canned dragons
A La Sala
In Paul Simpson’s review of the new album from the Houston-based Khruangbin (sorry, no link), A La Sala, he acknowledges the fact that they’ve moved past their influences into a sound all their own.
While it was easier to point out the key influences in the band’s sound on their earlier records, from Thai funk to Afro-pop to flamenco, by now it’s just easier to identify the group’s atmospheric guitars and steadily paced snare slaps as sounding like Khruangbin.
At this point, Khruangbin sounds entirely unique, and as this piece from Ryan Bradley explains, they are hard to imitate.
Music now exists primarily within the stream, which is to say passively: We turn it on, like a faucet, and out pour songs representing some mood, or emotion, or any of the other words we used before we had “vibes.” Perhaps it’s an aura, like “chill.” Or a vague, evocative mind-set, like “always Sunday.” The tap turns and out pour songs we already liked, along with burbles of what is a little new and different yet fits in beautifully. This is the arrangement in which “Khruangbin vibes” excel. Such music is extremely slippery, genrewise. (Is it psychedelic lounge dub? Desert surf rock? The sound you hear inside a lava lamp?) As such, it pairs well with a huge span of music, across genres and eras; it has a kind of algorithmic inevitability to it. But this slipperiness also means that quite a lot of the bands now producing Khruangbin-vibesy music are entirely forgettable.
The consensus on this album among critics seems to be that this is sort of a return to their roots for Khruangbin, embracing the power of a more deliberate groove. The single, “May Ninth,” which was released before the proper album dropped, is a sweetly soporific, minutes until midnight slow jam with an intimate feel.
The whole album is cohesive, so it’s easy to take a song like this as a statement of intent. Listen to the entire record and you’ll probably find yourself in agreement. You’ll also most likely feel a lot more mellow.
Asymmetrical news coverage at most of the mainstream media sites is something that I’ve almost just come to accept without any particular frustration. However, there are times when a particular topic comes up, and it’s so obvious that the coverage has been unfair and skewed, that it creates a sense that I have only been told what the media outlet wants me to hear. It feels a bit insulting that the leadership at these organizations has decided that I’m not intelligent enough to get all the facts and make judgments for myself.
Uri Berliner, a senior business editor at NPR, just came out about the institutional bias at the network. He relates the conversations he has with people when he tells them he works at NPR.
After the initial “I love NPR,” there’s a pause and a person will acknowledge, “I don’t listen as much as I used to.” Or, with some chagrin: “What’s happening there? Why is NPR telling me what to think?”
In recent years I’ve struggled to answer that question. Concerned by the lack of viewpoint diversity, I looked at voter registration for our newsroom. In D.C., where NPR is headquartered and many of us live, I found 87 registered Democrats working in editorial positions and zero Republicans. None.
I stopped listening to NPR a few years ago. I used to love the network. Even though I knew it had some biases, it still did a reasonable amount of fair reporting. That all but ended in the years following Donald Trump’s election, as Berliner relates. For example, it was a given that, almost any time I turned on the radio, I was going to hear a story about abortion. I finally thought, well, they might as well come out and say they are now an abortion advocacy organization and not a journalistic one.
I wrote about the bias in October of 2022. Listeners of NPR simply weren’t hearing certain news stories because they didn’t advance the causes that the organization was promoting. It’s abundantly clear in Berliner’s account that the organization has certain goals it wants to advance and intellectual diversity, or even bare honesty, are not among them. It’s not that their objectives are malicious, by any means, but they aim to provide news that supports a guiding narrative and deliberately exclude that which may call that narrative into question.
I first read about this story in a piece written by Ariel Shapiro for The Verge. There were a couple of things that I found interesting about Shapiro’s take. Shapiro writes of Berliner that “he did not give NPR a chance to respond (journalism 101!).” I mean, the guy has worked there for 25 years and the story is littered with anecdotes of how leadership at the organization responded (or didn’t) to his concerns when he brought them forward. He’s not some outsider who may be misunderstanding the perspective of the company that is profiled in his writing. As is documented in the article, he gave his colleagues at NPR many opportunities to address his misgivings. So, I’m not sure that’s necessarily a valid criticism.
