Kindness and Cunning

So that was summer, folks! I found it absolutely exhausting, perhaps because in large part it was seven weeks of childcare on top of working two part-time jobs. Not terrible by any means, but exhausting. And hot, obviously.

Speaking of which, this month I’m going to grapple with faint climate change optimism (feel free to skip that if it’s a topic you don’t have the emotional bandwidth for right now).

Other than that, it’s mainly celebrating some iconic musicians of yesteryear, because that’s been how it’s been.

Nothing to add on a personal front, really, because I haven’t had time to focus on anything. (Except doomscrolling.)

But enough burying the lead. Let’s talk about Dolly.

Obituary

RIP DOLLY PARTON

A number of icons died in quick succession recently: Tim Curry, Yayoi Kusama, and of course Dolly Parton.

Each of them leaves a big hole in our popular culture, but we all know Dolly was something else.

I tend to feel that when someone dies over the age of, say, 75… at least they lived a full life. However, Dolly Parton was still contributing to culture in a big way. Her funding of the Moderna vaccine. Her support for the Black Lives Matter movement. And of course, the continued funding of her Imagination Library project.

I’ll write a bit more about that side in a moment, but I just want to focus on my obsession: songwriting.

I was just singing 9 To 5 to myself, and when I got to “working 9 to 5, for service and devotion” I thought, as I often do, wait – what does that actually mean? You’re working for service and devotion? Does that mean anything?

And then I remembered that “for service and devotion” is actually the beginning of the next line: “For service and devotion, you would think that I would deserve a fair promotion.”

Silly me for second-guessing Dolly Parton’s songwriting skills.

Many great songwriters will throw in lines that don’t mean anything but sound kind of cool. (Looking at you, Nick Drake.) The greats of American country music never never never do that. Every line is load-bearing.

They might try to use as few syllables as possible. They might nod respectfully to their framed icon of Hank Williams on the wall, and try to write in the most plain, accessible, easy-to-understand language that they can.

But everything needs to mean something. Everything needs to have a point.

People keep covering, and will continue to cover, Jolene, 9 To 5, I Will Always Love You and her other classics because she always had something to say, and it’s usually something that continues to be relevant.

Recommended

TAP

One thing this newsletter has demonstrated over the years is that YouTube is good at taking algorithmic swings at something I didn’t know I needed.

By the 1980s the culture of tap dancing – which had been a powerhouse of American popular culture in the early to mid 20th century – was very much on the wane.

Nobody really cared about Sammy Davis Jnr and the other icons of that era.

But Gregory Hines did. The last carrier of the torch, he and his brother dazzled the movie-goers in Frances Ford Coppola’s The Cotton Club (1984), and that gave him an acting career outside of tap dance.

He died way too young, but he did manage to get this film made where, in this scene, he brings out all the greats and reminds you just how talented they were.

Now, you might not give a shit about tap dancing – that’s okay, most people don’t. But what’s happening in this scene is something else, I think.

Look at how old these people are! These people are old. These people are really really old.

And look at the extraordinary precision that they can still get from their bodies.

I find this one of the most uplifting movie scenes to deal with ageing. If any of these people had to do a gruelling world tour for six months, at that age, it would probably kill them. But get them in a room with their friends, and the talent is there, and the joy is there, and the decades of learning is there.

And it’s just fucking great.

Recommended

FRANÇOISE HARDY

Another icon who passed away recently (at the age of 80).

She was a queen of the French 1960s pop music scene, influenced by The Beatles and English language pop music but still très français.

This was one of her biggest hits, and a long-favourite of mine – I was amazed to recently find there was actually a music video for it. And goddammit if she isn’t every bit as cool and stylish as they said she was.

Not hard to see why Mick Jagger was totally obsessed with her.

Recommended

TOM SCOTT on BLETCHLEY PARK

OG YouTuber and one of the Internet’s favourite nerds, Tom Scott officially retired from his weekly YouTube video routine a few years ago, and (literally) flew off into the sunset.

