(66)

Sometime in the last ten years, I noticed I had trouble remembering. I would watch a new movie, or listen to a new album, or read a book, or go to a buzzy restaurant, or visit a foreign city, and a week later somehow have zero recollection of what it was about or how I felt when I was in the thick of it. What’s weirder is, it’s not a full-on short-term memory loss. I routinely learn new songs on piano and hardwire the melody and harmony. I routinely remember the license plate numbers of suspicious cars or trucks that cut me off on the freeway. My wife and I are creatures of chaos, and I can routinely remember the exact coordinates of her car keys, or our son’s crocs, or a spare box of triple A batteries in our house. At work it’s the same: I can listen back to a demo I am finishing off, and with one listen can execute all the revisions I need to make without putting together a to-do list.

I’ve become a more passive consumer — that’s a given. Certainly more passive than I was when I was paid for my engagement, or when there was more at stake culturally (or socially) (or romantically) w/r/t having something interesting to say. When Mina and I first started dating, every new show we watched seemed to infuse our life with new inside jokes, new bits, new twisted metaphors, new stuffed animals with the names of Mad Men characters. There was an incentive to paying attention – remembering a detail that could be deployed in an email the morning after, a bit of dialogue that could smoothe over a tough conversation with a laugh.

But I also think it’s an overcorrection of what I call listening for the sentence: When you engage with an event or a piece of media only to the extent that it might help you mint something clever to say. It was something about myself I grew to dislike quite a bit – the glee with which I could and would reduce everything like a quadratic equation. Byung-Chun Han is fast fashion Foucault! Teddy Swims is AI precum! Björk’s best album was her swan dress! I’m not sure it’s art, but this Bryce Marden sure would look good hanging over my couch!

(67)

So much of what I’ve written has disappeared from the internet. I’m not upset about that at all – to have that portion of my writing that said nothing more than “please take me seriously as a writer” get lost in private equity shakedowns and various technological fissurings. What is left is often painful to re-read, as I imagine it is for any other writer who got their start online, learning on the job basically, completely naked to the rest of the world.

But if there’s one common thread through all the pieces, good and bad, it was that I seemed to have a lot of fun thinking about stuff. Making connections, however fraught. Noting the resonances hiding in plain sight, feeling impossibly warm inside when you stumble onto some rare factoid that somehow proves the hunch you had all along. As a young writer, which is to say as a young thinker, I was loose, silly, absurd, carefree. I was a child. I was ridiculous.

(68)

It turns out you can write without hitting publish – something that never had occurred to me until recently. Writing is a place, not just a product. It’s where you can work out the kinks of your brain. Which of course you could have learned from any AI generated copy on the website for any well-meaning manufacturer of bound paper products. Oh well – but I get “journaling” now. You get all the benefits of writing without the attendant anxieties of publishing. You don’t have all your half-baked egotistical nonsense out there for everyone to see. If I knew I could have just journaled, I’m not sure I ever would have “written”.

(69)

Except – being outside. Putting out the bat signal. That was also part of the joy of writing online. I wouldn’t go so far as to call early diaristic music writing a scenius, but there was the sense that the right people would find you eventually, that we would all work out more or less the same ideas together. You could just as easily lose friends if you didn’t have them on your blog roll! Whereto Lemon-Red? I sympathize with all the people who are writing on this platform everyday and wondering when they’ll finally be able to make enough money to do it for a living. But this kind of writing was never about money for me or my friends. It wasn’t about finding an audience, or building a brand, or looking for a good merch partner. This is our Minecraft. You’re just watching the stream.

(70)

As for Stranger Things: I can choose to be disappointed with what happened to this show, which was once perfect. I can choose to understand the series as a classic story of studio interference, the Noah’s Arcade effect, directorial ego, crown in the cradle, pick your pill. I can choose to poke fun of how old the actors looked, an unfortunate reality of the roles they signed on for ten years prior, or how bad at acting most of them turned out to be once the veil of their cherubic charm was lifted. I loved “Running Up That Hill” more than you’ll ever know. But for fuck’s sake. I can choose to share how painful it was for me to watch one of my favorite songs become the show’s punchline – to watch it become kitsch before my very eyes. And to be honest I did! The draft is sitting right here in my notepad. Or –

Or – I can choose to remember the sea lions. The trip to San Diego for my 40th birthday, the exact moment in time it seemed you couldn’t go anywhere in this world without hearing “Running Up That Hill” coming from someone’s speakers. I can choose to wonder aloud, would my brilliant 80s synth-loving friend Daniel Lopatin have been given the opportunity to compose for film in his marty supremely idiosyncratic style if the Stranger Things dark synth-driven score hadn’t been such a sensation first? I can ask myself: Without the windfall of Stranger Things, would Netflix have let my friend Zach Kanin make I Think You Should Leave? My favorite television show of all time? I can choose to think about how much my life has changed in the last ten years – a new city, my dad gone, a son I never thought I’d have.

(70)

As for Fire and Ash: Per Han, is Avatar all emotion, no feeling? All porn, no seduction? All spectacle, no event? Does this explain both its massive global success and its lack of cultural staying power? Do you remember what happened in White Trash Whore 16 or Buttman’s Big Tit Adventure 5? Any memorable lines?

Or do we count our blessings that the world’s most popular film is propaganda for action against climate change? Do we overlook the preponderance of “bros" and simply let it be what it is, which is a multi-billion dollar advertisement for the often uplifting experience of watching stuff together with strangers in movie theaters?

(71)

The Studio, which we just finished this past week – I mean this is the entire point of this show, no? Without The Kool-Aid Movie, there will be no The Silver Lake. One for them, one for us. It is entirely plausible, to me at least, that the same studio executive would want to make an IP cash-in that grosses billions of dollars and also be incredibly crestfallen when they aren’t thanked for bankrolling something newer and artier and more challenging.

The dream of course is you thread the needle – you do both at once, make art that also happens to make money. Kanye, for all his unforgivables, etc. But all too often, when you try to do that, you do neither. Or maybe it works, like, a little bit. You can have a kinda-sorta career making kinda-sorta art that kinda-sorta makes money. But the resentments pile up. It’s weird. You kinda-sorta end up hating everybody who kinda-sorta likes you. It is the definition of a middling existence.

(72)

Middlers and needle-threaders, I fear, don’t breathe the air of Pandora. This year I’m trying my best to let the things I make and work on with others be what they want to be. Are we making Kool Aid Movie? How can it be the best version of the Kool Aid Movie? How can I help this thing be the most Kool-Aid thing possible? I wonder why I look back so fondly on my time in advertising, writing television commercials and print ads for computer companies and sneaker stores and microwave meals and canned tomatoes. I was at peace with the assignment.

Yagottakeepemseparated…

My Silver Lake? I am releasing my friend Sarah Belle Reid’s quadraphonic album Manifold – an absolute ripper of trumpet and interactive electronics and the most out-there music I’ve heard in forever. I’m resisting my instinct to middle, down to the initial tracklist – a single, 45-minute piece of uninterrupted audio. I’ll have more to say about Sarah composing for multi-channel in another post, but yes, you read that right. It’s a quadraphonic album. Why see the movie when you can be there? It’s changed my tune on spatial audio, and totally rewired my understanding of composing with space – an ingredient of music that, to me, can be as emotionally resonant as melody, rhythm, or harmony.

Which is to say, it’s loose. It’s careless. It’s ridiculous. But what am I doing here, if not ridiculous things?

(60)

My job has been ‘make new music’ for over a decade now – the longest I’ve held onto any job in my adult life. The irony – I’m not sure it’s real irony, perhaps it’s more the ‘life’s funny that way’ Alanis Morissette kind – is that I don’t listen to nearly as much new music as I used to when I didn’t have this job.

In my 20s, I could plow through a couple thousand new albums in a year, with multiple listens courtesy long subway rides and long walks in between. I would also break up the year into quarters to study artist and label back catalogs or genres I didn’t know quite well: Montreal disco from January through March, Scandinavian folk from April to June, the beginnings of jungle, etc. I took notes on nearly everything I listened to, and wrote about a couple hundred releases each year as well.

In my current configuration, there are only so many hours in a day for music. I can spend my time making music, or practicing my instruments so I can get better at making music, or analyzing a single four-bar loop to understand why it doesn’t feel repetitive, or tapping in on the Hot 100 to glean what I can of a sweet spot between commercial tastes and my own, etc. Usually I am not making my music per se – just helping other people make the music they want to make. In any case, I am almost always listening with another purpose in mind. And that changes what you hear.

I’m probably listening to as much music-adjacent sound as I used to, but when I’m done working I have to rest my ears now. Our home is quiet, and so is our little pocket of Los Angeles. I sold my hifi when I moved here, and what’s left of my physical media collection resides in the hidden storage vaults of my son’s bedroom – a treasure for him to discover at some point, I tell myself… Breaking up the cobwebs, holding up my copy of Juan Maclean’s “Dance With Me” extended white label to the light…

The environments I listen to new music have also changed. For work, I listen on a pair of custom Augspurger monitors in a treated room with nearly even response from 20hz to 20,000hz. For pleasure, it’s usually my phone’s speaker. I listen when I’m cooking for my family, or exercising in my bedroom, or driving to the west side for a doctor’s appointment. For ear health reasons, I rarely listen on headphones anymore. New music therefore is rarely my totality. It always has a context.

I look forward to year-end lists, but also mourn that part of myself that could more credibly participate in the making of them. I mourn the part of myself that actively lobbied other writers to vote for my favorite albums so they would chart higher on our publication’s Best Of lists. I mourn the part of myself that believed the results somehow mattered – that the world would be an infinitesimally better place if more people listened to Deerhoof, or Annie, or Villalobos, or Madvillain, or –

(61)

“Is this good?”

I could answer this question with so much conviction twenty years ago! Jet’s Get Born – an hour of kitschy rock & roll posturing, no formal innovation, no danger whatsoever – this was the definition of Not Good. QED.

But then I tried to record a tambourine and you know what, the tambourine on “Are You Gonna Be My Girl?” sounds good. Then I work with many, many singers who cannot in any traditional way sing well and try my best to make it all work and try to find the right equipment to flatter their voice and try to massage the instrumental with them to get the balance right and you know what, the lead singer of Jet just has a great voice.

(Does he say “Yeah!!” a lot – like maybe 20 to 30 times per song? Yeah!! Is it better than Rob Zombie’s “Yeah!!”? No!!)

But maybe – maybe Jet are fine. Maybe their first record was totally fine. And maybe they are, in fact, very good at being Jet: a kitschy retro rock & roll revival band that can occasionally make you feel the way 70s classic rock can make you feel. Which, it turns out, is not quite as easy to do as I had previously thought it was!

(62)

“Why do I feel how I feel?”

I remain exceptionally critical of other people’s music, but I’m certainly listening with more compassion. I’m not trying to construct the canon anymore, or destroy the corny parts of the old canon, or reconstruct a new one that corrects for the errors and omissions of the old canon, etc. When I listen to new music these days, I’m just trying to find stuff I like. I’m just listening to feel things I haven’t felt before.

Which I imagine is how most people who identify as music fans listen to music! Oh well. Definitely took the long way here.

Here’s where that gets tricky. The more I’ve learned, the more I can almost always find something interesting in almost any piece of music. This is a useful skill for overcoming my allergy to most hyped artists, particularly “New York’s next great rock band” style hype. I couldn’t click with Geese’s new album – too distracted by the conversation surrounding it – until I studied how simple and elongated Cameron Winter keeps his vocal melodies, and how well the broad motions contrast the frenetic playing of his bandmates. Dispassion can lead to passion. That was my way in.

At the same time, I can almost always find something I don’t like too, even when my initial gut reaction is “this sounds like something I like.” I can connect it to a broader trend, or I can connect it to some version of artist posturing, or ‘best practices’ / industry standards, or the sound of something that really, desperately wants to be “a hit” or to be “serious” or (the worst) “timeless.” The anonymizing, zero-friction high-pass of so much pop vocal production; clunky triad voicings that overarticulate the harmony; dull synthesizer programming with zero modulation; wayyyy too much shit happening as a cover-up for no clear musical line, on and on — I can always find some loose detail and anchor a whole story to it. My brain just spirals out and the fire-breathing 20-year-old inside me takes over: “Is this new, or is this merely pleasurable?”

At my worst, I think: If I’m enjoying this, it must not be good. Is Geese – who I like! – just the diatonic Radiohead? Are Los Thuthanaka – who I like! – just Black Dice with keytars and cowboy hats?

(63)

So yeah: It’s become hard for me to say something is ‘bad’ or ‘good’ these days. “What I listened to most” is meaningless. Octatrack tutorials on Youtube? Todd Barton’s Buchla 200 videos? My favorite music of 2025? I’m 43 years old, man. Do you think I’m going to listen to The Hellp when I can listen to Wayne Shorter?

Most interesting music of 2025?

Candidly? Is Addison Rae “interesting” because of how perfectly uninteresting she is? A smooth, frictionless vessel for other people’s music and emotions, leaving no trace of herself? A marvelous feat given her celebrity? She’ll be your whatever you want… Is she interesting because she is at the vanguard of major labels manufacturing consent for AI? Is this how major label artists finally get healthcare? By becoming the sales force?

Candidly? Is my favorite song of 2025 the AI ‘60s soul’ cover of Rob Zombie’s “Dragula” that was going around a few months ago on Instagram? The irony – or perhaps this too is mere Alanis – that AI can so deftly handle “soul” music, can so smoothly execute all the signifiers of rhythm & blues music, aka black music, and that the first record deals for AI artists are ones that peddle whitewashed r&b, soul, and gospel? Have we really bypassed tragedy and gone straight to farce here? But! But whoever it is singing, that voice…

(64)

This is not even trolling. If you are or were a professional writer, your favorite song is the one that produces the best copy. Your enjoyment of the music has no small degree of relation to the thoughts you generated while you were engaging with the music and the complex of people and cultural context that created that music. And those thoughts – the act of thinking – maybe that is the pleasurable part of listening to, I dunno, Romy Mars. Maybe you don’t like how you feel when you listen to Romy Mars. But maybe you do like how you feel when you think about how you feel when you listen to Romy Mars. Get in! Let’s talk about it!

(65)

In the absence of music I believe was “best” –

In the absence of music I believe was my “favorite” –

In the absence of music I swear to you was “interesting” –

This is the song I chose to share with other people. It’s a demo, at least in name, of a song called “If You Know Me” by the New York-based artist Hudson Freeman. I discovered this song like so many others do – on Instagram, via algorithm. In the video, the artist appears in front of a corn field on a peaceful country day. His guitar is hiked up high, and you can see the bottom three strings visibly vibrate when he strums them – perhaps because of some esoteric tuning, but either way it completes the hillbilly vibe. Freeman himself seems lifted out of a Sherwood Anderson short story – a twisted apple with a strawish mop of brown hair and an uneventful mustache. There are crickets and other sounds of the outdoors in the background – probably foley, as mythmaking is a given when the presentation is this blatantly ‘authentic.’ It’s a persona, no more or less than Kurt’s or Iggy’s. And the more I see Freeman in my feed, the more I admire his artistry in that way too.

And yet when I shared the song I provided no context, no pretext, no argument. I just sent the song. Granted: There’s the unconveniently convenient fact that this is a folk song, played by a human on an acoustic guitar with what appears to be little technological aid beyond that, against a yearlong backdrop of ethical and economic panic re: AI music. But was that why I’m sharing this? Hard to know.

Or maybe it was a more familiar sort of rebellion. Is “folk is back” back? New York’s logical response to indie sleaze pussy/dick/butthole type music, not unlike when “freakfolk” was the logical response to electroclash 20 years ago? Does every generation get the new weird America it deserves?

Whatever it is, I just love this song. There is a studio version, but I prefer this stripped back take. I love that it is just happy to be a demo – no more, no less. It is not trying to be “the best song.” It doesn’t seem to be trying to convince me of anything, really. It’s just something that somebody made, something that they thought was worth sharing with us, and something I thought was worth sharing with you. Guzzle up!

Tomorrow, I (Nick) am releasing ‘Stereo Music for Breakbeats and Samplers’, my debut album after a decade and change of helping others make theirs.

From the label copy: “Over 15 tracks, Sylvester takes the breakbeat to its breaking point, with fast-paced microsonic sampling and modular improvisations not typically heard in rap, house, garage, drum & bass, drill & bass, or other well-worn domains of the break. In Sylvester's world, the drummer is no mere timekeeper. Rhythm becomes sounds becomes rhythm again, in a rapid call-and-response style that recalls trading fours and the playful humor of early musique concrete.”

Today I share the album’s liner notes, written by my friend Sam Hockley-Smith. It’s a beautiful meditation on the joy of listening to supposedly difficult music. Sam and I have had hundreds of conversations over the years about how and why we listen to music, especially the knottier stuff, and I was honored that he accepted the gig. Just yesterday, when I was trying to coordinate this Substack co-authoring thing, we got on a tangent about metafiction and Sam said, “People get too hung up on understanding books tbh.” Which is, in a way, the tl;dr of smartdumb. Thanks again to Sam. Essay reprinted entirely below.

