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About ten years ago, I was standing on the deck of an aircraft carrier with Kelefa Sanneh. From where we were standing, we could see downtown San Diego, where Comic-Con was happening. Every street was visibly choked with undulating masses of gooning, sunburnt redditors. As the plastic lanyards they all wore around their necks caught sunlight, they glittered, in aggregate, almost as much as the ocean.

"The Story of Rockism" by Jaime Brooks (2025)

#music #rockism #poptimism #music criticism #media criticism #cultural criticism

Is America ghosting the rest of the anglosphere?

"Taylor Swift’s career began during the aughts, when anglophilia was much more commonplace. Like many of her fans, she’s clocked serious hours on Tumblr, a platform whose American userbase is infamously fixated on BBC shows like Sherlock and Doctor Who. Unlike those users, Taylor Swift is a real life celebrity who was able to leverage her power to compel the guy who plays Loki in the Avengers movies to walk around in public sporting an “I Heart T.S.” tank top. If anglophilia had a leaderboard, she would have to rank near the top.

In recent years, though, her predilection towards UK cultural products left her vulnerable to some of the most intense backlash of her career. She seemed completely blindsided by the reaction she faced from fans in the States after she hard-launched a public relationship with Matty Healy of The 1975, an extremely British man who became quite famous in his home country after realizing that LCD Soundsystem’s “All My Friends” would have been a much bigger hit had it been made by a bunch of guys in their twenties. A sizeable chunk of Swift’s fanbase went into open revolt until she made the clutch decision to swap Healy out for an American NFL player."

#music #technology #tariffs #geopolitics #economics #mark fisher #taylor swift #anglophilia #poptimism #music criticism #BBC #canada #cdnpoli #canzuk #justin trudeau #mark carney

A comprehensive guide to ghostwriters, virtual pop stars, and the world to come.

“Recording artists are special because of their records. Even the Grateful Dead, a band known specifically for spontaneity and improvisation, didn’t truly become a mainstream force until bootleg recordings of their live shows started circulating on cassette in the eighties. The less valuable recordings are, the less special artists become. Last month, the backlash to Frank Ocean’s abbreviated Coachella set began on social media before the set itself had even ended. Those sympathetic to Ocean were quick to remind irate fans that “artists don’t owe you anything,” but the shifting economics of the music business make it clear that the reverse is also true. I wonder if people are getting tired of artists. It certainly does seem like artists are getting tired of increasing pressure to justify their own existence for steadily diminishing returns. Maybe none of this works anymore. Maybe it hasn’t been working for a long time.“

#ai #chatgpt #ai drake #music #technology #vocaloid #hatsune miku #drake

A story about songs that predicted the future, and what we can learn from them.

“Whenever new technology impacts the music business, there’s always talk of how it will “democratize” music and open up new “creative possibilities.” In the case of Chuck Berry, this is demonstrably exactly what happened. Amplified guitars, magnetic recording tape, and resilient vinyl discs allowed him to make music that couldn’t have existed otherwise, and to experience a level of success that would not have been possible ten years earlier. Still, the underlying economic conditions and incentive structures of our society can only allow for so much possibility. It may be true that Berry blazed the trail that the world’s most successful recording artists have been walking ever since, but maybe the scope of what’s possible in our world is too narrow to accommodate any other way of doing things. Maybe the frontier wasn’t wide enough for more than one trail in the first place.”

The Menace of Generative Music

Hi, this is my new newsletter. The first installment is about the biblical flood of generative trash content that is about to overwhelm the platform internet, and more specifically the effect this will have on music. Subjects covered include Spotify’s business model, The-Dream’s childhood inspiration to become a musician, and the fact that you have to scroll through intro paragraphs the size of Ulysses to get to the actual recipe on recipe websites now. Please consider sharing and/or subscribing if you enjoy it. Thanks! -Jaime

#music #technology #ai #streaming #spotify #john philip sousa

Jaime Brooks is a Portland-based musician and writer. She has performed as Default Genders and as a member of Elite Gymnastics, a band which she revived...

Here is a very long interview with me (Jaime) about snow flakes 2022, the cost of housing, the culture of the record industry, french house, Xiu Xiu, and Yakuza: Like A Dragon.