He’s clearly had a good break, because now he’s back, and moving ever closer to the sort of BBC Four documentaries I used to love watching.

In fact, I think he very much has that David Attenborough / Michael Palin energy – which (as H will attest to) is pretty much the highest praise possible from me.

Here he is on a tour of Bletchley Park, talking to the guides and historians and getting some fascinating insights.

I mean, I am a middle-aged Englishman so this stuff is crack to me, but still, highly recommended.

Recommended

WINK & YOU MISS IT

Listening to Say You’ll Be There by the Spice Girls the other day, I was reminded that in the 1990s there was a synthesiser that everyone seemed to be obsessed about.

In fact, throughout the 80s and 90s there were two drum machines and one synth that basically became their own genres, and they were all made by the same company. They were: the Roland TR-808, the Roland TR-909… and the Roland TB-303. (Daft Punk’s first album had all three, and little else.)

Fatboy Slim’s first single was actually called Everybody Needs A 303, and after that it was everywhere.

But I think Norman (Fatboy Slim) Cook probably took his inspiration from this track I’m recommending: the national anthem for a particular kind of UK Raver.

Higher State of Consciousness by Josh Wink.

I think this was the first track that was about the 303. The focus is this keyboard riff that just loops, over and over, getting progressively more insane.

Also, I love the video which was filmed at a music festival just down the road in Otmoor. So even though it was a little bit before my time, it’s all kinds of nostalgia for me.

This is the ‘official music video’, by the way. Not to be confused with the other 112 official music videos for this track that you can find on YouTube.

Recommended

PEAK FRANK DREBIN

YouTube occasionally feeds me clips from the parody police show Police Squad, and it reminded me of this – which constantly squats rent-free in my mind.

Technically from the movie The Naked Gun, this is the best kind of parody of detective noir fiction.

Recommended

LOST WEEKEND by PHOEBE BRIDGERS

Still giddy, no doubt, from his success at the last Bastard Session in indoctrinating my entire family in the ways of drop dead by Olivia Rodrigo, Peter decided to try his luck again recommending the new Phoebe Bridgers album Lost Weekend – particularly this song.

The tone reminds me a lot of Billie Eilish, who I’m a big fan of. But I’ve been so busy these last few weeks that I have dipped in and out of the album but haven’t really been able to get immersed in it. Hopefully that will come.

But two things I love:

I love the opening lines to this first song (and therefore the album):

Crying in a suit and tie
But you should see the other guy

I also love this video, which is a ‘lyric video’ – something I never really saw the point of. ‘Either make a proper music video or don’t’ was perhaps my view.

But I realise when I was a young lad (in the 1840s) we had cassette and CD booklets where we could read the lyrics to while listening to the song. (Sure, you can do that on Spotify, but it’s an audio platform and it never occurs to me.) So being able to hear the song and see the lyrics can help get the meaning – particularly as they stay on screen as they get added.

Also, I initially thought this video would be lyrics over a photograph, but it’s actually a static video shot of fireflies (? other insects?) dancing in the beam of a laser over what looks like a Los Angeles flood control channel. Which seems to perfectly capture the mood.

So… maybe lyric videos are good now?

So this was the summer where it felt like climate change went up a notch. Frankly, I think every summer recently has felt like that, depending on where you are in the world, but this was Oxford’s turn.

The last big shock for me was actually the flooding of 2012 to 2014, which felt… I dunno, biblical. It just rained and rained, and I was living by myself on the boat, and it was a baptism of fire. Except it was water. And not a baptism.

Anyway, here we are.

My algorithmic feeds are like “Cool! You’re back on the climate collapse doom-scrolling? Here, shovel this down, you anxious little rabbit – we’ve got you on the platform for another hour at least…”

That said, I’m actually starting to see a bit more reasons for cautious optimism than I have for a while. I don’t think climate change will make humans extinct: we’re extraordinarily resourceful fuckers.

But of course, I might be wrong – and either way I do think it’s going to get rough in our lifetimes.

