pop culture picks from ‘one of the best years ever’, economically speaking
hello,
so, you’ve made it to the end of 2023. congratulations for surviving another year of whatever this life is. more than that, some of you should be thrilled, because things are good, as any Nobel prize-winning economist would tell you. and what else do you live for but the economy, which has given you ‘one of the best years ever’?
i have a few suggestions.
watching
i can’t claim the rare sighting of the lesser spotted Jai Paul at Coachella, but the first show i saw in 2023 was as astonishing to me, in a different way. Age Is A Feeling by Haley McGee had a limited run at Soho Theatre following on from the 2022 Edinburgh Fringe. fortunately for me, i caught it whilst i was trying to recall the details of her last show, and wondering what had happened to her. it turns out she’d written another show i can’t stop thinking about to this day. the premise is classic millennial territory, in a sense: a nostalgic deep dive for when she turned 25, easy to make appeal to a narrow demographic. but McGee does a lot more than that, especially in her writing and performance. for a subject so personal and that ought to hold little resonance with me (i doubt i am her target audience), i found myself completely taken. how she was able to sustain my attention with the kind of wisdom and wit is nothing short of a marvel to me; McGee is absolutely my kind of storyteller, and i will make sure to see her next project, whatever it is.
online, there’s always a YouTuber i discover far too late for myself. this year, it was Lily Alexandre, whose critiques of art in today’s internet culture have helped clarify a lot of the mess for me.
i also enjoyed Notation Must Die by Tantacrul, from the clickbait-y title down to the explanations of challengers to the crown of music notation that in fact proves its durability and flexibility over the ages.
reading
what can I say here? i bought more books i haven’t yet read? i’ll focus on articles…
on pop culture criticism, i loved the major music moments Substack, which published three articles observing peculiar styles and trends in 2023. i read and re-read them all; i wish there were more! “sad girl” Music and its consequences was my favourite.
if you’re interested, i’d also recommend subscribing to The Automated Society newsletter, a regular tracker of the many instances of automated computing’s impact on individuals and communities across europe, as administered by corporations and nation-states. and, yes it’s often bad. if you want a reliable chronicle of the real-world effects of ai-fuelled nonsense hype cycles, for instance, go subscribe. i sense the writer of this newsletter has a more optimistic view on the potential of modern tech than i (low bar, i know). but the following quote from issue 93 identifies the common link between our beliefs (and is the reason why i rate this newsletter): that today’s forms of automation won’t hit in quite the way tech bros would have us believe.
In four years of covering automated systems, I’ve come across one exception. Swiss scholars designed a pupil-assignation algorithm to make schools more diverse in urban districts. A small town implemented it, automatically reducing segregation in schools.
This example shows that courageous decision-makers could deploy automated systems to improve lives. But this will never become a trend. Safety is achieved by having people on the streets who care about their communities. Health is achieved by having enough qualified medical personnel and affordable medicine. Trust is achieved through honesty. Automated systems will always be helpful as sidekicks, not as lead actors.
to me, that last sentence carries by implication a warning we should heed above accelerationists’ claims of sentient killer robots; we humans are more than capable of destroying each other’s lives using automated systems if we don’t.
listening
*rant warning* a couple of my podcast choices this year come from a frustration with shows i listened to which i thought were awful. i blame an old friend for one of them: earlier this year, they asked if i would listen to an episode of a popular podcast named The Rest is Politics (no i will not link to it) in which Tony Blair’s crony-in-chief Alastair Campbell and cabinet minister Rory Stewart interview various public intellectuals and the like about their ideas. the episode in question was part of a series called ‘Leading’, where they interviewed economist Kate Raworth about her concept of ‘doughnut economics’.
now, i had to be frank with my friend on two counts. firstly, i wondered why they would bother to listen to Alistair Campbell about anything (for non-brits, do a search of his name with the words ‘iraq’, ‘war’, and ‘dossier’); i doubt a podcast from Vladislav Surkov on the rise of avant-garde jazz in post-war europe would have his ear, no matter how good it was. secondly, Raworth’s doughnut economics idea sounded to me like the imaginings of a tepid form of democratic socialism, the sort only endorsed by political liberals afraid to admit what it would take to achieve anything like it.
all of this is to say that it reminded me of a podcast that i already subscribe to called Macrodose, which summarises and analyses contemporaneous economic and political issues perfectly, all in weekly 20-minute segments. it’s the only current affairs type podcast that makes sense to me right now, i refuse to endure anything else.
