Music Music Music Music Music Music Music Music Music Music Music Music Music The glamour and excitement of music kind of is transferred to the philosophy. The philosophy is pretty glamorous, I think, especially the stuff I was reading in the 80s,
which was Ronan Bart and Julia Kristeva and all those people. and in the 90s I started reading I don't know, Virilio and that kind of thing it's quite exciting and glamorous I think there was a good piece recently by Owen Hathaway about the foreign agent series that semiotechs used to do, do you remember them? yeah, I read the piece little black books they were kind of sexy little books so there was a kind of glamour it didn't seem particularly scholarly work even though a lot of them were professors and studied deeply and read all of Western philosophy
before they wrote A Thousand Plateaus but it didn't feel it didn't have that lumbering quality that a lot of scholarly work had it felt very intense and glamorous I think probably by if you combine that with you know, hip-hop or, you know, My Bloody Valentine or something, then it's quite a potent combination, not necessarily intellectually, but, like, in terms of the combined glamour and buzz of this sexy, exciting thinking, and then this music that's very exciting. So I can see why someone who was, like, 18 or something might be affected quite strongly by it.
But that's what happened to me. That's how I got into philosophy really was. Actually, no, I was interested, you know, when I was 15 or 16, I was interested in, like, what is the meaning of life? Why is the world so unfair and unjust? So I was interested in philosophy before I started reading the music press, but that was where I came across, you know, people combining Foucault and The Fall, you know, or Birthday Party and Nietzsche, you know, these sort of quite intense combinations of things. So there were already references, there were already people doing that in the UK? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. There were, particularly on the NME, the New Music Express,
there were a bunch of writers who were, you know, I mean, there would have been intellectuals who would reference, you know, I don't know, Marshall McLuhan or, you know, or Marx or something like that. But particularly in the end of the 70s, early 80s in the UK, there was the intake of French ideas. And often it was stuff that had just come out in translation. So it was actually 10 to 15 years old, you know, books that had come out in the 60s in France. But they were sort of arriving and having their impact in British academia, particularly in the area of film studies there's a guy I know who's writing a whole book about the
impact of French theory on UK intellectual life and two of the main areas were this magazine called Screen I think it was called which had all these film critics like Peter Wallen and Laura Mulvley and then the music press So that's why he got in contact with me. He interviewed me about how I used to read writers like Ian Penman and Barney Hoskins referencing Derrida and Foucault and Roland Barthes and all these things in a very intoxicating way. and a bit later I became friendly with one of these writers this guy Chris Bowen when I was a journalist
beginning to be a journalist and we became friends and he lent me his own copy of Julia Kristeva's The Powers of Horror so it was not just mostly it was indirect through reading this stuff but occasionally people would directly influence you by giving you books But still your undergrad studies were history, right? Yeah, that's right. Actually, I applied to do politics and philosophy. There's a peculiar course at Oxford called PPE, Politics, Philosophy and Economics. Oh, yeah. And I applied to do that and I wanted to drop the economics. And then they offered me, I think they correctly divined
that I was too interested in continental philosophy. at Oxford it was a very much about logical positivism and and sensible you know sensible English stuff they correctly gathered that I was not suited to study philosophy at Oxford but that I had something you know that you know they thought history would be a better fit so I accepted that it was actually a good development because I learnt a lot during history so I did all my reading of continental philosophy in my spare time. Well, yeah, but it's very interesting. The mention that Martin did at the beginning had a reverberation because I was
re-reading your piece, your old piece about the CCRU and as well it's five years as well since Mark Fisher left us and I wonder how did you came about to know the CCRU in the first place. And you mentioned this fanzine abstract culture, you know. Is this true? Did you connect with the CCRU activities because of this? Because this was published originally by Robbie Mackay. Yeah, yeah. I'm not exactly sure the sequence events,
but I was friends with Kojo Eshin, who was sort of like an ally of theirs. I think he was an associate member. I was living in America, but when I would come to England, I would often go to Kojo's. We'd hang out. He'd play me records, and he'd tell me about stuff. We'd share ideas, and I'm fairly certain he must have shown me those things or told me about these people. But it's also possible that Mark Fisher or someone, maybe Robin, just emailed me. I had a website from about 1996 onwards, and people would contact me usually because of the books or just because I put inflammatory opinions up on this website. And I had a lot of great conversations with people.
It's still fairly early in the days of the World Wide Web and email. so it was kind of a novelty to get like a email from someone you've never heard of and I would write long long replies to people I still had the mindset of you know of letter writing you know and the epistolary culture so I had this great conversation and probably that's I think the next stage was then Mark I think I have somewhere like very early emails from Mark I kept all my emails in documents so I actually have correspondence with Mark I think and then they sent me these things and yeah I was very excited
by them some of it is quite hard to understand but a lot of it particularly the stuff that Mark did was very pretty clear and very kind of aggressive not aggressively laying down a viewpoint very strongly, it was very intoxicating and they looked amazing as well you know so I was really excited and then I guess I got the sense something really interesting was going on and they had some interesting allies like Orphan Drift and there were some other people that was meant to be in the piece that I think only had a quite small role but I actually interviewed this guy Howard Slater who was doing a fanzine called Break Flow He's a very good friend
of mine very very good to him yeah yeah yeah we've got we collaborated we've done concerts together yeah so yeah he was part of this whole scene around extreme techno hardcore not the junk not even the jungle kind of hardcore but like that praxis no with christopher yes yeah exactly it felt like there was and there was a guy called matthew fuller who did interesting stuff like to do with i don't even know what it was about like hacking and yeah yeah he was like a sort of he was someone not in academia but like using academic ideas in this exciting way um so it felt like there's this sort of um uh what do i call it kind of para-academia or renegade academia yeah yeah like a sort of para-academia like stuff stuff
was on the borderline between the scholarly and the inflammatory and the renegade, zamizdat, I think is another sort of term I would have thrown around, not really with any real sense of its historical meaning, but like the idea of something that was subterranean, that existed outside proper channels. And, you know, I sort of noticed some of the texts quoted me or Kojo Eshin, so he's a little bit flattered to be taken seriously as well. Yeah, they seemed to be very aware of what was going on in the more interesting music journalism of the 90s, and also, yeah, like it was philosophy that was hip to jungle.
That in itself was enough to... The fact that CCIU centred jungle and drum and bass at the heart of their thinking was like, you know, enough to bring me on board in itself, I think, because I was such a believer in jungle and rave culture in general. It's interesting because there is a lapse of time between the moment in which you publish the piece and then the whole reaction around CCRU that I guess has to do with the anthology that Robin published, but as well this weird U-turn of Nick Lange towards the ride, etc. But it's very interesting because your piece still encapsulates very well
what was going on or the general idea about what was going on there at Leamington Spa, etc. Yeah, I don't think there was much else written about them. That's one of the main things. and I don't think there was much where someone, like, you know, it discusses all the ideas, but it's like a reported piece, you know. I actually went, Lingrafanga paid for me to go to England, and I went to their headquarters, and I spent the whole evening with them, and we had a Chinese meal together. I met Matthew Fuller, I met Howard Slater in a fairly greasy cafe in Bethnal Green, and went to Orphan Drift House, you know. is they've got a reported journalism element to it, which makes it a bit more, I spoke, you know, I did, you know,
by that point I'd never been a real journalist until I moved to America and I learned to do secondary reporting. So I spoke to people who, like Andrew Benjamin, the guy they were fighting with at CCIU or in conflict with, I spoke to people disagreeing with them, like Judith Williamson, who gave some great quotes from a more, I wouldn't say traditional left wing, but like a left-wing critique of C.C. So it's a proper piece of journalism. And I'm still a little surprised that, you know, Lingua Franca never ran the piece. I think they thought it was too weird. They were too weird. They weren't sure if these people were real academics. But of course I'm completely vindicated because, you know, say if I was an A&R man,
like, you know, if there's such a thing as an A&R person with intellectuals. And I could have signed up. As a talent spotter, I spotted Mark Fisher, Steve Goodman, Code 9, Robin McKay, Urbanomic. There was a whole bunch of people, several others, who become important thinkers and publishers and or cultural activists like you know like code 90s uh you know i i did i had no idea they were going to do that but yeah history has proved me right and lingua franca wrong it should have run the piece then they would have had that then they could have claimed to spotted these very important
people um early on um so yeah i feel vindicated it's a smaller version of it ended up appearing in an Austrian intellectual magazine, art magazine, and then I put it on the web, and that's how it really sort of had a life, you know, just being on the web, that piece. It's interesting, because then the Guardian piece on accelerationism, how this fringe philosophy anticipated the future, or something like that, it was written in a sort of similar fashion no they came here to you we and they interview Ian and then they went to Cornwell and interview Robin you know it's like 20 years later or something yeah yeah yeah absolutely this was like 2015 or something like that but it was
the same sort of well actually it's a sort of copycat thing and then do you want to talk or or do you have any opinion because maybe you don't have one about how then this sort of dirtbag or anti-woke left somehow co-opted some of the ideas that, for example, Mark was introducing in exiting the Vampire Castle and his later writings. Right. Oh, you mean the critique of identitarian politics? I don't know, I haven't really been following what the dirtbag left doing so much.