#long reads #music #jaime brooks #elite gymnastics

i don’t know if you will see this or answer (not that you need to or anything) but something that has been on my heart a long time is how poorly you were treated by music media people back when you dropped the DG 2013 EP. it was upsetting to see how, for the people who “reviewed” your music (not even having listened to it), it was just another clickbait clickfodder article they wrote in 20 seconds, they didn’t care about being responsible in reporting on your work, but it was your life, your art. you felt like you had to retreat, it seemed like you were like “yeah of course how silly of me to think i could make something and it be successful”, and i was hurt on your behalf about that (which, fair, not my place not my business i don’t know you), since i felt you really deserved positive recognition for the amazing thing you had made (anyway it was very special to me, and your music continues to be).

but anyway, i am so so happy you kept making music and kept releasing it, despite everything.

That was a long time ago, and sometimes it's hard for me to figure out how I should feel about it now because I'm so distant from the place I was in life and the world at the time it happened. Most people I run into now who weren't directly involved in some way seem confused about what exactly happened. Like, in the initial Pitchfork review for Main Pop Girl 2019, the writer described the controversy by suggesting "On Fraternity" was written from the perspective of a stalker or predator. That's not remotely true in any sense, but I see why someone attempting to summarize it in retrospect would assume it was something like that. The size and intensity of the reaction just does not make a lot of sense in retrospect if you're just looking at the song.

When I try to get my head around the other factors that might have influenced the takes people were having, it just kinda gives me a headache. Was it something I posted on Tumblr during that year-and-a-half stretch when I was known for posting on here? Was it because of who I was hanging around with? Was there something about the initial positive review of the song on Pitchfork that rubbed people the wrong way? I have no idea, and at this point I don't think there's anything valuable to learn from ruminating on it.

I don't think I regret that it happened, though. If I'd released the same music a couple of years later, I don't think many industry/media people would have felt comfortable voicing the types of suspicions and criticisms they had about me in 2013 in light of the superficial corporate embrace of trans people that was starting to happen in the American mainstream. That doesn't mean they weren't still thinking that stuff, and it doesn't mean they're not still thinking it now. I don't think I was robbed of a career or acclaim or anything like that. The resistance I ran into was real and I would have run into it no matter what. If there was a choice in front of me, it was between having that resistance be silent and frustrating or loud and overwhelming. I think there's upside to it having been loud and overwhelming. Nobody can gaslight me about it now, nobody can try to tell me I'm the one that was overreacting. So many of my actual life experiences sound made up to people I meet now, and given my commitment to sincerity, that dynamic would be so much harder to deal with if there wasn't such a huge paper trail backing me up.

Like, would I rather be facing the realities of a collapsing music industry and the extremely high likelihood of national anti-trans legislation getting passed post-2024 as someone who learned how things really work in 2013, or as someone who is only figuring it out now? To me, the answer is clear. I've had years to sort through my illusions and get ready for the world we're living in now. So many of the painful adjustments my peers are going to have to make are things I did years ago. In that way, what happened was a blessing, and that's how I've decided to think about it. Maybe that's not the best approach, maybe at some point someone's going to say something about it to me that totally changes my whole perspective on it, but that's what's been working for me.

12 track album

hi here is the debut album from elite gymnastics. if you’re following this tumblr you might be OEG and thus you may be wondering “debut album? what about ruin?”

ruin was a compilation of two EPs. it was the same 5 songs presented in two different versions. this is a whole album. listen to it and you will understand.

Here is a link to a documentary called The Target Shoots First. It follows a guy named Chris Wilcha in the early ‘90s after he gets a job at Columbia House and decides to bring a camera with him to work every day. Columbia House was a mail-order CD retailer co-owned and operated by Sony Music and Time Warner. They had eye-catching introductory deals where you could get 10 “free” CDs of your choosing upon signing up, but you’d get locked into a subscription service where you’d have to continue buying at least one CD a month afterwards. They would automatically send you (and charge you for) their “selection of the month” unless you sent in a postcard letting them know what you wanted instead.

After MP3, the industry changed so much that Columbia House’s entire business model seemed impossibly archaic. For many years, if I ever thought of Columbia House at all, I thought of it as a strange relic of a bygone era, something that felt impossibly distant from the music business of the present. Watching this documentary this week, I was really shocked by how similar Columbia House feels to streaming platforms. The conversations the film’s subjects have with one another about genre as a marketing tool feel like they could just as easily have been about Spotify playlists.