the other podcast choice borne out of frustration is my own fault. i tuned into a BBC podcast series earlier this year on The Rise and Fall of Britpop (i will not link to this either), out of interest for how two of its main (characters? champions? culprits?) viewed it 30 years on from the scene’s inception. i wonder about the level of britpop’s influence on mainstream british culture. i certainly knew about it at the time; i would go so far as to say i am as much a child of britpop musically as i am of Thatcher politically… and i am suffering from the effects of both. to me, too much of the music was and remains awful on repeated listens and is inferior to the rise of beat combos and the british blues explosion of the 1960s, the glam, pub, progressive and punk rock movements of the 1970s, the new romantic period of the 1980s… well, everything that preceded it. but it’s hard to be honest about the music of your youth when you had so much fun, and Steve Lamacq and Jo Whiley were never going perform such an act of nostalgic self-harm.
still, it was amusing to hear them address (or skirt around) britpop’s embarrassments, like, the sexism. the emergence of the new lad from the culture was meant to be ironic and woefully misunderstood, apparently (yeah yeah, sure it was). some penned stinging rebuttals to Lamacq and Whiley’s revisionist take on the era, like Neil Kulkarni’s Too Much Music blog: Please Please Just Fuck Off With This Bullshit: Lamacq & Whiley & The Lie Of ‘Britpop’.
some had already been penned at the time. take Björk’s comments to NME from back in the day:
Britpop… for me is middle-of-the-road ; stagnation and normality. If we were talking food, it’d be something very boring I don’t really like, like bread. Potatoes. No taste, but it fills you up… Don’t give me toast and cornflakes and potato salad and a roast dinner and greasy pub foods… everybody hates British food. And that’s what Britpop is to me, boring and bland and egg and chips and beer. I don’t understand beer, it’s like drinking wood, it doesn’t get you anywhere. I’d rather skip it altogether or do a f—ing bottle of Cognac and go the whole way.
listening to the podcast reminded me how britpop and successive waves of indie rock subgenres have bored me to the point that my taste in guitar-based music has hardened to basically nothing-less-than-hardcore. this is where my favourite two-guys-in-a-room podcast of 2023 comes in. i credit Mathcore Index for turning me on to and helping me navigate a universe of rock subgenres with the selection of albums they review every episode. this respectful parody of the math rock scene from Good Game is one of their year-end faves.
they are responsible for my favourite rock album of the year too, Wanton Psalms by Serbian-based post-hardcore/mathcore/noise act POLYWHY. i appreciate this band’s musicianship, i enjoy (and think i get) their ideas and tricks, and parts of it remind me of early Deftones, which is always going to pique my interest.
as for music that summarises how i feel about modern life, a little bit of glitch is better than most things, for what the sound inherently symbolises: instability to the point of fracture. blurstNRG by doktorb feels to me the most meaningful sonic portrayal of what it means to be online in 2023; endless waves of chaos. can be paired with Lily Alexandre’s videos on internet cultures for maximum disorientation.
an honourable mention in the glitch / chopping sample category goes to one of the originators of vaporwave, Oneohtrix Point Never, whose album Again finds more novel ways to explore the concept of nostalgia. The single A Barely Lit Path is a good example of this.
i also think Dog Dreams by Lucy Liyou is a masterpiece, for being able to collage a lucid sonic tapestry of dream states from many audio fragments. i marvel at how they were able to produce something so coherent from sources so disparate. a proper triumph over contradiction, presented in a way i’ve never heard before.
one album that embodies both the paranoid, pandemic-era feel of both glitch and collage but through the relatively straightforward use of samples is Decay by Fatboi Sharif. the poetry is brilliantly bleak. don’t listen to this to cheer yourself up.
what have you done though? and what are you gonna do?
*looks back at last year’s resolutions*
… my major aim is to put at least one ep i can be proud of in your inboxes by this time next year.
oops. that did not happen… but it’s for the best. my pioneering ‘delete first, think later’ quality control system has saved your ears from some goddawful songs. there is only one original piece of work i worked on this year that i’m even remotely happy with at the moment and that is far from complete.
i fared much better in the fiction-writing department. i quite liked the monologues i published, ambulance chasing and wasting time. i think the form suits me well. i may try to publish more stuff like this in 2024. the dream would be to complete a longer form piece, but that’ll be the promise i most likely break if i make it.
i wrote some essays as well, of which the one about ai in popular music is probably the one most worth reading.
i’m probably most proud of my news bulletin type piece from the start of the year, which i was told was ‘a bit dark’ for the use of real names, but what does that mean by the standards of today, really?
anyways, i’m looking forward to next year, with ever greater ecological destruction, ‘artificial intelligence’ generated violence, online enshittification, and the false hopes of electoral politics strangling mainstream discourse. but some central banks might get inflation down, and Taylor Swift’s never-ending concert tour will save the global economy, so swings and roundabouts, eh?
stay safe, and live laugh love one another xoxo