Of the demographic findings about the makeup of NPR’s editorial staff, quoted above, Shapiro writes:
This is remarkable given that NPR has a very specific obligation to its audience (and potential audience). It is a public institution. However pitiful an amount, it does receive public funds. According to Gallup, Democrats make up 28 percent of the electorate, behind Republicans (30 percent) and Independents (41 percent). I am sure that some of you will be angry when I say this, but yes, in order to reflect America, you do need some staffers who understand how the other three-quarters of America thinks.
What’s interesting about that statement is that Shapiro knows many readers of The Verge don’t want to hear any opinions except the ones that reflect those of their own tribe. Some people will be reflexively angry about any notion of including views that aren’t in line with their preferred orthodoxy.
Probably the closest publishing platform to the one I’m using — Ghost — is Substack. Although Substack is much more popular for a few reasons, not the least of which is the low barrier-to-entry (it’s free if you are not charging for your publication), it has come under quite a bit of scrutiny lately. There was a big push to get writers to abandon the platform after The Atlantic posted an article asserting that there were many Nazi publications using the platform to spread and even monetize their ideas. A prominent tech journalist named Casey Newton, who was using Substack, led the charge to get the company to amend its content moderation policies. After not achieving complete success with his campaign, Newton took his publication, Platformer, to Ghost. Substack did, however, remove five accounts (out of the six that Newton reported) that were distributing Nazi material, in accordance with its existing policies about violent speech. Many writers opined that this was the bare minimum that Substack could do to quell the outrage that was being directed at them.
Despite the outrage, though, no one (that I’m aware of), including Newton, ever really came out with compelling evidence that there was a major content problem on Substack. The six accounts that were reported to Substack were among hundreds of thousands on the platform. Nor did the people criticizing the moves that Substack took ever really specify what concrete actions they were seeking. Others fretted that Substack making content moderation decisions was a slippery slope and that writers who weren’t associated with Nazi speech would be the next targets. So the furor eventually died down.
Now, the latest source of upset with Substack is that they recently created a separate category of followers for blogs that are not tied to subscriptions. People are worried that this will create lock-in, as a publisher can export their subscribers, but cannot export their followers. Andrea Grimes (presumably no relation to Elon Musk’s mistress and baby mama, Grimes) writes about the change, comparing the move with something Twitter would do.
But when Substack tanks — and I think its right-wing, Musk-flavored, tech-bro-brained management indicates that it will — it won’t just mean losing the audience for our 280-character late-night gummy jokes and covfefe memes. It won’t just mean losing a huge community of colleagues and readers. It will mean losing a substantial portion of the audience for content that takes a hell of a lot more effort to produce — the thoughtful rants, the reported deep-dives, the serial fiction, the smart criticism. And without access to “follower” lists and emails, there will be no way to find them again. Writers will, once again, have to rebuild from near-scratch elsewhere.
It does seem like a concern, and some major publications are reporting that their subscriber growth has dropped off since the changes were made. It’s also the latest controversy about the company to get people all riled up (a trend that started way before the Nazi scare). Given the reactive nature of many writers who are terminally online, I think it’s safe to suggest a wait-and-see approach.
Borderline Savings Time
A friend recently introduced me to the Orthodoxy and Heterodoxy podcast, wherein Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick explains the Orthodox Christian faith. One thing I took away from it, and really appreciated, is the exploration of the Orthodox view of competing brands of Christianity. Fr. Andrew describes other sects as “incomplete.” Having come from a Protestant background, the characterization struck me as both charitable and accurate. There isn’t any attempt to denigrate other forms of Christian faith, but merely to point out that perhaps there is more out there to discover.
I try to remember the words of Fr. Andrew, as I read the writings of Christians from other backgrounds. For instance, I frequently check out the Patheos site, which has a mix of Christian thinkers from different denominations, as well as writings from those of other religious traditions. The articles are helpfully broken up, with categories like, “Progressive Christian,” “General Christian” or “Hindu.” With these granular distinctions, you really know where the views are coming from!
