ewen's posts

UK Twee & The American Gaze

Fri, 12 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0100

This script was originally performed and published as an audio essay via the Side Missions project.

In Vassal State, Angus Hanton goes into forensic detail about the UK’s ‘special relationship’ with the US. He examines how romanticised British companies are being increasingly run through and captured by American ones, to the extent that one in ten Brits now work for a company owned on the other side of the Atlantic. Full disclosure, I’m one of them. To quote:

The British characters we assign to shops – Morrisons, the working-class supermarket from Bradford, or Gail’s, the blousy bakery from Hampstead – are fictions; both are owned by US private equity firms, as are the middle-class temples of Majestic Wine and Waterstones.
Will Dunn https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/book-of-the-day/2024/04/how-america-bought-up-britain-vassal-state-review

Every time you tap your card to pay for an American multinational’s product, the American payment provider skims off the top again. To put it all the way bluntly, behind a shaky facade the UK is fast-becoming a sad little island shamelessly selling off the family china.

Adam Curtis’ latest singular project for the BBC, Shifty, compiles reams of fever dream-inducing footage from the end of the last century into a contemptuous swipe at Britains establishment for not just accepting, but gleefully celebrating, the death of any identifiable vision for the country’s future. In its final part, we see a dithering assemblage of forgettable suits trying to decide what will go into the Millennium Dome’s 14 “zones”. The bankruptcy of ideas and decaying hollowness of collective values is laid bare. This vacuum is somehow stretched by the hands of Peter Mandelson who delivers an empty impression of delight down the phone upon noticing a stale projection on the wall of a toad-in-the-hole. He declares:

I absolutely love toad in the hole. I haven’t had it since I was about six.
Peter Mandelson https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m002d2k5/shifty-series-1-5-part-five-the-democratisation-of-everything

Meanwhile, something a little bit eerie is happening in UK music. Donning my tinfoil hat for a quick second, I can’t shake the feeling that it’s all connected. Central Cee, pinkpantheress and AJ Tracey all released albums recently that caught my eye. On the cover of Central’s record, Can’t Rush Greatness, he sports a Union Jack beanie and holds up a chain to the camera, proudly bearing a piece dedicated to Queen Lizzie II. On Fancy That, pinkpantheress also decided to honour our deceased ruler, wearing Crown Jewels as part of a collage also featuring a red telephone box. That same phone box is sketched out on the front of AJ Tracey’s latest effort, Don’t Die Before You’re Dead, in front of a stylised Big Ben and Houses of Parliament enshrouded by blue dragons.

Who is this for? As a 30-something (white) male, I won’t try and pretend I’m the target audience here (full disclosure, my 11-year old second cousin from Canvey Island knows more Central Cee bars than me), but I’m convinced that this level of whiplash cannot be explained purely by ageing out. From where I’m sitting, the presentation evokes similar feelings to the experience of walking by those played out souvenir shops on Oxford Street. Locals intuitively understand that these places are for visitors and tourists that have internalised a reductive narrative about Britain from a distance. What is a quintessential souvenir, if not a comforting myth that the world is as simplistic as the stories you were told as a child?

This performance goes undeniably deeper than aesthetics. Pinkpantheress does her best Bridgerton cosplay in the video for Tonight, while Stateside details a long-distance love affair with an American. Central Cee explains how British life contrasts with American culture on GBP alongside 21 Savage. AJ Tracey namechecks Lupe Fiasco and 2Chainz on Imposter Syndrome, then Destiny’s Child and TLC on West Life. The age old adage of “breaking America” has been around for a long time, but this might be a distinctly new sub-genre. How did we get here?

