Overthrowing the Billionaire Class, and also pop videos

As I look through this month’s recommendations, I see a distinct pattern. There is a crop of music videos – new and new-ish – which have caught my imagination, because I love me a music video. And also, surprise surprise, a bunch more stuff about social injustice, wealth inequality, and… just this sense in the air that the wheels are starting to come off for the powers that be. I know I write about that every month, but when you’re watching a car crash of this scale in slow motion, what else is there to write about? (Apart from, obviously, pop videos.)

In other news, I am fucking knackered. Kind of working three jobs at the moment: temporary low-paying University admin work, setting up my freelance business, and joint summer holidays childcare (the most demanding job of the three). So… same sort of situation as for the last 2 or 3 years, basically. My life is a rigid schedule, because it has to be. In order to make sure I get my temp job done I need to get in the hours each week, and in order to make sure the childcare duties are split fairly I need to make sure I can handover at the right time. And then I still need to find time for all the other life admin, and occasional emergencies (like a huge chunk of my tooth chipping off yesterday and me needing emergency dental surgery).

Sometimes I feel like I’m hovering close to burnout, but actually there are two things (other than family+friends) that help me feel like I’m still connected to joy in life, and they are: the monthly Bastard session… and this monthly newsletter. Giving myself one social musical piss-up, and one very low-maintenance creative project, each month is just enough to feel like I’m not losing those muscles completely.

Everything else is still pretty much on pause.

Which is perhaps why my current perception of the world around me is the heaviest of the heavy (ongoing political crisis) and the lightest of the light (music videos). Not really room for much else.

So… er, yeah. Thanks for helping me stay sane! Shall we?

Recommended

DROP DEAD by OLIVIA RODRIGO

The whole family is now obsessed with this song – especially my youngest. It has even supplanted HOT TO GO! by Chappell Roan (for now at least).

I first heard this song covered at the Bastard Session, and the person who covered it shared it in our Discord. I watched the video, loved the song… but I kind of hated the video itself:

I love the aesthetic: the low picture quality, the high frame rate, the aspect ratio, the colours, the lighting. But a video about ‘Isn’t Versailles great?!’ feels like a bad take in 2026, and it also feels very male-gaze-y.

HOWEVER…

Then I learned she made more than one video for it. And as far as I am concerned, THIS is the official video:

Those my kin out there who have grainy homemade Canon Powershot videos of emo-infused pop songs somewhere on their hard drives, I see you.

Recommended

JOHNNY HARRIS & NEWPRESS

Johnny Harris used to be a star reporter for the Vox YouTube channel, before going solo. I always thought he was talented, in a slick sort of way, but his journalism seemed to me to be style-over-substance. And he fell off my radar a bit.

Now he’s back with grand theories about the future of journalism. Here he is on SubwayTakes:

His take? Like the thumbnail above says, we should all stop consuming the news.

SubwayTakes (which I wrote about last month) is all about coming out with the most outlandishly spicy take, and then fleshing it out with a genuinely thoughtful argument, and Harris makes a good case here. (Similar, in fact, to the SubwayTake I featured last time about how we need to consume less music.)

Then, on Saturday morning, I found myself clicking on a video that I didn’t know was by Harris’s new media journalism company, Newpress.

Really?! China ‘secretly’ saved the world last month? How is that not the worst kind of clickbait?

Except that this isn’t clickbait. This is seriously good, important journalism.

Do you remember back in April (of 2026) when pundits were saying that the closing of the Strait of Hormuz was going to create the worst oil shock in history? Far worse in the 1970s, which brought down the whole Breton Woods economic system? Whole cities would have to power down?

What happened to that?

This video makes the claim that the pundits weren’t wrong, but China did something extraordinary that it didn’t publicly announce, which has huge implications for, the global economy, the fate of Taiwan, and who rules the seas.

On the basis of this video, I think Harris might be on to something.

I think his SubwayTake is pretty compelling: news headlines (which are not the same as journalism) don’t tell you how the world works – they tell you how the world doesn’t work. They focus on aberrations, outliers, freak events – because that’s what gets attention. But they actually end up making their audience more confused, and less well-informed – and therefore more helpless, and more angry.

I haven’t subscribed to Newpress yet, but if it is really able to deliver a regular big picture analysis of what happened last month – rather than a hyper-sensationalised take on what happened eight hours ago – I think I might.

Recommended

NEWS PANEL BAFFLED BY POPULARITY OF ROBIN HOOD

This is a comedy skit taken from the comedy show Game Changer (I think?)

And I personally feel like it is Peak Satire to the point where maybe we don’t need satire anymore. Maybe the job is done.

(Note: to our transatlantic cousins, the definitive ‘ROB-in-hood’ is the Disney cartoon with animals instead of people.) (You know, animals instead of people to take the sting out of the subtext.)

Recommended

THE WRITING’S ON THE WALL (LEGO VERSION)

OK Go are famous for their incredibly elaborate DIY music videos, usually filmed in one single unbroken take. The Writing On The Wall is perhaps one of their most famous.

Well… here it is in LEGO:

Recommended

UNLEARNING ECONOMICS on WEALTH TAX

If you’re interested in how wealth taxes might work in practice – and hey, y’know, even you aren’t, because I am clearly a shameless bore on this subject – this video from YouTuber Cahal Moran (aka Unlearning Economics) is a great deep dive into the different options on the table:

• from Richard Murphy’s oven-ready taxes-on-wealth-that-aren’t-exactly-wealth-taxes (i.e. it’s all about the revenue, baby!)
• to Gabriel Zucman’s global 2% on assets above €100 million (i.e. the super-rich pay the same relative amount as everyone else)
• to Gary Stevenson’s national 2% on assets above £10 million (i.e. we need to stop aggressive acceleration of wealth concentration)
• to Thomas Pikketty’s 0.1% global wealth tax (i.e. getting the super-rich to just declare their wealth is even more important than the revenue).