What I’ve noticed recently is that I see ads that are targeted towards the demographic of the reader expected to be reading that particular viewpoint. It has been revelatory. One particular ad stood out to me when I was on an evangelical Christian blog post. The ad featured a t-shirt that read, “Wanna Make Everything Electric? Start With The Border Wall.” I kind of did a double take when I saw that. I knew that some Christians were particularly vociferous in their opposition to illegal immigration and their support for a wall to stem the tide. When I saw that t-shirt, though, it struck me as especially callous. A flippant joke about electrocuting human beings like insects caught in a bug zapper is a seriously bad look.
Jack Jenkins writes for Religion News Service about a Catholic charity, that helps migrants, receiving harassment from far-right sources.
For Pajanor, whose group operates homeless shelters and 14 food pantries in the city, the recent avalanche of hate followed a visit by James O’Keefe, a far-right provocateur who was recently forced out of Project Veritas, the activist organization he founded, following complaints regarding his treatment of staff. O’Keefe appeared earlier this month with a film crew outside a hotel that was being used by Catholic Charities San Diego to house migrants who had been processed by CBP.
In videos posted to social media, O’Keefe and his team can be seen questioning security guards outside the hotel. O’Keefe even posed as an exterminator to try to gain entry. On multiple occasions, O’Keefe suggests migrants in the hotel came into the country illegally and speculates, without offering evidence, that some were being trafficked.
This kind of targeted abuse is a terrible phenomenon that was mostly ushered in by our former president and current Bible salesman, Donald J. Trump. As the article points out, the Catholic charity was serving legal immigrants who had been processed. They weren’t even the Gonzaga basketball team. The tragic irony is that I saw the same ad hawking those crass t-shirts on the sidebar when reading the article about the harassment of the Catholic charity workers.
As many well known voices have pointed out, the Christian supporters of the former president have not, as supporters originally predicted, molded him in the image of Christ. Rather, he has molded them in the image of himself. Russell Moore points this out in his Christianity Today column.
“If The Simpsons were written today and wished to make fun of evangelical Christians,” he writes, “would the caricature be someone inordinately devoted to his family, to prayer, to churchgoing, to kindness to his neighbors, to the awkward purity of his speech? Or would Ned Flanders be a screaming partisan, a violent insurrectionist, a woman-ogling misogynist, or an abusive pervert?”
I follow the logic Dr. Moore is using and fully believe an evangelical caricature like Ned Flanders would look entirely different than they did 30 years ago. The worst realization is that, as Moore depicts, they would be quite the villain.
In many ways, though not in all, it’s gotten much harder to share the music you love with others. I was reminded of this a couple of days ago. For my wife’s birthday, my sister made her a playlist on Apple Music. This was thoughtful and kind, but unfortunately, we don’t have Apple Music. So my wife had to copy down the tracks that made up the list and find the songs to make her own playlist on Qobuz.
Back in the day, when you had a crush on someone, or simply wanted to spread the gospel of superbad tunes for getting down, you made a mixtape. If the recipient of your tape had a cassette player (which everyone did — they were standard government issue), they could listen to your creation until their heart’s content. Or until the tape wore out (this is a real thing).
Austin Kleon has returned to the practice of making mixtapes, buying sealed cassettes in bulk, then taping over the music on them and creating his own covers. It has become a monthly ritual for him. I’m assuming those creations are for his own personal enjoyment, though, as there is only a slight chance that anyone else will have a cassette player to play back the contents. Kleon gets around the sharing limitation by making a YouTube playlist that showcases the songs from the mixtape.
While a YouTube playlist is an inventive way of capturing the contents of your mixtape so that others can partake of your bespoke musical tastes, even that method has its limitations. The most obvious of which is the fact that not all the music you want to share will necessarily be available on YouTube. Admittedly, though, YouTube does have a lot of even obscure music. Search for something like celebrated Chinese blink-and-they’re-gone shoegazers Baby Formula, and their limited output is available in full.
However, it can be difficult when the songs are taken off a full album stream and divided into chapters. Additionally, you are relying on the kindness of strangers with names like MrTurboExteme to upload your favorite stuff. Otherwise, you’re out of luck.