Exit to America

There have always been contemporary British artists that became household names in the States, but the list is getting smaller and smaller. Here’s the artists that scored number ones on the Billboard Hot 100 in the 2010s:

Tajo Cruz (2010, featuring Ludacris) [Island, Mercury, both owned by Universal]
Adele (2011 x 2, 2012, 2015) [XL, distributed by Columbia (owned by Sony)]
Calvin Harris (2011, featuring Rihanna) [Def Jam, owned by Universal]
Mark Ronson (2015, featuring Bruno Mars) [Columbia, owned by Sony]
Zayn (2016) [RCA, owned by Sony]
Ed Sheeran (2017 x 2, featuring Beyonce) [Asylum, Atlantic, both owned by Warner]
Lewis Capaldi (2019) [Vertigo, owned by Universal]
Harry Styles (2020) [Erskine, distributed by Columbia (owned by Sony)]

Compare this to 1988 ALONE:

George Harrison [Dark Horse, distributed by Warner]
George Michael x3 [Columbia, owned by Sony]
Rick Astley x2 [RCA, owned by Bertelsmann]
Billy Ocean [Jive]
Steve Winwood [Virgin]
Def Leppard [Mercury]
UB40 [A&M]
Phil Collins [Atlantic, owned by Warner]
Escape Club [Atlantic, owned by Warner]

The fall-off is a madness. On top of this, the new crop of hitmakers have had to aggressively assimilate themselves into US culture so relentlessly that they were likely all over Harry & Meghan’s stateside soft-launch mood board. American artist features, release parties in LA and promo runs on the US late shows are the norm. Fuck a chokehold — Sony, Warner and Universal (all American-owned companies) have the pop music industry in the Walls of Jericho (tbh the wheels were set in motion back then).

Calvin Harris rode the ubiquitous, distinctly anti-regional wave of EDM in 2011 right to no. 1 with an all-timer Rihanna feature on We Found Love (BTW the follow-up, 2016’s This is What You Came For, has to be the flattest, most disrespectfully bland RiRi vocal ever put on a record) and then went out with Taylor Swift. Ed Sheeran might well be the UK’s answer to Drake — raw talent and relentless work ethic aside, he has proved equally adept and willing to shape-shift into whatever worldly sound the global pop market will reward. This is a skill in itself, but ultimately (like the others) the cost is that Ed is fundamentally dislocated from (and indirectly harms) the sustainable development of British art scenes and subculture.

While Adele is famously private, Mark Fisher identified why her time-travelling ability marked her out as special:

Take someone like the stupendously successful Adele: although her music is not marketed as retro, there is nothing that marks out her records as belonging to the 21st Century either. Like so much contemporary cultural production, Adele’s recordings are saturated with a vague but persistent feeling of the past without recalling any specific historical moment.
Mark Fisher https://thequietus.com/culture/books/mark-fisher-ghosts-of-my-life-extract/

Adele is a singular, nostalgia-drenched powerhouse that has all but exited the UK music scene. She last released an album in 2021 (30, which was basically recorded by the start of 2020) and has limited touring since then to a two-year Las Vegas residency and ten shows at a purpose-built “Adele Arena” in Munich (plus a cringe-inducing carpool karaoke w/ James Corden) . She’s played one UK gig in eight years. None of this is intended as a critique of ability or judgement over the quality of the tunes. It’s an observation of the UK’s irrelevance in their work these days.

In many respects, today’s offer to musicians dreaming of landing it big in America is a simple one — remove your art from any distinctly British tradition, then we’ll talk. The door policy has become stricter, the relative rewards behind the door have ballooned while your local struggles to keep the lights on. Ed Sheeran (1) and Calvin Harris (2) are building entire villages in the UK with their winnings , while Adele is getting Architectural Digest write-ups about her four (4) gaffs in Beverly Hills, alone. These people have, quite literally, outgrown the UK and provided a winner-takes-all blueprint for the next gen.

Debuting UK Twee

The unabashed use of national symbols like the Union Jack, red phone box and classic tartan patterns in these album covers are giving pungent “twee” flavours. pinkpantheress’ predilection for britpop-inspired fashion is well-established, while Central’s Lizzie chain has it’s own GQ feature. The obvious reference point is 90’s “Cool Britannia” mainstream, which on one level operated as a window for the rest of the world to gaze upon Britishness as a quaint relic. On the other side of the mood board we’ve got The Great British Bake Off, Downton Abbey and Paddington, all outsized smashes (and cozy, non-threatening throwbacks) on the other side of the pond. It’s as if the point is to delicately package up British music into an all-inclusive holiday where you never have to touch the locals. Welcome to the comforting world of UK Twee.