There’s something there for everyone!

Except, you know, Elon Musk, but, like, fuck him.

Recommended

GOD & THE BROKEN RIBS by JACK WHITE/LIAM LYNCH

Once again, fulfilling my contractual obligation to point out a stunning Jack White music video every year or so.

And I do mean the video – I like the song, but it’s really this beautiful take on visually representing the devil which is equal parts creepy and iconic. (The video is actually not by Jack White: it’s by American comedian/musician Liam Lynch.)

This isn’t the whole song, just a clip. But give it a whirl, and tell me it’s an image that doesn’t stay with you…

Recommended

THE UPRISING

Have you noticed how much people have started talking about guillotines in casual conversation? Post-Epstein Files particularly, the idea that ‘the guillotines are coming!’ just seems to be part of the public discourse now.

Anyhoo, I see that Wat Tyler is getting a nice shiny new biopic…

So, once again, the story so far:

Summer holidays: hovering around burnout. I’ve been in this situation pretty much since the pandemic ended, and the reason is because I spent most of my adult life trying to figure out how to make a career out of being a musician (specifically a composer) and almost a decade ago I found the solution: library music for film and television. Exactly what I wanted to do! Fit me perfectly. I knew it would be harder, and take longer, than it seemed, and I was right – it took me years before I started making any money. But I realised not long after the arrival of ChatGPT that AI would kill it.

What I actually thought would happen was that the US government would see sense, recognise that these new AI products were destroying copyright, and would pass restrictive legislation to prevent them from just turning into plagiarising machines – but it would take about 5 years for that to happen, and business-to-business creative industries like library music would be decimated in that time. As soon as Trump got re-elected, however, I knew that meaningful regulation would never happen, and library music was a career dead-end for me – and also, you know, it was kind of the death of culture in the US, and any other country that complies with US law (such as the UK).

So I’m in this precarious employment situation because the safest career option for music composers got nuked, just like every other musician’s career option has. And I’m still fucking sour about that. I battled through illness and then a pandemic to make the library music career work, and then governments just decided to kill copyright. What could I have done?

The lesson I learned is that my society just simply doesn’t economically value new music enough for me to make a career out of it. Instead, I had to go back to my ‘musicians day job’ of university admin, and find some way to make a decent living out of that. Suboptimal when you’ve just started your sixth decade, but there we go. That’s the story so far.

Anyway, this month has been all about the realisation that… I wouldn’t actually go back to making library music, even if it was an option. In fact, I don’t like the idea of music ever being my main job. I don’t actually think being a professional musician suits me.

Not because I have given up on music – the opposite in fact: I care about it too much for it to be my main job. Here are some of the reasons why:

1. I need a life to write about!

I don’t want the story to be about the story. I think when we’re young us musicians can spend all our free time doing music and still have plenty to write about, because so much life, so much story is happening to us. We don’t need to preempt it. But as we get older, and settle into our niches, life happens to us less. And I find that if I spend all my time indoors recording music, barely any life happens at all.

2. We all need something we do to switch off

I didn’t want to do music because that was the least intolerable way of making an income. I never had a problem with working in an office. In fact, the social aspect has always been good for me, I think. I wanted to music because it was the thing I enjoyed doing the most. Now, with any project there will be times when it will be less enjoyable, but when you’re relying on it to pay the bills the whole dynamic changes. It becomes stressful, and you need something to switch off to. I want music to be the thing which I switch off to.

3. The dream just for music to pay for itself

Now, I would still love to write and record music, and the dream is to one day find a way to make some money from it. Money helps expand what you can do, but it also helps you find an audience – because it means you can’t just make music that you like: it has to be something other people are prepared to pay for. This takes you outside your own creative bubble, which I have learned is something I want.

Slight problem: people don’t pay musicians for music anymore, so my next project (sigh) is going to have to be to see if I can innovate the business model. If I can’t… then at least I tried. If I can then I imagine that ‘a business model for selling your own music that actually works’ would probably be more interesting to people than my actual music, but I’d be fine with that.

4. The fundamental economics of selling music

While we’re on the subject…

Over the last couple of decades, all roads have ultimately led me back to this point. Music is a uniquely difficult thing to sell, and it’s not just the capitalism of it all. All musicians making new music are competing with Mozart, Nina Simone, The Beatles… Their music is not new, but it’s always new to a new generation of music fans. This is a creative industry where supply has outstripped demand for centuries, ever since printed sheet music. And if music is your sole income (rather than a side hustle that pays for itself) then you live in such financial uncertainty that you have to make the safest of artistic choices. I think you can make better music if you don’t have that uncertainty.

5. I don’t need more temptations to go into Hermit Mode

This is maybe the biggest reason, and I’m really noticing this as I’m having to network for the freelance job – and enjoying it. The part of being a musician I enjoyed the most was the solitary business of composing. But I have a tendency to be too solitary, and to go long periods of time without speaking to anyone. This is much less of a problem now I’m married with children, but it’s not gone completely. Perhaps this is really just an extension of having a life to write about.

6. I’m not built for touring

If you want to avoid Hermit Mode, and you want to socialise more, there is of course one way musicians of all stripes can make money (just about), and that is touring. But I am not built for touring! I know that that kind of routine would tip me into depression in a heartbeat.

6. And I never liked the culture of the music business

Being a musician who socialises doesn’t have to be that intense, of course. Being a successful music composer also requires networking. But I have never felt comfortable networking inside the music business, and I recently realised why. The mainstream music business is a fashion business that pretends to be an art business. The audience that pays for fashion is generally young, and has money to spnd. If fashion is what you’re really selling then you need to pay a lot of attention to your appearance, and how you present visually. No matter how old you are.

