Some respect!

First, some news: My application for Langara College's Library and Information Technology Program fall 2024 semester has been accepted. It's time to get LIT this September! 🔥 🔥 🔥

I'm excited to be back in school as a 40-year-old, for a bunch of different reasons. Spending time at the People's University for Gaza at UBC over the past few months has been an excellent reminder of just how inspiring the youth of today can be. I'm excited to soak up that same kind of politically-charged energy on the Langara campus, while hopefully providing helpful contributions to the school's student movements with my decades of perspective and activism experience.

On top of my core classes, I'm excited to take electives about indigenous history, queer history, political science, feminism, gender studies, and creative writing. Mostly, I'm just excited to be a student again! Some of my best friends graduated from Langara's LIT program, and they all have great things to say about the school. More importantly, they now have jobs in fields that makes them feel like happy, productive, and fulfilled members of society, with salaries, benefits, and consistent work shifts that match the amount of time they spend on the job.

After working as a largely freelance, self-employed "music journalist" (or as a broke musician, broke live music promoter, or broke publicist) for the past 20 years, I'm tired of the feast-or-famine economic precarity of it all. I'm tired of begging editors for assignments. I'm tired of waiting for big American publications to pay me in a timely fashion. I'm tired of being a cog in the hyper-exploitative music industry machine: where newness and marketability are valued over lasting, sustainable careers for artists; where middle-men make more money than musicians ever will.

I'm tired of answering desperate email followups from publicists, who I know are just trying to do their job for their clients within a deeply flawed (and clearly overwhelmed) system — one that feels like it's consistently on the verge of breaking down completely. However, I'm even more depressed about the desperate messages I get from musicians, every single day. For whatever reason, these bands and solo artists from different genres and communities all over the world know I'm the kind of person who might write them back. From what I can gather, most of them are simply trying to make sense of their places within a confusingly corrupt music industry ecosystem, where the inequalities are always obfuscated. Don't even try to ask "the experts" what's going on, unless you want to be gaslit, dissed, and dismissed.

In today's modern music world — where manufactured consent for subscription-based streaming services reigns supreme, resulting in horrifying existential devaluations of music and the people who make it — organic popularity, like the kind we saw with Cindy Lee earlier this, year is rarely, if ever, rewarded. Instead, predictably "successful" (a.k.a. financially lucrative) legacy artists will continue to receive all the attention, accolades, and funding. In terms of contemporary artists, the young, photogenic ones with major label PR/marketing budgets will always get the biggest Spotify billboards, in the biggest cities — before they're chewed up and spit out so the industry can move onto the next shiny new thing, perpetuating this culturally and monetarily poisonous cycle of exploitation into the future.

In case you haven't noticed yet, mainstream pop artists, major labels, and streaming services are all in bed with each other in a late-stage capitalist orgy of money laundering, exorbitant prices for consumers, and fake clout. All of these issues have devastating impacts on the international community of working musicians, and the people who love music. It's obvious, simply from the consistently rising price of streaming service subscriptions — not to mention concert ticket prices!

At the end of the day, if you prefer to have music spoonfed to you by a boring, predictable algorithm — or buy $50 Taylor Swift LPs at the grocery store — just know the "convenience" those things offer have costs that extend far beyond the tech/music industry's infantilization of the listener. The environmental impact of everyone being terminally online is one worth taking a pause to think about.

Phew! I want to apologize for the rant in your inbox today, and any resentment or negativity it might bring with it, but I'm not sorry for my intensity on this topic. Now that I've been accepted into Langara's LIT program, I'm overjoyed to have the opportunity to bring my twin passions for music and history to a new field of study, where I can continue down a path towards my dream vocations of the future: music historian, archivist, physical and digital media librarian, and possibly even soundtrack supervisor for film and television.

TL;DR: If you see me on campus at Langara, give me a shout. I'll be the guy riding the skateboard in pink shorts!

What I've Written Recently

For the May 2024 edition of Bandcamp Daily's Tape Label Report, I interviewed Raegan Labat, founder of the Chicago-via-Louisiana cassette label Tough Gum.

Shabason, Krgovich, Sage album review (Aquarium Drunkard)

Plus a bunch of artist bios that will see the light of day soon!

What I'm Listening to Right Now

June 7th is the birthday of Prefab Sprout's Paddy McAloon, which gives me a yearly occasion to celebrate Saint Paddy's Day! My favourite Sprout song is "Bonny," so here's a beautiful live performance from 1985.

What I'm Watching Right Now

Toy Machine's 10th video, Real Life Sucks, is another stone cold classic from my fav skate company of all time. I'm going to write about my love of Ed Templeton and Toy Machine in more depth in a future edition of this newsletter, but for now, hit play on this monster of a skate video from "the company that invented nothing" and let the grin spread across your loyal pawn face.