Ground zero for the theory of UK Twee is Central Cee’s LA Leaker’s radio freestyle back in 2022. First off, he deftly establishes a familiarity with Los Angeles culture to make the hosts feel understood and at home.

They think I'm the one that can bridge the gap, huh
I came to LA to work, but first, where the bitches at?
They're tellin' me Tao or The Highlight Room

Central Cee https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ZCKZnJmhx0

After making this peace offering, Central moves into the next phase of the freestyle which acts as a translation manual of common US parlance to the equivalent UK slang. Here’s an example:

You say "The trenches", we say "The ends"
You say "Y'all", we say "You lot"
You say "Restroom", we say "Toilet"

Central Cee https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ZCKZnJmhx0

This structure demonstrates an understanding of the local patter and does the work of bridging the gap with his own parlance for the audience. In effect, he is masterfully edging the US listener into his world. The magic trick is complete with the final phase of the freestyle, where he rattles off American references to the host’s delight:

Stood outside of the night club, try make the trap line kick like Flight Club
All of my drip from Rodeo Drive, ain't none of this shit from China, huh
I don't want Nobu, I need me a yard food, so I'm in Inglewood

Central Cee https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ZCKZnJmhx0

This freestyle was a masterstroke, by conventional metrics. He would go on to become the first British MC to make the Billboard top 10 albums chart with Can’t Rush Greatness. (To put this in perspective, Tinie Tempah had the best previous effort back in 2012, reaching no. 21. The Streets commercial crossover moment, A Grand Don’t Come for Free, went 4x platinum in the UK but only managed #82 on Billboard). It’s impossible to overstate how anomalous this level of mainstream US success is. In a later interview with the Guardian, he revealed the extent to which his writing style is explicitly engineered for foreign ears:

“I’ll tell you this in a mathematical way: when I rap, I never really end my lyrics on a word that could be misconstrued through my accent. I’ll never end saying ‘matter’ like ‘matt-uh’. If you” – an American – “sang ‘bitch is gay’, it would sound the same way how I say it,” he says with a grin.
Sheldon Pearce https://www.theguardian.com/music/2023/apr/07/central-cee-interview

Lost in Translation

Stormzy, Skepta and Giggs each did a similar circuit of US Hip Hop Radio around the time when they reached their respective “peak” US stock. Things went down differently, shall we say. In 2015, Hot 97’s Peter Rosenberg did a video with Stormzy on GRM Daily called “Bagel And Shots”. The pair take a drive around Shoreditch, eating bagels on Brick Lane, drinking shots at Boxpark and talking about transatlantic musical appeal. What strikes me watching this back now is the deference and permission that a young Stormzy gives, and the ease with which Rosenberg receives it:

Stormzy: Do you think it’s possible to keep it so British and cross-over, for you guys, over [there]?
Rosenberg: I think it’s going to happen. It’s going to take someone like you, or Skepta…let me put it this way, though. It either has to have a hook that for some reason doesn’t sound that British, or it has to be so different but funny, or amusing, or catchy in someway.

Hot 97 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BGOfP-c0abs

Unironically, Rosenberg brings up his love for The Office (UK) moments later, the prototypical example of a UK cultural phenomenon that had to be re-packaged into a brand-new show for American audiences. For anyone unaware, this bloke’s public persona is that of the backpack-rap lifer, the true music nerd “keeping one ear to the ground at all times”. Yet, he all but states that a British MC cannot land in the US with authentic British styles. Stormzy reads between the lines and lends an olive branch in the shape of Skepta’s NYC link-up with ASAP Bari, It Ain’t Safe. Pete provides positive reinforcement.

At the close of the video, Stormzy freestyles over Ruff Sqwad instrumental Pied Piper outside Shoreditch High Street station with none of the concessions Central Cee would make ten years later. In much the same way that Rosenberg rejects the notion of authentic British artistry, he declines to spit on the beat and exclaims “there’s not a chance I can get in this pocket”. Rather than demonstrating any curiosity about the unique origins and culture of Grime freestyles, he can’t help himself reach for a familiar US reference point in Battle Rap. The pair part ways and I’m convinced Pete Rosenberg never left Boxpark that day.