Now, confession time: I went to an artsy boarding school, which is often seen as a training ground for media. So every time I found myself networking in the music business, it felt like being back at school. Except I was an adult, and not a young one. And… neither was anyone else I encountered. So it just felt so childish to me, like I’d regressed back to being a teenager.

7. But we have a common enemy!

That said, I get it! The music business and I have a common enemy: the economics of selling music. You need to make money somehow, and if the only viable option is selling young, hot, wealthy artists to young, hot, wealthy fans then that’s what the business will look like. And it’s much easier to do that if you don’t care obsessively about the music itself. If you want to sell the art not the fashion then you’re competing with the Mozarts who died penniless.

Right now, despite how exhausting it all is, I’m enjoying pursuing a separate day job – one that has elements of creativity, but that I can eventually switch off from at the end of the day.

7. Having said all that…

Let’s be realistic, this is exactly the kind of thing I could completely change my mind about in six months. Maybe this is just sour grapes, and I’d jump at the opportunity if I genuinely thought it was available. I would need quite a bit of convincing though. And really, I think the solitary nature of composing is the big thing for me at the moment. I don’t think it’s healthy for me to give myself a reason to sit still for 40 hour a week and not speak to anyone.

The main thing I learned this month was the thing above about dreaming about my music one day paying for itself, but not being my main job.

The second thing how lucky I am to be married to someone who has watched so much medical drama that she’s basically a doctor. Which means that when I get shingles or my tooth splits in half she knows what I need to do to make sure it’s resolved as quickly as possible.

The other thing… is about fucking AI. Again.

About something that I like about fucking AI. Again.

I haven’t been in a position to actually record music for a long time – for that I need unbroken blocks of free time, which I just don’t have now. But from time to time I have been able to write down and explore ideas about what my next musical projects might be.

And in doing so I’ve found something that AI is really good for – and that is a huge task that I have found so overwhelming for the last twenty years or so:

• organising my traditional music sources.

First, let’s do the dance again:

• AI is primarily being used as a plagiarism machine,
• it is starving resources from communities around the world in order to service its data centres,
• it is a massive bubble that will soon probably crash the US stock market and send shockwaves through the world,
• and just because CEOs are starting to realise they can’t fire everyone and replace them with AI doesn’t mean they won’t keep trying to do it again every time AI looks like it might be ready.

With that said…

Finding traditional English songs that are interesting to modern ears is not, in my opinion, a needle in a haystack. It’s a needle in the UK agriculture industry’s annual grain output. The scale of the project is huge, and up to now I have only been able to note down sources that I’ve happened to stumble upon. Often the same sources every trad musician stumbles upon.

AI chatbots can search through, analyse and re-contextualise the works of all our favourite modern artists, but they can also search ‘traditional’ (i.e. out of copyright) works too. And I’m finding this fascinating.

Being able to search through pretty much every traditional ballad readable on the internet by incredibly specific theme, for example, was unthinkable just a few years ago. Being able to cross-reference historical works instantly, and try to get a sense of what was popular then rather than what’s popular with historians now… that would have been work that took academics years. If an LLM is just seen as a search tool that actually understands the language of its index, that’s a pretty big deal.

And it wasn’t LLMs that killed my library music gig, whether I want it back now or not. It was a bunch of billionaires who decided to kill copyright, and who have been successful at it. For now, at least.

What comes after Enshittification?

I’m thinking a lot about music at the moment, although still not really in a position to get back to making it. This month is mainly me thinking about… just the mountain of obstacles facing musicians right now, and how that is maybe a microcosm of everybody just trying to make a living. I realise I’m spending as much time daydreaming about building ‘digital public infrastructure’ for artists as I am thinking about actually making music. Because I’m old enough to remember systems that actually worked for musicians, and I’m wondering if the technology is straightforward enough to bring them back.

I’m not saying anything new in suggesting our current political and economic systems are unsustainable. But week by week, month by month, I’m really getting the sense we are past a kind of public awareness tipping point – and in lots of ways, large and small, I feel like people are ready for something new.

Which is handy because (just to pull things back to this email) I’ve got about six billion recommendations this month. Just like last month, actually. This time lot about older male role models for some reason. And a lot about America, which is obviously far away, but this month’s email is all about canaries in coal mines.

No new music for me this month, and no other writings either. Still focused on starting that freelance business. It’s eating up all my time at the moment. Blah blah blah. It takes as long as it takes.

When I haven’t really been up to much (or much that I would put in a newsletter) I tend to just muse on the state of the world, and that can often get a bit bleak – perhaps because I don’t want to feel I’m putting my head in the sand. But this month I am actually pulled towards cautious optimism.

So…

Recommended

KEEP THE METER RUNNING

This one’s a bit special and I’m going go long if you don’t mind.

I love YouTube and I basically never watch television anymore – be that the BBC or even Netflix. YouTube has essentially unlimited variety, and you will never be short of things to learn, or of new perspectives.

However, if I’m honest, it is rare that YouTube is able to reach the heights that television can at its best. YouTube creators don’t have the time and the budget to really tell big stories.

You guessed it: until now.

Kareem Rahma is the host and producer of arguably the most popular format on social media right now: SubwayTakes. More on that in a bit.

Keep The Meter Running is his attempt (successful, in my opinion) to reach the heights of television on YouTube. This is a proper show – an event – rather than a discussion or a monologue about an event.

The format is that Rahma gets into a New York taxi and says to the driver: take me to your favourite place, and keep the meter running.

That’s a good format idea for some high jinx and shenanigans, but there’s a bit more going on here than that. In this interview, Rahma talks about having been just emotionally lost in recent years, and missing his father – an immigrant from Egypt who worked for many years as a New York cab driver. Rahma believes that New York cab drivers – usually immigrants, usually unbelievably hard-working, usually people who have seen some shit – can be vital male role models for the rest of us.