Squeezing Toothpaste on a Circuit Board

Or: Notes on Stereo Music for Breakbeats and Samplers

by Sam Hockley-Smith

Cards on the table: What you’re about to listen to is what I’d call “funny” music. It’s not exactly difficult to listen to, but it isn’t easy either. Truthfully, it’s difficult for me to write about “funny” music without worrying you’ll think Nick’s just Weird Al-ing it here, or that this album, Stereo Music for Breakbeats and Samplers, is somehow ephemeral or “not real” music. Let me explain.

I once got into an argument about Merzbow in a parking lot. If you don’t know, Merzbow makes noise music that answers the question of what it would sound like if you got stuck in a steel factory that was in the middle of collapsing and then just kept collapsing into infinity forever. The argument happened because I could not comprehend that my friend might actually have fun listening to noise like that. I was defiant—refusing to believe in the concept of aural punishment as entertainment. 

Decades later, I can say that my beef was less with his love of harsh noise and more with myself: I couldn’t hear any joy or humor or life in Merzbow’s music, so I just assumed it couldn’t be there for anybody. My mistake! Odd noises, when properly arranged, can be funny. A tank wheel squeaking across an empty military parade route, a baby figuring out how to make that THBBBBTT noise with its mouth…The combination of humor and music is weird like that. I almost wrote that they were “strange bedfellows,” but the truth is that they rarely share a room, let alone a bed.

When I first met Nick Sylvester, he had a blog where he would write fake conversations between real musicians in all caps. There was one between LA rapper The Game and the Arcade Fire guy that I think about weekly. No matter who he was parodying, though, they all took on a similar concept. What would happen if an artist—any artist—became totally, absurdly fixated on a single idea or misunderstanding?

Nick had an uncanny ability to make each line seem like something each specific artist might actually say or think. It was too ridiculous to be satire, but still the jokes permeated the stuffy self-seriousness that made up the majority of the music industry. It felt like a correction, or at the very least a reminder: Serious stuff could be funny, and funny stuff could be serious without trumpeting its cleverness. 

Stereo Music works in a similar way. Listen to enough of a certain genre, or an individual instrument, or any audio really, and you start to notice the patterns, and how those patterns repeat. The same way that Nick blew apart the innards of the interview format, here he’s dismantling the recognizable breakbeats we’ve all heard a million times. He’s scribbling all over the blueprint, pushing them to their breaking point—chopping, mashing, warping them into unrecognizable shapes until rhythm becomes melody becomes rhythm. The humanness—the uneasy humanness—can’t help but bleed through. These are not sterile, sequenced programs. Nick is performing the transformations in real time by hand and foot via modular synthesizer. It’s a symbiotic relationship between human and machine, predicated on the flaws of both parties. It doesn’t quite blend together, because it shouldn’t. The joy is in one’s call to the other’s response, the constant communication breakdown, the rare moments when they make contact.

Imagine someone squeezing toothpaste on a circuit board, or a swarm of robot cicadas attacking your tomato plant, or coming up for air in a pool of liquid metal, or a broken steel drum wobbling drunkenly down a steep hill. Is this funny? Is it difficult? Both? Neither? That’s the point. Don’t get hung up on the details. Don’t try to signify. Trust your body. Let it hold on to what it wants to hold on to.

There’s no difference between “funny” music and “difficult” music — it’s how you choose to hear it. My advice: Trust your ears. Trust your body. Let it hold on to what it wants to hold on to Don’t try too hard to get this one. And if you think you got it? I think you did, too.

Stereo Music for Breakbeats and Samplers, out July 22 on smartdumb. [bandcamp]

(56)

Like so many of us who expend all our cellular energy thinking and making and supporting independent music, I was saddened to see that Billy Jones, a New York institution, had passed over the weekend. We had talked a bit about his health troubles last August, but it never came up again. I had been under the assumption that he was through the worst of it. Alas.

The broad strokes of this man – co-founder of independent venue Baby’s All Right, founder of Billy’s Record Salon, former Piano’s booker, fearless entrepreneur of so many Manhattan clubs that, like the best Manhattan clubs, were shuttered a year or sooner after opening, manager-in-a-pinch of so many artists you know and likely love – would be enough to talk about. Baby’s was a true triumph — a fever dream I still can’t believe remains a reality. There’s a reason every new New York artist wants to play there, and every successful artist who’s not from New York wants to play in front of its iconic latticework of backlights. Playing Baby’s is a career milestone – a Madison Square Garden for new artists. Not a victory lap so much as a starting block. Selling it out means you might even have a chance of making it elsewhere.

But proper nouns are so far from capturing the tireless and generous spirit of Billy, his ubiquity, his kindness and approachability, his deep belief that awesome things were still worth doing, or at least trying to do, even if they weren’t going to make you or anybody else any money.

He’s the kind of person you hoped still lived in New York.

(57)

Quick aside. In the early 2000s there was a New York band called the Octagon. Johnny Mays, who was my friend Simeon’s best friend from Alabama, was in the band with Zach Mexico, who started Baby’s with Billy, and Will Glass, who I would eventually take drum lessons from up in Harlem. Deep in my email, I have notes from a show of theirs at Piano’s. Apparently one of their amps caught on fire. Apparently I had a lot of thoughts about frontman Zach’s unbuttoned party shirt on stage.

Nowhere in my email, though, is a note that Billy was not in the Octagon. I could have sworn he was, and have gone two decades now thinking he was, and brought up the Octagon constantly whenever I saw him, which in retrospect must have seemed completely deranged. In any case, I met Billy over 20 years ago, adjacent to the Octagon in some way or another. His musical journey started around the same time as mine, he was incredibly supportive of me, and I like to think I was the same for him. We both moved to New York after 9/11, hoping to take part in the same cosplay of cool that’s kept people coming there for centuries now, and we both lived within a block of the Bedford L stop, when the only grocery store was Tops and when the line “Zach Braff worked in this restaurant in the movie Garden State” was a meaningful thing to say to a first date at SEA.

(58)

“Be the change you wish to see in the world.” Did Gandhi say this, or Billy?

There’s a moment you realize that New York is not a city at all, but a collective hallucination. If you want New York to be the New York you thought it was going to be, you have to make it happen. Nobody is going to do it for you.

That was the reality of independent music in the late 00s in Brooklyn. The places and sounds and people we have moved there for had already moved on. Venues were closing down every other week. The dominant form of live music entertainment at the venues that persisted was a particularly virulent form of chillwave called shitgaze, whose fans were some of the foulest-smelling people I have ever encountered. I can assure you, Lizzy Goodman met nobody in these bathrooms.

Candidly, I felt left out. My solution was to start a band and try to make the music I wanted to hear in the world. This led to starting a label, which led to throwing the parties I would have wanted to go to, with the music I wanted to hear, with the people and artists I hoped would come to them. Maybe it wasn’t Basquiat dancing on the bar with Debbie Harry, but it made my time in New York feel special.

For Billy, it wasn’t about starting a band or label – it was about having his own venue. I remember being in total awe the first time he took me through Baby’s before it had opened. We were about the same age, early 30s then. I remember wondering, Were people our age even allowed to do something this? Open a venue? In New York City? Were bathrooms in rock venues allowed to be this clean? Better yet, it wasn’t going to be just a venue. It was also going to be a restaurant!

Man. I thought I was insane deciding to put out people’s music. Billy was on another level. Outside of prostitutes, drugs, and gambling, music and food have to be the quickest and surest ways to lose money. Both at the same time though? Wow.

Except you don’t do these things to make money. You do these things because you realize you have to. Because you realize nobody is going to do it unless you do it. In that way, Billy’s professional career was one big beautiful gesture of hope. New York isn’t the same as it used to be, sure. But what if it was?

(59)

I learned this past weekend that children, sometimes as early as four, learn about climate change. What they’re told, in no uncertain terms, is that the world was a better, more beautiful, more ecologically diverse place before they were born. And what they’re left to intuit is that their parents – and their parents, and their parents – did nothing to stop it from happening. For that reason alone, I don’t doubt the conviction of anyone younger than me who says they think this life is a drag, a dumpster fire, a foregone conclusion, have fun where you can, while it lasts.

And yet I feel a recharged sense of responsibility, an unusual if not entirely spiritual predisposition towards hope. My son will understand what’s happening in the world whether either of us like it or not. But perhaps I can help him see the world for what’s still here, for what’s still beautiful. Perhaps I can show him that some people still gave a shit.

New York will always be better before you got there. But not everybody has the luxury of mourning. There are people who are not ready to give up. There are people who are still doing beautiful things, or at least trying to, because what else is there to do?

To me, that’s Billy. Thank you for too much. I miss you already.

(50)

Bless this feed for Stuart Berman alerting us that it’s been 20 years since Sleater-Kinney’s The Woods came out. I have a very clear memory of listening to the album on a rickety treadmill at that shady gym off Driggs Ave in Williamsburg (for a time, the only gym off the Bedford stop). I had exercised so infrequently in my life till then, that the second I stepped on the treadmill it was like I began to sweat profusely almost immediately, and I ended up getting shocked through one of my earpods within the first few minutes. I took this as a sign, got off the mill, and didn’t exercise for ten years.

(51)

There were a lot of things that were different about The Woods, though I didn’t have the vocabulary at the time. For Stuart, it was about the band pulling from a different set of reference points – more Led Zeppelin, more bombastic, less Gang of Four, less ‘arty’. In a word, it sounded dumber.

All I knew was that it was the first Sleater-Kinney album I actually liked. At the same time, it was a loud, fatiguing album — like going to a noise show in a small DIY venue without wearing ear plugs. (In fact, the only record that had ever made me feel that way was Sightings’ Michigan Haters on Load.) I didn’t know what this meant exactly, but had to listen to The Woods at half the volume I was used to listening. Even still, my ears felt like well-done steak.

(52)

When you make digital recordings, there is an upper limit for how loud the final file can actually be: -0dBFS. That’s the loudest you can go. If you cross that line, the recording “clips” – and historically, digital clipping was a very, very miserable, truly unpleasant sound for the human ear. This is different from clipping via a guitar amplifier or a microphone preamp, which creates interesting kinds of asymmetries and intensified harmonics we call 'distortion’ and ‘saturation’. But in the early 2000s, when analog-to-digital and digital-to-analog converters were still relatively new technologies, digital clipping was an absolute no-no. It physically hurt your ears.

As part of this album’s aesthetic, the producer Dave Fridmann and the band had embraced digital clipping, which is to say embraced hurting people’s ears. The decision was interesting because historically it happened at the same moment when “major label rock” (if you will) was trying to figure out a way to navigate the “loudness wars.” Sort of like an audio Pepsi Challenge, the broader public think music sounds better when it appears to be louder, at least initially. So labels started demanding mastering engineers compress and limit recordings to have more apparent volume, at the expense of overall dynamics and at the risk of/inevitability of digital distortion.

This is the era of Metallica’s St. Anger, Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Stadium Arcadium, etc – and there was something not-so-quietly desperate about rock music competing for market share with pop and rap especially – more minimally arranged genres that can more readily and naturally sound louder.

Indie rock wasn’t on the radio like that, so this was very much a choice Sleater-Kinney made — to make a rock record that sounded, basically, like shit. I thought it worked (and still works) beautifully, especially against the often bizarre lyricbook. Following the monstrously chunky guitar freakout of “The Fox” you get: “On the day the duck was born…” This was not exactly the kind of music that was going to help American Apparel sell more catsuits.

It’s not a record you can pull out on the regular, but I’m not sure “can you pull it out on the regular?” is necessarily a good rubric for music, or really any aesthetic experience. I think it’s OK that you can’t exercise while you listen to this music, or do much of anything. You just have to take the beating.

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A few years later, also in Williamsburg, my friend Derek Miller would pick up where records like The Woods left off. In his apartment, he had begun making the demos for a band that would eventually be called Sleigh Bells. The sound of the first Sleigh Bells album is, among many other things, the sound of first-gen Apogee Duet converters being clipped on the way in, and God what a beautiful sound that is. The character of Apogee converters clipping is very very different from the character of Digidesign (Pro Tools) converters clipping. Part of that was Apogee had designed a soft-limit feature so that sound would be stopped right before it crossed 0dBFS, and the sound of that soft limit to my ears had more of the curdle of slow-moving tape. Derek had figured out a way to make it sing. “Why doesn’t this feel how it feels when I play it live?” is likely the guiding principle. Derek is a masterful shredder and as a songwriter/producer, a master of extreme contrast. I don’t think you could get away with melodies like “Crown on the Ground” or “Kids” unless the instrumentals were as gnarled as they are. It’s such a fertile proposition – a very smartdumb proposition – and every Sleigh Bells album is a fun (and usually jealousy-inducing for me) moment to see where Derek and Alexis land inside the 0dBFS aesthetic.

I am in debt to Derek for many things, but for now: Derek was the one who eventually got me back into the gym after my post-Woods scare. No mirrors, no TVs, just results! Thank you.

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There was a period in my production career when I was only making loud, noisy, blown-out rock records. But the physical fatigue of this kind of music is real, and after I finished Yvette’s Process – which, coincidentally, Stuart Berman wrote about on Pitchfork (8.1!) – I noticed a dip in the upper mids in my right ear and panicked and decided it was time to take a break from the hard-hitting, heavy-boozing 0dBFS Aesthetic lifestyle I was living. As the song goes, I sold all my guitars and amps for turntables and synthesizers. For a decade, I just made Yaz records.

Call it a midlife crisis: A few years ago I had been craving 0dBFS again. I think that’s what initially attracted me to Copenhagen’s MØ. Karen had massive radio records under her belt (“Lean On”, “Final Song”, “Don’t Leave”), but her beginnings were punk and DIY in Copenhagen, and she missed that sound and that Total Energy Thing type energy. The album we made together, called Plæygirl, came out a few weeks ago, is not a 0dBFS Aesthetic record per se, but is a pop record that draws on the feeling of the 0dBFS Aesthetic. It’s an emotional homecoming for her, and a creative recentering for both of us.

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Tapping in on the tech: Creative clipping is just part of the gig of being a producer at this point, and there are hundreds of software options that emulate certain clipping responses, that accentuate certain “bad” clipping sounds, others deemphasize them, etc. But candidly I really hadn’t had to do much clipping for the rounder, deeper aesthetic of records I was making. So Plæygirl was first time I had to try to find some nuance in the 0dBFS aesthetic — which I guess isn’t a very 0dBFS aesthetic thing to say.

My problem with a lot of 0dBFS Aesthetic type music – from hyperpop to Load to Brat — is that as an artist it doesn’t give you a lot of next steps moving forward. It compresses your dynamic range of expression to hard cadence, tension and release, tension and release. In my bones I can understand why Sleater-Kinney called it for a bit after that one. The left-turn would have to be drastic to get out of it – like you’d have to make a freak-folk album or something. Do we want that? Does Sleater? I’m curious to see where Charli goes from here too; for what it’s worth, I do want a Charli freak-folk album.

This was also the first time I worked extensively with another mixer – another 0dBFS Aesthetic vet named Lars Stalfors (too many credits to list). Among a million other lovely qualities, Lars has an exceptional ear for clipping – when to clip, how hard to clip, what to clip with. I didn’t realize how much the Lavry Gold converters, when you clip them a few dB, simply are the sound of commercial American pop music the last decade and a half or so. It’s a character we might not be able to articulate but we just know, not unlike how the frequency response of an iPhone microphone has transformed how we hear the human voice.

In the past I would work so hard not to shred my low-end – bass response is one of the first casualties of clipping – and it was frankly amazing to see Lars find a way to get the shred without losing a certain essential character I find lives below 30hz. There’s just a lot more nuance to be had than I had initially thought.

Technically, streaming technology should have ended the need for records LUFSing in that -5, -6db zone. You’ve heard every old guy on audio internet say some version of this, how music sounds worse than it used to, hypercompression this, ear fatigue that. But I think the Rick Beatos of the world didn’t account for the possibility of 0dBFS not as a market directive but as an actual creative aesthetic. And I don’t think they accounted for people like Lars (or Skrillex, or Dylan Brady, or Charli, etc) making an art of the sound of nowhere else to go.

I don’t want to be so pat as to say music has to be this loud to compete against the clamor of other more distractions, to say nothing of the clamor of humanity. So many albums have been ruined because the band or the label wanted the album louder — and yes, I am talking about Merriwether Post Oblivion. There are plenty of people making music that isn’t loud too, and I swear there is nothing sweeter than the sound of headroom. I don’t think it’s a gender thing, and I don’t think it’s a young people versus old people thing. You could say the last 100 years of music has been about taking music to its breaking point – formally, materially, intellectually. The danger: Music is more fun to talk about than listen to.

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A few years ago I began batting around the concept of “smartdumb” with other musician friends. Initially it was just a parlor game: a loose framework to categorize the kinds of things I liked and the kinds of things I didn’t, and an effort to understand why I felt the way I did about either. The term naturally invited a Cartesian plane of categories – dumbdumb, dumbsmart, smartdumb, smartsmart – and when I first posted about it online, those categories understandably upset a lot of people, mostly those who didn’t want to hear that the thing they like is considered “dumbdumb” by a middle-aged white dude. At the same time, nobody seemed to disagree that Jack Antonoff was “dumbsmart,” so perhaps I was onto something.