A few months later and Skepta is guesting on Peter Rosenberg’s Real Late Hot 97 radio show. It’s an odd affair. Skepta is palpably vulnerable, going into moving detail about the trauma he and a previous girlfriend experienced following a miscarriage, then dealing with the loss of a close friend. Rosenberg, to his credit, shares a genuinely touching anecdote about recounting memories of his wife’s deceased brother. Skep succinctly explains how music curiosity only seems to work in one direction:

Skepta: This is what people don’t know about you. This is the stuff that people laugh at you about.
Rosenberg: What were some of those? What did he [Virgil Abloh] tell you?
Skepta: Just like my accent and stuff, you get what I’m saying. But that’s your identity, so carry on doing what you’re doing. It might feel like people are always like “I can’t understand you” or “I don’t understand what he’s saying”, but, bro, we don’t understand what Young Thug says. Someone from New York speaks completely different to Chief Keef. I couldn’t understand what Keef was saying when he first started, but I liked the story. He was giving me the story so raw and so real that I had to, I want to know what he’s saying.

Hot 97 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJssn3bcUtM

Can you spot the difference? These artists have genuine fans across the states, but these interactions were all characterised by an apparent lack of curiosity and glaring gaps in foundational knowledge you would expect from professionals. To a young hopeful taking all this in, a chilling crossroad emerges — carry on authentic British musical traditions and make peace with disappointing the immovable object of American taste, or lean in to quaint ideas of Britishness for suitable export.

Nothing Great About Britain

On a recent episode of Chuckie and Poet’s HC Podcast, Elijah sat on the sofa and had words for UK radio programming. In particular, the normalisation of BBC Radio 1Xtra (a UK taxpayer-funded station) filling daytime playlists with stale American-made music, culminating in the genuine horror of Joe Budden’s now twenty-year old Pump it Up getting spins at half nine (AM) on Mother’s Day, with chest. The conversation moves around discussions of US music monopolisation in spaces critical for British artist development, Sunday morning as a protected time for honouring heritage musical styles and the importance of fostering local music scenes through grassroots music policies in the rave. This analysis of the UK music industry, from primetime to grassroots, is crucial to understanding not where “growth” has stalled but what vital ground has been given up. The “middle class” of British music, much like the countries, is under attack.

Turn on the radio and it sounds like 20 years ago, it doesn’t even sound like ten. Now we’ve got like a generation that don’t even believe that you could have a radio that sounded mostly UK, or they haven’t been to a rave that’s mostly UK. The first things that we went to — [UK] Garage, Grime, all those things — yeah you might have a dancehall section, R&B and hip-hop, but you could have three hours, four hours of UK music. These people haven’t grown up in that environment, at all.
Elijah https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rufRdhJTCtE

There is a US-backed cartel operating in most UK music venues as well. Live Nation UK, a subsidiary of Live Nation Entertainment, has a majority stake in Academy Music Group and Festival Republic. This means US-based control of your local 02 Academy and next trip to Wireless, Leeds and Reading festivals. The magic trick is complete with the US ownership of the major ticketing platform, Ticketmaster, who got to act as middle men for the national scramble to book a place at one of Oasis’ historic comeback gigs this summer. They gladly used this position to drink themselves silly at the well of nostalgia, cynically gouging prices under the guise of “dynamic pricing” in league with the Gallagher brothers. Wouldn’t you know it, another faustian bargain with the dollar for our records.

The promised “democratisation” of opportunity and tearing down of gatekeepers like radio through the proliferation of streaming has collapsed the middle class of music. In the book Mood Machine, Liz Pelly writes about Spotify’s insatiable desire to fill their playlists with “ghost artists” on their own books and to drive listeners away from listening to album’s as a a cohesive body of work. This process has led to the vandalisation of the LP, the most intimate and fullest expression of an artist’s interiority, in favour of vibes-based potpourri. Crucially, gate-keeping the platform and the playlists gives the DSPs a payola-like monopoly of their own.

