America wanted Huey Lewis in pill form. Thirty years later, pop music’s performers are better looking, its production styles silkier, and its sonics deep enough to swim in, but a kind of Charmin toilet-paper softness is at the center of every song again. Chris Richards argues that the sound of today’s “pill pop” can be traced to the rise of Xanax and Percocet—that we want our music, like our increasingly vast pharmacopeia, to dampen any distress signals: “It’s a smoothness, a softness, a steadiness. An aversion to unanticipated left turns. It isn’t new, but it’s increasingly everywhere. You can hear it in the Weeknd’s demulcent falsetto, in Rihanna’s unruffled cool, in Drake’s creamier verses, even in Justin Bieber’s buffed edges … In that sense, the pill-pop aesthetic and the streaming experience go hand-in-hand. Crafting a hit single with sleek synthesizers, pillowy electronic drums and Auto-Tuned purrs might be enough to get you in the game, but it isn’t enough to win. Dominance belongs to those superstars willing to replicate their softness in abundance, and then roll it out on the streaming platforms … the anxiety-smothering sound of pill-pop is bound to help define this moment in our cultural memory—the same way late-sixties rock-and-roll still pulses like an LSD vision, or the way mid-eighties hair-metal still screams like cocaine.”

• Martin Herbert’s new essay collection, Tell Them I Said No, looks at artists who’ve shunned the self-promotion and ceaseless glad-handing that have overtaken the profession. Hettie Judah writes in her review, “Herbert examines ten artists who have withdrawn, some in extreme ways, from the self-promotion and courting of celebrity that is bundled up with our understanding of art-world success. Here we find Lutz Bacher, who assumed a near invisible, gender-ambiguous identity; Cady Noland, who ceased making art despite acclaim, and now monitors and bedevils anyone seeking to sell or show her work; and Stanley Brouwn, who shunned photographic documentation and recordings, and once had all the copies of a book featuring images of his performances destroyed … In 1983, David Hammons sold snowballs of various sizes off a pavement pitch in downtown Manhattan, in an event titled the the Bliz-aard Ball Sale. A few years later, in a rare interview, he detailed his objection to the gallery-visiting public. He thought that audience was ‘overly educated, it’s conservative, it’s out to criticize and not to understand, and it never has any fun. Why should I spend my time playing to that audience?’ ”

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