When I teach, I tell my students: Don’t measure your worth through your pages […] You measure your worth by your questions. What kind of questions are you asking yourself? What are you trying to discover in the work, and are those questions inexhaustible? The fact that you cannot answer them right away is the very fact why you should stay with them. Take them for a walk. Collaborate.
“We’re just trying to organize the unorganized, which is the vast majority of musicians right now. There [are] so many similarities if you look at [efforts to] organize Uber, freelance writers, adjuncts. …It’s the same problem, where it’s so hard to organize because you have so many employers.”
Spotify’s annual Wrapped campaigns make unpaid influencers of us all.
“What if we decided to reject this ‘masterful coup of free advertising’ and instead chose to collectively admire all of the different ways, besides the shallow value of play counts, that music has contributed to our lives and to society this year?”
For the Fall issue of No Depression, I wrote about the unprecedented environmental impacts of digital music and streaming. There’s a myth that because listening to music digitally involves no vinyl records made of plastic or cardboard sleeves, that it somehow must emit less carbon. The opposite is true: the current era of music streaming has led to the highest levels of carbon emissions ever produced by recorded music.
The piece largely centers on an interview with University of Oslo professor and researcher Kyle Devine, the author of Decomposed: The Political Ecology of Music. We talked about the harsh material realities that power current listening habits (“Because to store and transmit data over the internet requires electricity, it’s often the case that when you’re streaming music online, you’re probably burning coal, uranium, or natural gas”) as well as the broader impact of the on-demand instant-gratification culture that streaming is part of.
The carbon footprint of data centers, fiber optic cable networks, and consumer electronics combined with the massively higher rate at which on-demand consumption is happening are all factors, Devine explained. Here’s something else he said that stuck with me: “We now have so many more people doing so much more listening so much more of the time. Once you add up the aggregate energy effect of billions of people streaming billions of songs and albums all of the time, and the fact that all of that takes electricity…that is what contributes to this overall picture that the streaming culture of music that exists today is a greater contributor of carbon emissions than any other previous format…. Streaming a file off the internet is much more efficient than producing an LP. That efficiency gain is actually outstripped by the increase in amount of listening that is going on today.”
I also spoke with author and University of Glasgow professor Matt Brennan, who co-authored a study with Devine last year titled “The Cost of Music,” covering the economic and environmental realities of streaming. He succinctly explained why the environmental impacts of music streaming can be hard to grasp: “We know that flying is environmentally bad. The message has got out there on that. But part of the reason that people understand that is that in order to travel on your holiday, you have to go to an airport. You have to physically put yourself in this massive building and see the infrastructure that makes that possible. You don’t do that when you listen to music on your phone. You don’t have to go to the server farm and see all of the energy that’s being consumed to make [that] possible. So people don’t tend to think of music as having an environmental impact.”
The piece contextualizes digital listening within the broader material impacts of internet infrastructure, and argues that since streaming relies so heavily on data centers owned by Google (where Spotify data is stored), Amazon and Apple, music communities might consider seeing themselves in solidarity with actions taken groups like Google Workers for Action on Climate or Amazon Employees for Climate Justice.
Devine had illuminating things to say about the desire for “solutions” in the music industry: “People want to know, ‘What do we do?’ They want a utopian pep talk or a Hollywood ending... I’m not especially hopeful. It’s a bit grim.” As a political ecologist, his primary interest is not providing a consumer guide to the most environmentally friendly options for music consumption. “Each of these formats, in the history of recording, comes with upsides and downsides…The purpose of this research I’m doing is more to call attention to these bigger systems of problems and inequalities, so that people may demand more of those systems in terms of genuine responsibility and transparency.”
The full piece can currently only be read in print in No Depression, an ad-free, non-profit, reader-supported magazine operating since 1995. I’d also highly encourage those interested in the topic to seek out writings by the authors and researchers interviewed for this piece.
Singing is such a special, personal, 'bodily' instrument, the direct experience of which has largely disappeared from our Western societies, and the title of this post is a little jab at the notion that the voice is something that has to be slick and/or impressive, something you are born with (hence 'talent shows') or that needs to be trained a-la-fitness style, to show a vocal equivalent of perfect abs. I am not interested in impressing anyone when I sing, and wouldn’t dream of calling myself a singer; rather, singing is part of my musical toolbox, I use it (and words) to convey something which I cannot convey with instruments alone...