I’ve had a lot more time to live with the idea. I think of it less now as a cheap way to categorize pop culture, and more akin to a broader cultural ecosystem, with four broad experiences keeping each other in balance. The term became a guiding light for my own work as well – a way for me to hit reset on myself and get out of my own way. When I quit my old company a few years ago, I knew immediately my next one would be called Smartdumb.

Since so many of you are new around here (thank you for subscribing), I thought I’d try to explain where I’m at with everything – the origins of the idea, the different categories as I understand them (dumbdumb, dumbsmart, smartdumb, smartsmart), and how “smartdumb” has become a mantra as I try to figure out how to make a living as a culture laborer in the year 2025.

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When I moved to New York in the early 2000s, I interned for the writer Chuck Eddy. Eddy was (and very much still is) a music critic who was skeptical of music that music critics like. A proud midwesterner, he liked what he liked without reservation, and dismissed what he didn’t with withering, balloon-popping ease. He often used the term ‘heavy metal’ to describe certain seemingly superficial, aggressively bone-headed musical entertainments he found to be quite meaningful — certainly as meaningful as anything other critics deemed ‘art’. When I worked for him, he argued relentlessly for industry confections like Ashlee Simpson, alt-right hillbillies like Kid Rock, and novelty acts like country-rappers Big & Rich — which was itself a very heavy metal thing to do.

This was not some corny Signifying Rappers-eque Well Actually-ing of supposedly low culture. My sense is that Chuck genuinely was moved by these entertainments, not because they signified anything, but because they somehow managed not to signify anything at all. They were pure pleasure — 100% id. And for Eddy, as a critic, this kind of shamelessly sui generis, brain-shortcircuiting pleasure is the highest virtue. Where it gets dicey – and often where it gets sublime – is grappling with the perverse pleasure so many of us can take in enjoying entertainments we know to be ugly, misogynistic, outright brutish or pubescent, or simply in supposedly bad taste. I don’t know how else to say it but to say it: Nobody does it like Chuck. I’m grateful I got to spend time with him.

A few years earlier, Eddy edited a writer named Kelefa Sanneh, who would take Chuck’s heavy metal approach to even more extreme territory. Sanneh’s "Rap Against Rockism" essay becoming a kind of manifesto for something called ‘poptimism’ – the argument that commercially minded, industrially manufactured ‘mere’ mass audience entertainments like pop and rap and country could be just as artistically valid as supposedly ‘serious’ art. Poptimism slowly but surely became the dominant mode of all music coverage, right at the moment legacy media was beginning its great contraction.

When I first began to engage seriously with music, the walls between “art” and “entertainment” had already begun tumbling down — or perhaps the better metaphor is whatever happened to that wall in the Run DMC/Aerosmith video. New York Magazine played fast and loose with its four-quadrant Approval Matrix: from Lowbrow to Highbrow on one axis, Despicable to Brilliant on the other. Girl Talk mashed up Elton John with Notorious B.I.G., while DJs like Nick Barat made a name for themselves jamming high against low. For a moment, it seemed the most interesting writers were only interested in mass entertainment. At the time it was oddly bold, if not slightly trollish, when Pitchfork to decide cover Taylor Swift in earnest, amidst news items for a new Deerhoof album or a tour dates for Tapes N’ Tapes.

The business of supposedly smart people engaging with supposedly dumb shit is still alive and well, but perhaps not exactly as alive as it was. (Certainly not as alive and well as the business of dumb people engaging with dumb shit.) Writers like Spencer Kornhaber and Ted Gioia have made some headway trying to understand the consequences of this hierarchal breakdown and shift in where we put our attention. For my money, nobody understands it better than W. David Marx, whose excellent book on culture in the 21st century, Blank Space, arrives later this Fall.

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What is a smart person and what is a dumb person? Pardon my heavy metal. To me, a smart person is simply someone who engages with the world, attempts to create new meaning, and in the process challenges or supplants the old ones. A dumb person is simply someone who experiences the world without necessarily engaging with it. He does not create meaning, and accepts the meanings previously created by others. For my part, I am way more a dumb person than a smart person, and have the screen time reports to show it, though I admit that’s a very smart person thing to say.

What is smart shit and what is dumb shit? I use these terms loosely as well, and suspect they line up with W. David Marx’s definitions of ‘art’ and ‘entertainment’. Smart shit is, loosely, art: It challenges your understanding of what is fun or beautiful, and in the process rewires your brain and expands your possibilities moving forward. Dumb shit is, loosely, entertainment: It often conforms to the lowest common denominator understanding of what is fun or beautiful, and technically speaking the ‘best’ dumb shit is essentially frictionless in its erasure of your free time. Dumb shit, in this way, is a kind of accidental propaganda for dumb shit.

Very few entertainments are purely smart or purely dumb. I studied Lucretius in college, and was always taken by his understanding of his own work: If you want people to drink the medicine, you have to put honey around the lip of the cup. De Rerum Natura was his explanation of how the world works. In some parts he went into very esoteric territory, like explaining how free will was possible due to the random swerve of invisible particles, which is to say Lucretius was way early on “atoms”. It was a science textbook. The honey? He wrote this textbook as a poem. Adjusting for the time difference, that’s like learning AP Chemistry with Grape Juice Boys memes.

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As for the word ‘smartdumb’, let’s start with the obvious. Smartdumb is extremely pretentious. At the same time, I’d say it’s as forthright about that as any word can be about itself. If it is unpretentiously pretentious, it is also, somehow, pretentiously unprententious. So yeah, all this is pretty fucking silly when the world is burning and children are starving. You’re totally right.

But when you’re taking something that’s both highbrow and totally inconsequential seriously, calling it “dumb” is an easy way to acknowledge that. And when you’re taking something lowbrow and totally inconsequential seriously, calling it “smart” is an easy way to get people’s goat. The former gets annoying in a false humility kind of way. The latter often results in the worst kind of Well Actually – true boner killers. But the gesture has the same function: You’re signaling to the world that meaning is flexible, structural. You’re the creator of your own meaning.

Mashing opposites together and trying to make sense of it all is nothing new. It’s at the core of zen. The goal of any koan is to get yourself past dualistic thinking. To go east is to go west — just think about it. That tree that fell – the one that nobody heard – both made a sound and didn’t make a sound.

Smartdumb is different from “smart things, dumbed down.” Like a koan, there is some irreducible mystery at work. Something so profoundly simple, you’re left in a state of awe. If you smell Kant’s swampy ass around the bend of this incredibly pretentious Well Actually-adjacent paragraph, you would be correct. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

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Let me try to summarize where we’re at and try to stick some semblance of a landing:

(a) There’s the distinction between "smart" entertainments, which we might call art, challenging and rewiring your understanding of what is beautiful and all that good stuff; and "dumb" entertainments, which we might call merely entertainment, i.e. entertainments that more or less 'gives the people what they want," or conform to the current understandings and forms of what is beautiful and/or entertaining, or some hyper-compressed, hyper-addictive can’t get enough of it version which we call, with love, ‘trash.’

(b) There’s the understanding that these distinctions are somewhat malleable, or at the very least exist on a spectrum of taste. There’s the original concept of a ‘guilty pleasure’ — liking something below one’s supposed taste level – which slowly but surely, by the term’s very persistence, negated the taboo itself. I watch "Love Is Blind" with the same verve that I read William Gaddis. Taste as a status signifier has evolved as well. Like microplastics in our bodies, it’s nearly impossible for even the most high-minded snoots among us not to like at least a little bit of dumb shit. In 2025, I’d say we say one has "taste" to the extent that we think their balance of supposedly smart and supposedly dumb preferences is in an interesting configuration. “I like Pauline Oliveros and I like Teddy Swims.” Weird but sure, let’s get coffee. “I like Teddy Swims and I like Benson Boone.” Skeletor runs back into cave.

(c) While most cultural products seem to exist somewhere between smart and dumb, there’s something oddly mysterious and irreducible and zen-like about the things we call smartdumb. It’s best understood in relief, i.e.: If it looks like art, it probably isn’t.

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I moved to Los Angeles almost nine years ago, the day before Trump got elected. 2016 was a come to Jesus moment for me. I had had some success in the music industry, and an artist I had developed was signed to a prestigious British label. But I was running out of time and money. If I wanted to continue to make a living as a music producer, I would need to put myself in a position to do more business within the larger industry. My path to success at that point had been extremely anomalous and self-defined. In a word, I think I just got lucky. For me to have any sustained career, I would need to learn how to make entertainments.

It hasn’t been uncommon to encounter independent musicians like myself say, in a moment of weakness or self doubt, something to the extent of, “Fuck it, I’ll just move to LA and make pop music.” In practice, it’s so much harder than that, but not because pop music is technically difficult to make. It’s because human ears are incredibly good bullshit detectors. The casual listener can hear a piece of music and know, intuitively, that whoever made it is just going through the motions. You don’t need to know how to play instruments or how to write a song or really anything. Something will feel off. There’s a frequency that just seems to be missing.

What I realized quickly out here is that the people having success making commercially minded pop music genuinely believe they are making awesome stuff. Someone like Benson Boone genuinely likes Benson Boone’s music. He’s not making Benson Boone type music just because he thinks that’s what the people want. He believes Benson Boone music is fundamentally meaningful art. People need to believe you believe in it. They can tell when you’re just phoning it in.

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Which brings me to what should be the super controversial part of this piece – where I say some things are dumbdumb, other things are dumbsmart, and so on – but this far in I hope you can tell I actually care about all this and am not just taking the piss. I know how hard it is to make stuff – not just stuff you like, but stuff other people like, and stuff that other people like more than other stuff made by other people and which gives you a fighting chance financially and spiritually of making more stuff that hopefully both you and other people like. This shit is hard. I’m right there with you.

To me, Benson Boone’s “Beautiful Things” is textbook dumbdumb. I say this with love and admiration and without judgment. There is so much about this song and recording and performance that is, by any standard, “of quality”. I should say I also love many dumbdumb things, and admire the relentless versioning and craftsmanship necessary to make truly frictionless, hear it in CVS dumbdumb type things. Everything about “Beautiful Things” is entertainment. It conforms to what a significantly large number of people believe to be “good”: real instruments, a dynamic American Idol-type vocal performance, a big huge chorus that the singer is really, really selling hard, a wordless post when the feeling is just beyond words, as if to say: the beautiful things truly are gone.

It’s a recording that could have been made 50 years ago because it was, to some extent, a recording that was made 50 years ago. “But it’s just a great song, you know?” The people who say things like this are not the same people who say, “If it sounds like a great song, it probably isn’t.”

Dumbdumb has no rub. It is without guile. It is nostalgic for nothing in particular. In music it is the sonic equivalent of a rollercoaster ride, with twists and turns and ‘surprises’ at the exact moments our brains have revealed themselves to want twists and turns and surprises. It’s a rush, for sure. But nothing in your life changes when you get off the dumbdumb rollercoaster. You will not see the world differently.

What I admire about dumbdumb is that it doesn’t promise that you would. What troubles me about dumbdumb is that it seems designed to keep us from even considering the possibility.

Reality shows, amusement parks, Jimmy Fallon, social media influencer content, the grist of doom scrolling, the kid on Instagram who says “Boom” with his dad – almost all this is usually, probably dumbdumb.

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Then there is smartsmart. So much music by Daphne Oram is smartsmart, as is a lot of music brought to us by Editions Mego. Steve Reich’s “It’s Gonna Rain, Pt. 1” is smartsmart. Many paintings by Cy Twombly are smartsmart, and many films by Stan Brakhage are smartsmart. Gaddis’s JR is smartsmart. I love many smartsmart things. These are blinding lights, pure, uncompromising art experiences that challenge the status quo of what is beautiful, good, and meaningful. They announce new ways of seeing and hearing. They don’t care if you are entertained.

Many smartsmart things have rewired by brain and changed how I see the world. But at the same time, they take a lot out of me. I’d much rather watch Arrested Development than Window Water Baby Moving. I find that smartsmart things are more fun to think about than to actually endure. What I admire about smartsmart things are that they have no interest in entertaining me. What troubles me about smartsmart is that I kinda wish they did, at least a little. I can’t shake the sense that their medicine would hit harder if there was just a little honey around the cup.

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Dumbsmart, to me, functions like a gateway. It’s what you get when well-meaning people with smartsmart ideas or left-leaning interests try to figure out ways to introduce those interests to a broader audience. There is a beautiful, inclusive intention at work here. Dumbsmart is work that appears sophisticated, if not a little aspirational for a mass audience. It promises an elevated art-like experience, but wants to spare you the full-on discomfort that a true art experience often requires. There was a coffee shop on Manhattan Ave that my old bandmate Matt used to say served “hipster shots”: espresso pulled in such a way that it was big on fruity and exotic overtones, but had little actual coffee body, where the bitterness resides. This is dumbsmart.

Most LCD Soundsystem songs are dumbsmart. Beyonce’s Renaissance is dumbsmart. Jack Antonoff seems to have the dumbsmart Midas touch, making the most rote I-V-vi-IV sparkle again. Prestige television is, for the most part, dumbsmart. Self-serious lyric-forward indie rock — stuff like The National, or Mitski, or Phoebe Bridgers — is often dumbsmart. Something like the How Long Gone podcast is textbook dumbsmart. Most books by Jonathan Franzen are dumbsmart. A lot of new electronic dance music that makes a costume of the sounds of credible musical subcultures but then puts in service of a traditional vocal performance and song structure, verse chorus verse chorus bridge – that’s dumbsmart. Pollen is dumbsmart. It’s not a bad thing.

Which is to say, if I’m being candid, most of my work as a music producer has been dumbsmart too: well-intentioned attempts to broker subcultures and “pure” art ideas to people who are rightfully skeptical of “pure art ideas” or who simply don’t have the patience or time for them. I am recontextualizing, re-presenting, or perhaps just abridging. I love a lot of dumbsmart music. What I admire about dumbsmart is spirit of inclusivity, and its concern for the actual minute-to-minute experience of the work itself. Dumbsmart, like dumbdumb, wants you to be entertained. What troubles me about dumbsmart is, even while I am enjoying it, I can’t help but feel like I’m being handled. I can’t help but feel like I’m getting a watered-down version of the real thing.

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I agree with David – culture is best understood as an ecosystem. I am concerned about the invasive nature of dumbdumb species, which grows everywhere and gladly takes up all the attention space we’ll give it. Smartsmart species are not exactly flowery, don’t attract many pollinators, but the pollinators they do attract historically change the landscape in good and profound ways. I struggle most with the optimism of dumbsmart, as even when it flourishes – creatively, commercially, whatever – I can’t unsee the myriad compromises it makes in order to survive.

I know those compromises well. To be clear, I am very grateful to be in a position to be making those compromises, and there’s a lot to knowing which compromises to make. Ten years into living out here, I can say, at the very least, I am a serviceably good maker of compromises. I make a lot of kind of weird music that sort of a lot of people like.

But then I think about Benson Boone, and how I imagine Benson Boone feels about Benson Boone’s music — the sound of two hands high-fiving all the fucking time. I genuinely wonder what it would feel like for my tastes to perfectly align with the tastes of a global audience. For my whole life, I’ve made peace with the fact that this was just not in the cards for me. But what if I was wrong? What if I had a backflip in me after all?

A few years ago, the artist Sarah Belle Reid challenged me to make a list of music that had achieved commercial success that I also admired on a formal, musical level – music that had succeeded as entertainment but also spoke to me as art. I wrote without thinking: SOPHIE’s “Lemonade”, Nelly’s “Hot In Herre”, M.I.A.'s "Paper Planes". Missy Elliott's "Get Ur Freak On". Clipse's "Grindin'". David Bowie's "Fame". Beastie Boys's "Sabotage". Tiga's "Bugatti". Daft Punk's "Around The World". Beck's "Loser". White Zombie's "More Human Than Human". Yung Joc's "It's Goin Down”. Barry White's "It's Ecstasy When You Lay Down Next To Me". Rage Against The Machine's "Bulls On Parade". Jay-Z's "Can I Get A". OG Maco “U Guessed It.” Was there a common thread?

In the flow of the assignment, I just started writing things I loved, anything, in whatever order it came to me: Fluxus. Cy Twombly. Basquiat. Miles Davis On The Corner. Basic Channel. Denis Johnson. Lydia Davis. Fred Troller designs. Iggy Pop. Lou Reed. Eastbound & Down. Jane Hirschfield. Winesburg, Ohio. I Think You Should Leave. Adams & Carmichael productions. Caravaggio. Digi-dub reggae. Excepter’s “Vacation”. Helter Skelter. Dance Pt. 1. And so on.

Not all of these things succeeded as mass entertainments. But what struck me about my list was that, at the intersection of wildly popular entertainments that also happen to be art I like, there is a certain degree of Eddyish heavy metal. These musics have clarity that comes from their being exceedingly reduced – distilled to their essence. It’s unclear how or why they work, but they do. In the process of distillation, they have become even more fundamentally mysterious.

What is there to say about SOPHIE’s “Lemonade”? The experience of it is the meaning. There is nothing left to explicate in a Basic Channel record. There is no water weight left to burn off in this chorus: “It’s getting hot in here/ So take off all your clothes/ I am getting so hot/ I’m gonna take my clothes off.”