Do you know about the geopolitical significance of the petrodollar, by the way? I feel embarrassed I didn’t learn about it sooner, because I realise now it’s the elephant in the climate change summit.

Every country’s economy needs energy: for factories, hospitals, transport systems, homes, etc. And for the latter part of the 20th century, that energy tended to come from oil. Oil was always traded in US dollars – hence the ‘petrodollar’. So when oil-producing countries sold oil to the US they would get dollars in return, which they would frequently want to invest in the safest assets they could: US government bonds. It became known as ‘petrodollar recycling’, and was something of a virtuous circle for the US economy.

But it all relied on oil. Particularly in key Republican-controlled US states, where oil is still critical to their major businesses: petroleum refining, oil-fired power generation, plastics, fertiliser, asphalt, lubricants, etc.

Which meant that noises would occasionally be made about preventing climate change, but behind the scenes any meaningful action was sabotaged.

Now of course, in the second Trump term, they’re saying the quiet bit loud: the US government is actively embracing fossil fuels as quickly and intensively as they can, and trying to crush clean energy, which they see as a ‘competitor’. Which is obviously bad.

But, as I have said many times, they are also a bunch of clowns who are destroying US influence on the world stage by the day. They only have a few allies left, who are generally considered pariahs, and the rest of the world is trying to escape them, and the petrodollar, as quickly as they can.

Enter China.

Here is some good news:

TLDR: China has long been obsessed with energy independence from the United States, and their considerable production of clean energy products has just been stepped up dramatically.

And countries are snapping it up like… well, like there’s no tomorrow. Pakistan, for example, has been electrifying so quickly that in 2025, for the first time, more of its power was generated from clean energy (55%) than fossil fuels (45%).

Yes that does still leave us with the problem of economic dependence on China. But if the planet is still habitable we can at least work that problem.

I never liked the movie Cool Hand Luke. Even though it is considered one of Paul Newman’s greatest, and I’m a big Paul Newman fan.

The movie is a little bit like The Shawshank Redemption, except the Powers That Be successfully grind the hero down and win. The fact that the hero finally accepts his fate is even pitched as kind of a happy ending. It feels like it was written by a prison governor.

The title of the movie comes from a scene in which Newman is playing poker against all the prison tough guys, and he wins through sheer bluff, not having any good cards at all. He demonstrates that “sometimes even nothing can be a pretty cool hand”.

I’ve been thinking about that line a lot in the last few days. If you want to see what making the best out of a bad hand really looks like, I think you’re much better off looking at Dolly Parton.

She has spoken an interviews about how a bank teller had a crush on her husband, and her husband had a crush on the bank teller, and he was spending more and more time at the bank and that was the inspiration for the song Jolene. After she released that song I imagine her husband got himself in check pretty quick.

Apparently the same day that she wrote Jolene, she wrote arguably her most famous song.

At 21 years old, she had become a co-host on the TV show of extremely influential country singer Porter Wagoner. In 1973 she wanted to leave to start her own solo career, and he threatened to sue her if she did.

She left, but as she did she released the song I Will Always Love You, and dedicated it to him. He did sue her, he won, and she eventually paid him many years later, but the audience was absolutely on Dolly’s side. (Footnote: when Wagoner was old and sick and broke and dying, Dolly bought back his publishing rights that he had sold, gave them back to him so they would support his children, and stayed with him in hospital till the end.)

Then of course there was the time when Elvis wanted to cover the song, and she was delighted. But ‘Colonel’ Tom Parker wanted her to give up half the rights for the privilege. And, in her characteristically charming way, she said no thank you, go fuck yourself.

When Whitney Houston eventually turned to the song into the biggest hit of the 1990s, thanks to her movie The Bodyguard, you might expect there to be jealousy and animosity. Dolly heaped praise on Whitney’s version, however, and invested the royalties into numerous good causes.

I mean, I could go on, obviously.

But the main thing the obituaries have been reminding me is that she had (in spades) the two most important virtues we all need for navigating through this life.

The first is kindness. The second is cunning.

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.