A couple of times in my life I have come close to being musically 'cool'. The first was with my very first job after university, with Virgin Records in Sydney. I helped set up the biggest record store in the Southern Hemisphere and I was still young enough that my opinions on music automatically carried more weight than anyone else's: He's in his early twenties and works in a record store. He must know what he is talking about. (Ha!)
The second peaked exactly two years ago this month when I finished working for a battered music and culture magazine in both London and New York. Having become a bit friendly with a couple of the music journalists, they kept my eye in on what I should be talking to clients about to make us sound cool listening to.
Perhaps the editorial voice we were most jealous of was The Quietus. And they've just released their top albums for 2017. (I know nothing about what's good in music anymore but I still know what's good in music journalism.) My first thought was that two years is a loooong time in music and I have no idea who the vast majority of these artists are. My second thought was good.
The travails of the music industry in the digital age were a source of considerable rumination during my initial foray in newspapers and magazines over fifteen years ago. The Napster Era had cut a swath through a hugely profitable, creaking industry. (Margin on back catalogue CDs was 44%. Ask me how I know.) And print media was anxious to not have it happen to them -even though everyone knew it would... and ultimately did.
So-called digital destruction -perhaps mechanised destruction is better- started with the very beginning of the timeline and moved up all emergent media forms to day. You may disagree if you think of music as 'radio' -and thus coming after print media- but I promise you 'vocalisation and body movement' long-predates even cave art. It predates fire.
Cycles being cycles, the media that is first to experience digital destruction is also the first to emerge -out of an oil-slicked sea at the head of a procession of human art forms. Again, stay with me on this. Yes, desktop publishing emerged before ProTools/GarageBand/etc but that only solved production. It still hadn't solved distribution. (That came later with blogs and print on demand.) Consumer-level audio platforms emerged at the same time as the heady, dial-up days of the early web where I would queue up five songs in Napster at night, go to sleep, and wake up to find I had three of them. Three!
This was the siren call of the digital utopians, joyously calling you to founder your ship on the reef of digital destruction. Cut out the middle man! Choose yourself and find your audience! No more gatekeepers!
As dangers go, the siren call was more insidious than a simple false one because it is fractionally true. Yes, the marginal cost of creative production has effectively reached zero. There remains, however, the perennial problem of the Underpants Gnomes.
Looking at this list of the best albums of 2017 -self-selected because of The Quietus's focus on indy music, obviously- I spy a hugely encouraging 'Phase 3'. I see the Dominant of Witchcraft's magical renaissance happening in a way that doesn't lead me to let out a long sigh. It is hopefully an example of the wildest dreams discussed with the Scarlets -that a genuine magical culture might emerge from the currently-motif-only resurgence of witchcraft in popular western culture.
This being the apocalypse, however, it is currently emerging into gloop. The latest in an endless stream of Brooklyn witch articles I read this week rolled out the old 70s trope that the witch trials killed millions and were an attack on innocent women's bodies. This falls for the white middle class error that Camille Paglia and others regularly observes afflicting the feminism of major urban centres: assuming the white middle class experience is the totality of women's experiences rather than, in the case of witchcraft, *gets a napkin and pen* approximately 3% of it. (To be clear, I'm mostly fine with this. It seems to me the best response isn't to say "wrong" but "also" -because these things did actually happen.)
The gloop that a nascent magico-musical renaissance may emerge into spills from the same digital platforms that perpetuate an across-the-board, low-resolution, white liberal view of the world. See, for instance, this excellent article on the impact of Spotify.
Spotify loves “chill” playlists: they’re the purest distillation of its ambition to turn all music into emotional wallpaper. They’re also tied to what its algorithm manipulates best: mood and affect. Note how the generically designed, nearly stock photo images attached to these playlists rely on the selfsame clickbait-y tactics of content farms, which are famous for attacking a reader’s basest human moods and instincts. Only here the goal is to fit music snugly into an emotional regulation capsule optimized for maximum clicks: “chill.out.brain,” “Ambient Chill,” “Chill Covers.” “Piano in the Background” is one of the most aptly titled; “in the background” could be added to the majority of Spotify playlists.
As an industry insider once explained to me, digital strategists have identified “lean back listening” as an ever more popular Spotify-induced phenomenon. It turns out that playlists have spawned a new type of music listener, one who thinks less about the artist or album they are seeking out, and instead connects with emotions, moods and activities, where they just pick a playlist and let it roll: “Chillin’ On a Dirt Road,” “License to Chill,” “Cinematic Chill Out.” They’re all there.