There is no alterior motive – no “infiltrating of the mainstream” – in “Lust for Life.” Johnson: “I knew every raindrop by its name” – semantically it’s quite clear, yet the sentence has an aura. What is there to say? It just is! At once, a question mark and an exclamation point.

That’s where I’m at with smartdumb. It is, to me, the most beautiful and elusive species of art-entertainment. It succeeds as both by not trying to be either. If I can’t make it myself, at the very least I want to help steward it.

My friend Erich Schwartzel recently said to me that he liked my “technology newsletter” – speaking about this very newsletter you’re reading. It didn’t occur to me until he said it, but so much of what I’ve written about so far is me trying to figure out what kind of music is worth making right now, in this moment of significant and likely irreversible technological upheaval. It’s a moment where the technologies, and their primary stewards, seem actively if not sentiently trying to convince us that humans making art isn’t that important. As a working human artist, it’s a black hole I just kinda have to choose to ignore if I want to get through my day intact.

Smartdumb, whenever I encounter it, makes me feel the exact opposite way. The way I feel, I imagine, is not unlike how that kid from American Beauty felt watching that plastic bag in the wind, or how my young son felt this afternoon as he rolled oranges down the slide of his playhouse, laughing uncontrollably as his mother tried to catch them mid-air. I wouldn’t mind feeling like that more often. I suspect you might agree.

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A few years ago, when I was hocking a music collaboration app around town, I ended up at the Beverly Hills residence that Max Martin uses for his studio. Martin has a publishing company called MXM that signs mostly young, mostly Scandi writers and producers. In the industry they benefit from the mystique of Martin’s pop god afterglow, though what actual secrets he’s taught them, who knows. If it’s like most other famous producers’ publishing companies, you see him at the champagne toast signing and never hear from him again unless you make him a lot of money.

Martin was not there, as far as I know, when I visited. I remember a few stories about Martin though, readily told by his staff. These are all thirdhand — correct me if you know better.

From 2015 until maybe Weeknd’s “Blinding Lights”, Martin was not exactly on top of the charts. He was no longer the Max Martin of the Katy Perry era just a few years prior. Rap had become the dominant sound of pop music, and the airtight mathematical polish Martin had been known for as a songwriter had fallen out of favor for a style that was looser and (everybody’s favorite word) vibe-ier. “Technically better songwriting” was immaterial to the conversation. Martin had to adapt.

A notorious editor and rewriter and polisher, Max first had to control himself from getting too caught up in the details, his staff said. He had to focus only on the broad strokes. So the first story I was told, which was relevant because I was trying to get this guy to use my app, was this: Max would probably never use my app because Max didn’t even print WAV files of his bounces. Instead, he recorded back the playback from the monitor speaker and listened to the recording of the recording on his phone. Like, voice memos. The song was flattened twice, first by playback, and then by quality reduction, then by the speaker on the iPhone. Whatever details couldn’t handle that translation were not important to him. He wanted broad strokes only. Those were the only things worth paying attention to.

The second story, which I heard because my brilliant app allowed for rigorous A/B testing from one demo version to another: Max wasn’t doing a million versions of every song lately, because he tried not to work more than four or so hours on any one production. The most popular music at the time sounded tossed off, maybe a little even unfinished. Martin found that any work done after four hours not only had diminishing returns, but actually seemed to hurt reception of the recording. Polish, it seemed, had an audible, discernible sound.

Again: We’re talking about 2016-2020 or so, that span of time when rap was pop music. Rap music had made an art out of what I call the sound of velocity – when a record sounds like it was made quickly, and that’s part of its emotional appeal. The drums are just a two-bar loop. The chord progression doesn’t change. There aren’t whooshes and whirrs in and out of sections. The vocals are upfront and unfussy, you can hear the Autotune working, the top-end isn’t too hyped. The record is wall to wall words, but no one word arguably matters more than the song’s title. The lyric book is a cascade of images and obsequious flexes that serve the melody’s contours, though the content of the verses doesn’t seem to have any clear relationship to the choruses. The loudness war had supposedly ended, but every record was smashed, and the low-end was shredded – which is how you print your day-one demos if you want any chance of the music making the project. Popular records didn’t end so much as run out of time — the final chord of the progression just hanging there unresolved. Pop music around then sounded fussy by comparison, if not outright corny.

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I suspect the Max records for Ariana Grande’s Sweetener era are examples of this looser, rougher, sound of velocity sensibility — lessons learned perhaps from the relatively dismal reception to the work for Katy Perry’s Witness singles like “Chained To The Rhythm” and “Bon Appetit.” By Martin-ish pop math standards, was “Bon Appetit” “technically better” than the Sweetener singles? Regardless, “technically better songwriting” wasn’t what was working anymore. Something had shifted. “Is this good?” was a secondary concern. The new more pressing concern was, and is, “Is this believable?”

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No song will ever be as believable as a person talking straight to camera. To sing is to perform, and to perform is, to some extent, an exercise in not saying what you mean, at least not directly. Tiktok has created a reality hunger that only it can satisfy. It’s laid bare all other entertainments’ formalities. I hate myself for saying this, but the feeling I get when I watch a “technically great” film or listen to a “technically great” album is not that different from sitting through the religious ceremony of a friend’s wedding. I’m distracted by the formalities. I just want to get drunk and yell.

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It’s a credit to Addison Rae Easterling that she waited as long as she did to release music commercially. The Louisiana native found her following on Tiktok by posting dance videos to trending songs on the platform – a million followers in just a few short months. She quit college and moved to Los Angeles, signed with a talent agency, and quickly cashed in on the moment when Spotify was giving seemingly everybody half-famous an outrageously lucrative podcast deal. She shilled makeup products, then launched her own beauty and fragrance lines. She played bit parts in a few films, but like so many social media stars, her shine did not translate to more traditional forms of media.

I think that’s because, in traditional forms of visual media – movies, tv – things kinda still need to be technically “good”. “Good” requires a vastly different set of artifice and technique beyond what’s required for success on social media. Lily Singh was very believable in the context of Youtube comedian with an enormous following; in a way, it would have been unbelievable if she had actually been funny as the late night TV show host she briefly aspired to be. Her undeniable presence could not make up for her lack of skills as a writer and interviewer and showrunner. Or more charitably, perhaps it’s just a different set of skills.

Either way, music is no different. The last five or so years, the biggest companies in the recording industry have tried to translate the amorphous “social media personality” into the more traditional form of “recording artist.” For one, it would save them a hell of a lot of money. The industry can surround you with the best writers, producers, vocal coaches, etc. – it can Weekend at Bernies you into an afternoon slot at Coachella no problem – but what remains incredibly difficult is getting the public to give a shit. That costs real time and money. Meanwhile, social media personalities only have audiences. It doesn’t matter if they have no traditional musical talent or point of view – the industry can finesse that. Talent is not the limited reagent for success here. It’s why major labels stopped signing artists, and started signing audiences.

Outside of the Lil Nas X story, the strategy has been an enormous bust. But not for the reasons you might think, e.g. quality of the music. So few of these social media personality bets have succeeded in the music arena, I think, precisely because the music was too good – relatively speaking.

If "believability” and “likability” are why these personalities gained followings in the first place, there is something undeniably unbelievable about them all the sudden having a song written by, say, Madison Love or Amy Allen – two incredibly talented songwriters I’ve been lucky enough to see do their thing in the room. These writers are powerful winds to have in your sails, and help artists find their point of view. But perhaps that’s the problem. Perhaps it simply isn’t believable for a social media personality to have a strong artistic point of view.

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Addison Rae’s first foray into commercial pop was “Obsessed” in 2021. The song is incredibly clever. It doesn’t skirt Rae’s celebrity status — it makes it the centerpiece. Stick to what you know! As for point of view: She will be unapologetic about her success. Love it! What seems to start as a trad love song in the verse shows its teeth in the chorus: “I’m obsessed with me as much as you…” Some of the most talented name writers and producers helped bring it to life, including Benny Blanco, Blake Slatkin, and Madison actually. This should have been a slam dunk.

The problem wasn’t the song, I don’t think. It was the vessel. People wanted this song to exist in some way, just not as the debut song of Addison Rae. Thankfully, they’d only have to wait two years for Tate McRae to release “Greedy”, a song with curious resonances beyond the Rae and McRae of it all:

“You say you’re obsessed with me so I took a second and I said, ‘Me too’”

“I’m obsessed with me as much as you” (Rae)

vs

“Can’t you tell that I want you? I say ‘Yeah’”

“I would want myself baby” (Crae)

(And while we’re here: Tate McCrae’s boyfriend, The Kid LAROI, got his break with a song called, “Addison Rae.”)

I am of course passing over the many differences between those songs, but I do think vessel matters way more we songwriters like to admit. By the time “Greedy” had come around, Tate McRae was two EPs and a full-length into a recording artist career, and light-years beyond her beginnings as a contestant on the reality television series So You Think You Can Dance? and backup dancer and choreographer. She had bona fides. She was believable as a recording artist who could perform a song like “Greedy” or “Obsessed.”

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So what does a believable context look like for someone like Addison Rae?

Charli XCX did the industry’s work for free: The context would need to be meme. Rae’s appearance on the “Von Dutch” remix was textbook smartdumb. She appeared as a novelty, like when Rodney Dangerfield released a rap album. There was no pretense of Addison Rae being an artist per se – she just got drunk and yelled, if you will.

Forgoing the pretense of being an artist is also how Charli XCX was able to go from being a mere recording artist to a social media personality. Nothing is “technically good songwriting” on Brat, which is a large part of why it was so believable. “I’m just living my life…”

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Which brings me back to Martin. Luka Kloser and Elvira Anderfjärd – two MXM writers, are the songwriting and production team behind Addison Rae’s post Charli run of songs. I admire both of them so much and appreciate how quietly provocative their new work with Addison has been. I don’t even need to seek it out, to be honest. I know there’s a new Addison Rae song because I will receive at least five to ten messages from friends, all more or less asking the same thing: “Is this gas? Or is this mid?”

What is true for Addison Rae, and perhaps for more artists in the age of social media than not, is that gas is mid, and mid is gas.

This not a qualitative judgment about “Diet Pepsi” or “Aquamarine” or any of these songs or productions. I am saying that gas, as a quality, is perhaps at odds with success in the social media personality becomes pop star world, where you first and foremost must be believable. (This has always been the case, in my opinion, in the more rarified corners of underground dance music where I’ve made my mutton, but that’s a different piece.) Mid – when perfectly calibrated – is its own kind of gas.

It is believable for a Tiktok personality who got her start making dance videos to make vibey music with no clear point of view – by any traditional metric, the definition of mid. It is believable for Rae to put on genres like makeup tutorials, to wear references like the t-shirts of post-punk bands. I’m relived to see I’m in agreement with Meaghan Garvey, who recently wrote about “High Fashion”:

“On first listen, [it] feels a little uneventful. But on listen two, I kinda like it that way.”

The more Martin-ish, more clever LA pop approach clearly didn’t work for Addison – she wasn’t an industry plant, but whenever the music mismatches your status, you are effectively botanical. And if the music was too naive, which is to say not resembling contemporary pop music, Rae would have run the risk of alienating the 90 or so million followers she’s won in part because she’s just like them.

Each new Addison Rae song hits like a lovingly curated Pinterest board – less an artistic expression, though not exactly a strict recipe of things to rip off either. More than anything, the music seems to wink at its references — acknowledge the ‘debt’ but also to look askance at the very idea of musical history.

“Diet Pepsi” is a clear paean to early Lana Del Rey, from the throwaway line about ‘blue jeans’ in the verse to the vocal stylings to the title itself, a humble nod to “Cola.” One gets the sense that “Aquamarine” exists solely as a word to allow for the Arca remix, “Arcamarine,” a way for Rae to signal her status as a Fan of Underground Music without subjecting her fans to the blistery realities of Arca’s aggressive sonics (cf. Björk vs. Björk Swan Dress). Her latest song is titled “Headphones On”; it is a song with word salad for lyrics, which is believable, and a chorus about listening to music when you feel sad and lonely and confused:

So I put my headphones on/ Listen to my favorite song…

Which is believable too.

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“Come As You Are” by Nirvana came on the classic rock station during my ride to some friends’ dinner party this past Saturday. With the volume barely above a whisper, I found myself listening not for Kurt’s voice or the guitar riff he lifted from Killing Joke but all the delightfully dumb little drum fills played by Dave Grohl.

For the first and a half or so, Grohl plays the drums not unlike percussionists in an orchestra — adding texture and power to bolster another instrument’s part. He punches out the kick and snare following the main riff’s rhythm, with very polite sixteenth note rolls with light crescendos for tension and punctuation in the turnarounds.

Around 1:37 is when Grohl erupts (by this song’s relatively tame standards). Leading into the bridge, he inverts the placement of the kick and snare so the snare is now on the one, like a dinkier version of his “Teen Spirit” fill. Here he also pushes the tempo just slightly, which make the band seem like a race horse waiting for the starter pistol, bucking to get to the next section. Grohl also adds density to the drum pattern, with two kicks on first two eighths where there was previously only one. At the turnaround of every two bars there’s small 16th note fill on the snare that is so effortless and elegant, jumping out of mix and insisting on the gallop.

These are by no means “iconic” drum fills, though Grohl has plenty of those. They’re simply little musical riffs that Grohl wrote into the song that help it go — things all great drummers are more or less always doing in some way or another. Publishers will disagree, but I’d argue Grohl’s riffs are essential musical figures that define the composition, and are not just ornamentation. If there was an air drumming competition in my Uber, I would make my name selling those little licks in the bridge.

As I’ve moved away from recording and performing rock (drums, in fact!) and into more left-of-center pop and dance music, I confess I’ve come to miss the ways I could use the drums as a musical instrument, and not just as a groovy metronome with occasional variation “to keep the ear interested.” The drum set, more than any other instrument commonly used in contemporary commercial music the last 70 or so years, has been benched like seemingly no other instrument. As popular music became louder and more powerful (in the LUFS sense), more editable and easier to make, more vocal-forward, etc., the dynamics and musicality of the drummer — all the little not at all obnoxious stuff that drummers like Grohl just did as a matter of course — have quietly disappeared.

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Imagine telling a guitarist she can only play the bottom string, or a singer he can only hit the root note…

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O drum fill, where art thou? Two reasons I’ll offer up: One, the fast and dirty ‘demo’ stage of new musicmaking (at least out here in LA) more often than not ends up being the ‘final' recorded stage, and two: The drum set is an insanely difficult instrument to record well, let alone play musically.

The instrument makes loud short sounds, but also deafeningly high-pitched sustained sounds in the form of cymbal hits.

Each loud short sound also tends to resonate all the additional drum shells — you’re trying to get ahead of that.

The kick pedal can be squeaky.

Each drum has two heads, a beater head and a resonant head, and depending on their relative tightness, you have to deal with (a) the pitch of those drums, (b) the length of sound each drum creates, c) the relative pitch envelope or ‘pitch swoop’.

Your hi-hat might have an errantly long decay or ‘ring’ to it, even when it’s technically closed. You are using mouse pads, felt cloth, wallets, duct tape, “moon gels” — literally anything you can find to dampen these gremlins that will otherwise accumulate into an unpleasant recording.

The temperature of the drum heads, the material you’re using to strike those drum heads (wood, nylon, brush, etc), and to say nothing of the force with which you’re striking…

All of these are concerns before you even have a drummer sitting down to play. They may be good at playing the drums live, but in a studio setting they might not have control over their dynamics and hit the hi-hat way too hard, stuff like that.

And all that is a concern before you even put microphones up, and figure out placements to compensate for or heighten the sound of the room, to minimize phase cancellation, let alone toy around with which microphones you want to use. Coles as overheads to help darken the cymbals and top-end and slow the transient response a bit? KM84s on the snare (vintage or Warm replicas?) because you want a nice and forward crack? A mid-forward dynamic mic like a 57 on the kick because it’s a disco record and you know you’ll want the kick’s fundamental in that 80-90hz zone and leave room below for the bass or bass synth, etc?

All that is before picking preamps, which again is both a stylistic and technical concern, do you want something that traces the transients faster like an API (if the drum part has a lot of notes like in metal then probably) or do you want something that’s going to soften it up a bit, maybe let more of the low-end through because of the relative resistance, the transformer selection, the metal used inside the transformer (nickel or iron?), etc.

And you haven’t even begun to mix the drums yet. You haven’t even begun to edit the drums or fix all the kick/snare flams because the drummer is bad or revoice the top-end with the Pultecs because the drummer, despite your kindest suggestion, still wants to beat the shit out of her open hi-hat.

Fun fact. The recording engineer, i.e. the person who knows all this stuff, often gets paid the least out of anybody in the entire process of making the record.

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Or you can just steal the drums!

Hip-hop’s preferred alternative — sampling old drum breaks — turned out to be too enticing. It’s not just the drum sounds but the drum performances you’re getting too. You’re getting the best drummers, playing well-recorded kits in a top-notch studio, mixed perfectly, ready to go. How could you blame anyone for sidestepping one of the most painful processes of any studio recording sessions and just wanting to use a chopped up break? Even if it’s kinda sorta messy ethically?

