✘ Choose your medium. Play the game.
- Normcore - Charli XCX's niche is mainstream - Humans vs. algorithms - Building a new and diverse music industry - Mention AI again
Creators and consumers alike use different mediums to create and consume. These mediums influence our experience and perception. They also influence how much artists can earn and how much listeners pay. And yet, I feel that none of us ask ourselves what our medium is. Which medium makes you happiest? Where do you find your voice? Your ear? When do you break this pattern and open yourself up to something new? We’re currently in a moment where there’s a lot of noise about how the mediums that we know are being uprooted. Yet, we also know that there’s a long history to both creation and consumption. And, we also know that developments come in cycles. With this, I invite you all to consider what your medium is.
Tech-forward
If you read this newsletter, you’re interested in tech and innovation. Yet, there’s also plenty of music that isn’t necessarily tech-forward. This is strong in classical music, which focuses so strongly on a canon of music stretching back a few hundred years. There’s a struggle to allow new composers to find their medium. It requires rebels like the ROCO - a chamber orchestra from Houston - to give a voice to new music. Moreover, they innovate relentlessly, working to integrate video, gaming, and more into their performances. Their listeners consequently experience music differently, through these different mediums and beyond the standard concert hall. It takes a lot of effort to pull this music of old traditions into new practices and cultures.
At the other end of the spectrum, there’s electronic music - a fairly new medium compared to classical music depending on how you look at it. It appears a genre made for innovation. At the same, it’s grappling with a newfound maturity in certain sections. Think of Techno moving from the dancefloor to the museum exhibit, in not always unproblematic fashion. Electronic music seems almost caught in this double-bind of being the most tech-forward while trying to find legitimacy in a canon of compositions.
There’s a convergence happening where music in its various guises and genres faces the same issue: which medium do you use? It’s all sonic and all of it captures emotional responses. You can be tech-forward and create a show that provides commentary on tech trends. You can be tech-forward and try to push music experiences into new world-building efforts. But choosing the medium requires understanding why you say yes to it. More importantly, it requires saying no to a lot of other things. This counts for artists and listeners alike.
Identity-stretching
Choosing a medium requires accepting it as part of your identity. There’s artists like Dadabots who choose research as their medium to explore sonic outputs. Their entire identity stretches around this medium. Accepting this as a listener is part of what will allow you to enjoy their performances - you have to let them humor you and vice versa, basically. There’s artists who engage with emerging technologies and choose that as their medium. They question the very fabric of music creation, while still creating beautiful music. As a listener, you can take in this music without understanding its creative background. You can simply identify with its drum ‘n bass tendency, or its soft piano sounds.
Take Portrait XO, who you can choose to listen to or choose to understand her creative process as well. She’s an artist who uses AI-driven tooling and who mixes visual and audio in ways most of us can’t - even in our dreams. I definitely find my ear in digging into the way she creates. For me, it adds another dimension to the music. It stretches my identity, as I feel it does hers by creating in this way. In a sense, there’s a point of suture here, where I attach myself to the position of the practice of artistry by Portrait XO. Her act of creating stretches her identity into a correspondence. My act of listening and understanding brings me into that correspondence. My listening is not a point of closure, but a point of emergence. This is what make the identity stretch out producing both the artist and the listener as objects recognised by each other.
Mainstream breaking point
Taking these ideas to a logical endpoint brings me to Charli XCX, who’s new album and rollout brought Tati Cirisano to point out how mainstream has gone niche. She writes:
“The question now — not just for Charli, but for other ‘cult’ stars following a similar model — is how far a niche can grow before it loses the core community that made it special in the first place. Or rather, how fast.”
Here, we see that stretching identity question at play. While artists embrace their medium and core fans understand why, there’s a combined identity stretching. This usually breaks at the mainstream point - which is different for each artist and in the perception of each listener. Yet, it can always exist through the connection of the medium.
The whole current discourse around superfandom speaks of cultivating fandom and how laid-back listening through playlists doesn’t allow for that. This is true, but there are ways to grow and nurture connections. One of those is to be clear about which medium you choose. Once this connects between artist and listener, their identities stretch round each other. They meet, they suture. On a smaller scale, this leads to genuine connections. At the larger, mainstream, scale this leads to parasocial relationships.