This format isn’t just about getting some juicy real life clips that can be turned into Instagram Reels. He is genuinely looking for some life advice.

And he’s also trying to show a different side of America, particularly New York. He maintains you can travel the world without ever leaving New York.

New York seems to be having a bit of a moment right now – and Rahma’s support for Zhoran Mamdani during his mayoral election campaign might well have contributed to that.

Anyway, I have no idea how Rahma is funding this new YouTube show. It doesn’t seem to have sponsors, and there’s no way YouTube ad revenue is ever going to pay him enough for this level of production value. So let’s enjoy it while it lasts!

Recommended

THE UNITED STATES ACCORDING TO CHINESE MOVIES

I’ve recommended many videos from this channel (Accented Cinema) in the past. I’ve had a particular love of South East Asian movies since the 2000s and, although I’ve seen a lot of movies from Hong Kong, I don’t know much about cinema from mainland China.

This video is a review of how modern Chinese culture sees the USA, as viewed through Chinese movies.

And the TLDR is rather fascinating, I think.

Many movies deal with American lack of interest and downright hostility to Chinese culture, particularly as experienced by Chinese immigrants, particularly concerning differences in family life. A few make fun of the dumb action hero machismo, and explicitly of Donald Trump.

But the general feeling is actually that the USA is an exciting, culturally-diverse place full of open-minded people. And the open-minded part is really interesting, as many of these Chinese movies seem to use the United States to critique some of the more socially conservative aspect of Chinese life.

Anyway, watch the video – it’s a good ‘un.

Recommended

KERMODE AND MAYO

More on the older male role models here.

I realise that I have been listening to Simon Mayo and Mark Kermode, on and off, for about 30 years. I first heard them when film critic Kermode had a slot on Mayo’s BBC Radio 1 show, and now they have their own YouTube channel where they talk about film, TV and culture more generally I think. They have quietly and steadily got better with age, in my opinion.

I wanted to single out this video: not because of the film review, which is incidental, but because of the conversation between them.

Kermode says that he wanted to like Steven Spielberg’s new movie more, but was ultimately left disappointed. Mayo (getting emotional) said he recognises the disappointing aspects, but still felt this was an important film because it was a celebration of empathy at a time when we badly need it.

Kermode says this is why their show exists: because Mayo will balance his cynicism by saying things like that.

And then they spend the rest of the episode talking about how much they love each other, basically. Which we all know men should do more, so here you go.

Recommended

INDE NAVARRETTE PLAYS LAST OF US

If you want an indication of how Hollywood, and celebrity, is changing…

This is a very standard type of YouTube video: a YouTuber films themselves playing a computer game (often for hours) and then just chats idly throughout it, giving you a much less filtered, much less ‘performed’ window into their lives.

Except that this is the star of the film Obsession, which (along with Backrooms) became a smash Hollywood hit recently and beat the latest Star Wars film.

Inde Navarrette is, in Hollywood terms, hot right now. Like, hotter than the surface of the sun hot. She’s doing a billion interviews, and probably fashion shoots and whatever else.

But she is also having this incredibly unfiltered relationship with a huge audience.

I’ve mentioned before about how canny politicians like Zack Polanski are bypassing mainstream media and building direct relationships with audiences with their own channels.

I wonder if this is the future for Hollywood stars too.

Recommended

THE ATLANTIC’S AI DATASET SEARCH

Can’t help but add a little more AI news, things being as they are.

The Atlantic magazine has created a fun little figurative hand grenade which they have thrown into the Discourse™.

It’s a publicly available database that allows anyone to search a creative work to see if it has been gobbled up by AI.

I am nowhere near important enough to be in it. Which is… good? I guess?

Recommended

GEORGE CARLIN DUBS THOMAS THE TANK ENGINE

Decades before the word ‘woke’ was appropriated and weaponised, George Carlin was the wokest and angriest white comedian in the US.

Known to my generation is that nice old man from Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, he was a gateway to radical politics for dudes slightly older than me.

Anyway, unrelated to all that, I was surprised and charmed to find that he had also done expletive-ridden voiceovers for the children’s TV show Thomas the Tank Engine.

It’s a little hit and miss, but I did like the train that could make his cat defecate by pointing the TV remote at it and pressing the volume buttons.

Recommended

SEASICK STEVE

There is something particularly mournful about a musician in his mid 70s singing about the season finale of America.

They’re shutting the whole thing down
All that’s left is the theme song

I’m currently in a slightly optimistic frame of mind when it comes to the direction of world politics. But he’s right that it’s the end of the America he used to know.

And, good or bad, will he live to see the next one?

Let’s start with the bad news.

The market value of what musicians make (i.e. music) seems to have declined steadily since the arrival of Napster. And it was never that great to begin with.

But pirating reduced it to zero. iTunes brought it up to 0.99 per track. Spotify changed the game again, offering musicians £1 for around 300 streams – which, for context, means 1 million streams will pay you a little over £3,000.

Spotify changed the game in more ways than one, of course. It became the only game in town if you wanted to get your music distributed. If you wanted enough money from streaming to pay the bills then you needed to satisfy their recommendation algorithm – and so musicians get flattened into being ‘content creators’.

But there was always money from touring. Until the ticket companies and the venue owners got consolidated into one glorious monopoly, and the musicians started to get squeezed there too.

And then along came AI.

These days musicians are being told to accept that yes, their music will be used against their will to train generative AI, which will ultimately replace them – or at least flood the market to the point where… well, musicians aren’t really needed by society at all anymore.

Now the good news.

Nilay Patel, editor in chief of tech website The Verge, often talks about how the music business is always the canary in the coal mine for the media at large. The way that musicians get screwed today will tell you how everyone will get screwed in about five years.