Drum machines also have a lot of key advantages over a “live drum set performance.” What you lose in dynamic and musicality, you gain (exponentially) in pure sound-pressurizing power. Imagine a live situation: The 808 kick takes all the frequency excitation spread across a few octaves of a kick drum and puts all that power into a single sine wave, with zero concern for microphone feedback — your 24” Premier kick never stood a chance.

Drum machines (here I include sample-based drum sequencers, like in your DAW) disembody a “live drum set performance” into discreet sounds. You can have the snare loud and in your face without dealing with hi-hat bleed. There is no noise floor to contend with — all the ‘air’ surrounding each drum set hit, all the air that accumulates and makes the drums sound ‘real’ and ‘in a room’ is an absolute necessary feature of a ‘live drum set performance.’ A drum machine is a starting point creatively, whereas a recording of a dynamic live drum set performance is an exercise in many compromises.

I am not suggesting we moved away from live drum recordings solely because they’re difficult to make. Drum machines and sampled drums are more times than not an aesthetic choice too — and a great one! George Michael famously liked drum machines because there was less performance information competing with the vocal. The uncanny and unnaturally cold perfection of the sequence can be a strong musical choice that serves the music — from Kraftwerk to Metroboomin to Sly Stone to the warped and warping modal-like klang of Sophie productions. I love drum machines, I love samplers, I love drum sets. I love Youtube tutorials about how far to push the hi-hat back to get the “real Atlanta trap sound.” I love the elastic tight-rope walk of a good EDM drop, with quantized sequences of thoroughly unquantized sounds. I am not yelling! There is no cloud in my sight!

But again: Speaking for myself, as a person who is expected by artists and labels to write, engineer, and produce a finished recording from scratch in about six hours (for free!), I do miss the musicality of the drum set as a recorded performance instrument. I miss Grohlness. I miss having a hair dryer in my studio to heat up the snare drum head. I wish I could afford to make more music where Grohlness was keystone and not just ornament. I miss the sensibility of a great drummer negotiating the pocket and groove as the song progresses — something that requires quite a bit of programming if you’re doing the drums in the DAW, to say nothing of knowing the kinds of negotiations and flourishes that are even compositionally meaningful and not just rhythmical redundancies or variations on the hi-hat “to keep things interesting.”

It is the difference between being a hi-hat god and merely being “like” one.

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I don’t know why it didn’t occur to me to look this up sooner, but on Sunday I learned that the main sample for Q-Tip’s “Vivrant Thing” is the opening section of “I Wanna Stay” by Barry White and The Love Unlimited Orchestra — pitched down a bit, bolstered with drum samples.

I had never heard “I Wanna Stay.” The beginning is of course incredible — a platonic ideal of groove for me. Then the record quickly falls into the sad saccharine tropes of a lot of disco with strings, which is too bad (though perhaps par for the course with Love Unlimited). I can say without reservation that I like “Vivrant Thing” a lot more than “I Wanna Stay.” But I’m also dogged by a quote whose provenance I can’t remember, which feels so apples and oranges to me but hey here I am, thinking about it even still:

“There are 1000 Kandinskys in a Picasso. But there’s not a single Picasso in any Kandinsky.”

Maybe The Painted Word? Quantize me.

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I’ve been releasing other people’s music on my record labels for over 20 years now. As I wonder aloud why anybody would do this in 2025 — start an independent label with any semblance of a profit motive! — I’ve tried to remember why I did it so many times in the past.

My first label was called Beekeeper Records, which I started in 2004 with my close friend Matt Lemay. It was named after “Beekeeper’s Maxim,” a song by the band Brainiac. We were both music writers and musicians, and Matt had already begun recording, mixing, performing, and touring in bands of his own. I won’t put words in Matt’s mouth, but suspect he’d agree with the following: We wanted to start a label because we felt like freeloaders and wanted to have some skin in the game.

Our first and only release was Kyoshu Nostalgia, a mini-LP by a Tokyo-based artist named Marxy, who is now better known as the cultural critic W. David Marx. The music was a brilliant homespun mashup of 60s changes and vocal harmonies and the digital chirpiness of 80s and 90s J-pop. We didn’t offer a royalty advance or a recording budget beyond mastering. It was a 50/50 deal after our costs for manufacturing and press mailers.

But our label’s “sell” was that we had unique access to the press. We thought we could help get the music in front of the right writers and publications — that would be our first step, and we’d respond and react from there. It made perfect sense to us! So it was a rude awakening when we realized that our very status as music writers actually made us suspect to other music writers at the time. “I love this, but I can’t write about it because… well, you know,” was a pretty typical response. Marxy’s music was thoroughly unique, which was what we loved about it — it was the dense, referential kind of record Matt and I would both love as music critics. But culturally it was at odds with the sounds and trends of that moment — it was incredible music but hermetically sealed to our pockets of the press. It spoke to no broader context.

Our label’s biggest weakness (among many!) was infrastructure: we had no distribution partner, aka a larger entity that would help get our CDs in brick-and-mortar record stores. We pieced together distro through Carrottop and others I’m forgetting, but the broad scale of our work was truly DIY: calling record stores around the country and trying to get them to buy a few copies of Kyoshu Nostalgia on consignment. Other Music was responsible for easily 80% of the sales of Kyoshu Nostalgia, which was an amazing feeling for two people who had spent quite a bit of money in Other Music. But 80% of the records still ended up underneath my childhood bedframe in the Philadelphia suburbs, and Matt and I slowly but surely drifted away from Beekeeper as we became more involved in other projects.

My next label began five or so years later. I was in a rock band called Mr. Dream with two of my best friends. Candidly, we couldn’t get any label to take interest in us. At the same time, there was something still icky about “self-released” – it meant that nobody in the business of making money off music thought your music would make any money. Even for more experimental music, a cosign of some commercial viability is meaningful.

So we invented a label. It was called Godmode, after a song Adam Moerder had written about a man he had seen on Youtube who had built a killdozer-style tank and gone ‘godmode’ on a small town, knocking over buildings and resisting arrest for several hours. In interviews, we complained about the “fatcats at Godmode Records” and all the nefarious Noah’s Arcade-like things they were trying to get us to do to take it to “the next level.” The band toured nationally with Sleigh Bells, Cloud Nothings, and Archers of Loaf and released three albums and three EPs. Inexplicably, this music — which was directly opposed to what the press was actually covering — was also rewarded by my old brethren of music critics. Writers were quick to note that Adam and I had been music writers in the past, but hey! “Rest assured! The music doesn’t suck!”

One of the odd things about starting a vanity label is that everybody slowly realizes it’s a vanity label, and somehow that ends up being worse than self-releasing music. The best thing I thought we could do for the band, from a credibility standpoint, was to build out the label. We already had a community of bands we enjoyed playing shows with, who themselves were self-releasing and understood the curatorial value of being associated with a label. I didn’t have money for advances, so my sell was that I would record and mix and produce the music for free, as well as put it through the same press pipes that had helped my own band achieve some level of notability. If there was any money made after expenses, we’d split it 50/50, which was considered the “standard indie deal,” as understood by people who had never actually entered into standard indie deals.

That era of musicmaking – from about 2010 til the end of 2014 – was very special for me. I lost thousands and thousands of dollars and even more hours to other people’s music! But that was beside the point. A community had begun to emerge around the label. This was our CBGB moment of sorts. We threw shows in abandoned party supply stores. We recorded constantly. We explored new instruments, and we started splinter bands and released the music in short-run cassettes. My conception of a label was not unlike a cocktail party, where you want to have all different kinds of people who are surprisingly compatible with one another. That initial energy and sense of community is ultimately what attracted artists to the label from outside New York, and which led to other opportunities for me as a producer and artist developer. That year ended so beautifully: About ten of us toured Europe together one winter and played the final party of a music festival in Rennes, France, closed out with Lenny Kravitz’s “Are You Gonna Go My Way?”, which was the only remaining MP3 on my USB stick that I hadn’t played that night.

Let’s stop for a second and catalog what I thought an independent label could do up until then:

Independent labels were distributors. The label you signed with determined where your music was available (or wasn’t!).

Independent labels were interest-free banks. Labels paid for the recording and manufacturing of recorded music products, and in my case I did the recording and manufacturing myself, usually in exchange for permission to distribute and otherwise “exploit” (not my word, but wow) the master recordings for moneymaking purposes.

Independent labels were marketing companies. I helped craft a meaningful story about the music for an audience we thought would be most receptive to that music and that story. We tried to find fans for the music, usually by trying to find writers or publications whose own business interest was in breaking new artists.

Independent labels were creative studios. As an engineer, producer, and co-writer, I became intimately involved with the creation of the records I was supporting on the label. The goal was to make music that was more competitive — music that had a chance of standing out — and to give a front door of sorts to music that was a little more inpenetrable. In that way, I was developing artists, and helping them tell their story through the music.

Independent labels were curators. My label helped create a tight-knit social scene of like-minded musicians who supported one another’s work. The label at first only served artists from Brooklyn, and in that way curated a geography and a DIY sensibility within that geography, not unlike other labels might curate a genre (e.g. Rap-A-Lot) or a certain veneer of quality (e.g. Warp).

My question: Are any of these things true anymore?

Labels are not necessary for distribution — let’s start with an easy one. Every label’s music is in nearly every store. Bandcamp is an outlier; I’d also argue there is such a thing as “bandcamp music” in the way that “indie music” used to be a meaningful descriptor. Their relative looseness around copyright means you’ll encounter more edits and remixes and unauthorized materials too. But broadly: yesterday’s fault lines of a label’s distribution are nowhere to be seen. I’d argue distribution itself has become a commodity, especially as DSPs sideline more and more human editorial for the algorithm.

Labels are still banks, but one seismic shift is that major labels no longer demand to own the master recordings in perpetuity, and for the bigger deals most ‘major’ indies have similar royalty splits and options as the majors. Candidly, the bank-iness of majors is often a lot more attractive than the bank-iness of indie labels: Majors can afford to take a bigger risk on something ‘indie’-leaning because they know Ariana Grande has another album coming out in the fall, and if you don’t recoup they’ll likely let you out of your deal way more quickly. Majors are also co-owners of the biggest music store on the planet. Are you actually going to sign with an independent label for less money and worse placement on DSPs because you think the A&R who took you out for sushi “really understands your vision”? It seems like a much harder sell, from my vantage point.

Labels still have marketing departments and budgets, but another seismic shift, besides the well-documented demise of music publications, is the outsize expectation on artists to be their own CMO on socials. Part of that has to do with audience and platform fit. Right now, audiences just seem to react better to artists directly promoting their music in a lofi, vertical, casual, memetic way than traditional marketing like (horizontal) music videos, billboards, etc. “Portrait” versus “landscape” is meaningful. When so much of our lives are mediated through screens, the main attributes of “quality” are “reality” and “personality”. “Bedroom artists” are bullshit; artists in bedrooms are reality. Audiences trust the artist more as seen in their natural, un-artisty environment, become invested in their quirkiness, and pride themselves on being there from the beginning. The exceptions prove the rule: that’s just how it works most of the time now. The “quality” of the music is important insofar as it serves that fiction. It’s why the most financially successful labels are putting money behind artists who already are great CMOs for themselves. Artists come into label deals because they are good at marketing themselves.

Which might be why I find that artists don’t want or need labels to be creative studios anymore either. So many well-meaning people, myself included, try to start labels in the mold of Motown: a label with a clear sound and sensibility, everything comes out of the same building, made with the same players on the same console, etc. Maybe this was just a necessity in the past — a wrinkle of geography. But to partake in a “label’s sound” is an active, not passive, choice — which is to say an artist would have to willingly cede certain decisions to the "artist” that is the label, from the sound of the records to the cover artwork. I find that fewer and fewer artists want that. They kinda just want you to give them money so they can pay the people they already work with or find a few proper nouns in LA to help them do what they’re already doing in a “slightly elevated” way. It’s not entirely ego-driven! By the time a modern musical artist has gotten on anyone’s radar, they likely will have developed a lot of their own sound on their own, and built an audience on their own. It’s already working in their mind — why change it up if they don’t have to?

That leaves curation. Labels were extremely important organizing principles 20 years ago, to the point that many record stores organized parts of their shelves by label! Labels were signifiers of quality, or sound, or sensibility — labels, in a way, were artists. With streaming, that role has been cut off at the knees. Labels are no longer consumer-facing. Sure you can follow a label’s playlist on Spotify, but the platform’s algorithm is the primary curator. And the platform is the artist.

I am shocked by how many talented artists I work with who have no historical understanding of independent label’s role as curator — artists who make dream-pop who have never heard of 4AD, artists who make “french house” but who have never heard of Crydamoure. No judgement, just something I’ve noticed. I still listen to anything Philip Sherburne releases on Balmat, anything Dein Bein releases on True Panther, anything Matt Werth releases on RVNG, but I increasingly find myself to be an outlier.

After 2015, what I found artists needed more than a label was a manager who could help them navigate the music industry, but who also was willing to spend some money on them at the beginning to get things started, so they can enter a bigger deal with more leverage. Good for the artist, good for the manager (who works on commission). Over time, we’ve seen that become more of a standard: the management company that also has a small label. The management’s label exists as a way to fund the beginnings of a project and get things going and have a clear path to recoupment, with the broader financial goal to ‘flip’ the deal to a larger label, i.e. to partner or be bought out of the original deal.

My sense is that most of these companies start with the best of intentions. But the things I’ve historically valued about labels – their curatorial spirit, the community-building, the creative collaboration – gets sidelined in this configuration. Labels in this configuration are strictly a financial instrument. They are small change venture capital. They are slot machines that play you.

Which may, in fact, be exactly what you need at a certain juncture of your career as an artist. And you certainly have your pick of them! I highly enjoyed this piece about the definition of quality, and how it has changed over time, and how businesses need to adapt to consumers’ expectations. So many people have optimized for the new reality of record labels: they are not curators in the artist development business, they are speculators in the audience development business. “We throw gasoline on the fire!” as so many execs out here might have put it before January.

But me?! I don’t know man. Throwing gasoline on fires? And usually you lose money? Except sometimes you don’t? Does this sound fun to you? It doesn’t sound fun to me!

So what is the point of an independent label in 2025? I thought I’d have an answer this far into the piece, but truthfully I can only speak on the point of mine moving forward. I like having skin in the game. I like making music with my friends. I like making music for my friends. I like music that feels like a secret language between people who have known each other for quite some time. I like music that feels a little like an inside joke. I like personalities. I like music that makes people say “I can’t believe somebody put this out.” As a label, it’s the only way I’ve ever had success.

Next week on smartdumb, I’m releasing my longtime friend and collaborator Sarah Register’s debut solo recordings. We started working on them in 2021 and returned to them this past December. One record reminds me of This Heat and Glenn Branca; the other is a rose between two thorns, a sweet ballad cased in guitar feedback. Sarah played in one of my favorite bands – Talk Normal – and currently serves as Kim Gordon’s guitarist. For many years, Sarah has been a second set of ears for me as my go-to mastering engineer, and she helped perfect the deep, amniotic low-end and ASMR atmospherics that defines the early Channel Tres and Yaeji records. That’s Sarah up above. I need to cook dinner otherwise I’d figured out a way to post some audio.

Update: Sarah Register’s “Right” b/w “Does It Hurt” are out now. Here’s the video for “Right”:

(28)

An older man on my block in Los Angeles happens to look and dress a lot like members of the Hells Angels motorcycle club I used to see congregating outside their hideout on 3rd Street in East Village. My new friend is much kinder and much more talkative and likely hasn’t committed any serious crimes, so I admit I’m embarrassed my brain lumps him in with a violent global outlaw motorcycle gang. I see him almost every morning when I’m walking my dog, when he usually asks me if I have finished reading Autobiography of a Yogi, the book he recommended me when we first met.

For whatever reason, I only realized today that my friend doesn’t remind me of Hells Angels so much as he reminds me of the Hells Angels who performed in a 2007 art piece by Aaron Young, called “Greeting Card.”

There is scant record of the happening on the internet, which is interesting in and of itself – for better or worse, so much of the internet from that era continues to disappear. I managed to dig up this Page Six-ish blurb on New York Magazine’s website:

On September 17, artist Aaron Young turned the Seventh Regiment Armory into an art-world version of an indoor Hells Angels rally. For seven minutes, ten riders performed elaborate burnouts over a vast patch of specially painted boards; their tires dug into the orange paint, underneath leaving giant scribbles in their wakes. Five hundred VIP guests stood on the second-floor wraparound balcony as the riders skidded, back-circled, and revved their engines. Amid celebrities and curious somebodies such as Stephanie Seymour, Chloë Sevigny, Terry Richardson, Usher, Rufus Wainwright, and Tom Ford (he and Sotheby’s “sponsored” it; Art Production Fund produced it), many in the audience had to make use of the gas masks passed out at the entrance as the air filled with burned rubber and exhaust. At the end, two cycles “signed” the painting AY 07, to cheers.

My friend who lived on the same block as the Hells Angels at the time, and a few of her girlfriends (one of whom was kinda/sorta dating the artist iirc), managed to be among those 500 guests. Probably because I wasn’t invited, I decided to dismiss the whole thing as yet another art world piss-take. But here I am thinking about it almost 18 years later.

