#24 Daniels, James Blake, sand talk, canaries
A pot pourri of recent thinkings, readings and viewings.
Hello, I exist, hello
I’ve had a busy couple of months (years) juggling music, family & work. Thanks for hanging in with me and still being here! I hope you are doing ok.
I have found myself reading some things recently, and thinking about some things, and wanting to share but perhaps without too much commentary! So rather than my trademark long rants and rambles, today you’ll get a handful of things that are a bit more scattershot - some new rabbit warrens to fall down.
First up …
DANIELS AT SXSW
This hour-long SXSW presentation from the Daniels is one of the most inspiring things I’ve watched in ages, and it is going to get many repeat viewings from me.
Like many people I truly adored Everything Everywhere All At Once, and hearing the film’s directors talk about why they made the movie - and why they make movies at all - is an incredible tonic for any artist questioning their practice in our current cruel and confusing world.
Spoiler alert: they are making art in order to try to make the world a better place.
Hearing them talk about the power of story to “reconcile paradox” and allow us to “sit in uncertainty”, about how art can help to “knock us off our trajectory” and unsettle us from unhealthy or inhumane systems that we inhabit by default in the 21st century .. this presentation is a rigorous but complex critique of capitalism, of complacency, of content creator culture, delivered intentionally with humour and compassion.
I was already so sold on this .. and then 45 minutes in Daniel Kwan quotes directly from Sand Talk by Tyson Yunkaporta, a book I’ve literally just finished (see below) - it is a truly inspiring and incredible book which, in short, looks to communicate and share ancient indigenous ways of thinking and tries to imagine practical ways to apply that indigenous thinking to modern life.
Specifically, Daniel zooms in on the idea of the “lookout” that appears in indigenous communities and cultures:
Paraphrasing here, but the idea is that in an age where we are all “connected” to thousands of people globally (I’m right now sitting on my bed casually writing an email to eight thousand people) really the most useful and important thing we can do is tend to our most immediate social circle, our immediate location and bioregion.
To imagine a world of interlocking lookouts, big groups of small groups of local groups, is to imagine a world of great resilience, of great care, of local focus and a more grounded inter-connectedness. This resonates with a lot of the ideas around biomimickry and emergence that adrienne marie brown writes about, and the ideas around bioregionalism that come up in Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing (see below).
They spend the entire presentation dropping koan-like quotes from all kinds of sources, to the point where I’m about to go back and watch it again but make notes on where all the quotes come from - annotate it, make a bibliography. I’m not a nerd, you are.
Anyway, if you have been interested in any of the kinds of things I have talked about in this newsletter in the past 12 months, go watch the Daniels speak at SXSW. Now. It’s a really compelling synthesis of a lot of ideas and feels that have been on my mind - and it’s also got me really excited to see what these guys do next, what stories they chose to tell, what collaborators they choose to empower.
Watching this makes me so happy to have people with these ideas having a seat at the table in mainstream film and culture.
NOW EVERYONE HAS A JAMES BLAKE TAKE
There is so much commentary around this, so rapidly, that I don’t really want to add much to the noise. But a couple of things …
Peter Kirn’s piece in Create Digital Music, which was posted yesterday, is a pretty thorough catalogue of all the ways in which James Blake’s Vault idea have been tried before or are still being tried now. When it launched my first reaction was .. “what about my precious Bandcamp?” Could James and a bunch of rich buddies not just get together and buy Bandcamp back from their dubious new overlords, and implement your cool ideas there? But, as this perhaps establishes, James and his buddies are likely not nearly as rich as we sometimes think they are. (Pretty sure Fred Again is though, if you do the napkin maths on his Australia arena tour. Jeeshus.)
But yeah, Peter’s piece also reveals that the founders of Vault are also the founders of sound.xyz, one of the many web3 music platforms that tried to launch during that shared web3 hallucination that got a hold of some of us more than others.