Play the game
With culture flattening, we’re at risk of potentially only listening to music to question if it’s interesting or fulfils a certain function. To choose your medium and accept its rules, you start to play a game. Each interaction becomes a world-as-play - I draw on Zygmunt Bauman here - with its own rules and regulations and memes. These games don’t involve algorithmic rules, only rules-of-thumb. All players make these up as they go along. Sometimes you lead, sometimes you follow. Everything that happens outside of it is muted, a noise from afar. Choose your medium, and enjoy the game.
LINKS
👟 Normcore was always a misunderstood fantasy (Delia Cai)
“But normcore’s true legacy is most apparent not in our modern New Balance-ification of style but in its status as a cultural artifact that changed the way we identified, defined, and talked about trends and aesthetics today. Coining a sticky name—whether the trend actually exists or not—and thereby speaking an entire cultural discourse into being might have been a novel event in 2014, but these days, it’s just another week on #corecore TikTok; the dividing line between naming the thing and making it a thing has never been blurrier—and the social and real currency of the skill has never been more valuable.”
✘ Normcore also became an identifier in music that didn’t do much. The decline of leading critic websites in recent years can be related to an apparent laziness in defining music. Basically, it’s a call to actually discuss the music instead of merely the surrounding aesthetics.
🐁 Did Charli XCX go mainstream, or did the mainstream just go niche? (Tatiana Cirisano)
“So, it was perfect timing for Charli to lean further than ever into internet micro-scenes for the Brat campaign, appearing to abandon the major-label marketing blueprint in favour of antics that only her niche would understand.”
✘ I also brought a quote from Tati’s article into my piece above. It’s a brilliant analysis of our current moment. Nobody goes big, many people go big in their niche. We see crossover stars, but even they don’t hold the stage that previous ones did.
⚔️ The latest online culture war is humans vs. algorithms (Elena Klein)
“While providing a more organic means of compilation, group messaging can still produce echo chambers and other pitfalls associated with complex algorithms. And when the content in your group chat comes from each member’s respective highly personalized algorithmic feed, things can get even more complicated. Despite the flight to algorithm-free spaces, the fight for a perfect information feed is far from over.”
✘ There’s some good recommendations of social platforms that try to be different. There’s also blockchain-based alternatives like Warpcast. It’s fun to try them out, but I personally feel that they always descend into requiring too much of my attention to actually make them work. I prefer to take it even slower and look at tools like Sublime.
🏳️🌈 Building a new and diverse music industry (Srishti Das, Akriti)
“… it’s not so much about self-esteem or fear of recognition but more about anxiety regarding the future and career stability. The uncertainty about what it means to be an Artist and what to expect from a career is a broader industry issue. In terms of safety and flexibility, the biggest impact has been that many women now have more control over their careers. Those with supportive teams mentioned that their teams wouldn’t make them work with someone who made them uncomfortable. Many are with Independent Labels.”
Hanna Kahlert (MIDiA Cultural Trends Analyst)
✘ Several of my favourite people thinking about music all together here. Check out the Be The Change report here.
🪖 I will fucking piledrive you if you mention AI again (Nikhil Suresh)
“Most organizations cannot ship the most basic applications imaginable with any consistency, and you're out here saying that the best way to remain competitive is to roll out experimental technology that is an order of magnitude more sophisticated than anything else your I.T department runs, which you have no experience hiring for, when the organization has never used a GPU for anything other than junior engineers playing video games with their camera off during standup, and even if you do that all right there is a chance that the problem is simply unsolvable due to the characteristics of your data and business? This isn't a recipe for disaster, it's a cookbook for someone looking to prepare a twelve course fucking catastrophe.”
✘ I think there’s a lot of people who need to read this. I encourage everyone to breathe and count to 10 whenever you catch yourself thinking you just need to include AI into your workflow or business practice without understanding why.
MUSIC
I was at SONAR last week, where I caught a lot of great music. One particular highlight was BAMBII going b2b with C.FRIM. They built a fantastic party atmosphere hopping from 90s rave bangers to smash pop hits to drum ‘n bass to everything in between. This particular 1000 Genre mix by BAMBII gives you the vibes.