One of the details lost in the above writeup, according to my friends, was how funny it was. This was not helter skelter. The cyclists rode slowly and delicately, their motorcycles wielded less like vehicles of mayhem and more like weird mechanical paint erasers. If you’re me, you see the words “indoor Hells Angels rally” and immediately think of monster truck rallies, specifically the opening warmup show of motocross riders performing insane mid-air tricks, jumping over crushed cars, turning an entire stadium into a kind of hornet’s nest of two-cycle cacophony. That’s just not what it was though. Instead here were hardened probable criminals on Harley-Davidsons putting on an artsy-fartsy pony show. They filled the room with engine noise and exhaust, and created tire marks on painted boards, but that was the extent of their terror. The happening itself was of course performance art, but also the fact that Young convinced them to take part in the first place.

I admit I wouldn’t mind one of Young’s scuffed up painted boards hanging over my sofa — an artifact of late Fluxus, which itself is a spiritual forebearer of smartdumb. What bothered me initially about the piece – i.e. “What did the artist even do here?” — is now what enchants me, i.e. “Wow, he managed to do barely nothing at all.”

(25)

Last Thursday my college roommate texted me for parenting advice. His middle schooler wanted to stay up late to be among the first people to hear Playboi Carti’s new and long-awaited album Music. His question: Did I think the album would actually drop at midnight ET? Given the outsize marketing spend — billboards seemingly everywhere, an extensive partnership with Spotify, etc — I said I thought it’d happen. My friend agreed to let his son stay up. “But if it doesn’t drop, he has to do extra math,” my friend said. “He agreed quickly. Very confident.”

At 12:31am ET, the album still hadn’t appeared on DSPs, and wouldn’t until around the break of dawn. I felt for my friend’s son. I too had been down-thumbing Carti’s Spotify page, trying to see a latest release that wasn’t “Blick Sum,” so much so that I nearly overslept my weekly Friday therapy call. My therapist, upon my apology, shared that his own teenage son had forced him to listen to the album on their morning commute to school.

That morning the deputy editor of Pitchfork tweeted, “Carti to me is like what if EDM was for guys who don’t really like women.” My guy, I love you — quite a bit — but you’ve forgotten what it’s like to be 13. This is not EDM. This is heavy metal. I don’t get the Tipper Gore routine in 2025 either, for music that is no more or less loud, ignorant, and post-pubescent than the last 50 years of loud, ignorant, post-pubescent music. We are not listening because it is smart. We are listening because it makes a virtue out of its dumbness.

(26)

“The turbulence that calls itself heavy metal, or the best of it anyway, is a triumph of vulgarity, velocity, verbal directness, violent apathy, conceptual simplicity, pissed-off punkitude, adolescent overating,” wrote Chuck Eddy in 1991 – the first line in Stairway to Hell, his trollish guide to the 500 best heavy metal albums in the universe. Among the top “heavy metal” albums are records by Teena Marie, The Headhunters, and Miles Davis, and at the book’s end there is a surprise chapter called “25 Reasons Disco-Metal Fusion is Inevitable in the Nineties.”

Eddy is also quick to point out heavy metal’s black roots. “Distortion, feedback, amplification (electrical energy in general, in fact), guitars as penis-extensions, sympathy for the devil, barks at the moon, so on and so forth — were harnessed by African Americans like T-Bone Walker and Robert Johnson and Charlie Christian…back when most every white boy ‘cept Link Wray (an American Indian, anyhow) sang like Eddie Fisher.”

What Eddy calls “heavy metal” is not far off from what I would call “smartdumb.” I also prefer Eddy’s “heavy metal” over the more popularized “poptimism,” which fused too easily with capital and became high-falutin cover for music publications to pretend that writing multiple news items about Drake and Taylor Swift wasn’t strictly about pageviews. And at this point poptimism has become so bastardized/tippergored that most music fans under 30 think getting your music in a Grubhub ad is somehow cool.

(27)

My favorite music is ugly and always has been. But it is also sublime – extreme crassness sublimated into a thing of beauty. I have never put my faith in newness. Newness is marketing. Newness is a mirage of capital. The ugly, the crass, the profane - our worst predilections — I have always cherished music as a locus for their transformation. From there I’d say crassness is an essential component of meaningful subculture. The moment a subculture is no longer crass, it ceases to be one, let alone a meaningful one. It’s why Benson Boone dresses like Freddie Mercury, and also why no one will ever dress like Benson Boone. Asterisk.

What’s so exciting to me about Carti’s popular success – besides the fact that he is picking up where Miles Davis’s 70s era sound-wall/Stockhausenisms left off (“I never end songs: they just keep going on”) — is precisely how crass the music still is. “Don’t say you’ll die for me, lil bitch. Just die.” Just die! At a moment when seemingly every other major commercial music artist is trying to figure out a way to slimjim their way into a brand deal with a donut shop or a tour sponsored by pimple pads or AI sunglasses... I’ve been wrong before, but right now have trouble imagining “Playboi Carti presents new Munyun-flavored Funyuns” or “Playboi Carti and JP Morgan Chase bring you the Good Credit cash rewards credit card.” (“Charge dem hoes a fee.”)

As for whether I like the album? Whoa there, T2! It’s 30 tracks, came out Friday, and my last 72 hours have been spent trying to figure out how I can get my son to say “please” instead of just yelling at me. I can’t come to your party but for now: I’m just happy to know that people who are a hell of a lot younger than me think music is worth staying up until midnight for.

(24)

About 15 years ago I realized that William Gaddis was my favorite author. This is not a popular stance, or really even a good one. His novels are, by anyone’s account, including my own, incredibly difficult to get through. They are always funny! But it’s hard to articulate a grand payoff even when you do get through them. He is not exactly smartdumb, though smartsmart isn’t it either. I finished all 586 pages of A Frolic of His Own this past weekend, and spent the off-hours of child-rearing trying to figure out why I keep coming back to this terrordome.

Frolic is a send-up of legal language and lawyers and litigiousness in America. Everybody is suing everybody in this book, but the main case is an amateur playwright who believes his Civil War play Once In Antietam has been ripped off for a new Hollywood blockbuster called Blood in the Red White and Blue. Rather than leaving it at that, Gaddis forces you through pages and pages of legal opinions, circumstantial evidence, in-person testimonies, and nearly 100 torturous pages of the play itself. I find that you have to just let the words glaze over you sometimes, that the onslaught is the desired effect.

Aside from his debut The Recognitions, Gaddis wrote almost entirely in uncredited dialogue. There are no “Wyatt said” or “Sinesterra said” – it’s on the reader to figure out who is saying what based on the diction and rhythm of the speech itself. In Frolic, this becomes stream of consciousness taken to near-breaking point: actual character dialogue, ambient television chatter from the local news, internal monologues and judgments and reminisences all blur together into one endless, often intractable text.

I find there’s a beautiful desperation to his style – or more precisely, a melancholy. Legal language is about precision – making sure what you write cannot and will not be misunderstood by anyone. These characters are similarly desperate to make themselves immediately clear but don’t know where to begin, and so become tongue-tied in the process.

It reminds me of Dürer’s Melancholia I, in which an angel is surrounded by all the things she could be doing – painting, numerology, sculpting, playing the lute – but she can’t figure out what to do first, and just sits there paralyzed. Gaddis's main characters are miserable failures who can’t finish the job; other characters are stock frauds who can finish the job a little too quickly. Which is to say, there’s a lot of Gaddis self-talk in these books — the inner monologue of any artist trying to make something deep and meaningful and worth fighting through for an audience that seems to prefer the exact opposite. No surprise, these books are deeply pessimistic about the relationship between art and commerce. When I wake up anxious in the middle of the night, the bullet train of words spinning through my head sounds a hell of a lot like Gaddis.

Old habits die hard. Once I finished the book, I jumped into all the secondary literature I could find: reviews, academic papers, annotations. I listened to a lecture Gaddis gave in Vermont in 1979. I was eventually reminded of Gaddis’s preoccupation with the player piano – a mechanical instrument that came to America in 1876 and, via punched card rolls, made it possible for anyone to sit down and “play” music on the piano, simply by tapping one’s foot on the device’s pneumatic pump. By 1916, 65% of all piano sales were player pianos, and the market for piano rolls developed quickly as well, first classical music, then popular song, then increasingly just the latter.

Gaddis wrote an article for the Atlantic about the player piano in July 1951, entitled “Stop Player. Joke No. 4”. To Gaddis, the player piano experience was “the opportunity to participate in something which asked little understanding; the pleasure of creating without work, practice, or the taking of time; and the manifestation of talent where there was none.”

Drew Dickerson:

And it is exactly the eradication of failure—“invention” as we’re told here, “eliminating the very possibility of failure as a condition for success precisely in the arts where one’s best is never good enough”—that represents, for Gaddis, the player piano’s most fundamental scandal. Failure, so considered, is not an exterior menace to the completion of the player piano history. Rather, following the logic Gaddis outlines, failure is immanent to artistic merit, constitutive of success at the same time that it reasserts itself in a practice for which one’s best is never good enough. With the player piano, one need no longer be a skilled musician to enjoy music in the home. (The gramophone too fulfills an analogous function, during a roughly contemporaneous period.) For an artist who would go on to spend his entire career writing about standardization, counterfeit, imposture, and the downward adjustment of expectation in postwar society, the player’s exemplarity was evident from the very start.

I am oversimplifying. But I wonder if Gaddis’s extreme style – not just his subject matter – emerged out of this latent anxiety. The anxiety of not being replaced by a machine. It would be hard, in a sense, to create a punched card version of The Recognitions. One’s best is never good enough. Every sentence is, at best, a beautiful messy failure. Machines are bad at failing. Perhaps the only way to resist mechanization is to be the biggest failure of them all.

Aside from Bernhard (my fourth favorite author), who Gaddis himself tips a hat to in Agape Agape, I can’t think of another author I’ve read who has accurately predicted and portrayed the anxious spy-vs-spy feeling of making art in the age of Artificial Intelligence. AI could easily write a John Grisham novel, but could it write The Recognitions? What does that say about either?

Whenever I am printing stems to deliver to Universal – stems which surely become fodder for their own AI engines, otherwise why would they have become so blase about master ownership in the last ten years – the thought occurs to me: Could a robot make this song? Is it genuinely human if a robot could make a reasonable facsimile? If a robot could make it, was it worth making in the first place?

Now granted, you don’t want your number one objective to be: Make something a robot could never make. That is not music. That is hell. Or rather it’s a different kind of hell from commercial pop music, an industry in which artists willingly become servo-mechanisms for audio product that will succeed to the extent that it sounds like audio product. In that circle, the goal is to make something a robot can’t make now, or at least not in the next six months, or perhaps make something only a more advanced robot could make. “Hits sound like hits” – the industry’s most important tautology. Cross this Styx at your own peril.

Like our woodcut angel friend, I struggle with ideas about perfectionism – so concerned about getting the feeling exactly right that I’ll easily spend six hours tweaking the amplitude envelope of a kick drum and never finish anything. At the same time I struggle with the degree to which my brain and decision-making has been molded by capital, and struggle with how much music I don’t dare make because it won’t sound good on the punched card.

All these years, I’m intrigued by Gaddis refusing to just pump the pedal even a little bit: tighten up the plot, make the characters a bit more intelligible, trim the fat, etc. Instead at every turn, he insists on failure. In the New Yorker a few decades ago, the author Jonathan Franzen (who has written mostly dumbsmart books) chalked that up to artistic cowardice, status mongering, old man yelling at cloud type anger and outright curmudgeonry.

Maybe! Though I’m not sure what to do with a guy who gives up on JR like that. Maybe big sloppy failures are the only human thing left for us to make. Maybe failure for Gaddis is, as Gregory Comnes pointed out in 1998, a precondition for achieving any sense of worth: better to fail at something worth doing, “because there was nothing worse for a man than failing at something that wasn't worth doing in the first place (Gaddis, 529).”

Better to play yourself, as it were, than to get played.

(22)

As far as I can tell, MD Foodie Boyz began only a few months ago. It is a podcast featuring four middle schoolers from Maryland, produced with an imitative mid-fi sheen we’ve come to expect from ‘four dudes talking about stuff’ kinds of podcasts. Limited expertise hasn’t kept anyone from starting a pod lately, but credit to the Boyz for picking a believable lane: They review food they’ve eaten. Pizza, celery, hot wings, nachos, Doritos, cookies, milk, vegetables. Sometimes they detour into music reviews, and a few of the earlier videos involve trips to fast food restaurants, which are notable if only because you get the full effect of how young and delightfully gangly they all are, despite how expertly they imitate the adult podcasters they admire. They are, by their own estimation, Maryland’s #1 Food Podcast. No argument here.

Looking past a slew of things that make me uncomfortable about four middle schoolers in the public eye, I’m enjoying this very much. It’s basically Superbad: The Podcast. It is pure adolescent joy – a rollercoaster ride of stupidity in the best way possible. There is no payoff, but there was no promise of one in the first place. It is voyeurism: This is what four teenage boys are doing after school in 2025 instead of playing Final Fantasy 3 or practicing the clarinet. MD Foodie Boyz are an excellent example of what I would call dumbdumb.

(23)

Not unlike TikTok Rizz Party, the MD Foodie Boyz attracted a peanut gallery of attention. Looking into the early posts on Instagram Reels, you’ll see the internet’s expected negativity (“there should be a tariff on podcast equipment”) and name-calling: Chubperm, McLovin (he really does look like McLovin), Nonchalant One, and Noname. But quickly this gave way to a different game: A rolling fan fiction written by commenters who attempt to explain and uncover the shifting power dynamic within the Boyz themselves:

troythejet: In recent episodes, McLovin has exhibited a remarkable shift in his presence on the pod, subtly yet decisively asserting himself as the new alpha. His takes have not only been consistently sharp but have also carried a persuasive weight that seems to steer the collective discourse. This is particularly evident in his ability to synthesize competing viewpoints and align the panel toward a shared consensus-most notably in his compelling endorsement of the Red Chip O show as the preeminent standard.

What makes this transformation so intriguing is not just the strength of his arguments but the way he wields rhetorical authority. He doesn't merely state opinions; he dictates the terms of the conversation, making agreement feel like an inevitability rather than a choice. It's a shift from passive participation to active orchestration, marking a clear transition from contributor to leader. If this trajectory continues, we may be witnessing the emergence of McLovin as the dominant intellectual force in this space.

When I say I “like” MD Foodie Boyz, what I am really saying is I like the combined narrative effect of the Foodie Boyz’s relative innocuousness and the commenters’ relentless poking and prodding and pynchoning that a conspiracy is in the works. It strikes me as very McLuhan: the ‘cool’ content of MD Foodie Boyz is heated up (cooked!) by the participation if not outright ‘completion’ of others. Whatever this relation is exactly, it’s an excellent example of smartdumb.

(24)

Where does that leave a piece like this? Or something like this piece by Taylor Lorenz (“the middle school social media stars are at the forefront of an impending Gen Alpha podcast boom”)? Where does this leave the grimy slew of managers and agents and producers who follow these children on Instagram, carefully figuring out the best “in” in hopes of another Talk Tuah? How wet are Monty and Avery’s lips right now?

Twenty years ago, when I was closer in age to Chubperm than I am to myself now, I was wary of the media’s stance as an innocent, panoptic bystander. Especially in the context of “trend reporting”, I was interested in how reporting on a trend constituted a kind of collapse of that trend. The word “exposure” is meaningful here (cf Virilio), insofar as something can become overexposed. There’s always a butterfly that gets loose, it seems. Even when it’s positive, our love for something – our desire to share it with as many people as possible – can’t help but hasten its ruin. At least a little bit — that’s what I thought. I struggled with that until I set myself on fire.

A piece like the one you’re reading is the definition of dumbsmart. I am watering down all kinds of McLuhan, which is smartsmart, and deploying it haphazardly at best. This piece has an air of challenging discourse but I’m not sure how much nourishment is left, as I’ve done all the chewing for you. It is a rollercoaster ride of stupidity masquerading as a piece about rollercoaster rides of stupidity. You are Noname. So am I.

(20)

In the NFL postseason, my analyst wife trades football for reality television. The show she studies is called Love Is Blind, a dating show on Netflix that debuted a few weeks before COVID lockdown. “Reality show” is a designation beneath the show’s creators, so Love Is Blind is a “social experiment where single men and women look for love and get engaged, all before meeting in person.” It is hosted by Newlyweds: Nick and Jessica’s Nick Lachey — no stranger to reality — and his current partner, the actress Vanessa Lachey.

After our son goes to sleep, we watch the show’s cast of real people sit in dystopically staged rooms called “pods” and talk to other people in adjacent “pods”, with the hope that they might find someone for the long haul. My wife is nothing if not professional. Just like with football, she takes copious notes while watching, cross-referencing the plots of former seasons and episodes, Derrida-ing her way into the show’s accidental themes and latent anxieties. Her findings are then recapped on her podcast, Love Is Kimes, with her co-host David Dennis, Jr.. (Smash that subscribe.)

It’s worth noting that the show’s title is not Is Love Blind? To appear on the show is to enter into an alternate reality in which we all testify— from the show’s creators to the people on the show to us viewers at home – that love can be blind, or perhaps could stand to be a little blind. Wouldn’t that be nice, or at least interesting, to see how that played out? That perhaps our over-reliance on our eyes and physical appearance has become a kind of moving cataract-y blind spot that keeps us from seeing people for who they really are or could be in relationship to ourselves. (Here’s the link again to my wife’s podcast.)