I actually met one of the sound.xyz founders around that time, via my dalliance in “crypto cultural illuminati discord server” (that’s my description) Friends With Benefits or $FWB. That was a time wasn’t it. LOL. Anyway I remember we had a video call, him pitching me on the idea that would eventually become sound.xyz looking for buy in from me, and he was a galaxy brain fast-talker who, in our brief conversation, seemed to me like someone who knew how to grease the wheels of tech/VC-land to generate a lot of cash for themselves and/or for other people. So that’s great for him. I remember just listening to him go on and on and thinking “good for you.”
Back to Peter’s CDM piece. I can feel the exasperation in there. It is so hard not to tip into cynicism and negativity, and don’t get me wrong, Vault should be interrogated and there should be a critical lens applied when big names with major label infrastructure behind them purport to be artist-friendly innovators. It’s hard to resist the urge to just shit on James Blake for ‘doing it wrong', and to pile onto him because he is - by most metrics - doing just fine compared to the rest of us. Peter even acknowledges his own energy in the piece, using tags to catalogue the article not just as “business”, “web,” “trends” but also “cynicism” and “trolling.”
I just get nervous that when we pile-on too hard, with too much vigour and mean-spiritedness and cynicism, it actually sends us backwards. On some level I’m just happy to see someone with the broad reach and profile of James Blake speaking up on how messed-up our current situation is. You can pick holes in his arguments, you can question his intentions - writers will fall over themselves to undermine in like this full-of-itself Consequence of Sound headline calling Vault “OnlyFans for music” - and I do hope James has some resilience and some boundaries in place on socials because people will be trolling him and trying to provoke and upset him for years to come because he has chosen to talk up, and because he is trying something.
I think the easiest thing in the world is to be cynical about this stuff - and while I think criticism is important, we need to iterate on ideas, and critique them, to inch forward to better futures and better options for artists.
Do I think Vault is misguided? Yep for a bunch of reasons. I’d love to see far more transparency around it’s founders and mission. But do I want other artists to be dissuaded from speaking up, or from trying things, for fear that they are going to get shit-canned for taking a misstep here or there? No. Like all things, it’s complicated, and complex. I fear that a lot of smart people are going to default to a jaded takeaway here, from this whole thing, and I’d rather us stay open-minded and open-hearted.
WHAT IF DSPS WERE PUBLIC INFRASTRUCTURE?
If you are underwhelmed by Vault and looking for an inspiring idea, this whole thing has taken me back - not for the first time - to this article from ancient times, i.e. 2021:
In it, Liz Pelly argues the case for socialising streaming services - i.e. considering music as a public good, and advocating for some kind of centrally-administered access to music that could guarantee fairer compensation for artist labour.
It’s a wild idea but also the kind of thing that I can imagine happening if we could just pull our fingers out as a civilisation, and/or somehow wrest control back from money/growth/corporate narratives:
It is increasingly clear, though, that ensuring robust music futures means imagining systems drastically different than the current corporate structure, and out from under the sway of market logic. We should conceptualize futures where music is part of the greater ongoing project of freeing art from capitalism.
As part of that work, we should think about socializing music streaming. Music is an integral part of the cultural landscape: It brings people together, it provides an outlet, as well as an archive. At best it can reflect the tenor of society at any given moment. It is a public good. What would it look like if we thought about access to music the way we thought about other important forms of culture and information — for example, books? Physical copies of music have long been available at public libraries, but we don’t currently conceptualize universal access to music as a public good, to be managed in the public interest with public funding. We should.
It’s a really inspiring article that I return to often. Purely because it is reassuring that people like Liz are out there having big ideas and articulating them so carefully and so well. For every James Blake, there’s 10 Liz Pellys out there who actually have the radical ideas that might help in the long term.
We need to ward ourselves somehow from cynicism and nihilism! So we can continue to hold these radical ideas in our mind, and not dismiss them as “oh that will never happen” - even if the project of “freeing art from capitalism” does not happen in our lifetime, without those of us here to imagine a future where it can happen, we will not be taking any steps towards it, only further away, to more greed, more atomisation, more extraction. How to ward ourselves from nihilism? Get local, and get connected to your fellow humans, in empathy and warmth. Tell the right stories to yourself and to each other.