Or… maybe not. Because, to the surprise of nobody outside Silicon Valley, everyone hates AI, and everyone hates AI music.

Yes, people are listening to it, often in Spotify playlists of background music. But if all we have to eat is mouldy bread, a lot of people will eat mould. That doesn’t mean they like it.

To me, it feels to me like we might have passed a tipping point of enshittification – in media, in social media, and particularly in music.

Of course I could see why Spotify became so dominant. It was just so convenient! All the music in one place for a monthly subscription. Sure it didn’t pay artists much, but it paid more than piracy, and it removed so much friction.

But now, as a lover of music, the experience from Spotify and the industry at large is just… bad. And keeps getting worse. It’s clear that no one on the business side of music really cares about music. It’s just a handful of cartels, and no one really needs to try anymore.

Here’s the thing: if someone wanted to bring a bit of friction back, I think as a consumer I’d be happy with it. I would rather go back to some kind of iTunes model where I pay around £1 for a track which I then own. I wouldn’t need to pay a monthly subscription for an increasing mountain of slop.

I feel differently about ‘convenience’ and ‘friction’ now. It just doesn’t seem as attractive anymore. There’s a reason why cheap all-you-can-eat buffets didn’t make restaurants redundant.

And I’m clearly not alone in this sentiment.

Let’s come back to the man of the moment, Kareem Rahma, and the hottest property on social media right now: SubwayTakes.

This was the clip that set me off on this little internal mini-rant.

Because it’s a discussion that mirrors what I’ve been feeling.

10 years ago it seemed like streaming was here to stay and we would never go back to paying for digital media, never mind physical media. Even if the alternative was better for musicians, and a more sustainable ecosystem. Each listener would have to make a sacrifice of convenience to help musicians, and how realistic was that?

Now it’s not a sacrifice. Now these old-fashioned forms of media can offer you something that Spotify can’t: control. You can use an uncluttered, non-distracting interface that doesn’t feel like it hates you. You can build your own library without having to pay rent for it. You can choose to not spend any money on music for the next few months if you want to. And you can gift music to other people as a present, which is something I really miss.

Where is this utopian neo-luddite technology going to come from though? Are iPods going to start selling again?

Well, it’s early days, but one reason why music might be the canary in the coalmine could be that musicians are surprisingly resourceful fuckers. From punk to early hip-hop to proto-grunge, there have been many occasions when musicians have bypassed the music industry and managed to build large audiences. Usually all it takes is for one music scene to really commit to the idea and give everyone else a proof of concept.

Initially I was wondering why we haven’t seen this DIY movement in musicians for decades, but then it occurred to me that since Napster there has been been one long continuous DIY movement on social media. Platforms like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and TikTok initially seemed to be enabling musicians, artists, entertainers and journalists. It was helping us all get around the gatekeepers.

In the last few years, however, it’s become clear that they are simply the new gatekeepers. And they’re worse than the last ones, because these software-brained CEOs are way too high on their own optimising supply to realise that they are destroying the media ecosystems that their businesses depend on.

So, my prediction: the thing we call ‘tech’ has become essential to modern life, and it’s not going anywhere, but I suspect as a society we’re going to move away reliance on the increasingly enshittified Silicon Valley tech companies – because it was only ever convenience that bound us to them, and that convenience is rapidly vanishing.

And if history is anything to go by, musicians might once again be the canaries in the coal mine here.

Better technology already exists! We just need people to tinker and share.

My sense is that positive change is coming, in so many areas in so many ways, but it’s easy to forget how much it is still early days.

I mentioned a tipping point in the way we relate to music. I think globally there has been a much wider tipping point, where the number of people who feel that our systems are fundamentally broken has now become the majority.

The desire for fundamental change seems like it has reached a critical mass.

Because when everyone believes that society’s systems are imperfect and run by leaders who should know better, nothing really changes.

However, when everyone believes those same systems are being aggressively weaponised against them, they start to organise.

I’m seeing so much grassroots political organising at the moment. And so much development of digital public infrastructure – particularly in Europe.

Now, let’s be realistic: shit’s still pretty bad right now though. And there is still plenty of room for it to get worse.

But, with each month that passes, I get an increasing sense that our technofeudal overlords don’t really know what the fuck they’re doing.

And there’s a new generation of community builders who don’t exactly know what they’re doing, but they’re fast learners.

Maybe I’m totally wrong about all of this.

But we need to focus our attention on something, and this is where my attention is now.

I feel music more intensely now I’m not able to make it

At the beginning of the year, I had a plan. I knew I didn’t have the free time to make any new music, however much I might want to, but I might have the time to finish off and polish up some very very old music I’ve made. And if I was organised and efficient, I might even be able to get an album ready to put on my website for the March edition of the newsletter – which would be the newsletter’s 12th anniversary.

That plan… did not work out.

Not only have I not had enough time to make new music, I haven’t even had the time to complete old music that was maybe 80% finished. I just haven’t had any time at all for creative stuff.

The early part of this year was taken up with various child illnesses, much like last year, but that’s not really the problem. The fundamental problem is that I’ve been stuck in precarious temporary jobs that don’t pay that much but end up taking more than their allotted hours.

So, to remedy this, time that would have been spent on creative projects has actually been spent on a new creative project of sorts: moving to going freelance on the kind of work I’ve been doing for the University of Oxford.

I’ve come to realise that the challenges of promoting traditional folk music are actually strangely similar to the challenges researchers face promoting their work and their careers.

In fact, if you are a researcher, it might even be something you’re interested in! Here is my very basic new website, as my alter-alter-ego: oxcommunicate.com. Recommend it to a friend. 😎

If I can make this work, I’m hoping I can bring some music and some social life back into my routine, as well as probably doing the childcare a bit better.

In the meantime, this newsletter is still the only creative outlet I have – as ever, promising new music at some point but unable to deliver now.