I confess I am only half-watching Blind most of the time, while I look up the price of vintage digital effects boxes on Reverb or read instruction manuals for Eurorack modules I don’t own. My only semi-meaningful commentary so far has been on the music supervision, which is “incredible” in the best way possible, and not a little smartdumb. The soundtrack is pop songs you have never heard before – uncannily and eerily similar to ones you’ve heard, but simply not “real” as we might say, because they are not sung by a known artist. They are “fake” songs.

It is, as the LA Times put it, a “wall-to-wall soundtrack of infectious yet strangely disposable pop songs about love and heartache, with lyrics that narrate the show so perfectly they feel as if they were generated by artificial intelligence.”

Here’s writer Meredith Blake a few years ago:

Consider a recent scene from the fourth — and arguably most unhinged — season, which concludes Friday. While enjoying a romantic date aboard a boat, lawyer Zack got down on one knee and proposed to project manager Bliss, who accepted even though she’d been passed over weeks earlier for another woman.

As Zack leaned in for a passionate kiss and ran his fingers through Bliss’ hair, a soulful acoustic song swelled on the soundtrack. “Kiss her with passion, as much as you can / Run your hands through her hair, whenever she’s sad,” went the lyrics…

You will likely not hear these songs anywhere else except in Love Is Blind, and that was the best part. They helped create a hermetic seal around the show’s dystopic reality. Not only is dating different in the Love Is Blind universe, but the music is different there too. You are fully immersed into a new reality; these songs are the most popular songs in that world.

In the world of Love Is Blind, these supposedly “fake” library songs serve the illusion of the show in a uncannily real way. I always thought it to be a deliberate feature of the show. So you can imagine my surprise — how thoroughly my own reality was punctured – upon hearing Billie Eilish’s “Birds of a Feather” early on in Season 8, or Black Eyed Peas’s “I Gotta Feeling”, or Jason Mraz’s “I’m Yours”. These are songs that firmly exist in our reality, not theirs. Why was I hearing them? Who was hearing them?

I won’t bore you with the copyright technicalities of library music or “sync music” as it’s better known. Suffice it to say that “sync music” is often cheaper than licensing better known songs by supposedly “real” artists on “real” labels or with “real” publishers. The music is technically just as competent, well-performed, and well-recorded as supposedly “real” music. But instead of distributing the music under the umbrella of a “real” artist and agreeing to the pay structures of the music industry, the musicians who make sync music do so on behalf of a sync catalog company, who in exchange for the work and underlying copyrights will offer a total buyout upfront. It’s an honest living, and a fairly uncomplicated relationship with music: Making music in service of a feeling or function, not in service of capital or celebrity or other fictions that the music industry has grafted onto our fragile medium.

This season of Love Is Blind is the first time in the show’s run that supposedly “real” songs are being licensed. “Being able to incorporate some of these great songs and great artists into the show is really exciting, and hopefully an elevating, entertaining experience for the audience,” show creator / ChatGPT impersonator Chris Coelen told Variety last week.

What Coelen seems to misunderstand is that I don’t want an elevating, entertaining experience. Perhaps similar to what’s happening in video games too, where players are less and less interested in games with realistic graphics. I don’t want our reality. I want their reality.

(21)

As much as I want to, I won’t make the case that the supposedly fake music of Love Is Blind is a lot more interesting than the supposedly real music of, like, The Kid LAROI.

But if you’ll excuse some light Chuck Eddy cosplay, I want to talk about fake artists, and how, no surprise to anyone who reads this newsletter, I often prefer “fake” music made by “fake” artists over “real” music made by “real” artists. My least favorite kind of music is “real” music made by “fake” artists. My favorite is “fake” music made by “real” ones.

Which brings me to Liz Pelly’s Spotify broadside. I admire Pelly (and her sister Jenn) so much. And I support her main point: the streaming economy has eroded the monetary and spiritual value of music. Writing about the music industry is a labor of love, and Liz has put considerable effort into investigating streaming – not just the business but the broader costs. She’s a true ally to musicians and artists. We are all grateful to her for sounding the alarm.

But I find her spite for “fake artists” to be a bit underexamined. One re-reveal of her Harper’s piece, the well-documented observation that Spotify had begun to use “fake” or “ghost” music for certain electronic chill/lifestyle playlists instead of “real” music by more established electronic artists like Jon Hopkins or Bibio, seems to presuppose several things:

1. People who want to chill would prefer to listen to Jon Hopkins and/or Bibio whilst chilling. (My guess is: Internal data likely has proven otherwise. What’s likely is that the things that make Hopkins/Bibio’s music interesting and unique are the same things that stick out and make them less suitable to background listening than music composed explicitly to stay in the background.)

2. The “real” music of Jon Hopkins and/or Bibio is more conducive to chilling than “fake” library music written precisely for the purpose of chilling. (My friends: Chilling is competitive business. Especially in sleep/relaxation playlists, sync music composers are incredibly precise about the optimum dynamic range, frequency spectrum, harmonic movement, instrumentation, even flavor of white noise and water sound used in their compositions. That’s because Spotify and Apple have extreme amounts of data on listener habits. They know exactly what will keep their listeners on the platform. It’s frustrating. In a past life, I humbled myself to the task of trying to learn the rules of modern ambient playlist music, not unlike learning the rules of a sonata or a rondo. I worked quite hard at getting records on the Apple Sleep/Chill playlists, attempting to replicate the sound of whichever Apple-owned, Platoon-distributed content(s) dominates that playlist — and as close as I would get, there was always something missing. It’s a genre unto itself, which is why at this point 99.5% of the music on that playlist is likely the same few “fake” musicians making it.)

3. Music written with a clear function in mind, as opposed to music written for the purpose of artistic self-expression (cf. Hopkins; Bibio), is a less metaphysically valuable kind of music. Perhaps because it courts commerce so flagrantly, it is not “art” at all. (Many of us unwittingly inherit a Euro/Western/white understanding of music’s value strictly in terms of individual expression/harmonic complexity/melody is most important/etc, and in turn undervalue music’s much longer history as functional social medium — in war, in religion, in the home, in dance, etc. Is the bell player in a West African drum circle a fake musician playing fake music? Is my son, who puts the entirety of a plastic toy microphone into his mouth before screaming at the top of his lungs, a real one? This line of inquiry gets tricky quickly.)

4. “Real” artists have “biographies” and “links to websites.” A Google search would not “come up empty” for a “real” artist. (Many people make art and choose art as their ‘social medium’ because they want people to engage with them through their art, not in relation to the person who made it, cf Gaddis, ‘artists are the dregs of their work’, etc. In any case, this line of thinking also gets tricky. Are you more real if your biography is longer? If you have more links to more websites?)

5. “Low-budget stock muzak” is “steamrolling real music cultures, actual traditions within which artists were trying to make a living.” (The ‘actual tradition’ of artists making a living through work that serves no apparent function is a relatively new phenomenon, and the ‘actual tradition’ of artists as the primary organizing principle of music is even newer, an inadvertent demand created by the dominance of the pop recording industry in the last century. An aside: Why can’t ‘music for Apple Sleep playlists’ be an actual tradition? Was the vaunted Motown tradition not, by Gordy’s openly admitted design, a playlist of deliberately simplified black music for record-buying, radio-listening white people?)

6. "Stock muzak” is not made by “real” artists. (Where does this leave producers and songwriters? All the people who help make the music for supposedly real artists? This gets into rockism territory quickly.)

7. “Stock muzak” by “fake artists” is not just a matter of “authenticity in music,” but a “matter of survival for actual artists, of musicians having the ability to earn a living on one of the largest platforms for music.” (Actual artists! Earning a living! When it would seem, by this logic, that the only way to identify an actual artist is if they aren’t earning a living! More shortly!)

8. Only “real” artists should be able to earn a living making music. “Real” jazz musicians, like the one Pelly interviewed on the park bench, seem to encounter a reduction in their own sense of realness whenever they dabble in “fake jazz.” (My condolences, James Jamerson)

I don’t believe Liz intends to denigrate working-class musicians. Her point is much more holistic: the system is so rigged that music workers have a better shot at a living wage making “fake” music for library companies than attempting to make “real” music as or for “real” artists. If they were able to make “real” music, they also could see potentially bigger payouts and perhaps most importantly, their souls wouldn’t need to be crushed. Hate the game, not the player, etc (though I’m not sure where that leaves the rapper the Game).

She’s not wrong, but neither is my reality: I like making fake music. Just as much as I like making real music. So do most of my professional colleagues. We just like making music. It is a compulsion. We try are best to make money from that compulsion.

And truthfully, laboring on behalf of “real” artists you’ve heard of, who make supposedly real music, is often way more soul-crushing than writing music for sync. The soul-crushing aspect has nothing to do with the content of the music. It has to do with how our work is valued and dignified by the people who do or don’t pay us for our work. Functionally, artists are proper nouns – organizing principles for audio content. Functionally, there is no difference between the 20 or so songwriters who make music under the umbrella of a fake ambient library artist and the 20 or so songwriters whose names are listed under a Rihanna record. You’re almost certainly not meeting the artist!

When you go to such great lengths to distinguish between “fake” music and “real” music, you do the recorded music industry’s bidding for them. More than fame or money, the recorded music industry sells music makers on the promise of being a “real” artist, or working on “real” music with a “real” artist and getting a “real” cut. Sometimes it works out just fine and you make enough money to keep going or buy a nice watch. But it’s important to recognize it as a fiction, and one I’d argue is way more dangerous to artists and music makers than any WFH sync gig.

In a sync licensing agreement, such as when I write music for a commercial, I get paid a clear, agreed-upon fee for my labor. There is a brief, a deadline, an agreed upon number of revisions, and a kill fee if the client ultimately doesn’t like my work. You don’t see any money beyond the original fee, but here’s something worth noting: most music does not generate significant royalty income anyway. It’s not an act of desperation to take the money upfront. It’s just good business.

In the music industry, where I write real music for real artists, there is no upfront agreement. It’s also almost always on spec — as in, let’s see what happens. That’s the spirit of music, for sure. But what that means is, if I ever expect to be paid for my work, I still have to deliver all of it upfront and provide the client/label with near-finished products. What that means, roughly:

As producer, I host the artist, for free, at the studio whose rent I alone play, using recording equipment I bought with my own money.

I co-write a song with the artist at no cost, create or co-create the production, record, edit, and mix the artist’s vocals at no cost. In 2025, “demo vocals” are often the final recordings, and are expected to sound pretty close to finished.

At no cost, I print these pre-mixed stems for the mixing engineer who will eventually “mix” the record, which means find the 5% of the record s/he can improve on without crossing the artist/label demoitis Rubicon. It’s basically like playing Operation but with audio, with a whole slew of deliverables afterwards.

Then I wait for one or two or five years to see whether the label who signed the artist even wants the record, or even still works with the artist. Only then, at that point, do we talk about me getting compensated for my labor.

To keep things clean but not too off from reality, let’s say you have to quote around $5,000 to $7500/record just to make a decent wage. This amount covers your time and expenses and administrative personnel (management, lawyer, assistants, session players whose fees you fronted just to keep things rolling, etc). You quote $10k because you know the label’s A&R usually will push back and try to get you for half that. If it’s a big artist, maybe budget isn’t as much of an issue but you still get push back on points. If it’s a new signee or “baby artist”, the negotiation turns into this whole thing about "believing in the artist” and “everybody is coming down on their fees because we believe in the project” and so on. Are you not going to believe? So you agree to half your fee and a percentage of the royalty.

Some fun facts about royalties though: Your publishing royalties are next to worthless unless the record does well on pop radio, and fewer and fewer records end up there anymore. Maybe you get a sync – on a Netflix show, like Love Is Blind – but that’s topping out around $7.5k/side, maybe $10k and usually half that if it’s an indie, and you’re only seeing a a percentage of the publishing side really. If you get a contract with master royalties from the label, they’re usually ‘crossed’ with the entire project, meaning the artist’s entire recording and sometimes marketing budget need to be recouped before you see any residuals.

More likely than not, the record will come out before you have an agreement in place with the label anyway. It will get done eventually, as I mentioned in my post last week. You like the artist! You want to preserve the relationship with them and their team and the label. You don’t want to be “difficult”. It’s a volume business, you’re told – take as many shots on goal as possible. While you’re waiting to get paid, an A&R wants to know if you have any instrumentals for a k-pop artist you’ve never heard of who’s going solo. They’re looking for something “fierce” and “playful.” Why not? So you spend a day or two making fierce and playful instrumentals, knowing fully well you’ll likely never hear anything about this project ever again.

This is the business of “real” music. I am so grateful I get to do what I get to do. It’s not a reality show, but it is a social experiment. You wake up, you show up to your pod. You hope it all works out.

(16)

I only have one story about Mark Zuckerberg from college.

When The Facebook launched at Harvard in February 2004, I wasn't in a rush to join. Why would I? I was already on Friendster! But I gave in out of curiosity, and soon became one of the site's first thousand or so users. I existed on the internet then as a published music writer named "Nicholas B. Sylvester" – a styling formality I had somehow decided to keep from my high school newspaper days, when the editors insisted on full names and middle initials. Thanks again, Jason L. Schwartz and W. Sean McLaughlin!

I schlepped the totality of my government name into the signup page, logged in, and soon realized I was the only person on all of (The) Facebook who had his name like that. The unspoken point of the site (and perhaps cosmically why it rolled out just a week or so before Valentine’s Day) was to help with dating. And "Nicholas B. Sylvester" was doing me no favors.

You'd think I could just change it myself. But the site's code was in such a neonatal state, users didn't have the capability yet to revise their own names. It wasn't a bug, but you might call it an inefficiency.

If I wanted my name changed, I would have to reach out to Mark Zuckerberg directly, and Mark Zuckerberg would have to do it himself. I found Mark's email via Pine (zuckerb at fas, iirc) and sent him the request along with my compliments on the site. He wrote back within a few hours, and said he'd make the change after he got back from class that evening (Mark was still going to class). There were no firm promises made, but later that night, there he was: Nick Sylvester on thefacebook.com.

I've been thinking a lot about this interaction the last few weeks – how for the longest time, and for such a simple reason, I was rooting for Mark Zuckerberg. A flaw in the code had, ironically enough, made me a fan of Facebook. It would have been more efficient for everyone if I could have just fixed it myself. But the inefficiency forced me to become invested in the site. The inefficiency put me in direct contact with the site's creator, and allowed the site's creator to do right by me and my request. The inefficiency also made me feel like Mark Zuckerberg cared about me and other users. I wish I still had that e-mail. I wanted that site to win it all.

(18)

We’re hearing a lot about efficiencies and inefficiencies lately. I admit I didn’t quite understand Elon Musk and Zuckerberg and other Silicon Valley elites’ support for Trump and “Governmental Efficiency” until I read this article over the weekend. The author Mike Brock does an excellent job of laying out the libertarian techno-solutionism we are up against, and why it’s so dangerous. Please stop reading this and go read that instead. I can’t recommend it enough.

Running a country like a CEO – that’s a premise of this administration – means ruthless efficiency. And at many tasks, humans are way less efficient than algorithms and LLMs and rule-based robots. America’s architects couldn’t have known what was coming, but if I remember one thing from US History in high school, it’s that the inefficiencies of our government were part of their design. The founding fathers didn’t want important things to be happening too quickly. The balance of power – perhaps the Constitution’s crowning inefficiency – forces people in power to slow down and make sure they’re not missing something. In the slow roll, they’re forced to come face to face with how broad governmental decisions will affect actual people. Inefficiencies, in a way, are a kind of smartdumb.

Of course, not all inefficiencies are great or deliberate. But when you worship at the altar of efficiency, you're only a few stations of the cross away from saying the great swath of us are useless eaters, and that the plants and animals we can’t eat are the most useless eaters of them all. You’re way closer to the untethered Zizian logic than you probably should be, cranked out and hoping that your AI sympathies will spare you in the uprising. Not my tempo.

(19)

Perhaps that’s why I feel the singe of “inefficiency” so acutely. Music is an inherently inefficient medium. There are more direct ways to get your point across. Perhaps music can be "efficient" at stirring emotions, but our ears tire quickly, are incredibly sensitive to bullshit, and can’t help themselves from intermodulating. Like a dog in a bathtub, recorded music can’t be held down to singular interpretation. The ease with which anyone can now remix and re-edit and repurpose recorded audio has made the musical propagandist’s job both a lot easier and a lot harder.

As a music producer, I exist at the nexus between art and commerce. My job is to negotiate the balance of efficiencies and inefficiencies. Low end is something I have to negotiate everyday. Deep bass frequencies – 20 to 40hz, let’s say – are among the most emotionally satisfying things a body can experience. But they are wildly inefficient, requiring considerably more energy and headroom than “more efficient” frequencies from let’s say 100 to 8000hz. If you have a record with a considerable amount of deep bass frequencies, like in genres like dub techno – with the same amount of power exerted, your final recording simply will not sound as “loud” as a record with the same energy concentrated in the mid frequencies. Some of that has to do with our own ears, a technology that found that frequencies around 1000hz got us humans the most bang for our buck. Everything from stadium loudspeaker systems to Spotify’s decades-old volume level limiting algorithm essentially “penalize” music that isn’t efficiently using the audible frequency spectrum. The end of the loudness wars has been greatly exaggerated. There’s a reason dance music so easily sounds like shit on streamers.