What have they taken from him? Well I think that the general, obviously there is some sort of reading that you can take against political correctness and council culture. So this raw attitude of Marx's writings, I think, for some, let's call it or I call it, neo-reactionary or anti-woke political thinkers. But probably this has more to do with the Chap Trap podcast and similar people.
They found something that already had radical potential, but as well, I don't know, it's tricky. I don't know if my team has something to say about this. Well, I don't know. maybe if you can connect it if you see I mean were you surprised by the turn that for example Nick Lund took and because that was kind of clear or it became kind of clear through the years but then I guess Mark I mean he had this famous fallout with Nick Lund but famous that I actually don't know so much Did he? Oh I didn't know that Do you actually have a falling out with him?
Well, these are just kind of legends that I've been hearing through the years, but apparently they were living in almost like a commune type of situation in Stock Newington, and apparently at some point there was this huge fallout between Mark and Nick. I don't know the specifics, but I don't know. for me it kind of connects it's a kind of catastrophic reaction that I've seen in three figures with different degrees but a kind of reaction to liberal left or some kind of leftism you know certainly the strongest will be Nick Land then I've seen something similar how it happens
is very complex but i see something like a kind of allergic reaction to some kind of leftist positions so the second one will be nina power another person who also you know mixed philosophy and music writing and many other kind of this transdisciplinary and the third one in a much less degree will be mark fisher with especially the vampire castle kind of because there is a a kind of conflict within his thinking in regards to some kind of left position but at the same time having quite an identitarian position himself in terms of fetishizing maybe too strong but like a strife towards some kind of british working class of
the social welfare state maybe that it was in the 60s 70s you know certain kind of elements that was there that seemed very that they had a very strong impact to Mark and that he was defending somehow. That was my impression. So yeah, I don't know if you can comment about this catastrophic reaction towards the left from certain thinkers connected to CCRU. Well, I probably am not familiar enough with Nick Land's later writings to comment. I mean, I think I downloaded, is it called The Dark Enlightenment? I downloaded it. Yeah. I just never had the time.
and I'm sort of academically or in a little sense of like in a quite detached way quite fascinated by this turn of events because I've long had kind of an interest in reactionary thinking and this sort of this sort of poisoned view of the world that you get in certain artists and whether it's a writer like Celine or I'm trying to think who else Wyndham Lewis, I read this great little book by Frederick Jameson on Wyndham Lewis. It's really fascinating because there's something about this sort of mindset that produces quite powerful, very powerful writing. And like Selene or Wyndham Lewis' writing is very powerful.
Yet it also leads them to these lamentable political positions. the sort of disgust with humanity that creates this sort of fevered writing, fiction, also leads them to this sort of yeah, you know, it's either fascism or monarchism, you know, there are examples of writers who are monarchists, royalists of some kind, or I don't know, there was some there was some writer I forget his name a Welsh poet and novelist who believed that the future of Wales
should be that it was be independent but be Catholic and have a Welsh king which is just like several completely impossible scenarios you know but that he put all his political eggs in this sort of ridiculous fantasy of what Wales would be like I wish I could remember his name He's quite a famous poet, I think. Yeah, I find that sort of reactionary thinking, you know, or someone, I don't know, I feel like Kingsley Amos at one point was, you know, a communist towing the, you know, the Russian line and then the Soviet line and then abruptly, when the tanks go into Hungary, I think he becomes completely disillusioned and then goes to the other extreme of being this very grumpy sort of
conservative reactionary figure. You know, I'm quite fascinated by the, you know, all E.M. Turin, it wasn't E.M. Turin like a Romanian fascist at one point in his youth. And then he becomes this distempered philosopher of decay and, and misery. Sort of Morrissey of philosophy. I was described him as. So I find that, you know, intellectually I find it quite interesting and like, The idea that people who are reactionary have access to these sort of artistic powers, that their grim view of the world led itself to some kind of poisoned comedy, you know. But yeah, like the political positions are, you know, terrible.
And where was I going with this? So I think in a certain sense, from what I gather, when Nick Land's thought has gone, It seems to be most consistent in a way with what he was doing before. It takes a certain anti-humanist impulse within the CCRU. And that amazing book he wrote, it is an amazing book on George Bataille. It's full of loathing for humanity, for organic biological existence. And it has this apocalyptic delirium to it. you know, that sort of language of fetishizing collapse and sort of enjoying chaos and all that kind of stuff.
There seems to be more of a logic to that that's been carried through to his compositions. I'm not really sure what he politically stands for, but it seems to have the same tenor anyway. Whereas you could say that what Mark was advocating politically in his last years is really a long, long way from what the CCIU were about. I've been reading Post-Capitalist Desire, and it's full of language to do with care and human flourishing and community. community, you know, he still has a little bit of a, he has a little aversion to the word community, which is like a sort of aftertaste of CCIU, not liking anything kind of worthy and wholesome.
But I think the general idea essentially is community, you know. So it's all these sort of kind of quite humanist, I think you probably still intellectually reject the idea of humanism, but I mean, effectively, it's kind of like a social democratic, humanist kind-hearted sort of politics that he's proposing, a politics of joy and you know, he goes on about relaxation, the need for people to relax and have less time working, you know, more time just enjoying things you know, enjoying themselves. It's quite a sort of cuddly politics in a way
that he seems to be heading towards and that's a long way from the kind of talk the CCIU were doing in the 90s yeah there is no techno forget the human human viewpoint obsolete you know the machine has its own agenda technology and capital have their own dark will and humans must be carried along with it I was thinking yesterday because I found this meme that probably you saw before, with a graphic chart going downwards from the death of David Bowie in January 2016, and things going shit with Trump, Brexit, the pandemic, etc. And I was rereading your book, Shock, where you spotted this grim parallelism
between the thing white Duke era of David Bowie and Donald Trump, and these predictions of a strong leader who would, and I quote, sweep through the Western world with a right-wing, totally dictatorial tyranny. And you said, he called for a very medieval, firm-handed, masculine god, awareness where we go out and make the world right again. And it's quite interesting because I can see this after 2016, and it's tragic because as well the death of Mark presents this need for all of us, this need of care, general awareness of mental health issues, etc.,
but at the same time this huge wave of populism, neoreaction, abject forms of masculinity, etc. and then as well we were talking about these movements and figures like Kanye West that could be the closest thing to this Bowie of the thin white duke I don't know if you agree with this but it's this figure that suddenly represents it's the embodiment of a strong leader for the avant-pope movement And I don't know if you see... Yeah, go ahead, please, please.
I think one of the things that's most striking about this era is the power of... Where it relates to glance is the power of the image, you know, and this sort of... So, you know, it's not even the... it's not even like the policies as such or the content of what someone like Trump says, it's just these images that they project, like Kanye West had this whole thing about the red caps, didn't he? Yeah, yeah. How much he mentioned this weird fetish object of the hat, and I think I guess this idea of he seemed to respond
to Trump as some kind of father figure or something, which is if you look at there have been articles about the dreams of Trump fans, how they dream of him as this sort of father figure who came in to look after them and would be like this kindy father so very far from what appears to be the reality of him as a father and as a business leader and all the rest of it but yeah, these horrific images I always think of the thing when they came out in front of the White House and stood by the church holding the Bible, or when he came out of hospital with COVID and had that whole ceremony standing on the balcony,
tearing off his mask, you know, trying to stop not weeds because his lungs are in terrible shape. He's breathing very heavily, but he's trying to do this projection of erect strength. and it's all very fascist. It's also very glam. It's also very PR. The languages of visual languages are all coming from the same place. And it's what a lot of glam artists understood and lived by was the power of these simple images. So I think that's what, I don't know how seriously we can take Bowie's thought.