If you have purchased music outright, ironically, it’s even more difficult to allow others to partake. I can share a playlist with my wife on our Qobuz plan, but I can’t include songs that I’ve bought through Bandcamp that aren’t found on the streaming services.
It seems, that even with the ease of embeds and streaming music, we are missing something with the switch from physical media. It’s not dissimilar from books. We used to be able to share a book with a friend after we had read it to spread the love. Now, we’re DRMed into keeping things to ourselves (at least some of us — I have to admit to preferring ebooks on my Kindle). I’m immensely grateful for the ease at which I can access just about anything in the history of recorded music, but we are definitely making some tradeoffs in our embrace of bits and bytes to carry art.
Neil Young put his catalog back on Spotify. He was moved to do so by the fact that Apple and Amazon are now serving the podcast he objected to (The Joe Rogan Experience) and that led him to remove his music from the streaming service. He reasons that he can’t remove his music from all of those services, so apparently the next best thing is to make it available on all of them. As befits Young, he does advocate for Spotify updating its offering to include hi-res, something that most music streaming services are now doing.
Young concludes his post by stating his hope that Spotify “will turn to Hi Res as the answer and serve all the music to everyone. Spotify, you can do it! Really be #1 in all ways. You have the music and listeners!!!! Start with a limited Hi res tier and build from there!”
Young doesn’t address that Spotify is now paying Rogan more than ever to shoot the breeze with his guests, while paying artists less than ever for their music.
Chris Welch from The Verge cancelled his Spotify subscription after waiting for years for the company to offer hi-res.
But I’m also an audio nerd who owns a handful of very nice headphones and earbuds. And sometimes I just want to plug in my USB-C dongle, lay on the couch, and truly sink into a new album. And it’s those moments where I’m inevitably disappointed with Spotify, because I know what I’m hearing isn’t the best it can be. I’m paying for an objectively inferior listening experience. Well, I was. A couple months ago, I got tired of waiting, so I let my longtime Spotify subscription lapse and purchased a year’s worth of Apple Music.
I much prefer my Roon + Qobuz setup to Apple Music, but I can see Apple’s offering as the next logical step when moving from Spotify to get higher quality music.
The Verge also has a guide to Spotify alternatives.
We’re Big Pants People Again
The NYT recently ran a piece about baggy pants coming into fashion again. The observances about the cyclical nature of fashion trends made me pause to reminisce a bit.
My dad drove me the four hours across mostly rural NC that it took to get to my college orientation back in 1994. He didn’t seem in a particularly good mood during the drives. On the way back, he shared an anecdote about a friend long ago who had been hit in the head by a glass bottle thrown from the side of a passing vehicle. He then observed that he didn’t see other incoming freshmen at the orientation dressed like me. I was wearing my standard uniform, informed by the skateboarding culture of the time — baggy jeans and an XL Dairy Queen t-shirt that hung off my wiry frame.1
My dad believed that a seemingly random act of senseless violence could happen to me simply because I looked different. Of course, he might have been right. People are frequently targeted for bullying based on whether they fit in or “look normal.” What’s interesting here is the arbitrary nature of the cycle of fashion in determining what is right to wear at any given time.
Fast forward two years, and I’m no longer wearing baggy clothes, but tending to favor clothes that fit. I suppose college had reformed me, at least somewhat. However, many other people were at that point wearing baggy clothes and I still stuck out in a crowd of up-to-date fashionistas. I had been ahead of my time and had certainly been derided by some of the same people who now recognized my sartorial choices as totally appropriate.
A few years ago, I would occasionally wear a mustache. Much ridicule ensued from certain people. People hinted that I looked like the star of an adult movie. One guy I talked to wanted to grow a mustache but said he couldn’t because, “I work with kids.” Now tons of guys are sporting mustaches and little is said. It’s amazing how something that is popularly agreed upon as creepy can become cool in just a few short years.
I guess I’m just reminded that, if you feel you are out of step and you are tempted to change your style because it isn’t mainstream, you sometimes just have to wait a bit longer.
- I did work at the DQ in high school, so I wasn’t a complete poser. ↩︎