TWO GREAT BOOKS I JUST READ
Some great books I have read recently:
I greatly enjoyed heading out to the parks and trails near my house, touching grass, and reading this book about how we can take the deep and practical wisdom of indigenous thinking and apply it to our deeply inhumane and cruel modern lives.
And god Tyson is funny as hell, which helps, he has a wickedly dark humour and at times a searing honesty and vulnerability about his own life.
I’m going to just copy-paste what I wrote on Instagram when I was half way through reading this:
Half way through this and already know I’ll be reading and rereading this book for years to come. Jaw dropping insights, compassion and wicked humour in equal measure. so much wisdom, so much to learn (and unlearn)- the kind of book that synthesises so much else that is on my mind (climate, culture, connection) into some unifying ideas that are actually practical, in terms of how to be and who to be. Thank you Tyson Yunkaporta who unlike me has the good sense to not be on this platform
Reading this more or less concurrently with Sand Talk was perfect.
How To Do Nothing is very much a manifesto on labour and bioregionalism, disguised as a self-help book with a very self-help-y kind of title. Carrying this around with me, at work or with friends, people would see the title and joke “oh, wow, I’d love to learn how to do nothing!” with a kind of knowing and exasparated tone.
The thing is, this book is not really about doing nothing, it’s about rewiring your relationship with the world .. craning your neck to see things differently, and in doing so, start to see clearly what are the things that actually are meaningful and worthy to you. Stop doing shit that is pointless and hurts you, and lines someone elses pockets. It is a book about the attention economy only the surface level - it is a much much deeper critique of modern life than that, but it also contains practical solutions and wisdom on how to bring change, on an individual level and also further. It too focuses on how small acts of resistance in your life - making some very subtle new choices about how to spend your time - might actually be the most important and worthy thing you can do if you want to change the world.
This is a book that will make you feel better.
It occurs to me that many of the books that have had the biggest impact on me in the past two years - Naomi Klein’s “This Changes Everything”, adrienne marie brown’s “Emergent Strategy”, Rebecca Giblin’s “Chokehold Capitalism” - have, when confronting the various “great challenges of our time” landed in the same places - a primacy on indigenous thinking and pursuing indigenous justice - a focus on organising, small groups, unionisation, collectivism, co-operation - the true importance of “love” not as a Hallmark-card trope but as a practice that leads to positive outcomes - the deep never-dying importance and relevance of storytelling as a way to shape the world and the need to empower people to tell and understand stories as sense-making and truth-telling. Yeah. Its reassuring to read all these books from disparate perspectives and authors and have them land in similar places, it gives me hope.
CANARY IN THE COALMINE
This morning I read Slate’s Oral History of Pitchfork which was, you know, fine, whatever. But what I wasn’t expecting was to get to the end of my doomscroll and be knocked for six by this:
Nailed it. In the digital era, since the internet happened, those of us working in music have had a front row seat to disruption and behavioural change. We saw our labour devaluing first, we understood the perils and costs of social media first. We experienced the delusions of the DIY creator economy first. Musicians have been the canaries in the digital coalmine and I think what we can see now is the cruelty of our modern world, we’ve been on the receiving end of that already as music-makers and music lovers. We’ve had preview tickets to the endgame of capitalism and it’s a really cruel, lonely, confusing, greedy, cynical place. No wonder we are all fried, burned out, cynical, short on hope.
If you are short on hope, hopefully something in this newsletter - whether its one of the books I mentioned, or that Daniels talk, can help turn you towards feeling more positive.
Or, if you just need to feel connected, hit me up with an email and I’ll reply when I can <3
SHIEL FM: THE GOOD STUFF
Onnnne last thing, in case you don’t know, I regularly update a playlist with new music Ilike called shiel fm, and you can find it on both Spotify & Buy Music Club. It’s the good stuff.
Ok - talk again soon - or not soon ;)
Tim