Violent state repression of emergent youth culture, nestled in with industry bollocks, is the historic norm rather than an anomaly. The deadly ingredient slowly being dripped in to the cocktail for this generation is the collapse of music-making as a stable source of income, in and of itself, for enough people to constitute a sustainable scene that doesn’t have to capitulate at the first sign of a brand deal. Sugar-coating the state of things serves no one except the elites that benefit from this status quo. Major label bosses, tech execs and the 1% of artists in gilded cages don’t mind any of this. What’s the alternative?

DIY Will Never Die

Despite this grim mess of a picture I’ve gone and painted, there are shoots of hope to be found in the cracks. Jme is a one-of-one entrepreneur-to-the-bone unicorn, but can be found generously sharing the sauce while whipping it up over on Twitch/YouTube and, vitally, IRL. He’s marrying white-label-out-the-car-boot groundwork with Twitch streamer culture, rooted in a staunchly anti-streaming and open-source ethos. In practice, we have an artist putting together fully-fledged DIY roll-outs (e.g. star-shaped vinyl, pop-up shows, tape-deck air fresheners) for singles and giving you forensic behind-the-scenes detail (think screenshots of convos with vinyl distribution and photoshop walk-throughs to make custom foam hand designs). Jme has notably ignored conventional measures of “success” since day dot. He skipped joining Kanye West on stage at the Brit awards because he was hungry at the time Skepta received the Bat Signal at short notice. After a harsh examination of the deference of British culture and industry to the whims of US imperialism, it’s almost impossible to fathom the deliciousness of this irony. What can be understood, on a straightforward one, is that Jme continues to make art defiantly for himself and the scene he cares so much about.

Many will have cottoned on to Duval Timothy after hearing his undeniable handprints all over the distinct sonic palette of Kendrick Lamar’s 2022 album Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers. Despite this most titanic of US bring-ins, it’s refreshingly apparent that he is not budging from his local philosophy to appease new audiences. Here’s a quote taken from a Pitchfork feature shortly after all the K Dot hubbub:

[Duval Timothy:] I love outsiders: little micro-cultures of musicians who don’t enter the system…It feels like there are less true subcultures now; things get associated with brands. But it’s cool when you hear something from a place.
Jazz Monroe https://pitchfork.com/features/profile/duval-timothy-interview/

Say it louder for those in the back. FROM A PLACE. The constant in all of this is that the mainstream doesn’t want to let things flourish on their own terms, in the places that it comes from. At this juncture, I have to shout out Sister Midnight, the first community-owned music venue in Lewisham (also the borough I live in). Democratic ownership is an explicit principle at the heart of this project that offers a vision for how cultural production can happen under a fundamentally non-exploitative model. I’m under no illusions that these grassroots initiatives are operating in a whole different league, sport even, in comparison to the centres of power up for discussion here. It’s time to abandon outdated models that have long been rigged, in favour of spending time building a local treasure you and your mates can build community in.

One of my favourite sounds in the world, one that I memorialised in an NTS radio mix, is a whiff of two-step pulsing from a passing white van to signal the true start of summer. It’s a sonic signature lovingly hand-stamped and made inside the M25. There are rituals and forms imprinted on us by place that need honouring and a healthy dose of gatekeeping. The vultures will show, Drake might even get a creepy tattoo of you, but Cashh put it best — if you want greener grass, you have to water where you are.

I feel bad for not mentioning at least one feel-good story about “giving back” that I found in my Sheeran/Harris/Adele hit job research. Harris is bankrolling a Dumfries pub that’s doing wonders for his hometown’s local music scene. This is likely chump change for our kid, but it’s a start on the road back to genuine patronage. To be honest, asking for better elites is barely one step removed from bootlicking but I have no shame and the bar is in hell right now. Is it too much to ask that DJs come back from their Ibiza/Vegas/Coachella summer and underwrite a local music venue for the winter?

