The City We Forgot To Name
Asymmetrical news coverage at most of the mainstream media sites is something that I’ve almost just come to accept without any particular frustration. However, there are times when a particular topic comes up, and it’s so obvious that the coverage has been unfair and skewed, that it creates a sense that I have only been told what the media outlet wants me to hear. It feels a bit insulting that the leadership at these organizations has decided that I’m not intelligent enough to get all the facts and make judgments for myself.
Substack Lock-In
Probably the closest publishing platform to the one I'm using — Ghost — is Substack. Although Substack is much more popular for a few reasons, not the least of which is the low barrier-to-entry (it's free if you are not charging for your publication), it has come under quite a bit of scrutiny lately. There was a big push to get writers to abandon the platform after The Atlantic posted an article asserting that there were many Nazi publications using the platform to spread and even monetize their ideas. A prominent tech journalist named Casey Newton, who was using Substack, led the charge to get the company to amend its content moderation policies. After not achieving complete success with his campaign, Newton took his publication, Platformer, to Ghost. Substack did, however, remove five accounts (out of the six that Newton reported) that were distributing Nazi material, in accordance with its existing policies about violent speech. Many writers opined that this was the bare minimum that Substack could do to quell the outrage that was being directed at them.
Borderline Savings Time
A friend recently introduced me to the Orthodoxy and Heterodoxy podcast, wherein Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick explains the Orthodox Christian faith. One thing I took away from it, and really appreciated, is the exploration of the Orthodox view of competing brands of Christianity. Fr. Andrew describes other sects as "incomplete." Having come from a Protestant background, the characterization struck me as both charitable and accurate. There isn't any attempt to denigrate other forms of Christian faith, but merely to point out that perhaps there is more out there to discover.
Sharing Is Caring
In many ways, though not in all, it’s gotten much harder to share the music you love with others. I was reminded of this a couple of days ago. For my wife’s birthday, my sister made her a playlist on Apple Music. This was thoughtful and kind, but unfortunately, we don’t have Apple Music. So my wife had to copy down the tracks that made up the list and find the songs to make her own playlist on Qobuz.
Back in the day, when you had a crush on someone, or simply wanted to spread the gospel of superbad tunes for getting down, you made a mixtape. If the recipient of your tape had a cassette player (which everyone did — they were standard government issue), they could listen to your creation until their heart's content. Or until the tape wore out (this is a real thing).
Oh Spotify, All Is Forgiven
Neil Young put his catalog back on Spotify. He was moved to do so by the fact that Apple and Amazon are now serving the podcast he objected to (The Joe Rogan Experience) and that led him to remove his music from the streaming service. He reasons that he can't remove his music from all of those services, so apparently the next best thing is to make it available on all of them. As befits Young, he does advocate for Spotify updating its offering to include hi-res, something that most music streaming services are now doing.
Young concludes his post by stating his hope that Spotify “will turn to Hi Res as the answer and serve all the music to everyone. Spotify, you can do it! Really be #1 in all ways. You have the music and listeners!!!! Start with a limited Hi res tier and build from there!”
Young doesn't address that Spotify is now paying Rogan more than ever to shoot the breeze with his guests, while paying artists less than ever for their music.
Chris Welch from The Verge cancelled his Spotify subscription after waiting for years for the company to offer hi-res.
But I’m also an audio nerd who owns a handful of very nice headphones and earbuds. And sometimes I just want to plug in my USB-C dongle, lay on the couch, and truly sink into a new album. And it’s those moments where I’m inevitably disappointed with Spotify, because I know what I’m hearing isn’t the best it can be. I’m paying for an objectively inferior listening experience. Well, I was. A couple months ago, I got tired of waiting, so I let my longtime Spotify subscription lapse and purchased a year’s worth of Apple Music.
I much prefer my Roon + Qobuz setup to Apple Music, but I can see Apple's offering as the next logical step when moving from Spotify to get higher quality music.
The Verge also has a guide to Spotify alternatives.
We’re Big Pants People Again
The NYT recently ran a piece about baggy pants coming into fashion again. The observances about the cyclical nature of fashion trends made me pause to reminisce a bit.