He seemed to take an unwholesome turn, the combination of extreme fame, cocaine, the magic he was reading. And I think he's also picking up on something in the culture then. This talk about a strong hand to deal with all the filth is exactly the same thing as the speeches that Travis Bickle when Taxi Driver delivers, which is around the same time. It's like 1976. There is this period. And then a bit later you have, or around about the same time, I think you have the Charles Bronson movies where he's a vigilante. Do you know those ones? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Death Wish or something, isn't it? Or something like that. You know, it is like, you know, there's been this explosion of early 70s permissiveness,
pornography explodes sexual openness in entertainment and films pot smoking is semi illegalized in a lot of parts of America it's a very liberal the 60s is kind of happening on a mass level and then by the mid 70s there's this reaction so Bowie was tuned into that I think but also he's kind of going crazy as well so you sort of had to kind of be take it seriously but not seriously in a way he's obviously never going to be a political leader but it is interesting that those are the only
virtually the only public statements he ever made in his career that had a political position and later on he does that song Fashion on 1980 which he presents politics swing to the left, swing to the right as if they're just meaningless swings like fashion changes or something I think he generally was studiously apolitical but yeah I think the nature of his fame and the fact that he had huge crowds you know wrapped by him made him aware of the power of the singer as a sort of leader,
a sort of Fuhrer. So that was in his head as well at that time. Yeah, it's interesting because he used the thunder, didn't he? The thunder in some of the concerts, the kind of Nazi thunder, I guess. Oh, you mean the lightning? Yeah, that's a very potent image, isn't it? Then, I guess, a lot of you know like throbbing grizzle also took a lot of this imagery i mean i don't know who did it before but i guess it was at that time this kind of imagery that i guess it was made with distance with ironic distance and um yeah and then you know but it's interesting that But then after the period, let's say 2016,
it's like this distance was, the irony changed. The meaning of irony changed completely. And many, many young people kind of took these kind of symbols or these kind of representations of power for what they were. And the whole context, it's not, you had Trump in power, you had, you know, like Bolsonaro, you know, you had, you know, almost fascist figures that... Yeah, aesthetically, they're fascist. And that's on the level of which they're winning. You know, I mean, when you see some of the things that are talked about
and the language, if you ever go on the comments of a magazine like Breitbart or something, you hear people talking about, you know, executing and rounding people up and stuff like that. So, you know, I think there is a real potential of fascism there. But it seems, as far as we can see, it's going to be a kind of fascism of cheating, cheating at electoral politics rather than, you know, hopefully rounding people up and killing them. But I don't know, the way things are going, who knows? yeah it's very much like an emotional fascism and an aesthetic fascism and a rhetorical fascism the rhetoric of one nation and closing the borders
and restoring things to how they supposedly were so much better and yeah it's all the rhetorical tropes of fascism are present and correct it's very disturbing time to be alive really and it's so unexpected yeah I mean I think you know one of the things that I found most interesting about America is that a huge sway the population wants a king and America's founded on not having you know it's this foundational act of American existence as a concept is the kicking out of the king of Britain and we rule ourselves but they really want a king. They actually want a dynasty. They want something that, you know,
there are people who would happily give Trump electoral four years and then another four years and then another four years and then give it to one of his kids. This sort of dynastic tendency in American political life is very strange. The cult of the Kennedys. And then this weird thing now where they think like, who's the Kennedy they think still alive and he's going to come and join Trump and be the vice president. It's not Robert Kennedy. I cannot remember the name, but yeah, the other brother. The guy who died. I think the one who died in the plane crash or something. He's not actually dead. He's going to come back and be Trump's vice president
because forgetting all the actual politics of the Kennedy family, which some branches of it were very very liberal indeed, Edward Kennedy but it's to do this glamour of kingliness the glamour of the political dynasty and somehow it makes sense in these people's deranged minds that the glamour of the Kennedys would join with the supposed glamour of the Trumps in this ultimate American royalist uber dynasty, it's just insane it's insane it's medieval thinking, it's child thinking and well, it's not even child thinking I don't think, it's insulting to children I don't know, it's just such a bizarre But do you follow all the conspiracy
things of QAnon and so even as a cultural product? I don't like, I haven't delved deeply into it I have friends who explore that world and are fascinated by it I mean I pick up, I read articles on it I know the basic contours of a lot of these thinking. They're all kind of essentially emotionally the same, aren't they? You know, bad people are taken over. They're, you know, not only do we disagree with them, we can't just disagree with them. They have to be unspeakably bestily, not even bestily, like depravedly inhuman, eating children, having sex with children, trafficking children, you know.
So you have to make your enemies beyond evil, and therefore that justifies the righteous punishment you're going to impose on them. It's depressing. It's very, very crazy that something like the Capitolium event that a year ago could occur. It's insane if you think about it. You see the images. They are memes, like living memes, every single image. It's so weird. I know that you liked quite a lot Ariel Pink. And I guess he was presented there with John Maus. Yeah. That was upsetting. Yeah, I mean, yeah, I really like Aero Pinks' music. And yeah, that was a great surprise and a disappointment that he would be there.
I would probably be smarter than that. But I think it's this emotional, I mean, I can't, I shouldn't speculate really, but I think it's this emotional identification that somehow Trump, maybe for people like Kanye maybe for people like Ariel Pink represents a sort of weird combination of a winner and a victim because a lot of the language Trump uses is they're all out to get me they're evil they're thugs he always uses the word thugs about Democrats Democrats are thugs these radical left Democrats are thugs and they're persecuting me and somehow his persecution, he's an immensely wealthy person and privileged all his life. His supposed victimization
resonates with his demographic, his core base, who feel victimized. They feel they've been cheated of something, some kind of way of life where, I guess, there were good industrial jobs and the concerns of white people were centered and, you know, all this kind of stuff. You know, I mentioned the King thing. One thing that struck me is, again, I haven't explored it very deeply, but I am fascinated by all these sort of incel culture and this sort of pick-up artist culture and this sort of new masculinity thing.
And I was struck by the fact that there's a website, Isn't there a website called something like When We Were Kings? Like that? One of these sort of return to masculinity and men on top and women grateful. One of those sort of anti-feminist pro-masculinity websites called When We Were Kings. It's such an interesting idea. Like when, what does that mean? I don't know. But see, I'm either kingless, the kingliness of Trump is the guarantee or the bolster or the support system for all these micro, you know. Yeah, you wouldn't really be a king. You might be a king over your girlfriend or your wife, you know. You might be the king of the family. So, yeah, I mean, it's fairly standard patriarchy, I suppose. It's not particularly profound. But as a sort of slogan, I thought When We Were Kings
is quite an interesting crystallization of it. I don't know. it's obviously as well the thing about insoculture it's not when we were kings, it's return of kings that's what it is, the return of kings return of kings, yes when we were kings is the name of a documentary I think, about might be about Muhammad Ali I'm not sure but return of kings, yeah so yeah, we have been displaced from our righteous our righteous role as the patriarchs on every level, you know whether it's, yeah, we want a patriarch, a patriarch entertainer as our king, Trump.
Yeah, but it's really depressing that all these subcultures, like the insult or old right obscure forums are proliferating in a moment like, very bleak moment like this with isolation, people constantly like wired into the internet, etc. And then you see a decline in the subversive capacity of new genres of music, but genres of music that entail a certain form of social cohesion or tribalism. I don't know if you found recently any sort of subversive attributes in music subcultures,
or you feel that this progressive individualism and isolation by technological mediation is dissolving this tribal attitude that you could have found in subcultures. subcultures so you yeah I don't know I mean I haven't really seen anything in music that's super inspiring and sort of hope on that level I think it's hard to the moment because everything's kind of suspended so the normal the normal way by which music creates communities or energies
I've kind of been interrupted yeah I don't know I read the piece that your song wrote about micro and it's really nice but at the same time it makes you think about how all these micro genres are trying to compete in this general attention economy how you can select and produce new identities and it's pretty much like the yeah this general dynamic that you can find in social media like instagram or or whatever so yeah i was discussing it with
him and i was saying it you know like it's uh with kieran and um it's like you know can can there really be such a thing as a genre with one artist in it or even just two artists what is the point which you can really say something as a genre usually when enough people agree there's some kind of social energy it gathers around so you have enough people to constitute fans of that genre and other artists and these sort of micro genres or micro micro genres seem to be too fleeting and too small really to to have, you know, you compare it with something like hip-hop, which is a huge cultural formation.