Outro

As I was writing this, a whole drama played out in UK/US rap that was so perfectly on theme, I couldn’t make it up if I tried. It started with Skepta announcing his belief that UK rappers would win a hypothetical battle versus the Americans. This rallying cry conjured up the sum total of a Joyner Lucas response, followed by a series of rapid-fire disses from Skepta himself, Novelist and Big Zuu. For me, by far the most interesting contribution came from Ambush, who floated over a Preditah flip of Kendrick Lamar’s Not Like Us while turning fire directly at his Grime compatriots for giving any oxygen to this debacle. In the process, he summarised why I bothered to write about this stuff better than I ever could:

Really can’t fake this shit anymore, I don’t listen to American shit anymore
Ambush https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1PXFPl49eBE

It’s overwhelming sometimes, the impossible American headlock. Maybe looking at it through the prism of popular music can act as a template for thinking critically about your own complicated relationship to American imperialism. If you take one thing away from here, just do a stock take of how many times in the day your life is mediated by the US. The art you enjoy making, the friends you love being with, the food you cook and share. Get vexed about it. Then put some work in to reclaim it. Just know that this doesn’t stop at the tunes.

The Way to DJ

Sat, 17 May 2025 00:00:00 +0100

This script was originally performed and published as an audio essay via the Side Missions project.

Can you keep your soul in its body,
hold fast to the one,
and so learn to be whole?
Can you center your energy,
be soft, tender,
and so learn to be a baby?
Can you keep the deep water still and clear,
so it reflects without blurring?
Can you love people and run things,
and do so by not doing?
Opening, closing the Gate of Heaven,
can you be like a bird with her nestlings?
Piercing bright through the cosmos,
can you know by not knowing?
To give birth, to nourish,
to bear and not to own,
to act and not lay claim,
to lead and not to rule:
this is mysterious power.

Lao Tzu, translated by Ursula K Le Guin https://archive.org/details/le-guin

Have you ever been humbled so utterly that you felt grateful to the bone? I read Ursula K Le Guin’s 1998 translation of Lao Tzu’s two millennia-old (and counting) Tao Te Ching for the first time last year and it’s lived alongside me ever since. For the first time in my adult life, I had felt an unshakeable, unclouded and judgement-free communion with an ancient wisdom. With that realisation I felt weightless, my mind enveloped by a beautiful, pink sunrise on a clear summers day. I could reconnect with myself as a 13-year old, listening to Prototype by Andre 3000 on my Sony Discman on repeat and letting the love flow through me. I’m right back there, all over again. The words hit me softly in the chest without judgment or reason, simple childlike wonder allowed to blossom freely. Be like water, find your inner child and keep the soul intact. Fuck what you know, what you think you know and what you think you don’t know. Let it go, let it all go.

Roughly translated as the Book of the Way, reading the millennia-old Tao Te Ching all these years later is an exercise in what the kids are calling ego death and the highest self-awareness. It would be a myth to claim that I have been able to reconfigure my life into a harmonious, conscious practice of the tao ever since. I have taken the first step on “a journey of a thousand miles that begins beneath my feet”, as Lao Tzu put it. The book is made to be used as a map for you to get to somewhere else. It is for you to walk the Way and to live in the world with grace. In this spirit, I have spent time reconsidering a few of the things I do through a lens of conscious, taoist thought. I intend to zero in on the experiential reality of the craft (the vibe, if you will) and how I observe Taoist teachings enmeshing to provide meaning and guidance, rather than passing value judgements. An unremarkable geezer trying to find the Way.

First in these gentlest of crosshairs is DJing. As a quick and dirty primer, the long and short of DJing is sequencing records one after another, records dancing together in a fashion that conjures up more than the sum of the parts when done well. This basic technical premise comes from an altogether unfortunate and ugly source, in case you didn’t know — the record states that Jimmy Savile was the first person to host a party and run tunes through a turntable and makeshift sound system. Innovations on the form can be traced through the toasting and wheeling of sound-clashing in Jamaica, block parties and turntablism in New York, through to today’s industry standard digital DJ software popularised by Pioneer and others much later. The DJ “set” has gone on to achieve purpose beyond the (perfectly virtuous) aim of making people dance. Some are hailed for reinvigorating discarded music in new places (like Northern Soul in 80s dances at Wigan Casino) or re-contextualising disparate sounds in new forms (like DJ Oneman infusing sugary UK Garage with darker Dubstep). In truth, though, this discourse comes a far second when it comes to getting people through the door, in the first place. That is down to the party, the energy, the vibe itself. The DJ is an important cog, but a cog nonetheless, in the system of the dance.