Here’s another example - as a kid, I always assumed that Columbia House was a scam. That the amazing introductory deal with the 10 free CDs was a plot to lock you into a subscription service that would cost more than buying CDs at a store would. That’s actually not true. Columbia House was a great deal for customers. You really would pay less as a customer of Columbia House than you would have paid at record stores. In order to be able to offer these savings to the customer, Columbia House reduced the share of royalties going to the ARTISTS. They used exactly the same logic that they use to justify giving artists a smaller percentage of streaming royalties than the percentage they take from record sales. It’s basically the same scam, just using different technology!

There’s also an interesting section of the film where, in an effort to sell CDs to fans of alternative music, a lot of the younger staffers create a brochure full of reviews, recommendations, ironic distance, and grungy aesthetics. Essentially, they create something that feels very much like a precursor to MP3 blogs. The whole story felt resonant and contemporary in a way I really wasn’t expecting it to, and thus I would recommend this strongly to anyone who’s interested in the workings of the music biz.

I can’t embed the video because it’s on archive.org but here is a link to Tom Dowd and the Language of Music which is one of the greatest music documentaries of all time.

It was made in like, 2002? Les Paul, Ray Charles, and Ahmet Ertegun were all still alive and they all did interviews. It’s the story of jazz, the story of pop, the story of multitrack recording, and the story of the atomic bomb. It’s the story of the thread that binds all of those things together. It is almost all signal, and very little noise. It is the work of a man who knew he was going to die soon deciding to tell his story, and the work of all the powerful and famous individuals who knew him deciding to help even though there was no material benefit for doing so. It is just a great documentary.

some of your earlier lyrics directly reference Andrea Dworkin (Ruin actually introduced me to her as a writer—thank you for that btw). has your relationship to her writing changed much since that period?

I think my context for it has changed as my relationship with gender has evolved, but fundamentally it's still the same stuff that appeals to me about her work now as it did then. When I was first handed a copy of "Intercourse," two things really struck me.

First was her bleak, uncompromising view of the world, which I immediately understood deep in my heart to be the truth. In some ways it felt like no one else had ever told me the truth before, or at least not to that extent. It was almost like, a Truman Show ending type moment for me. I also loved that she used film and literature to make her points, that really helped me understand faster and helped me to trust her because I could tell she valued a lot of the same things about the world as I did.

Second was the lack of biological determinism. Unlike a lot of pundits who continue to take up much more mainstream media real estate than Dworkin ever did, I never saw her perpetuate a hopeless attitude about the extent to which one's biology impacts their decisions. Her criticism was so intense and uncompromising precisely because she believed anyone could be capable of seeing the problem and becoming part of the solution. She understood that the obstacle was not some primal animal instinct that it's futile for people to try to work against, but much less glamorous barriers like cruelty and stupidity and selfishness. At the center of all the pessimism about how bad things actually are is the optimistic belief that none of these problems are intrinsic to humanity as a species and that they can be overcome.

When I first came across her work, I understood that even as she was criticizing norms I'd upheld or structures I'd been part of, she was also pointing the way towards the exit. I felt that and knew I wanted to embrace what I knew was the truth about the world and try to do better. I wouldn't say that my conception of what that means has changed since then, just that shifts in culture and my continuing education have given me a lot more tools and terminology I can use to explain that to others.

just wanted to say thanks. i found ruin in 2012 at a very low point in my life and i found it to be very comforting at the time, it reminded me of my sister and our collective youths. so close to paradise was my favorite. been a fan ever since, and i try to keep up with everything you put out. thank you and please keep it up.

Thank you! I appreciate this.

do you have any dj mixes that inspire you

Yeah, actually there's one. There's this DJ Mix by Eye from Boredoms working under the name DJ 光光光 called Planetary Natural Gas Love Webbing 1999 or something like that. The third or fourth track is a recording of Baka water drumming taken from some educational collection of field recordings. At the time, I think partly just because it was relatively early on in my life as a music listener, hearing the sound of water splashing being contextualized as a beat in a DJ mix really tripped me out. Like, I had been making songs on the computer for a few years by the time I heard the mix, but my main points of reference for what I wanted to try and make was still music that had been recorded in studios by traditional musicians. I hadn't started really seeing the potential in embracing making music that could only have been made on a computer connected to the internet. Hearing the water drums in a DJ mix really pushed me in the right direction for some reason.