You know, it's a long way from that. On the other hand, some of the subject matter, you know, in some of this music is coming from people who are trans or queer. So people who are fans of the music often find, you know, a connection with it. So you can say it has some... Yeah, emancipatory... So, you know, it's sort of like a new form of post-geographical neighbourhood, I suppose. I mean, I think some of these artists do actually perform live and they have...
my son's been to like micro raves under under a bridge in brooklyn so there are these but it's it's sort of um yes uh it's quite um seems to have a fr an ability to fracture even you know the fracturing of genres has been on for a while it was going on in the 90s wave cards when it fractured into all these different tangents but this is like a new level of speed of fracture and of scale of fracture where it's like a splinter of a splinter of a splinter. So yeah, how it doesn't seem to lend itself to sort of to massification and gathering of energy
in a large way. I suppose, you know, the most hopeful example of politics and pop in recent history would be the grind for Corbyn, wouldn't it? But that actually seemed to have, as far as you can tell, seemed to have some consequential effects on that election. And ultimately, it didn't all win very badly with Boris Johnson being elected. But there was a moment where it felt like, you know, there was an unprecedented coalition of youthful support for what is actually a pretty moderate left-wing program, but you know, by the standards of politics of the last 30 years, it felt pretty radical,
some of the things being proposed. But I suppose what interests me about, I've written about as someone who was like a fan of early grime and then kind of lost interest in it. One thing that struck me was that although it had this political effect, you look at the lyrics of grime and they're not socialist in their consciousness at all. It's not even that they don't have lyrics about increasing funding to libraries or protecting the NHS, which you wouldn't really expect. But they don't have the actual values in them. They're all like, you know, life is tough. You've got to struggle. If you dream, you can make it.
Which actually connects to Trump, because one of the things I find most fascinating about Trump is him being the president of positive thinking. You know, like his actual belief system, which is kind of like the American religion, is positive thinking. If you want something strongly enough, you can get it. Which is something that Mark wrote about. Didn't he talk about magical volunteerism? Was a term he used. This sort of idea that your own fate is entirely in your hands. And if you just have enough willpower and determination, you're going to make it. So, yeah, a lot of the actual sort of lyrics and viewpoints in grime crime are more on the lines of that sort of, you know, motivational thinking and work
hard, you know, how hard they work. So, what I'm saying is that what happened was that there's nothing in the content of Grime, that led to Grime to Corbin and Grime for Corbin and the effects it seems to have had. It was entirely the sort of status as sort of representatives of youth that someone like Stormzy had, that sort of star power and respect he had with young people that had an effect rather than any content in the actual music. And what has been the latest genre of music that you've been interested or fascinated by or that it gave you a kick or excitement made you feel excited about um well the very latest one
it's not really the genre because the other artists are quite interesting but i don't so love them but really it's this group dry cleaning um that's far and away the most exciting record I've heard certainly in the sort of vague area of rock, you know, for a long, long time. And it's not that it's so exciting music. I think it's really good musically, you know, and it's really enjoyable, but it's got a quite traditional kind of post-punk sound. On my blog, I said it's almost like post-punk has become like the blues. You have this certain kind of Peter Hook kind of bass line. You know, you have this sort of scratch of guitar, whatever. You have this formal features of post-punk now.
It's codified as this quite narrow set of parameters. But really, it's the lyrics and the delivery of Florence Shaw that I think is so amazing. And actually, quite soon after sort of falling for this record and listening to it obsessively, I started thinking, like, ah, this is almost like it relates to certain things Mark Fisher wrote about, like the boring dystopia, depressive hedonism, there's a lot of references in the lyrics to sort of food, like little snacks and treats you give yourself to get through life. But just the utter sort of, it's very funny record, but it's sort of, it's kind of sort of heartbreaking at the same time. Like there's a sort of sense of the emptiness of life today and the disappointments and
sort of inanity and stupidity of so much of the stuff that is just the kind of the sort of everyday churn of the reality we live through so I thought I found it really powerful in terms of actual music probably the last thing that I thought was really amazing was all this stuff all the stuff going on in in trap using using auto-tune and other effects on the voice and it's sort of you know this stuff with kit kit this guy kit mackintosh wrote a really interesting book about it called neon screams on repeater and it's um it's it's rather it's kind of gone beyond you know there are lyrics
and they are almost quite funny and strange but really it's post language you know it's like the voices to pure texture and it has a very strange subjectivity in it that's kind of different from earlier rap it's kind of almost they're still rapping about you know women and expensive designer commodities and and sometimes gang life as well but they seem very kind of and almost androgynous, very soft and melted and partly it's to do with drugs I think and the kind of use of prescription and drugs that are intended to be used against anxiety or depression
are being used as drugs of abuse and drugs of intoxication. It creates this very woozy, dreamy kind of numbness, like blissed out numbness. And again, I sort of related to this thing of Marx, the depressive hedonism, the secret sadness of the 21st century that you wrote about in connection with Drake, and Kanye West and people like that. It's sort of quite a bleak view of the, as a picture of where people's heads are at, it's quite a bleak picture of it, but as music, I think it, People like Migos, Playboy Carti, Future, Young Thug, many others, Travis Scott, you know, just texturally.
And it's always, you know, there is more amazingly weird music being made, I'm sure, in tiny internet communities and in academia and, you know, in the conceptual electronic world. But the fact that it's happening on the radio, you can turn the radio and it's sort of... To me, as a creature, the era of the radio. If we're driving through LA, I turn on the radio and a track like Goosebumps by Travis Scott is on the radio. It sounds like this melted radio head track almost, like from Kid A. Or, I don't know, some of the Migos songs, you know, and it's actually on the radio. It just seems so exciting that something that strange is part of mass culture.
But that really was a few years ago. I think since then, I don't know. What do you think? What excites you? Well, I don't know. The Donda album by Kanye West. Donda, the last album, still is a pretty weird album. Yeah, I mean, for mainstream culture. But you are right. This is something that actually I talked once with Codenai, with Steve Kaufman, about the prevalence of very avant-garde techniques in voice processing in mainstream hip-hop. It's incredible. I don't know. Do you like 100 Gigs? I've heard a few things. Actually, my son was really into them.
My son is really, you know, it's almost like the passing of the baton or the job down. He has that young man's hunger to find new things. He's constantly chasing new sounds, new genres. So he sends me clips of a lot of these things and some of them I like, but not a lot of them excite me as much as when I was turning the radio on and hearing Future or something like that. Do you rate 100 kicks?
Well, I think it's a good representation of this extremely fragmented world with limited attention spam and this huge mix of genres and lack of any sort of respect for the context specific attributes of these aesthetics whatsoever. I don't find it like... I feel old for this sort of music as well. But the... How old are you? I'm 36. 36, yeah. Well, I'm 58. You can imagine how old I feel when Kieran sends me these sort of clips of things.
A lot of them, I genuinely don't quite see the appeal of them because they're very sort of, yeah, it's very much like, yeah, you feel like, I don't know, like if you listen to a lot of it, like a whole mix of it, you feel like you've drunk three Red Bulls or something, or, you know, you feel like, you kind of, like your nerves are shot, you know. It's so full of stuff going on, you know. I suppose in some way, it's interesting actually, like one of the words they use on this scene is glitchcore. Yeah. And that's a word that's quite an old word because it was used around the year 2000 or so to describe kids 606 and and I don't certain others you know there was a whole bunch of sort of stuff that at
that time seemed very attention span weakening and kind of crazed combined combination of genres but this stuff is a whole other level and it's got the this sort of extreme auto tune and and it jumps around between genres in a really manic way. I find it interesting precisely for avoiding this trap of Retromania and so I see that these kids they like Naked City or they like New Metal from the 90s but they have no interest whatsoever in Resuscitate, certain scene or something like that. They address this in a sort of extremely detached way,
like a color palette, or I don't know how to describe it. Absolutely, yeah, it's like all of history is there for them to steal things from them, but they don't have any sense of its context really, or only a very vague sense, and they just take these sort of sounds and these signifiers. Signifiers have kind of got detached from their signifiers in a really radical way and you can just mush them all together. It's totally like, as you say, like a palette of colours. Yeah, essentially, yeah, it is without nostalgia. And even when it does use old things, there isn't. Like for instance, some of the stuff that my son's played to me is people actually making modern day jungle.