These algorithmically designed playlists, in other words, have seized on an audience of distracted, perhaps overworked, or anxious listeners whose stress-filled clicks now generate anesthetized, algorithmically designed playlists. One independent label owner I spoke with has watched his records’ physical and digital sales decline week by week. He’s trying to play ball with the platform by pitching playlists, to varying effect. “The more vanilla the release, the better it works for Spotify. If it’s challenging music? Nah,” he says, telling me about all of the experimental, noise, and comparatively aggressive music on his label that goes unheard on the platform. “It leaves artists behind. If Spotify is just feeding easy music to everybody, where does the art form go? Is anybody going to be able to push boundaries and break through to a wide audience anymore?”
I can't help but think of this development in light of Tyler Cowen's book, The Creative Class, which describes the economic and culturally conservative/nostalgic turn of the dreaded Millennial. Being a neoclassical economist, he considers creative and economic risk-taking as good rather than what we might call 'presumably better than all currently available alternatives for living through the third act of a corporatocratic dystopia'. Viewed with the latter opinion, the book is a masterclass in interrogating cultural change without loudly proclaiming whether or not you like it or agree with it.
And it is that 'jumping up' to the next level of analysis that I want to focus on. Yes, it does seem that Yeats's mackerel are swimming in the opposite direction to youth (in western economies). But the solve isn't to push back down the milquetoast cultural emergences because you want something better or with more teeth. It is to think with it, to 'line' with it. One of my vodka-addled, semi-memories from film school is learning that human cognition is about a century behind what we now understand about the world as a result of technological analysis. I was all excited because it reminded me of Robert Anton Wilson and I got to pontificate in the tutorial about him and Leary's dumb circuit model. (Current tally of friends remaining from college: Zero.)
We've really only just -for our sins- got used to the idea of thinking of the brain as a computer. The return of cycle analysis -which could only have happened in an era of so-called 'Big Data' (a concept that has already left the stage)- is an even more foreign model. Nevertheless, if you're prepared for a little discomfort, it is a valid framework for thinking with these cultural developments. Yes, the platforms for cultural interaction at the end of 2017 are garbage. You should actively take steps to reduce your exposure to them because -by both design in some cases and accident/inevitable-fulfilment-of-an-archonic-worldview in other cases- they make your life and your mental health worse.
But it seems to me -as I've been saying for about five years now- the best way to do that is to use them to find the analogue until you no longer need them. Let's tie The Quietus article and the Spotify article together. Since its publication, I have been running down their top 100 albums all week -sometimes on YouTube, more often on Spotify- and found some really delightful and even challenging works that say something to me about a magical cultural renaissance.
Here's my shortlist.
- Simon Fisher Turner - Giraffe
- Actress - AZD
- Fantasii - MHYSA
- Dust - Laurel Halo
- Mario Batkovic
- Veld - Daniel O’Sullivan
- Hesaitix - M.E.S.H.
- Laisse ça être - Aquaserge
- Targ - Bargou 8
- Laraaji - Bring On The Sun
- Lee Gamble - Mnestic Pressure
- Ambient Black Magic - Rainforest Spiritual Enslavement
- Afro Mutations - Riddlore
- Sells His Record Collection - Japan Blues
- The Kid - Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith
- Superlative Fatigue - Errorsmith
- Bitter Music - Perc
- Ressemelage - Visible Cloaks
- American Dream - LCD Soundsystem
- Chloe x Halle
- Hungan - Kemper Norton
- Black Origami - Jlin
- Before the Applause - Re-TROS
- Utopia - Björk
- Total Shit! - $Hit and $hine
- Unseen Forces - Justin Walter
- Modern Kosmology - Jane Weaver
- Hunter Huntress Hawker - Laura Cannell
- Come Play The Trees - Snapped Ankles
- Call Super - Arpo
- TFCF - Liars
- Trifle - Lone Taxidermist
- James Holden and the Animal Spirits
- Peasant - Richard Dawson
Kemper Norton, Jlin and Trifle are currently/probably my favourites. But I knew maybe four of the full list (Björk, obviously) before I started listening. But just look at those magical motifs! This is what is going on while we all grumble about Cosmo publishing articles about crystal dildos. (Big deal. The Victorians beat this company to the idea by 150 years.)
So I listened to these artists on whitewashing, digitally-destroying, surveillance platforms. And it has been the best musical week of my whole year. I have no idea how these artists will make any money in five years time but then I have no idea how you or I will, either. It seems the only way out of that is through. Why was this my best musical week of the year? Humans compiled the list. And from it another human compiled a shorter list. Which some of you will listen to and then also share.
And while it very much reflects the editorial preferences of The Quietus -meaning it is not really reflective of all music on an absolute basis- these productions nevertheless exist. There are challenging artists out there right now grappling with the Dominant of Witchcraft. I find this hugely uplifting. And I think it bodes well for the other art forms emerging behind music in the procession.
A lot of things are really gross at the moment. But don't give up hope. The mackerel still run.