It's Good to Have a Hobby

Slow Motion Summer Mode continues here at The K.N.R.U.

First up: Hi to the new subscribers from 65LABS! Thanks for joining.

Yesterday I stumbled upon Hussein Kesvani announcing his new newsletter about book binding. I mostly know of Kesvani via Trash Future, which is nothing to do with book binding, but apparently this is a hobby he picked up during lockdown and now the subject of an occasional newsletter. His reasoning:

When I hit 30, and started to run out of steam, becoming fairly disillusioned with journalism, I also realised I had no idea how to really use the internet to have fun. I didn’t know how to use it to learn things, or to share the things I’ve learnt with other people, in spaces which would encourage, rather than to denigrate and demean if something wasn’t perfect (which, in most cases, meant monetiseable). In my youth, being online was so intrinsic to how I developed my own hobbies, tastes and artistic skills. And so, I hope that this newsletter can eventually bring some of that energy to people who also want to learn how to make books.

I am a little older than Kesvani, so my youth didn't involve being online at all and I often marvel at what it must be like to have grown up never knowing the world without the internet. While I don't feel like I have run out of steam, and am not disillusioned by music making (although I don't think I was ever, er, illusioned? with the music industry as such), I do recognise this loss of the internet as a place I used to enjoy and learn things from. And I like how simply and directly he explains his hope for his newsletter: bring some energy to people with similar interests.

And I was like: oh right! I too like the idea of making some small thing on the internet that hopefully brings energy and joy to anybody who might also be interested in what I find interesting, which is to over-think making noisy music and complaining about capitalism! I should be less precious about my writing and just keep posting!

Another difference in our circumstances is that, for Kesvani, book binding is an enjoyable hobby, but my chosen subject matter is wrapped up with the concept of 'work'. I am lucky enough to still be making music for a living and this has led to a particular set of neuroses and anxieties about the relationship between what constitutes a hobby, work, practice, praxis, experimenting, play; what it means to be relying on my musical skills to pay the bills, and where exactly 'enjoyment' ought to fall amongst all that. I am not sure what it means to me now to think of making music as something I do as a hobby. And that feels simultaneously like a huge privilege and also a bit sad.

But what I think really tangled me up over the years is a slow-dawning appreciation of 'the band', 'music' and 'songs' as commodity forms regardless of whether that band is as globally successful as BLACKPINK, or a self-proclaimed 'anti-capitalist' band like Godspeed You! Black Emperor, or a 'hobby band' playing local gigs purely for fun. Not record labels talking about 'selling units' or 'reaching new markets', but how it works at a more fundamental level. For example: this paper about internet piracy looks at the utopian potential of websites like The Pirate Bay and sharing networks like Soulseek. Yes, these tools void the notion of songs as private property, and anybody with access to a computer has access to most music ever made for free. But: all the music you can find there is still catalogued, formalised, squeezed into the shape of albums and songs. Nothing about the method of distribution or negation of ownership does anything utopian to these already-commoditised forms of the music itself. And the emphasis is still on collecting and a kind of digital-ownership, even if those collections are shared. What it most illuminates is our inability to think of music beyond these forms.

As an NME-reading teenager in the late 1990s I used to get so caught up in arguments about whether this or that band might have 'sold out'. Which usually meant selling music to an advert or playing shows promoted by Clear Channel (now Live Nation) or selling gratuitous merchandise. But really, the entire framing of popular music as I understood it was always already subsumed by capitalism. And what is worse is that capitalism has always been expert at creating 'communal solidarities' through which we get to construct and enjoy music together, even as doing so propels the system to alienate us all still further.

It took me a long time to learn how to recognise the shadow cast across what I understood as 'music' by this capitalist realism. Then it took time for me to learn how to deal with this liminal space I found myself lucky enough to inhabit with 65days, one of creating-art-under-capitalism, a space that capitalism deliberately carves out of itself to allow for a kind of artistic autonomy to flourish which, once established, can be subsumed back into the machine.

I don't know if any conclusions can be drawn from this. We all exist in and through capitalism. Music predates capitalism, sure, but now our access to it and any enjoyment we can take from it is mediated through capitalism. That doesn't mean it is necessary to always be thinking about things in those terms. It certainly isn't a recipe for writing a blog to bring energy and joy to people who might be reading it because they are interested in making music! But what can I say? Writing about this stuff currently feels more connected to my process of making music than, I don't know, writing about creative strategies for programming interesting MIDI hi-hat patterns.

Maybe I should take up book binding.

GOOD MUSIC

Good Luck Kingfisher Three (Original Soundtrack) is the latest release from friend and comrade-in-arpeggios Makeup and Vanity Set. It is a banger that you should probably check out. If you like my Polinski stuff, then you're almost certain to like this. All the 90s breaks and FM synths you could ever dream of.

GOOD BOOK

Just finished Capitalism: A Horror Story, which investigates 'Gothic Marxism' via horror movies and philosophy. I don't particularly enjoy horror movies (though I am a big fan of the Gothic and goths in general), but I am fascinated by how critical theory can tease out glimpses of utopia from texts that, on the face of it, are nothing but bleakness and doom. As the author Jon Greenaway says in an absolute banger of a paragraph:

If there is a utopian future to be made, it is one that includes all that haunts the capitalist imagination, every scrap of culture that incessantly whispers to us that the world does not have to be this way. It is a utopian notion to see the Gothic and horror not as a kind of closure of the possible but as an expansion of what could be; it is a gamble to believe that even in the darkest products of culture, in the midst of violence, horror and despair, there is the unmistakable trace of hope, glittering under the blood.

Echoes there of Fredric Jameson's infamous essay about Walmart as Utopia, the idea that the 'utopian impulse' is hidden everywhere, perhaps especially in despair, just waiting to found.

That'll do for this week. See you next time for more energy and joy!