But it's not like they've, like I doubt if any of them have done a lot of research, they probably haven't read my book or any of the other books on jungle. They just heard it on the internet. They probably found a YouTube tutorial that says, here's how to take a break and chop it up. And they've done a version of it that's quite nice. You know, it's quite nice. It doesn't have any, you know, it's hard to imagine it ever being played in a club or having a social dimension of what Jungle once meant. But it sounds nice. And there's another artist called Pink Pantheress, who's quite big, who takes a lot of tracks involved taking old beats, you know, almost the whole of a Jungle track or a U.K. Garage track,
and then putting her own songs on them. And again, yes, it sounds really, really nice. And there might be a little bit of nostalgia for me, but I don't think the artist feels nostalgia. They're just using this stuff because it's great old rhythms you can reuse. It's a bit like in the way in reggae culture, like in the 90s, you know, mostly people were doing dancehall, but sometimes they'd take a very old roots rhythm from the 70s and then put, you know, dance or ragga kind of vocals over it. Like it's kind of, you know, it's much less like, it's not like quoting or referencing, it's much more like cannibalizing a car, you know, you take an old engine out of a car
and you put it in a new car or something like that. Just totally pragmatic reusing of rhythms. Yeah, and in terms... Do you know, for example, this label, Niegge Niegge Tapes? I've seen the name, I'm not entirely sure what it references. Is it world? Is it kind of world music? Well, it's mixing very interesting, you know, like, you know, like pushing many boundaries, kind of, you know, African rhythms with industrial, you know, hardcore music. Like, well, it's very varied. There is a lot of varied music, but it's a label from Uganda that is becoming quite big. And a lot of African artists who,
the production is very pushy and this is getting quite a lot of attention this connection is this doesn't make you feel by any means nostalgic or maybe they are taking I'm thinking also of Principe Records which has already been going for quite a lot in Lisboa making with Kududo something really raw and hardcore and And yeah, I find this quite exciting. Yeah, they are very exciting. That's indeed a good example. They have this band, well, they have many, many bands. Duma, who did a crazy mix between, I don't know,
Greencore and Trap or something like that last year. And then they released a 7-inch in Sub Pop, I think, this year. but they had sounds of C so very very fast and aggressive music it's incredible and Duma they are touring Europe now many days and they're all principating I think no no no this is me again oh yeah yeah alright so I'll check them out they sound good yeah I've seen the name I sort of got the vague sense it was something to do with African rhythms and eventually do they have anything to do with what's that style music called? Is it Gekwom or something?
Well, that's in South Africa. I don't know if they have, you know, I don't know if they have some South African, like, non-artists, but I think there are connections. I think people are connecting quite a lot, you know, from what I heard. It's like bringing a lot of people together. I remember one artist is already quite, you know, there was a duo called Faka. That's right. I think they had like, you know, production or close to. Is that the correct pronunciation? That's what I heard. That's what I heard. Sorry. It's a good sound. I like that. Yeah, it's pretty amazing. That was a band that I was, I don't know if they're still active, but I saw them live
and they blew me away. They had a kind of queer style, very performative and so powerful. I mean, it was just one of the best things that I've seen, but that was already five years ago. And I guess another figure that I found very interesting is Pink Sifu. Pink Sifu? Yeah, Miguel has seen him live. Yeah, he's from Philadelphia. No? He's from Philadelphia, right? Or I am wrong. I don't remember. But he has a lot of records that he started maybe, I don't know, in 2015, 2014. And then with Black Lives Matter he did this record called Negro that is so...
You know, it's like doing punk, but it's like taking this idea from black metal of Necro music, music you know like necro recording is recorded so so raw and it's uh it really fits the mood but life is um is like sometimes uh uh bad brains but other times as well very like kind of orchestra free jazz scales it's very interesting a lot of rap you know like really a lot of rap and That's a figure that kind of blew me away for sure. Certainly, I guess for me, you know, it's been, yeah, people in the last years, people like Chinoa Moby, Matana Roberts, Moore Mother,
has been people who dealt with history, their history, their fucked up history, you know, like, and there is no obviously there is no melancholy nostalgia or anything it's just like hardcore confrontation with this fucked up history and then propelling it into the present and obviously there is a present that is extremely urgent and you know with Black Lives Matter and it's yeah it's the music that I've you know felt more well, I don't know, urgent, but also sophisticated and very interesting ways of
especially dealing with time and history. I mean, Moor Mother comes from this group called Black Quantum Futurism in which they apply kind of idea of, you know, African ideas of time, but also in regards to Afrofuturism and you know ideas that come from quantum mechanics and how to play around with time and for the lyrics they are it just kind of blows you away the way that they take you into places and they play with different temporalities that they are simply not used to and and and it's making something quite unique certainly non-nostalgic it's interesting because actually they are very
influenced by Kodo and the Otolith group. Gojo, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Interesting. So you were just talking about Pink's Cypher, did you say? Pink's Sifu. Sifu. Yeah, that's very interesting. I'll have to check them out. Very powerful. And in terms of writing, because I was reading your forward to Mark Fischer's Cape Punk and it's very touching you really feel that there was something going on at that time early 2000s with the blogosphere that it really
kicked something up and that you know what you would say that you would wake up in the morning to see what other person has written and And Robin was also talking about this today, which sounds like something crucial and urgent was happening every day in terms of discussion. And I was obviously wondering if you get similar feeling in terms of music writing today somewhere, or if there is some kind of exciting writing today that you could maybe think of. Not really. I think probably where it's happening is probably in books more.
I don't know. I mean, there were two books, actually both on repeater last year that really excited me. One was the one I mentioned, Neon Screams by Kit McIntosh. And then the other one was by Leslie Chow called Your History. and they're both very sort of original both very enjoyable and both short as well as someone who writes these enormous long books like 600 pages I think was the last one I was impressed that both books are like really short but bursts of excitement about music and there's probably other ones that I'm not
thinking of that where people are doing the most interesting writing around is within this book within book format I don't know I'm just not really a magazine that I look to regularly you know it's this you know just sort of names that pop up some of them are very old reliable names I don't want to say I mean, they've been around a while, like, you know, you read Philip Sherban on a new burial record and it's really good and interesting. But then there's, I don't know, probably younger names as well that crop up regularly. up regularly but there's not really a publication where where I sort of check every day or you know
to see what's going on there. Yeah I mean the blogs there are still blogs and there are still people who blog quite actively but there isn't you know like someone like Xena Gothic. Yeah. Yeah, but maybe he's the only one that he has like an incredible blog that you can expect something. Yeah, very, very long in-depth essays that are sort of like seem to be written very quickly, but like read like something that someone spent months writing. And so it's very energetic, but there isn't... In the old days there was the sort of energy of that level spread across, you know, 20 blogs
that were all in communication with each other. So, yeah, it's a bit of a shame. I do miss that. do miss that i mean i feel like a lot of that energy got pulled into uh facebook and twitter so and podcasts no as well yeah yeah podcasts i've never quite you know i never quite got with the podcast program but you know i appear on them and i do listen to them and yeah that seems to be where um where a lot of the sort of energies yeah the problem is that most of it i don't listen to a lot of music podcasts but generally they are like wide of like hot takes etc but yeah it's uh
obviously a lot of journalism now is on there but the problem is as well that this sort of decline of the music as a form of art that consolidates in this thing so-called album is disappearing so unless you are trying to react to instagram stories and singles like really immediate feedback um i don't know what what do you think about this this general decline of of album and this post album era do you have are you concerned or you don't mind or um i must admit i find it hard to
listen to a whole album myself. It's almost like a sort of discipline of listening that has been weakened. When it happens, when you get an album that you want to play over and over again and listen to many, many times, it's a really great feeling for me. Like Dry Cleaning was one. I don't know. Every year there's a bunch of albums, just a few albums really, that have that effect where you want to play them over and over again. But often I find with listening to records that I sort of check them out and it's almost like ticking a name on a list, you know.
I've done that. And it's whether you go back to it, I suppose, is the thing. But I mean, there seems to be a tendency for people to make things that resemble albums in the classic vinyl sense, that they're like 40 to 50 minutes long. You don't seem to get quite so many people doing these enormously long. There was a period when the CD was quite a new invention, when people would feel like they had to fill it up. So they do 70 minutes long albums. and in rap there was a tendency to sort of do skits and kind of things to pad them out that was a trend actually a long time ago really
not relevant anymore but then I don't know at some point in the 2000s people seemed to start deliberately making shorter albums that resembled the length of a vinyl album like Vampire Weekend put out a record that was like, their first record was like 36 minutes long or something, 37 minutes long. And that was wonderfully refreshing, because that sort of seems to be about the right length. Unless it has to be like a really sprawling, enormous work, and each track is 25 minutes long or something. There's definitely something about that length of like half an hour to 45 minutes that is, I don't know, maybe it's only people who grew up with vinyl albums that feel that way. I don't know, maybe my son's generation doesn't have that. that temporal thing but it just feels to me like that's the right length for an album that you're
going to digest and and um uh so yeah records that are like that sort of the dry cleaning one is like that it's only has nine songs i think something like that on it ten maybe um it's like a good it's a it makes my strongest aim and i think it encourages people to leave out up lesser tracks, go for a more cohesive mood. I don't know. It seems to be something that people, there still seems to be like within criticism, there still seems to be this interest in masterpieces. I like that. The masterpiece album seems to be a demand within critics and a certain kind of music fan. But in practice, I personally am much more like a track oriented
I think I often I find there's like you know one really amazing tune on a record that that's the one I fixate on and I go back to but like the rest of it the whole work of it you know have that appeal may I ask how are your listening habits like how do you actually you know how you encounter a piece of audio what you know you have like certain ways of listening or recall? Practically speaking, a lot of it has become streaming just because it's so easy. Streaming or checking things out on YouTube, sometimes Bandcamp and things like that.