Colleen’s blog “Ten Years of Singing Not Like a Pro”
Many thanks to Joyful Noise Records for inviting me to curate the August edition of its White Label Series, a subscription series that releases limited vinyl runs of overlooked albums not pressed to vinyl before. I chose Thelma’s 2019 record The Only Thing and wrote this curator statement:
I met many incredible musicians during my time working at the Brooklyn art space Silent Barn. One of them was Thelma, the songwriting moniker of Natasha Jean Jacobs. When I heard her 2019 album, I was immediately struck: The Only Thing is a beautiful, strange, swelling synth-pop record, with shredding string arrangements and eclectic, expressive vocals. I was struck, too, by its sharp lyrics, some of which chronicle the inherent heaviness of living in a body, of invisible and internalized pains. Yet there also seemed to be an intriguing droll humor to these songs.
The Only Thing quickly became one of my favorite albums of the year. It wasn’t until after a few months of listening on repeat that I learned more about the struggles Jacobs faced in making & releasing it—about how during the process, she faced a number of medical emergencies including being diagnosed with a rare soft tissue disease that made it hard for her to even hold a guitar anymore. As a result, she wrote the skeleton of this record with one hand on a tiny synth while in recovery from surgery. “It was the first time I was able to enjoy making music in a few years,” she wrote in 2019. “I was reunited with the feeling that making music is The Only Thing that makes me feel a very particular and necessary sense of being alive.”
Her medical condition also led to challenges finding label support for the record, due to her decreased ability to tour. She ended up self-releasing the album on cassette instead, & perhaps was better off for it. But hearing this part of The Only Thing’s story was a reminder of how the demanding touring expectations of today’s music economy can take a toll on the body and how, as Jacobs has discussed, ableist attitudes create a spectrum of barriers in all corners of the industry. I’m glad that the White Label Series can give these songs a vinyl pressing outside of those unfair and often invisibilized pressures.
The Anarchist’s Playbook: Occupy Boston takes a page from the radical underground (October 12, 2011)
Since all of the Boston Phoenix archives are either deleted from the internet or difficult to access, I have been wanting to republish some articles in full here for years, and thought this might be a good place to start. I wrote this short piece during Occupy Boston, at a time when it seemed like the contributions of anarchists were not being fully understood. It feels particularly relevant right now. This was written in 2011, and although I would report it out differently now, I still consider it to be an interesting document.
* * *
Just hours after his men finished wiping the Greenway's manicured gardens with the bellies, knees, and faces of Occupy Boston last Tuesday, the BPD top cop attempted to create dissent by blaming a familiar bogeyman: the "anarchists."
BPD Commissioner Ed Davis told the BostonHerald on Tuesday that he had no problem with the real protesters. "The [Occupation] group that was here for the first 10 days was working very closely with us," he said, "but they warned us yesterday morning that a new group, the anarchists, wanted to take control."
Occupy Boston scoffed at that statement — suggesting that the BPD was using a loaded term to turn public opinion against a nonviolent movement. "Any 'anarchists' who tried to disrupt the peaceful protests were BPD plants," the group tweeted from its official @occupy_boston account. "Our anarchists linked arms and sang songs. Peacefully."
In fact, the Occupy movement is deeply rooted in anarchist traditions and values. Many of the national Occupy movement's organizational tools — the lengthy general assemblies, the finger-waggling exercises in consensus-building, the free food and clothing available throughout camp — come from anarchist models of direct action, horizontal organizing, and gift economies.
In Boston specifically, Occupy draws on the experiences of the local direct-action activist community: the anarchists and DIY enthusiasts who have long organized non-hierarchically in collective houses and radical book shops. The current occupation in Dewey Square is ultimately providing a national stage for a fringe population that has espoused these anti-corporate ideals for years. But suddenly — as the protesters chanted to the BPD on Sunday night — "the whole world is watching."
Zaina (the activists interviewed asked that we not use their last names) is a 20-year-old BU student who volunteers in Occupy Boston's food tent. She's also a veteran of Food Not Bombs, an international grassroots network of independent groups that serve free vegetarian meals to all comers. Using mostly salvaged food, Food Not Bombs, like Occupy, is distinctly anti-capitalist. Before the Occupation, FNB's focus was on providing two meals a week — one in Central Square, one in Boston Common — mostly to homeless people and traveling kids. Now, Zaina and other FNB regulars work alongside other Occupy volunteers, serving food around the clock to the camp's residents and visitors; they've already fed hundreds.
In the next tent over from food, the "Really Really Free Market" offers a space where anyone can drop off unwanted items (mostly clothing) and/or pick up something they need — for free. It's based on the radical anarchist concept of a "gift economy." In stark contrast to market economies, there's no expectation of direct compensation for giving. Local collective houses organized RRFMs in Allston's Ringer Park throughout this past summer.
