dcom

Art takes time to learn, study, and practice. Malcolm Gladwell popularized the 10,000 hour rule - to become and expert at something, you must deliberately practise it for at least 10,000 hours - but even with that not all will reach expert status because they lack talent (Gladwell's popularization is widely critcized because it's a generalization based on a very small subset of subjects - but it's a useful parable). The better you become at something, the more the technical-mechanical aspects of what you're doing - how you make what you make - become automatic and you can concentrate on the what and why (this automatization is also the base requirement for getting "in the zone" and achieving the Csíkszentmihályian flow state). A very poignant example I can think of is improvisation - you must have exceptional talent and a master of your chosen instrument to improvise with skill, e.g. free jazz, which to a lot of people sounds like random noise, but which requires the musicians to react, adapt, and improvise around each other, know their phrase canons, rudiments - to really appreciate what the musicians are doing, the listener must also have an understanding of these things. Then there is the problem of creativity, a lot of people see artists as dithering, vacillating, and procrastinating slackers who should get a real job - but what they usually don't understand is that you can't force creativity. It, too, requires time to grow into at least partially formed ideas on what the artists wants to do, how they want to do it, which techniques they want to use (they might need to invent new ways of making because nothing appropriate might not exist) - but there's also the why, and for most artists, the primary reason is not money, nor fame. A lot of artists have an innate need to create, they want to see, hear, taste, or experience something that's uniquely theirs and it's first and foremost a subjective expression of their creativity, talent and hard work. Some could not care less if people like what they do. Art shouldn't be something bought in bulk and consumed as a commodity - it should make you think, it should entertain, it should bring up emotions, it should amaze and make you wonder. But I understand that YMMV, you might just want something, anything to listen to to avoid hearing the world around you - or your own thoughts.

Oh, and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Spotify#2016–17:_"Fake_artists"_controversy .

Hate your favorite band's latest song? On Spotify, it might be a fake. (Input Magazine) Scammers Are Gaming Spotify by Faking Collaborations With Famous Artists (OneZero/Medium) etc.

I've been wondering about some labels' Bandcamp pages - like Withhold and Furthur Electronix - the put out new releases but there's never an announcement or an email, so an occasional peek only reveals that there was something but it's long gone. I suppose notifications from the Bandcamp app would be useful, but I'm following such a large number of targets on Bandcamp that it's simply impossible to have them on - it would be useful if there was an option to disable the notifications by target and not have it tied to following. It would be easy to write a scheduled script that checks only specific Bandcamp pages for updates, but I just can't be arsed. Oh, and I really don't understand the hubbub around Withhold, there's a couple of nice tracks here and there but most of it's mediocre fare riding on limited edition artificial scarcity - although that is exactly what floats my boat, so I'm a bit conflicted.

We Need to Treat Artists as Workers, Not Decorations (William Deresiewicz, LitHub)

Here's the full Axios Trump interview. I dare you.

What. The. Actual. F*CK.

I think that a big part of the problem is not that artists think that they're entitled to make a living from whatever they make (they do), but that the commodification of the arts, like music, has made the consumers think that they're entitled to everything without compensation or for a pittance - a stance that is fed and exploited explicitly by services like Spotify. The same entitlement is behind the thinking that piracy and freeloading is only against the greedy big corporations, when they basically cater only to the most popular taste e.g. make huge amounts of money from the most popular fraction of the long tail that is published music - then the same entitlement is transferred by proxy to independent labels and self-publishing musicians, because hey, it's all good, it's free and no-one gets hurt but the greedy bigwigs of the big publishers and the big-name artists who have tons of money anyway, right? My childhood was financed by royalties from my mother's music career, not a big one, but sufficient enough for me to understand that artists need to get paid for their work, that making art is real work and not just something you do as side hustle, that art requires studying/training (10 years of classical music education and learning a handful of instruments taught me that I wouldn't be a professional musician) and not everyone is creative or talented enough to make a living as an artist or that all artists' art is good. This is why I buy all the music I listen to, and if something's not available or I don't have money for everything I'd like to have, I don't think for a second I'm entitled to pirate them because of it. YMMV. It's engineers with a hard-on for efficiency and no real appreciation for the arts who come up with services like Spotify. Art is not efficient and utilitarian, unless the motive behind it is just to make money - then it's just going for the lowest common denominator to please consumers to optimize ROI. Like in the Tyranny of Convenience article I linked earlier, I think that there is inherent value in things that are hard, difficult and not just readily available - like a refined taste in music - otherwise you just know the price of everything and the value of nothing (with a nod to Oscar Wilde's cynic).

Ah, Queensrÿche, I've always liked Geoff Tate's voice. I have The Warning, Rage For Order, Operation: Mindcrime and Empire on vinyl. Listened to Operation: Mindcrime on repeat when it came out, Suite Sister Mary is my absolute favourite. Silent Lucidity got them on heavy rotation on MTV outside Headbanger's Ball.

Kershaw's one of my childhood favourites. I used to listen to Human Racing multiple times every day from a cassette and wore it out. Just reading through the track listing pulls all the lyrics from memory.

Alanis Morrisette has a new album out - Such Pretty Forks In The Road - eight years after the previous one. I have all her albums. Saw her live at Pori Jazz festival in 2018.

What Happens When Trump Refuses to Accept an Electoral Loss? (Lawrence Douglas, LitHub)

On the topic of piracy - I personally don't do it at all, due to being comfortably privileged in having a job and a monthly salary - and being on the clock at the moment I'll elaborate only with a link to a particularly good exposition on the subject:

What Ek is doing is creating a narrative fallacy of his own, claiming that artists are required to engage with their fan base; he wants to reject any other reality and substitute it with his own (with a nod to Adam Savage) so that the dominant paradigm is to feed the insatiable novelty cycle the tech platforms thrive on. Of course he wants artists to release early and release often so that their output can become fodder for his service to grind. I think it's a fallacy that artists owe their fan base (or tech platforms or tech bros for that matter) anything - artists are not required to "continuously engage" and have "continuous dialogue" with their fan base. Ek is an extraction capitalist, he's pumping both the musicians and their audiences for resources (music and data) to make a buck, plain and simple; just another douche of the highest order seeking to "disrupt" - naturally he wants to control the narrative for his own benefit. Fuck this guy in particular.

Spotify always reminds me of Tim Wu's excellent article The Tyranny of Convenience (The New York Times): I think there's value in not letting someone else or machine learning to choose the music you listen to, so I personally don't care about radio or streaming services at all - I spend a sizeable chunk of my time actively searching for and sampling all kinds of music I could be interested in and I love making the connections between artists, labels and styles of music on my own instead of delegating the task to an algorithm. I don't want to be a passive consumer of music (or anything else), I prefer agency, so I purposefully avoid Spotify and its ilk - and if I like something, I want the artist to get paid so if possible, I buy their music as directly as I can.

I guess this was missed by some as I commented on an unrelated thread.

This is Not a Game (Jon Glover, Real Life Magazine)

Some very interesting remixes of Si Begg's OST for Paul Hyett's Peripheral (including one by our own @ignatius, if I'm not mistaken). The original OST is good, too.

Can't vote in person because not registered - absentee ballot.

Twitter's trending feature is illegal. Creating an imaginary law ex nihilo.

There's plenty of material for you to trawl, then - head over to SpaceTime.

Out in digital, including a wealth of remixes. Available directly from Nye's Bandcamp or from Childhood Intelligence.

Trump not ready to commit to election results if he loses (Associated Press)