I am not a big consumer of DJ mixes because I do not really follow contemporary dance music, but I do often think about the mediums of rap mixtapes and DJ mixes generally whenever I'm sequencing an album. I want my records to have the anarchic, unpredictable energy of those things, I want to create moments that are as surprising as the water drums in the Eye mix were to me. I feel like that's not generally something albums with songs and vocals are great at, so every step I can successfully take into that direction feels like a big accomplishment. I think I did a good job of capturing that type of disorienting vibe on "Reverse Chronological Order (Part 2)" on Main Pop Girl 2019. That's probably the best example I can recall of me specifically trying to create the feel of a DJ mix in a song.

Here’s a video of the EG set from the fundraiser yesterday!

A word about Acephalé Records

In 2011, Elite Gymnastics released a record called RUIN on Acephalé Records. It was a compilation of the RUIN 1 and RUIN 2 EPs that we’d released online for free several months earlier.

I do not have a lot of nice things to say about the music industry. Those of you reading this who have been following me for a long time know that sometimes the posts I used to make on Tumblr about this subject got more press than a lot of my actual music has. Those of you who were not there will have to use your imaginations to try to envision a world where a Tumblr post can get the kind of press that requires spending $3k a month on PR in the current paradigm. It was a weird time.

Regardless, it might seem logical to connect my complaints about the industry with the one label I did work directly with. I’m sure some people who sympathize with the record industry for some incomprehensible reason might want to believe that I personally just had a bad experience that doesn’t reflect the overall state of the business. Let me be clear: that could not be farther from the truth. I want to state for the record that I have nothing bad to say about Acephalé Records, or about Patrick North, who ran the label.

If anything, I feel like people don’t appreciate him enough! So much of the history of Internet Music ran through his office in some way or another. Before starting Acephalé, he was the A&R at a label called Summer Lovers Unlimited who were actually the first label to sign Crystal Castles. That story is fascinating, but it’s not mine to tell. SLU was also the first North American label to distribute the music of the Tough Alliance, the Swedish agit-pop group who started the legendary Sincerely Yours label, which in my opinion can be accurately viewed as the predecessor to Sad Boys and Drain Gang. Patrick’s relationship with Sincerely Yours continued after he started Acephalé with the release of the No Way Down / Tradewinds compilation by Air France. He was also the one who introduced the world to SALEM, whose unnervingly prescient music is only now being recognized properly, as the world finally starts to catch up to what they were doing all those years ago.

When I first heard the demos that would become Doss’ debut EP, I knew I had to show Patrick. I felt like they sat perfectly within the canon of singular creative statements Acephalé had been releasing, which at that point now included my own work as part of Elite Gymnastics. I would not have done that if literally any of the awful experiences I’ve had or witnessed in this business involved Patrick. Fun fact - it was Acephalé that released remixes of Doss’s single “The Way I Feel” from my friend Recycle Culture, who I knew from a message board. A favorite pastime of ours on said message board was to try to invent new genres from scratch, a practice we all got into when I came up with the idea of “Night Bus” music by trying to imagine what the exact inverse of Chillwave would be. RC was, at that time, workshopping a new genre concept of his own, and he used his Doss remixes to take it for a test drive. He called it “Hyperpop.” This was in 2014!

Patrick has probably suffered a lot of headaches as a result of his decision to try to work with the most exciting artists he could find on the internet regardless of whether or not they were “well-adjusted” or easy to work with. His lack of judgement or dismissiveness when dealing with people like me who were struggling and at times unstable is a big part of the reason why the Acephalé catalog continues to feel so strong and so resonant all these years later. It’s a small glimpse into a theoretical world where the industry cares more about whether or not artists are making great shit than it does about whether or not artists are wealthy, connected, upwardly mobile yuppies that industry people find it personally easy to relate to. If the industry had a dozen Patrick Norths instead of just the one, maybe it wouldn’t be so fucking boring, at the very least.

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