What I have instead this month is a bunch of recommendations based on not things but people. In March I noticed there is a particular type of science (or science-adjacent) communicator who seems to do very well on social media. They’re funny, they’re easy to understand, and they tend to write fiction on the side – which I think is not a coincidence. (Damn you Hannah Fry for being the exception that proves the rule.)

But let’s get this month’s doom-scrolling observations out of the way first…

The Quiet Part Loud

IRAN, BLUESKY & KAT ABUGHAZALEH

Quite a lot going on.

Recommended

ADA PALMER

If you have any interest in history, and particularly the history of the Renaissance, I highly recommend this video and it’s interviewee.

The interviewer, Dwarkesh Patel, strikes me as an AI-pilled tech bro with a knack for finding really good guests, and this is far and away the best guest I’ve seen. This is Ada Palmer, author of Inventing the Renaissance (which I’ve just started).

I thought I broadly understood the Renaissance and its key characters, but Palmer’s encyclopaedic knowledge in this video makes it clear I absolutely did not! She explains the intellectual journey of the Renaissance, with all its twists and turns, in a funny and highly engaging way.

By the end, I had a completely different opinion on Leonardo da Vinci, Cosimo de’ Medici, and especially Niccolò Machiavelli.

Hope the book is this good.

(Update: it’s really good.)

Recommended

HANNAH FRY

I’ve been rediscovering what a good science communicator Hannah Fry is.

Shocking as it may sound, I actually went off her for a while. There’s this phenomenon that used to be much more prevalent in podcasts where one of the duo would get weirdly competitive and sort of passive-aggressive with their co-host. John Green would have it with his brother Hank. Mark Kermode would have it with Simon Mayo. There are probably others I forget. But Hannah Fry had it with Adam Rutherford. I actually don’t notice anyone doing this anymore. Podcasts have become one of the dominant media in recent years, and I think everyone’s just better at it.

Anyway this video, in which Fry plugs her new BBC series on AI, demonstrates what an engaging presence she is. This YouTube video is from the New Scientist – who I’ve always thought of as a magazine but perhaps they’ve moved digital now? They do seem to be a lot less polished than average (which I quite like from scientists!) If anything, this makes Fry’s star power all the more evident.

I remember when BBC presenters would have a little bit of expertise but were mostly avatars for the unknowing-but-curious audience. Fry really seems to know her stuff on the computer science behind AI, and has insights and opinions I hadn’t heard elsewhere – which is rare in the saturated world of AI online commentary.

Recommended

CORY DOCTOROW

This is an interview from a while ago from Doctorow’s book tour for his big ‘Enshittification’ book.

I have a feeling I’ve plugged not just him but this book before, although I can’t seem to find a record – but, if the name Cory Doctorow isn’t familiar, he was the person who came up with the term ‘enshittification’ (a term which even my autocorrect now recognises!)

I thought I’d add him because, like Ada Palmer, he is also an author of science fiction who is also very good at communicating misunderstood real-world systems and histories.

Doctorow gave a lot of interviews but I remember this one being particularly good, although you might want to skip over Aaron Bastani’s slightly waffly intro.

When I’ve talked about him in conversation, people tend to quote a line from this interview: “Why did the tech companies do this? Well, why does a dog lick its balls? Because it can. They did it because we let them.”

Recommended

PROJECT HAIL MARY

I have not had a chance to see this film yet! But every review of it has been ecstatic. A frequent statement from reviewers and online posters has been that this is the best film they’ve seen in years.

It’s based on a book by Andy Weir, who wrote The Martian, which I loved. (I even wrote a eulogy to it.) In an interview, Ryan Gosling, star of this new film, hit the nail on the head when he said Weir writes stories that feel like they’re escapist but are actually about how extraordinarily capable humans can be in the most desperate of times like these.

So, as I occasionally do, I’m going to confidently proclaim that I’m going to really enjoy this film. Which is tempting fate in the worst way, obviously. But the odds are looking good.

Recommended

KAGI.COM

Last minute addition here, but it occurred to me that this as an online service that I’m finally at the stage where I’m comfortable recommending it.

As you probably noticed, Google Search has been getting worse and worse. “Gradually,” as Hemingway said, “and then suddenly” (with the rise of AI Overviews). Their AI is just wildly inaccurate, and the following top 108 results are all sponsored.

I’d heard nice things about Kagi.com as an alternative search engine, but… it’s a paid subscription. Can I really justify regularly paying for online searching?

The answer is yes. I pay $5 per month for 300 searches, and I haven’t hit that limit yet. And there’s all sorts of ways you can customise it.

I should qualify that I don’t know anywhere near as much about the Kagi company as I do about Google, so maybe they’re secretly working on the Torment Nexus. But they are a Public Benefit Corporation (PBC), they’re not funded by venture capital or private equity, and it is nice to have a search that works. And they say that (because you pay) each account is anonymised so they can’t track any of your search data. It does have AI answers, but you can switch them off.

And actually, weirdly, the thing I’ve been finding most useful is their ‘Kagi Assistant’ chatbot, which uses open-weight (i.e. free) alternative models to OpenAI, Anthropic, Google etc. The models are supposed to be less good (unless you pay £30 a month) but for the kinds of basic questions I often find myself asking, it’s just fine. And, best of all, my queries get deleted after 24 hours.

I don’t get any kickback for saying all this. I probably should though.

So my 50th birthday, which I was dreading so much, came and went. And it was actually pretty great!

I had wanted to avoid a repeat of my 40th, where I had arranged a weather dependent event (in March!) and of course had to scupper it at the last minute. Instead, everyone just came round ours, and I remember feeling rushed and disorganised and overwhelmed and just generally a bad host.