Another example of efficiencies I have to negotiate: song structures. One easy way to out yourself as a horrible person in the music industry is to say, “You know what they say! Don’t bore us! Get to the chorus!” The artists and I might make a section we absolutely love, that makes us feel all the things we want to feel from this piece of recorded music. But we are up against the cold unfeeling logic of songwriting efficiency, i.e.: is this section necessary? Is this word necessary? Can’t we just repeat this other word? I am trying to get ahead of this conversation as a music producer, so that I can say with certainty: Yes, random 22-year-old A&R who watched one Tiktok about Mike Caren, once, this is necessary!

The received wisdom is that the chorus is the money shot – it is the point of the music. Verses and prechoruses are useful only insofar as they make the chorus seem more exciting. Intros and outros are wildly inefficient, and bridges are only important if you’re trying to win one of the GRAMMYs that nobody outside of the industry really cares about. The most efficient songs are not the ones that make you feel something more deeply over time, but the ones you understand on first go. The logic can get brutal quickly: Is a song even working if people aren’t dancing upon impact, or if you aren’t singing along by the end?

Other stuff: I am negotiating the efficient realities of a raw upfront vocal against the fact that some raw vocals are, ahem, too efficient. I am negotiating the balance between familiar efficiencies like having some kind of rising noise effect into a chorus and unfamiliar but potentially daring left turns or simply dispensing with industry sturm und drang entirely.

Another way to put it: I am negotiating how much a song should be recognized as a song, and whether it hurts or helps the artist at that juncture in their career to make music that more resembles supposedly “timeless” music, even though “timeless music” usually just means commercially released songs from the last 60 or so years. (If you want an easy way to out yourself as a horrible person in the music industry who’s also down to dabble in some light racism, you can say, “It’s not really good music unless you can play it on the guitar.” Enjoy.)

Songs – music with a vocal melody, with a clearly defined repeated chorus supported by verses in between – are the atomic unit of the recorded music industry, partly because songs are the most efficient music technology when it comes to extracting and maintaining the most number of people’s attention. Speaking with no music, i.e. podcasts – are even more efficient, but that’s a different post.

As a producer, I am negotiating a lot of technicalities too, like the efficiencies of digital recording. It’s incredibly more efficient than magnetic tape, but you only need to look at what music technology has arisen in its wake: Universal Audio’s skeumorphic remakes of old compressors and EQs from the 70s; non-linear console emulations; plug-ins that replicate oscillator drift and every possible kind of electrical hum. We are missing something about the inefficiencies. I think this is where Simon Reynolds perhaps oversimplified. It’s not nostalgia or retromania that is driving the demand for those technologies, but the simple fact that there were attendant frictions and creature comforts of past inefficiencies, and comprise a certain je ne sais quoi that human ears find essential to enjoying music.

Similarly, but for another time: You see all these new DSPs in the wake of Spotify's ruthless efficiency trying to rescue the artistic context that’s been lost now that Spotify has essentially become the artist. How do we approximate even the simple immersive experience of buying a CD and reading the liner notes on first playthrough?Hint: The solution is not “immersive” audio!

I watch with empathy as tech company after tech company shows up to solve the music industry’s collaboration problems, rights management problems, payment problems, etc. There are so many problems! But maybe not all of them are problems, at least not all the time. Every music industry worker intuitively knows to leave room for a little inefficiency. Can’t pay the engineer? Give him 5% publishing! No contract? No problem. Here’s all my work. For free! If you don’t pay me, I just won’t work with you anymore. Working in this industry is bound by social contract – and an act of faith that it will all work out eventually.

I've heard the following advice credited to Benny Blanco: “When negotiating splits and credits, never let any one record be bigger than your entire career.” Credits and songwriting split negotiations can break your heart. But let’s take a beat and appreciate, at least for now, how it forces us to at least try to be human with one another, at a moment when so many powerful men are determined to keep us from doing exactly that.

(15)

I was saddened to see that the artist Rutherford Chang passed away a few weeks ago. I had met Rutherford almost 20 years ago through my high school friends Matt and Phil Tinari, and the last time we saw each other was on the roof of Petit Ermitage when Matt was in town drumming with Noura Mint Seymali back in 2017.

Rutherford was my favorite kind of artist: high-minded but clear in execution, mischievous but never not compassionate. Whenever he said what he was up to, my first reaction was always laughter, and my second was always disbelief: “How has nobody thought to do this before?” Conceptual artist is hardly ever said without scare quotes. But here was one whose goal was not just unpretentious but somehow a bit quaint: Rutherford wanted us to remember what wonder feels like. What if we… I don’t think I would have arrived at a working theory of smartdumb without meeting him.

Rutherford’s most well-known project was “We Buy White Albums.” The cover of the White Album is of course, just white, but that means that over time each copy accumulates unique wear and tear. They were at one point identical, but over time each copy became an original. Rutherford became obsessed with the subtle variations of each cover, and from there the subtle variations of the audio pressings themselves. He had purchased thousands of first editions by 2013 bt the time he opened the “We Buy White Albums” installation at Recess in New York. The exhibit was designed to look and feel like a record shop, with big bins and turntables – except all the albums were White Albums. Every six months or so, I would receive an e-mail from Rutherford about his “We Buy White Albums” exhibit traveling the world: Sacramento, Louisville, Rotterdam, Berlin. There was also an Instagram account, where Rutherford posted a new White Album cover every few days.

To me, the masterstroke was Rutherford’s audio experiment. What would it sound like if you played 100 different copies of the White Album at once? He digitally recorded side one of 100 different copies of White Album, then laid the audio on top of one another with the same starting point. Over the course of the side, each copy’s audio begins to drift from another – first light phasing, then faint echoes, then perceivable ones, then a granular mess of sound that’s reminiscent of processed guitar music like Fennesz or Tim Hecker. The familiar, made unfamiliar – except it’s also a beautiful recording. Imperfections, perfectly expressed. Hats off to fellow Thayerite Eliah Seton for not taking this one down:

You can learn more about Rutherford’s work on his website.

(?!)

The smartdumb playlists have been updated, with tunes from White Zombie, Ol Dirty Bastard, and the White Album.

(13)

Nine days before President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, a garage band from Minnesota called the Trashmen released a song called "Surfin' Bird." The manic sound and performance was inspired by California surf rock, which the band had only discovered the year before. As for the song, it was written by another Midwest group called the Sorenson Brothers, who had shared a bill with the Trashmen at a dance hall in Wisconsin. The Trashmen decided to cover their song but at a deranged, breakneck speed – like an early version of the ‘sped up’ Tiktok trend, you might say, or rock’s version of bebop. The lead singer adopted an ugly, honky, big bird-like delivery, and halfway through the recording just begins to babble and stutter and glitch out before the band restarts the song. “Surfin’ Bird” was an immediate hit, and reached Number 4 on the Billboard 100. "It's not about pain and killing and everything else," the band’s rhythm guitarist would later explain. "It's just hot."

(14)

An artist friend asked me to help work on a song he had begun with Pharrell Williams. To look under the hood of a Pharrell instrumental is a special thing. There were only a few stems: drum loop, 808, main synth, a vocal chop that comes in only during the chorus, and a second synth line that comes in at the end. The main musical figure of the record is a tremolated held chord pattern reminiscent of “Timeless,” Pharrell’s recent hit with The Weeknd and Playboi Carti, but harmonically it has more in common with Pharrell’s more adventurous work with artists like Fam-Lay and Kelis: two dense suspended chords you’ve likely never heard in pop music, that don’t quite resolve but nevertheless allow for beautiful vocal melodies if you know how to find your footing. New song sections do not announce themselves in any grandiose way either. Soloing the main synth line reveals a litany of little imperfections: portamento glides in unusual places, missing notes, and the nagging sense that all this is just too weird to even hazard calling it music.

I was enamored on first listen. My friend’s voice and writing thread the needle so effortlessly – never platforming or forcing a separate agenda, simply doing what this bizarre set of sounds and harmonies ask of him in the moment. I believe we can ‘hear’ the sound of effort in music, and I believe that the sound of effort is the shared characteristic of the music I tend to dislike. I also believe we can ‘hear’ the opposite, when a record has been made quickly, or when a record was fun to have made, or when a record simply isn’t weighed down by its own ambition.

When music is your job, it is hard to let go of ambition and just let yourself show up. I suggested to my friend a few loose ideas for how he could swing for the fences and really seize the moment here: sounds we might add, transitions that might sell the chorus better, perhaps a bridge with a new point of view. LA! But he is more smartdumb than I am or likely will ever be. “How about we just let it be a song,” he said.

(?!)

The smartdumb playlists have been updated, featuring music by Beck, Excepter, OG Maco and, of course, The Trashmen.

(9)

We know what disasters look and sound like from books and movies. If we haven’t experienced them directly, we have a rough sense of how we might behave. Even still, there were some surprises Tuesday night. My wife was in an airplane when the Eaton fire began. In a critical emergency, I didn’t expect to spend so much time looking at three little dots appear and disappear and reappear in an iMessage screen, as the airplane wifi hemmed and hawed our discussion. I didn’t expect to spend so much time looking for a portable french press in my cabinets, because wherever I was going to wake up, I would still want my coffee. I didn’t expect to receive memes from high school friends in the middle of packing my sleeping son’s toys and clothes, and I didn’t expect that I would actually take the time to reply to them. Finally packed, I didn’t expect to get in the driver’s seat and first wonder, “What music should I listen to?”

(10)

Time has felt suspended lately. Birds don’t tweet under smoke plumes. The new timekeeper is Watch Duty alerts. Social media applications, which moved on from strict chronology long ago, peddle slipshod alerts from 16 hours ago, two days ago, and so on. For once we scroll endlessly not out of addiction but out of desperation looking for something to be true, or instructive, or simply not confusing. This past week I did something I haven’t done in three decades: watch the local news. It hasn’t changed at all. A blind man could pick a weatherwoman out of a lineup. On the scene, a local reporter on the scene in the Palisades waxes poetic at the sight of the remains of a blue recycling bin, half-consumed by the flames. Uncannily, a local news weather quant named Mike Davis narrates the movements of water-toting helicopters as they douse new flare-ups in Hollywood Hills. Later that night, a watch enthusiast friend sends me a photo of Mark Zuckerberg, then a zoom into his watch: a $900,000 “Hand Made 1” by Greubel Forsey, which he wore while announcing the end of fact-checking at Meta.

(11)

We spent Saturday indoors at the Glendale Galleria, avoiding the heavy air and buying more supplies for whatever this week brings. As I waited in line at Dunkin Donuts holding a new air purifier, the customer in front of me ordered “Sabrina’s Brown Sugar Shakin’ Espresso” at the exact moment the Sabrina Carpenter song that inspired it began to play over the mall’s speakers. The two minimum wage teenagers behind the counter conferred with one another; neither of them seemed to know how to make the drink. Overly reverberated, the song is reduced to broad Huxleyian strokes: a breezy chord progression, a martial beat, an opiatic voice. The words themselves cannot handle the transformation in this space. Under the pressure of reflection, they simply dissipate.

(12)

Vocal pop music has never felt less essential to me. How can you trust anybody who’s singing right now? As I prepare my family for this week, I have found solace in artists who don’t want to be the main character. Mike Schommer’s dc15, re-released this past year. Plastikman’s Consumed. The Topdown Dialectic releases. Farben’s Textstar. Something about the Schommer in particular – this seems to be in step with how I am experiencing these protracted passages of time, where both not much and everything seems to happen all at once.

(6)

In 2001, the Icelandic artist Björk attended the Academy Awards in a dress that resembled a mute swan. It was lightly controversial in the media; the outfit was not typical of red carpet events. The dress, which was eventually revealed to be part of the artist’s album rollout, lived on as late-night show fodder, Halloween costuming, and other forms of parody. But as a cultural gesture, it was mere novelty - lightly amusing, ultimately frivolous. There is no before-swan dress / after-swan dress, except vis-a-vis Björk’s rising celebrity. I have found that many people, when they say they love Björk, have no history with the artist’s brilliant music or performances. They simply love the images of an Icelandic woman wearing that dress. Björk’s swan dress is an example of dumbdumb.

(7)

In 2016, the American artist Michael McGregor raised $472 on crowdfunding platform Kickstarter to print an edition of 20 t-shirts printed with the text “Björk Swan Dress.” “It’s an instant mental image maker,” explained the artist in his campaign. “The amazing thing is, it's probably the same mental image for everyone.” On first blush, the shirt appears to be no less a trifle than the thing it parodies. Upon closure inspection, there is the quiet elegance of the design, executed (I believe) by Chris Muccioli: the Ss curving not unlike the swan’s neck, the two red dots for unlauts that suggest eyes, the big O that suggests not just the dead swan’s surprise but ours as well. The shirt may conjour the same mental image for everyone, but it does not provoke the same reaction. It is a wearable Rorschach test – what? And how one reacts – Who? or Why? or Wow! – reveals more about them than about the dress, or the shirt, or the person wearing either. “Björk Swan Dress” is an example of smartdumb.

(8)

The smartdumb playlists at Spotify and Apple Music are now live. This week’s additions: Pauline Oliveros’s deep-listening masterpiece Accordion & Voice; Gavsborg’s exercise in phased looping and FM synthesis “Did Not Make This For Jah_9” (thank you Matthew Schnipper); and Bauhaus side project Tones on Tail’s “Go”, which was licensed for some show or movie I recently saw on Netflix, or Apple TV, or Hulu, though I can’t recall what or which.

(1)

I remember the exact moment my wife, a professional NFL analyst, stopped watching football. In the final minutes of Super Bowl XLIX, Malcolm Butler intercepted Russell Wilson’s pass in the endzone, certifying a Patriots victory over the Seahawks. I walked her home from the bar back to our apartment as she mumbled sports words I didn’t quite understand between what appeared to be actual sobbing. A few months earlier, I had been on one knee asking her to marry me when news broke that the Seahawks had just traded Percy Harvin to the Jets. The news was so catastrophic for her that my proposal and our expensive dinner reservation would have to wait. My wife remains an ardent supporter of her teams. But after that game, I noticed she no longer said she “watched football.” She “studied the games.”

(2)

A woman at a holiday party tells me about her Taylor Swift podcast. Each week she reports on Taylor Swift, Taylor Swift’s relationships, Taylor Swift fans, and her own relationship with Taylor Swift, Taylor Swift’s relationships, and Taylor Swift fans. She has a few thousand listeners per episode; additional content is available for Patreon subscribers. When I’m asked, which is not often, “Shake It Off” is the only favorite Swift song I can name. But it is not considered a serious pick among the cognoscenti, she explained. There is nothing to decode in “Shake It Off”, no refraction of the celebrity’s personal life to pore over. Listening is fun. But solving the crossword puzzle where person meets persona – that’s where the action is.

(3)

As a paid critic, I spent eleven months every year studying the games. I believed criticism should be in dialogue with the music, not subservient to it. To be a fan – fanatum, to appear before the temple – was the definition of subservience. I felt no obligations. I didn’t root for hometown acts. Like a budget Dostoyevsky narrator, I somehow found virtue in turning my back on the ones I had loved. Kill yr idols, etc. I was not listening to musics but to Music: connecting the dots between supposedly unrelated acts, celebrating the anomalies, looking for things that surprised me. If you knew about it, I already didn’t care. Beginnings entranced me. I was fearful of everything after. If I had my way back then, every band would release one 7” then break up immediately.

(4)

December was a month for resting my ears. After I turned in my lists, I could stop studying the games and try listening to music, not to what it signifies. To music I wanted to listen to, not music I thought might be important. In my twenties that meant Basic Channel, or Broadcast, or Miles Davis – these were happy places for me. But it became harder with every passing year to know, when left alone, what music I even enjoyed listening to, or what I should even feel when listening to music I supposedly enjoy listening to. My pleasure had slowly become my plasticity. I delight not in the sound, but in my ability to hear it. It’s a blessing and a curse. From the wax and wane of traffic to the Wal-Mart soul of Teddy Swims – I’m almost always able to hear something I love if I get out of the way and let myself listen.

(5)

On Christmas Eve, I watched my 15-month-old bobble around to Loidis in my kitchen. I cooked dinner for eight while listening to Jessica Pratt’s beautiful new album, and renewed my commitment to exercise listening to Kim Gordon. Patrick Holland’s best of list might have been my favorite – thank you for Fine. I love December because my mindchatter hushes almost naturally. I am not distracted by the broader contexts, the anxieties of influence: Is this not just a budget version of Vocalcity? Why make music that sounds like the 60s in 2024? Would this music hold up without the celebrity factor? I saved “Big Muzzy” because it sounded like Cocteau Twins, not despite the fact. In December the context is simply: my friends liked this or, my friends made that or, somebody I admire said they liked this or that. This is what the mixtapes we used to make for one another felt like. We listen to get closer to the people we love. We listen because our child is dancing.