But yeah, a lot of the time it's streaming. I have done writing for Tidal. Some of the things I've most enjoyed writing have been for Tidal and so that's they give you a subscription and it's a really useful thing to have. You know, I think I suppose we're all supposed to be boycotting Spotify now. I did use Spotify a bit despite the adverts. This is crazy. What do you think about this? The thing about Spotify? Because now it should be extremely clear for everyone that they are not interested in music. because in this sort of weird competition between Neil Young and Joe Rogan, they obviously decided that they are content providers,
but they are not content providers of music. Specifically sound. Yeah, yeah. And so a lot of their stuff now is like podcasts and programs and things like non-musical. I don't use it either, no, but as a statement, no? deciding that okay they are fine with Neil Young opting out it's like it's a huge statement it is and it seems to really backfired I have to confess I haven't really been following the story except just that you know they've pulled all his music off the site which is which is like a huge insult, isn't it, really? It's a huge affront to,
even if you don't actively follow Neil Young's music, like, I don't. He's someone that I sort of have this great respect for, based on just a few records, really, like Zuma and Russ Never Sleeps and a few others. And he's an amazing live performer, I saw once. But yeah, I'm not actually, I haven't actively followed his work for decades really but he's such a venerable figure and seems to have integrity and all these things as far as I know he's a good person so it's like a you know but just as a figure in rock you know he's this sort of figure of integrity it's a huge affront. And the other guy is a charlatan, he's like you are removing a musician that it's history
of the 20th century and you are living there a child. It's insane. Yeah, it is chilling I suppose. Is it just entirely based on the calculus of the number of streams they get? I mean they paid millions for Rogan I think when they hired him. But it's it's scary for streaming as well because how music depends on certain infrastructure that now is, yeah, it has potentially shapes the music relation to larger anti-democratic tendencies than depends on power structures that we have no clue about how do they work.
It's really scary, you know? Because actually my question about the post-album era is that some artists, like for example I was thinking about Rosalia and other mainstream urban artists, they see that they can make a career out of sporadic singles, videos, collaborations and this sort of cycle.
okay you do something with fashion industry you do something for I don't know a video game and then you release a music video and so but the album as such as the result of your artistry is declining somehow and I don't know for how long we are able to carry this sort of corpse from the 20th century like this idea of physical even though we have this huge revival and probably refining well I was gonna say just adding going back to the how I listen to things although I practically speaking it's a lot of it is either streaming or you know pump some PR people do still send me like zip files and things like that
it's not a very satisfying way of listening and actually recently like about three weeks ago, as you can see, I actually moved my stereo, which had been in the main living room, into this office. And the goal is to get back into the habit of listening to vinyl and make use of this collection, you know, this large collection of vinyl that I've accrued through being a fan and also, you know, at certain points I would be sent a lot of vinyl when I was first a music writer. So it's all sitting there. It's been sitting there for years, hardly used. So and I've always avant-garde electronic music that I want to listen to on vinyl. So I've moved it in here. So far
it's only worked if I just decide to just play vinyl all day. But like if I try and go back and forth streaming and the internet wins. And then that's a very unsatisfying way of listening because I find that I'm often distracted by something else. It might even be looking for another piece of music related to something I'm writing about or I'm teaching about. So I'll be using the pause a lot. So you're constantly stopping what you're listening to to hear something else that's related to what you're actually working on. And it's a very choppy, unmusical way of listening to music. Or at least with vinyl, it's so annoying, not that annoying, but it's slightly more annoying and physical to get up and lift the needle up but you tend to let it roll all the way
through so and i think that's a better way of listening to music um i don't really like streaming but if it is so um insidiously convenient you can't help using it i find um so it's a sort of crazy situation because I have like you know a lot of vinyl a lot of CDs I have a lot of tapes actually sometimes I like to get tapes out cassettes out and play them something about the format even the sound is kind of nice I think what do you guys use yeah no I agree with you is I also have the three you know I have a
stereo with all the you know with cassette cd and vinyl actually cd is quite enjoyable you know because it's in between you know like you can just like play it and it plays you know all the way obviously you don't get the warmth and the they sound pretty good though really i think for most people unless you're a real hi-fi you know someone spending thousands of dollars on your hi-fi for most people's CD is a better sound and yeah you can let it roll through but you can also reconfigure it to like the exact tracks you like you know yeah I think you know I think CDs have quite a lot going for them I think they actually sound better than ever like judging by judging by reissues yeah in fact I guess now with because you know vinyl is now taking a year to
produce so I think people are getting back into CDs and discovering oh wow it's actually quite cheap to produce a you know they don't have the glamour that they had but uh once they had and it's not vinyl but uh it's practical yeah it's not a bad format it doesn't have the glamour i don't think i don't think that's going to be a glamour of box sets or you know all the different ways whether it's you know the plastic case that gets cracked or chipped or it's the cardboard things which seem like nicer, but they tend to get worn out around the edges and start to look kind of shabby and crap. It is never going to have the glamour of something like this. This is actually a reissue.
Yeah. It's not the real thing, but, you know. Oh, here's another one, another reissue. Hawkwind, Space Ritual. Then I have all these sort of electronic things. obscure electronic records like this one by Ralph Lundsten the Swedish you are listening to a lot of early electronic and music concrete stuff, no? yeah, it's sort of become this weird obsession, I don't know why, there's something about that era that, I don't want to say it's glamorous but it's got a kind of romance I suppose, it's a kind of romance somehow, you know, these people very excitedly trying to break into a new frontier of music
confident that in the future everyone will listen to this kind of music they didn't foresee that there would be this return back to orchestras and things like that tonality and you see the images of the studio complexes with all their computers and, you know, it looks like a space station. And sometimes people are quite formally dressed, you know, with their ties and suits. But then there's also the stuff in the 70s that they tend to have long hair and look more like hippies. You know, I just find an endless interest in it,
the fact that it was so widespread and that almost, you know, all these different countries, you know, there's all this amazing Latin American music concrete. Poland, you know, these countries like Poland are like major players. All this interesting stuff is happening. I got very interested in experimental animation, like sort of before digital. And quite often there's a connection between, between, like say in Poland, I can't pronounce the name of it. It's a state run thing, obviously, studio something, something. But like they're doing all this weird, really weird, artistically experimental, kind of disturbing or grotesque animation.
But then they also get like, Kutowski, I don't remember all the names. all these bogus law I think is another one all these people who were like music concrete guys do the soundtracks to these really weird creepy animations out of Poland and Czechoslovakia and so I find that connection really fascinating as well yeah but there's just an endless there's more and more of it you know it's very interesting how many female electronic experimental people there were and Pauline Oliveira is a really famous one
but there's like many many quite obscure ones maybe only a handful of things that ever got on record you know you look them up and they have a long list of compositions but maybe one or two pieces got on like a compilation of stuff that came out on a label with a title like you know electronic music and some I don't know a very austere sort of title Do you know Robert this album that actually it was your present matching Roberta Settles Isolation No I don't know that one Ah you will you will love it What's the name of the artist? Roberta Settles Oh yes I do yes I have come across that yes exactly she's someone who I found
on the internet and there's only a few pieces right but like, didn't she go on to design shoes or something? Yeah, I was living in Stockholm, she was living in Stockholm, she's American, and in Gambla Stan she had these, not just shoes, it's sandals. Sandals, oh that specific. Yeah, yeah, yeah, and I was going there and see if I could meet her and then she died. I played in the Homemates concert which was, I guess, a highlight in my life. But see, that record, In Memoriam to Rieke Meinhof, and yeah, it's a very interesting record. There was a record label run by the state, but like the avant-garde, you know, maybe the studio, maybe there is this amazing studio in Stockholm called EMS.