My dad drove me the four hours across mostly rural NC that it took to get to my college orientation back in 1994. He didn’t seem in a particularly good mood during the drives. On the way back, he shared an anecdote about a friend long ago who had been hit in the head by a glass bottle thrown from the side of a passing vehicle. He then observed that he didn’t see other incoming freshmen at the orientation dressed like me. I was wearing my standard uniform, informed by the skateboarding culture of the time — baggy jeans and an XL Dairy Queen t-shirt that hung off my wiry frame.1
My dad believed that a seemingly random act of senseless violence could happen to me simply because I looked different. Of course, he might have been right. People are frequently targeted for bullying based on whether they fit in or "look normal.” What’s interesting here is the arbitrary nature of the cycle of fashion in determining what is right to wear at any given time.
Fast forward two years, and I’m no longer wearing baggy clothes, but tending to favor clothes that fit. I suppose college had reformed me, at least somewhat. However, many other people were now wearing baggy clothes and I still stuck out in a crowd of up-to-date fashionistas. I had been ahead of my time and had certainly been derided by some of the same people who now recognized my sartorial choices as totally appropriate.
A few years ago, I would occasionally wear a mustache. Much ridicule ensued from certain people. People hinted that I looked like the star of an adult movie. One guy I talked to wanted to grow a mustache but said he couldn’t because “I work with kids.” Now tons of guys are sporting mustaches and little is said. It’s amazing how something that is popularly agreed upon as creepy can become cool in just a few short years.
I guess I’m just reminded that, if you feel you are out of step and you are tempted to change your style because it isn’t mainstream, you sometimes just have to wait a bit longer.
- I did work at the DQ in high school, so I wasn’t a complete poser. ↩︎
Community Versus The Individual
Alisa Ruddell wrote a masterful and in-depth review of the visually stunning animated film The Peasants for Christ and Pop Culture. The movie follows a woman named Jagna, whose promiscuity threatens the social fabric of her community in rural Poland around the turn of the last century. The use of the movie’s contemporary changes cast against the original book it was based upon (which was published in parts between 1904 and 1909) provides fertile ground for illustrating changes in society.
What We Do Now
The new J. Mascis album, What We Do Now dropped recently, and has garnered a fair amount of attention. Though it’s expected that a solo album by Mascis will be a lower-key affair than a Dinosaur Jr. album, this isn’t the case with his latest effort under his own name. The songs have a bit more rock in their roll, though Robert Barry observes for the Quietus that doesn’t necessarily mean that you are going to be banging your head or that you will hear one of these tunes on the next Jock Jams compilation.1
But there has always been something kind of off about the kind of rock you get from Mascis. You can’t quite imagine it blasting out of a truck or playing over the credits in a Tom Cruise picture. No tubs are thumped. No fists are pumped. No-one is going to fly into a war zone blasting this. You would lose. Even the guitar solos conjure less the cliff-edge and stiff breeze of Slash’s bit in the Guns ‘n’ Roses videos; more like someone in a confined space wrangling with something. Like a man in a cupboard with a raccoon and a live wire.
Mascis leans into his strengths on this album. His world-weary, cracked vocals have a distinctiveness that is hard to match. As a reviewer for the Trouser Press Record Guide once wrote of Dinosaur Jr.’s cover of the Cure’s “Just Like Heaven,” “When Masic sings, ‘I must have been asleep for days,’ you really believe him.” His guest musicians also augment the vibe, with Matthew “Doc” Dunn and his steel guitar complementing the forlorn vocals in just the right places.
I won’t say that Mascis has a lot of new tricks up his sleeve, but perhaps what some of us need right now is to hear from a comfortable favorite. Take a listen below.
- Though I’m not sure they still make those. ↩︎
Sophie
I’ve loved the fourth track on the Small Black record, Limits of Desire ever since the album was released over a decade ago. It was a clear standout, a highly stylized, dreamy ode to a woman who could probably be described as a “free spirit.” The song is based on a real person. As is revealed in the anniversary reissue of Limits of Desire, “Sophie” can perhaps be even better understood as the spiritual successor to “Somebody’s Baby,” the Jackson Browne track that anchored Fast Times At Ridgemont High.
Small Black is just wrapping up a tour for the tenth anniversary of Limits Of Desire.