But the influence of anarchist culture on the Occupation goes beyond the notion of a free exchange of goods and services. For good or ill, the interminable, self-involved "general assemblies" — something often picked out as a weakness of the Occupy movement — also have their roots in the anarchist underground. It's called "horizontal organizing," decision-making without a command hierarchy or a leader.
"I don't think consensus organizing and horizontal organizing is exclusively anarchist," says Jacob, who lives in a cooperative house in lower Allston. "But it is an idea that we use and love. And I think that it is really addictive. When you participate in a collaborative process, long and slow as it is, at the end . . . every time we pass a decision, the crowd at the GA just roars. Just because we made it, we got through, we heard everybody's voice. And it feels good. . . . It's crazy. And so beautiful."
As the Occupy movement spreads to dozens of cities, it is bringing with it a new organizational structure that is fundamentally different from the marches and the protests of the Civil Rights era and, later, progressive protests against the Vietnam war.
For anarchists, the Occupy movement is transforming their intrinsic daily practices into tactics utilized by the masses.
"When I go to meetings, we do the twinkles all the time," says Zaina, referring to the now-ubiquitous hand gesture that indicates an occupier's support for a given idea. "And to see hundreds of people doing that now is so great. . . . This has been spread across so many people, you just look around, and you see 200 people doing the twinkles, and it's just so great."
I re-watched the 1977 film “Between the Lines” last night, which is loosely based on the early days of alt-weeklies that eventually became the Boston Phoenix. It’s funny to rewatch because even then, in the late 70s, the whole plot of the film is basically about the fading promise of alt-weeklies: the paper is about to get bought out by some guy who owns tons of other newspapers and wants to change the paper and add more advertising, no one is doing the exciting hard-hitting reporting they did in the 60s, everyone is bored and uninspired and thinking about leaving Boston for NYC where at least there might be better jobs. There is also a lot of newsroom sexism, a music critic who sells his promo records to buy weed, etc.
Even though he’s not the star of the screen and is generally a pretty annoying character, I’m kind of obsessed with this kid who works at the paper and is trying to break a local music industry investigation that no one asked for instead of doing his actual job, while all these burnt out 30-somethings complain about how nothing is as good as it used to be. No one around the office really takes him seriously, but he’s basically the only person on screen doing any actual journalism at all. (It eventually leads to a couple of music industry bros beating the shit out of him to get him to stop writing the article!)
While watching, I unsurprisingly thought a lot about working at the paper during its last gasping breath from 2011-2013, and all of the thinking we witnessed then and had been witnessing for years prior surrounding the death of alt-weeklies. Meanwhile here is a time capsule from over 40 years ago suggesting the dream had always been dying... or maybe that being part of such an outlet or tradition will always require having to try to figure out how to make the thing exist in a system that doesn’t want it to? Or at least that not every current media industry challenge is as unique to the conditions of 2020 as we might imagine.
This is a list of music I enjoyed in 2019. I made it in December but for whatever reason I never posted it. It never feels possible for these sorts of lists to be complete, so I often find them hard to let go of. But on the occasion of Bandcamp waiving their fees tomorrow for 24 hours, I thought I would share it. Hope you find something you like.
records
Holly Herndon - Proto
Jenny Hval - The Practice of Love
Moor Mother - Analog Fluids of Sonic Black Holes
Thelma - The Only Thing
Lisa Prank - Perfect Love Song
Dump Him - Dykes to Watch Out For
Thanks for Coming - Thanks For Coming
Sheer Mag - A Distant Call
Matana Roberts - Coin Coin Chapter Four: Memphis
Joanna Sternberg - Then I Try Some More
shows
Les Filles de Illighadad @ Pioneer Works
Pinocchio, AquaShade, etc. @ The Glove
Soul Glo / Control Top @ Mercury Lounge
Shimmer @ Secret Project Robot
Lily Konigsberg / Ani Blech / Preening / The Cradle @ windjammer
Billy Woods + The Funs @ Alphaville
Decisions @ The Glove
DJ Haram @ Panorama bar
Holly Herndon @ Pioneer Works
Devon Welsh / Skjell @ public records
the 24 hour show @ drty smmr!
Priests last show on NYE </3
every 2019 Baffler gig
Gauche, Sediment Club, Alice Cohen @ Secret Project Robot
Xenia Rubinos, Public Practice, Blood Club @ Murmrr
Empath + Control Top @ Pioneer works
Girlpool + Masters of Fright @ the cruise ship gig
songs by friends that I listened to on repeat for days
Yohuna - “Mirroring”
Emily Reo - “In Theaters”
Devon Welsh - ”Somebody Loves You”
Control Top - ”Chain Reaction”
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