Oh, yeah, yeah. And there was this label that it was a state run, but like by the kind of avant-garde, you know, I guess people maybe connected to Tech Sound and Free Jazz and things like that. They invite her to do the record. But then because of the title, and I guess maybe also the artwork, they said, no, no, no, it's too radical. So it's been reissued, has it? No, in fact, she put it out herself, Crazy Seen Music, the label, and it's the best, coolest record, you know, with the cover, the plastic, everything is just like the coolest in, I guess, 80s. I've not seen that one, I've heard some other things. I have it here but I won't find it.
But otherwise, but it's like the sleeve has the blood in the plastic sleeve and then the album has these images, no? Of Ulrike Meinhof from the newspaper. Yeah, with text and everything. And then the record is ultra sophisticated, minimal. you know i mean it's like pre-bernard gunther you know super super quiet but precise electronic music you know one of the best records maybe the coolest record that i i can think of yeah yeah well i've got to check that out yeah it just seems to be endless and so yeah it's just a weird obsession that I've pursued
I don't know I'm less interested in what's coming out of musical academy today I don't know why there's something about the sound of this early stuff the kind of reverbs they used and and I think you can hear more struggle somehow with the technology to achieve the results. I don't know why that should matter. I don't know why should it matter that you have to struggle. I don't know. I feel like it's just something you can sense a monumental ambition when people were struggling, like cutting up little bits of tape and sticking them together it taking a month for something to make a track whereas nowadays you can just move things around
very very easily and create similar kind of weirdness weird constructions of sound but there seems to be uh you seem to be able to hear the facility of digital culture in it and it doesn't quite have but then again you know i am my interest used to have a sort of cutoff point and then it's gradually creeping into the 80s and 90s and the early days of digital when it was it was quite clunky there's a kind of clunky early digital sound which you know the pop music version of that would be like the art of noise where um they had to use very very short samples you know like a sample was like one second long or 1.2
seconds long i think was there so they have a whole aesthetic built of these stabby sounds you know and uh so you can in in experimental music using digital early digital technology in the 80s and 90s you could you you have a sort of similar feeling of struggle against those limitations that becomes appealing in fact i'm sorry please go ahead i think it's an odd way to react to music it's almost like a kind of puritan aesthetic a protestant work aesthetic or something like they had they really struggled it's hard for them but i think that i think it comes through in some way in the same way like a music where where where there's a real drummer sweating you
know yeah it may not be as impressive as some beats you can program but it has a certain quality that makes it different, not necessarily superior, but definitely you hear the exertion, you hear the band, you know, physically exerting themselves to make music. Yeah, I was thinking of the, you know, because while reading, you know, your foreword to Mark Fissel's, I discovered Degeneration, the group that he had, the record Entropy in the UK.
and I could really feel like they were pushing with the samplers, you know, what they could do and start to do the breakbeat, you know, Manchester, but like, it's like a very sophisticated Manchester type of music with great, great samples, but you could feel that they were trying to push, do something with sound, do kind of, but, you know, like, I was trying to think of the tension that you were describing in regards to what concrete music was doing to music and like the way they were tearing it apart and you know there was a contrast to perhaps with mainstream music it's like really offering a new approach in terms of structural music that will demand a new perception in what
we you know music will mean and it was at the same time happening when music had the power to subjectify young people in ways that maybe never before in history had, because obviously the record history is quite short. And I think both of those two things, the capacity to structurally push music around and that capacity for music to have a strong impact in young people, both have obviously dissipated. And I think maybe for you more than us, just because you were a bit younger and perhaps you were at the peak of that moment of the capacity for music to really have a strong impact on young people and make them, you know, maybe for you, but like what Robin was saying, that he started to have an interest in philosophy because of music.
and you know like that music had that potential to save people people's young people's uh desires ways of thinking ways of dressing and i think that is really changing or it's not it doesn't have i mean certainly with fashion and everything yes it says what people but i i think that capacity to change people young people's perception and you know i have such a star a strong role in their life i think that's changing yeah i felt well not often but i've increasingly felt like you know um very much aware that so my whole framework of thinking about music is
comes from the 60s really and that's why I was kind of interested in the fact that Mark Fisher kind of was drifting back through time in his later writing and getting into people like Mark Fuser and talking about the Beatles like in this in the post-capitalist desire that I'm reading right now he sort of brings up the Beatles as sort of living this dream life that everyone should live because they could just do exactly what they wanted but as they got more more famous and powerful and wealthy they got more and more experimental you know and he holds it up as this ideal of life of course hard to imagine how most people could live like the Beatles but yeah yeah the Beatles certainly I think
represented for youth a sort of the band itself, the idea of the band as a group of people is like a little microcosm of some kind of collectivity I think. Some ideal way of living where you know work is play and play is work. You know I think is a very 60s idea I suppose. but yeah you know like punk and post punk are obviously still have a relationship with the 60s and then even when you get to like rave I think the part of rave I was most interested in did not really particularly have any relationship with the 60s but like you know initially people talked about the second summer of love and even the word
using the word rave the word rave is a sort of word that was used in the 60s Pink Floyd would have an all night rave there was a youth magazine called rave people talking about ravers like people who were just really wild dancers so yeah but all that feels like I think probably for young people now that all feels like a long time ago I should imagine and very hard to reconstruct and relate to what they're doing now I'm teaching at the moment and a lot of the courses I do draw on stuff from the 60s 70s 80s And although I'm doing my best to reconstruct the situation that these ideas emerge from and these musics and their utopianism,
I'm aware that it must seem like a really long time ago to a lot of these students who were born after the year 2000. Some of them were. Some of them would have been born roundabout, I don't know, late 90s. but yeah, most of them are like, you know, entirely 21st century people and the conditions don't apply and... I think, you know, I think clearly music does have some role in shaping consciousness, I mean, particularly with what's going on with gender and sexuality, I think, you know, there's a lot of music that relates to do with that and like sort of has a kind of emo-ish kind of quality is very much dealing with pain and
and loneliness and confusion and stuff in the way that indie music has before so it's not that it doesn't have you know it's not that people don't pay attention to what singers say or their public statements or their you know their allegiances you know and the stands they make people still set great store sorry to yeah it just came another thought came to mind in order to complement yes but i guess the potential for our revolution is too much but for um change society that has disappeared because in the city yeah it had the potential and it was transforming you know
many of the values and it was uh and but at the same time there was the possibility of something happening that it could be otherwise you know maybe 68 they started to break that dream but the potential that you know there could be a future a very different type of future that in the 60s was obviously available and then that has gone down the drain and now it's not surprising that you are describing this music with the term depressive hedonism, I think it was, because there is this, what Mark Fischer would call capitalist realism, which I think is a very problematic term because it's totalizing,
it's almost like ontologizing the power of capitalism, which is something that we're just reproducing, but the possibility of thinking that life could be otherwise, that it could be, you know, that definitely has changed and made the potentiality of music to have a very different role. While previously it did change society, it did change, you know, and it did maybe offer a point towards a different type of reality, now that has certainly dissipated and it's like you are in the trap and let's see how you deal you know with the trap that we are in interestingly enough you know the trap is the music you are you
know that is describing maybe some of these feelings it's so appropriate the word trap isn't it yeah it is one of the most popular globally popular forms of music i did a piece for the face a few years ago that was about the internet i think i even worked out with something like trap internationally like um deliberately playing off the associations of the word internationally but like you know the fact that there are people making trap in slovenia in in uh you know all around the world there's forms of trap music um and they all have the same uh the same tent the same bleak view of life really is at the root of it. Talking of the long life of the Beatles though, I was very struck that Ray Strowman did this
record called Black Beatles. Again, that idea of the Beatles as this somehow representing this perfect existence and you know, a life we'd all like to live. You know, and they're boasting very humorously and touchingly that they have attained that level of life's just a groove. You know, I think it's just something like, there's a line about, you know, I'm like a young man living like an old geezer, like a really wealthy person. Unfortunately, Ray Strowman also did a song called Up Like Trump. This is before Trump was elected, but, you know, Trump is sort of their idea of, you know, a great life living like Trump, you know. so yeah
different kind of messages coming from the same thing but what was I going to say? I had something to say that was related to this it's gone sorry no worries yeah no I think you're right I mean I just I suppose the question the sort of big question is whether it was all an illusion or whether it was There really was this moment when pop music had, you know, certainly I think it felt at the time that there was this explosion of youth energy that was initially just this raw demand for fun and excitement, which was like early rock and roll in the early 60s.