So I was hoping to do a better, more social event for my 50th. Even before the pandemic and parenthood, I had come to the conclusion that I don’t make enough time for my friends and extended family, and I thought this could be the starting pistol for that. I started planning in August last year, but my plans had to scale down with each month, and by last month I had basically given up on doing anything. Too little time. Too exhausted.

But I ended up having what felt like four consecutive birthday events.

First, my favourite present: H managed to organise and make a video comprised of clips from 50 friends and family. This alone felt like I was catching up with so many people.

Then there was the Bastard Session birthday special, which was a really good one, and also featured surprise visits from older brother who lives in Sweden and best friend from school, all machinated by younger brother. Everyone made fun of me for being old, including me. I had worried that the night would just feel like the same thing we do every month, but actually it was exactly what was needed.

The next day, a handful of core family and friends and partners came round to ours, in a similar way to my 40th except that it was the right number of the right people, with no pressure.

The evening after that was a chance to catch up with many of my Catweazle friends at a neighbours’ house gig. After a cathartic performance, Phoebe and Sam Twigg and I talked for about an hour about the truly extraordinary phenomenon that is the Catweazle club. How it shaped us, and how maybe we are just bit parts in its story.

This conversation, picking apart the importance of this community, its fragility and its transcendence, felt like the perfect coda to the run of birthday celebrations.

It left me with such a sense of gratitude for the communities and families I’ve been lucky enough to be a part of.

All in all, a very happy result.

For my next big birthday I’ll be 60, but let’s not even fucking think about that, shall we?

So, as I mentioned in the intro, I’ve been listening back to my library of unreleased songs, and realising that I’m suddenly happy with dusting them off and putting them online.

I had always assumed they were too amateurish, but I changed my mind. Part of that is perhaps a reaction to the slickness of AI generated music. Part of that is getting older and being more forgiving of my past self.

Part of it, however, might also be that I just feel music more intensely at the moment.

In the past, when I got the chance to make a lot of music, I would look back at these old tracks and feel like they just didn’t pack enough of an emotional punch.

Now, all music feels to me like it’s more emotional.

And this matters a lot to me, because I have been trying for years to squeeze as much emotion into a piece of music as I can. However, at the back of my mind I’ve been aware that this is perhaps missing the point – the amount of emotion a piece of music inspires is not a static thing. The same song can leave you cold one day and allow you to glimpse heaven another.

I’ve been wondering why. And recently I’ve been coming back to the idea of hedonic adaptation.

This is the theory that our happiness levels generally stabilise to a standard amount after a very good thing or a very bad thing happens.

Winning the lottery might not leave you significantly happier, after the initial shock. Losing a limb might not leave you significantly unhappier, after the initial shock.

So perhaps the thrill of making music wears off a bit when I get to do a lot of it?

There is another possible explanation. This process of hedonic adaptation can get corrupted when you introduce an addiction.

And I have found making music addictive. In so much as that it can take up all my focus and I can stop paying attention to anything else, in a way that can sometimes feel detrimental.

I tend to find the process of making music more difficult than I expect, but as I get towards the end of the creative process I feel like I get a high which does feel addictive. And I want the next song I write to produce more, and more, and more.

Anyway, whatever the underlying reason why music feels more emotional when I don’t get much time to make it, I’m trying to use this opportunity to note down as many ideas as possible while the inspiration is strong, so I have some good places to start from when I do get the time again.

Oh yeah, and if this month has taught me anything, it’s something I’m sure you already knew: the most precious resource in life is time.

I’m so old and I don’t even care anymore

I had so much excitement and motivation when making last months newsletter, and finally pivoting to just putting everything on a platform I owned. Then I got hit with a month where I had zero bandwidth, and so haven’t really been able to take it any further. Which is frustrating, obviously. It is also a big advantage of just having one day a month that I post things. Some months might leave me time to make a lot, and for others it may be all I can do to just write the damn newsletter. But at least I can pretty much always do that, and do it quickly.

So this will be a pretty minimal one, in advance of what I hope will be a gigantic birthday spectacular next month where I’ve made a ton of stuff. I live in eternal hope.

Having said it’ll be minimal, I do have a blog post. Last month I created a blog series called The Quiet Part Loud (where I could push all the politics out of the newsletter and thus stop each month from being a massive downer). I didn’t think I’d have time for it this month, but the Green party by-election win on Thursday made me optimistic enough to splurge a fair bit at the last minute.

I’m also sharing an old song this month that I wrote a million years ago. I’ll get to that at the end.

But first, I’m going to share a bunch of YouTube videos. Nothing remarkable about that – I do it every month. Except this time I have a bit of a thesis.

I’ve been writing for a while about how YouTube has been turning into a boring hub for two-dude video podcasts, but this month I realised something…

There is still a niche of old style YouTube videos that are doing very well, and they are the ones which are, for one of a better word, spectacular. They don’t just look good: they have a kind of visual energy and excitement to them.

In fact, let’s get into that now.

Recommended

XYLA FOXLIN FLIES COAST TO COAST

I have shared Xyla Foxlin videos in this newsletter many many times. But I want to share this two part video of her flying the United States from Coast to Coast in her 1943 Cessna prop plane, because I think it is a perfect example of where YouTube has moved.

The tutorials, the react videos, the daily flogs, even the video essays have increasingly been broken into small clips and put on TikTok and Instagram Reels. That’s where the audience is, and I think fewer and fewer people are watching them on YouTube.

But when people want to sit down and watch something on their big TV screen (and it’s hard to find a small screen these days) I think it tends to be this kind of YouTube video.

Someone doing something exciting and epic, usually outdoors. Not a video about ideas or conversations, but about travelling or building or enduring.

The views in both these videos are stunning. (And I don’t mean the number of times people have watched it.)

Recommended

LAURA KAMPF’S $1 CAMPER

I’ve also shared Laura Kampf’s videos a bunch of times. And, while a bit less epic than flying across the US, I feel like it’s still in this same category of videos that are actually interesting to look at.