And then it achieves consciousness of itself. And then, yeah, the Beatles and particularly John Lennon go through all the different stages of it. they have the attempt to leave Western consciousness by exploring drugs and mysticism. Then he gets into politics and does all these really strong statements. Imagine is a very strong lyrical statement of another way of life is possible. there's a famous interview with is it Red Dwarf or like with Tariq Ali like where Lennon and Yoko talk about revolution and the workers live in a dream and all this kind of stuff
he's wearing a black beret and then it all collapses back into private life and the marriage and this idea that I think Yoko said something like I don't know what it was but it's basically you know we can make heaven on earth but only between the two of us and our kids, you know, and our inordinate wealth, you know. So it's this collapse into just the, yeah, well, the last album's called Double Fantasy, isn't it? Which is sort of like, you know, the return to a very privatized hope, you know. So the whole trajectory of it is sort of in there. You can see a similar trajectory with Sly and the Family Stone. Like you could say there's all this hope and unity and crossing racial boundaries with the early Sly Stone music
and then there's a riot going on, it's kind of like a blueprint for hip-hop really, it's where the beginnings of the next phase of black music and the beginnings of hip-hop really kind of could be said to start from at least the consciousness in that record, which is very bleak consciousness and then, you know, yeah, so So there's all these sort of moves that sort of recapitulated slightly different ways over the ensuing decades. Rave music is sort of like this, yeah, politics of joy and community. And then it takes a turn to the dark and becomes much more gritty. And there's a riot going on, like, you know, with Jungle.
and sort of reformulations of the same material, the same impasses, I guess, are sort of confronted and evaded and reconfigured over and over again through the history of music. There are certain elements that make certain music at a particular time exciting. There is something that is doing. And I just wanted to ask you, what do you think these are? What are the related kind of elements or connections that make certain music interesting, you know? What are those things that then dissipate
and then maybe stops having that kind of edge? You know, what is what it brings these either scenes or groups or musicians, that edge? what constitutes what it makes that interesting vis-a-vis the time that they were done oh that's a big question um i i don't know i mean i think i i tend to this sort of i don't know if this is the right use of the word dialectical but you know there's a feel like with music like um there's almost like a kind of corrective mechanism within it like you know go a certain path, pursue it, and then it becomes a dead end. And then people realize that something was missing. Maybe not even consciously, but it's like, we realize that
but the sort of like something drives them in a completely different direction. So I'm trying to think of a good example. Well, like with, you know, say with post-punk, like post-punk comes out of punk and it's presenting the world in, you know, stripping the romance out of what, of the world in the sense, in an important sense, it's kind of no fun music. You know, the message of it is no fun, even though like say when the Sex Pistols cover no fun by the Stooges, it's the most exciting, you know, stampeding music and they make no fun sound like fun. I suppose that's the trick of punk that it's, yeah, it's dealing with all this negative stuff,
but somehow it's affirmative, even as it negates. And then Postpunt develops that, and you have the existential despair of an agony of joy division or a more political kind of worry, anxiety, guilt, represented by a group like the pop group. But at a certain point, it feels like the music has just become, has lost touch with some element of pop music which actually is fun sexuality enjoyment and then you have this sort of phase of return to pop um and um i don't know similar things you can track in the development of of dance music where there's a kind of drive to sort of make the rhythms more
and more challenging and more and more um pushing at the edge of being not groovy it's like this put with something like jungle it's like testing your your ability to dance to it uh but then it gets too then music gets too uh punishing or too difficult and then there's a sort of switch back to more hedonistic you know house music kind of grooves or a simpler kind of drum and bass rhythm that actually easier to dance to. So I just tend to see it sort of going through these phases and then it corrects itself. And so, you know, the way it works is like making a record that
sounds like Joy Division in 1979 is like the most amazing, crucial thing. But to do the the same record in 1983 that doesn't have the same meaning is actually a kind of boring thing to do. I don't want to name any particular groups who are doing it, but it's mean. But you know, there were a lot of people who'd missed that, you know, and Joy Division themselves have moved on to do New Order and make danceable music, still having a certain sadness or emotional content anyway that related to Joy Division, but essentially really good danceable club music, whereas other groups were still sounding like unknown places or whatever. And it's no longer, you know, so it's the actual, there's something about the, a record that is timely in its moment can then become a classic, you know, so it still has the same
power. It's not that it becomes outmoded, but the actual procedure of making that record becomes outmoded, you know, or not as interesting a thing to do. which is why I say yeah, at a certain point grunge was like a really powerful statement and when it broke into the mainstream that was really exciting and then by the time of 1996 and I don't know, the Foo Fighters or whatever the same sound doesn't have the same impact or meaning so it's a sort of historical sense of music but you know at the same time I think in any great music
there's something that always works I think that's one of the things about music is you can put it on decades later and there's something in it that you can just reactivate and it has this effect on you just like a drug or something so I wouldn't want to say timeless because we're talking about a fairly short brief span of time in the history of humanity and quite likely in 500 years it'll be incomprehensible but at least within our lifetimes there's a sort of timeless or time-defying quality to most music that's good that you can just dip into it you know and uh whatever is you know some things going on in music that are sort of aren't go beyond the history that made them if you know what I mean
Does that make sense? Yeah. Yeah, like if you put like on, if you put on an Al Green record, or I don't know, like if you put on, yeah, if you put on Dance to the Music by Sly Stone, and you happen to have read a book about Sly Stone or read Gryll Marcus on Sly Stone, if it will enrich your understanding of what Sly Stone and the final family stone meant at time or ever. But on a certain level, Dance to the Music is like a fantastic machine, you know. like you just turn it on and your mood just immediately elevates. And, you know, if you have awareness of history and you know what, the meaning of a multiracial group that had men and women in the same band and the way each, the meaning of each singer taking, each member of the band takes a turn to sing, you know,
a line and the democracy of it and all that. You can read all that, but just purely a sound. it's like yeah it's just a an endlessly effective machine for elevating your mood beyond any of the the finishing thing about that song is well which relates this idea of politics and pop is like there's no there's no virtually no lyrical content in dance to music yet there's no doubt that it's a political event you know it's the political event just the fact of it and the lineup, the composition of the band and the joy in it, the shout in it, the shout of joy in it is enormously socially, politically resonant at that time. But the
actual lyrics have almost zero content. Yeah, I'm going to add some bottom so it's easier for people to move their feet. I think it's one line and the chorus is dance to the music. so it's not you know the power of it is not in the performance as opposed to or the music rather than the words the text which I think is the case with a lot of a lot of music historically it's not it's not necessarily profound on a verbal level. It's something in the singing, something in the energy that's created.
I was rereading Retromania and this passage in which you talk about collecting Pokémon cards with your song. And I was thinking about this in the current context of the NFTs. and how these kids maybe not your son no but many kids that they went through pokemon now they are being exposed to nfts and so and this idea of uh collecting objects and you mentioned benjamin and it's very interesting how not mechanical reproduction but digital reproduction now is going to play
a whole new game with the whole thing of the metaverse etc. And all these light jump people are being exposed to a commodity that is very very strange. I haven't really read much or thought much about NFTs so but just sort of naively it seems like it's the naive comment seems like it's something that feels like an extension of Baudrillard's thinking right about value floating free of solid form symbolic value so this is like a sort of iconicity
without the actual icon so yeah it does have a relationship to Ben Amin's ideas like there's somehow somehow you're buying a stake in something just purely on its reputational associations right and it's it's aura in terms of knowledge and and hypnosis and you know All these things, all these intangible things that are a big part of how the economy and the culture work anyway. But this is like a sort of ultimate abstraction of it. Is that fair? I mean, that's a fairly obvious comment. So, yeah, it's mystifying to me.
Like, I can't understand it. I can't understand how you can invest. Is it like a form of investment? sort of an investment isn't it like it's like it's like sort of like but rather than own the painting as an investment you're owning a kind of sharing a idea i don't know it's it's it's very confusing to me and i don't i don't well yeah it's this idea of creating like digital scarcity Oh right, interesting That's like a limited edition print but without the print Yeah, exactly Sorry? But it's not, I mean I thought what is just unique
is the inscription in the blockchain but the thing can be totally reproduced Yeah, it can be Because there is I guess that's open, right? Well, yeah, that depends but there is this whole fuss about this DAO organization that apparently they bought for $2 million, the Jodorowsky Bible for the project of Dune. And they thought that they were going to be able to reproduce this digitally with this NFT mindset. And obviously, this is not the case, because you have no rights to use Moebius paintings whatsoever.
When you buy the NFT, the only thing that you buy is this little piece of the protocol, and that's all. But yeah, it's the very production of digital scarcity. So it's like trading cards, but without the card. But obviously you can speculate with this, no? And it's very disturbing because for kids it's like, yeah, this idea of surprise, etc. Like they are going to release. It's very weird. I mean, very, very weird without going into the economical analysis of this whole thing, which is strange. So strange.