Years ago she had a weekly series where she was renovating an old house in Germany. She has now moved to Los Angeles with her wife and stepchild, and in this project she is renovating a caravan that she bought for $1.

I find it hard to track down fun, easy-going, low stakes, non-political videos that I can just watch and relax. This is one of the very few.

Recommended

KEEPING A LIGHTHOUSE

I stumbled on this a couple of days ago, and it seems to be yet more proof that YouTube still favours people that make videos that are amazing to look at.

This guy’s job is to maintain lighthouses.

He (Scott Tacchi) has only 11 videos on his channel but they all have a ton of views (a couple in the millions) because he’s a good videographer and they are stunning to look at.

This one is his most recent, about what it’s like living in a lighthouse during a storm with 108mph winds.

And everyone in the comments loves the fact that onscreen he shows icons for TikTok and Facebook with big red crosses through them.

Recommended

BACKROOMS

I realise that I tend to share trailers more than I share movies, and that’s because I don’t get to see many movies at the moment. But the all-seeing algorithm does feed me plenty of intriguing-looking trailers.

This seems to be a horror film just based on the fact that some rooms feel intrinsically threatening. (Actually, on further research, it seems like it’s based on a whole pop culture phenomenon.)

I hope the film is good because the trailer is creepy as hell.

Recommended

DIFFERENTIAL EQUATIONS

This is very silly, and I keep watching it over and over again.

Recommended

GEORGE LUCAS VIDEOBOMB

This is even sillier, and exactly what the title suggests.

The Quiet Part Loud

BRITISH POLITICS CHANGED YESTERDAY

This is the first properly optimistic thing I’ve written on politics in a while, I think.

I turn 50 in a few weeks, and part of me doesn’t really care, and part of me very much does.

As ever, I’m going to use this as a notepad to help myself process what’s going on here.

There is definitely a big part of me that is absolutely dreading it, particularly the day itself.

In maybe August last year I realised I should probably get moving on organising a big splashy birthday party, and invite all my friends. I knew life would get busy, and the later I left it the more difficult it would get. Life gets in the way.

Well, this time life absolutely got in the way. Life stood in the middle of the road and started building a barricade.

By the time January rolled around, it was looking pretty unlikely I would pull this off. And then we had weeks of the whole family being ill, where I didn’t have the energy for anything other than looking after the children and getting the day job done.

I was thinking of appropriating the Bastard English Session as a party for all my folky friends, so I could obviously utilise that, but I wanted to have something for non-folkies too. I provisionally asked H and Mark (my brother) to help book a local pub the following day where people could drop in.

Yesterday I scrapped that idea. I just don’t want to do it. I realise I was just doing it because I thought that’s what you’re supposed to do.

I do very much want to catch up with friends, but I remember my 40th birthday when my friends making a lot of effort to come to an event where I felt overstretched and like a bad host. I felt like I inconvenienced them for something I didn’t really give myself the chance to enjoy.

This time I’ve come to the conclusion that I don’t want to see everyone on the same day. That is everything that stresses me about New Year’s Eve, multiplied by a thousand.

Instead, I want to mark turning 50 by spending the whole year focusing on catching up with friends properly. At times that suit everyone, where we can have proper conversations.

So yeah, that’s dealing with the day itself.

But there is the more general microtrauma of being reminded of your mortality. Tick tick tick…

Maybe I’m starting to come to terms with this, however.

I think as we move from our teens to our twenties to our thirties to our forties and so on… we need to keep updating our identity. We need to rethink how we present ourselves to others, and to ourselves.

This is the tricky part, I think. But once you know it needs to be done, it gets so much easier.

So I am currently in the process of working out what kind of behaviour is socially acceptable in your 50s, and deciding which parts of that I agree with and want to lean into, and which parts of that I want to push against.

For example I think there’s an expectation that, when you get deep into middle age, you become more focused on serving your community in whatever way you can. I’m very happy to lean into that. I think there’s also an expectation that you’ll start to despair about kids these days. Rotting their brains on social media, short attention spans, don’t know what it is to do a days hard work, blah blah blah. I’m happy to push back against that.

Perhaps turning 50 doesn’t even really push me to face new situations. Perhaps it’s the same old trade-offs that just get more pronounced: you’re hopefully acquiring more wisdom, but also your time is running out.

I found the transition from teens to twenties to be difficult. I found twenties to thirties to be easy. I found thirties to forties to be difficult.

Guess we’ll see about the next decade. Everything to play for…

One of the things that really saddens me about getting older is how little time I’ve been able to spend making music.

No one has the time to do the things I really want, particularly in this economy, and I feel wildly privileged to be able to have made as much music as I have.

But still, I always daydreamed it would be something I would constantly be doing, and that hasn’t played out.

That said, I made a pretty strange discovery recently.

I had decided that if I didn’t have the bandwidth to make new music now then it might be an idea to go through some of the old music I made years ago that I never released, finish it, package it up and put it on Bandcamp.

So I had a trawl through, and I was a bit amazed to discover not only how much there was, but how good I thought it was.

These are tracks that I had always thought of as early drafts that weren’t quite fit for public consumption.

Being able to examine them years later, I’ve changed my mind. I think I was always embarrassed by the amateurish production value, but a) it’s actually pretty good and b) in a new era of generative AI slickness, that’s maybe even an advantage.

I also realise that, individually, they might not be as strong as I might like, but when you put them all together, they do very much tell a life story. Much more so than I realised at the time.

So I hope to be posting quite a lot more music soon, but from my murky distant past.

This video below is one of my favourites, and I’m not sure how well it stands on its own. It was kind of a rushed demo. But if you know any of my other music, and my various philosophical obsessions within it, then hopefully it should carry a bit more weight.

It’s called For A Moment.