Over the long run of history, the working DJ doing this kind of job has been no more exalted than the barkeep or the door staff. People bark requests at the DJ with the same vim as their drink orders at the bar, the DJ turns up for their shift on time and keeps getting asked back if they can reliably service the punters’ enjoyment. Even in celebrated contexts, like New York Ballroom, it is common for the DJ to be restricted to a backroom, out of sight as the dancers work. This might seem antagonistic to the modern DJ as rockstar that pervades mainstream, Coachella-washed fantasies and runs up brand partnerships. It’s a functional, no-frills tradition of DJing, one that I have come to cherish and go out of my way in search of as an endangered, heritage artform. These days, I routinely get The Ick by perceiving the state of DJing and artistic bankruptcy that sits atop a landscape I once naively identified as radical in and of itself. That’s a whole story for another day, but firmly establishes my lowlife status as a jaded raver without throwing shade on the underground heroes doing it for the art, far away from the corporate day festival conglomerates.I increasingly think that this might be the hardest part about maintaining pure joy and love for a craft over a lifetime — keeping the light of youthful exuberance bright, while dimming the low-vibrational elements that piss you right off.

I started to DJ while at university (shout out Nottingham Trent each and every) in response to a wholly different, but equally momentous personal breakthrough — that well-worn, third-eye opening cocktail of Funktion-One soundsytems, MDMA buffets, paired with a permissive social fabric of self discovery and near-utopian quantities of free time. Pre Nick Clegg uni was the one, mate. Cliche as fuck it may be, I spent an entire second-year term’s student bursary on entry-level CDJs in an attempt to anchor my splintered, shallow identity around this scene. Chasing down sets at house parties, getting a show on pirate radio, rounding up circles of pals to the next Stealth rave, stalking the small-time local circuit on Facebook, buying a book called How to DJ (Properly). I wanted proximity to and credibility in a sub-culture I identified with hard. Putting in the hours in the rave, surfing the blogs, hunting track IDs, imitating pirate radio DJ blends at home, repeat. What else was there to do? In hindsight, throwing yourself head first into something new can come off like a whole bag of cringe on the surface. “Are you still doing the DJing, Ewen?” is an innocent question I get asked by people I love to this day. I mutter something back along the lines of “it’s just a hobby”, or “I just like doing it for fun”. This is mostly true, but I’m not about to pretend I didn’t start out with delusional visions of baying fans demanding “one more song”. The craft had to humble me first, before I could find my way here.

Early along this journey I encountered a loosely defined scene made up of labels that were incomprehensibly releasing fringe music on vinyl. Not content with stopping there, some acetate fundamentalists ran vinyl-only labels, with releases capped at two or three hundred presses. Sure, I could try my luck on Russian torrent sites (RIP funkysouls) waiting for one of this lot to upload a rip, but I was so scene-pilled by now that I started picking up these strange artefacts on assorted side quests to rave outposts of Berlin, Manchester and co. I quickly cottoned on that I might have to go and get a record player to listen to them, and off I went on a Gumtree hunt in search of something called turntables.

(Sidenote: I love the second hand, circular economy of DJ gear. It is a Hodge Podge of 40-something suburban ex-ravers with kids and a mortgage, 20-something serial renter sick of carting around decks gathering dust for a handful of flat back-to-backs with mates. This is the true DJ scene in my eyes, although I haven’t revisited since the Urban Outfitters-driven vinyl revival. Lots of nerds trying to hunt down obscure Japanese, discontinued, consumer electronic products and embarking on a misspent youth or coming to terms with the end of one. Teeming with pathos and weirdos, in the best way).

The Way’s brightness looks like darkness;
advancing on the Way feels like retreating;
the plain Way seems hard going.
The height of power seems a valley;
the amplest power seems not enough;
the firmest power seems feeble.
Perfect whiteness looks dirty.
The pure and simple looks chaotic.

Lao Tzu, translated by Ursula K Le Guin https://archive.org/details/le-guin

I took delivery of the Volkswagen camper van of turntables, a pair of pre-loved Technics 1210s, and waved off my shiny CDJs to a new home in Boston, Lincolnshire. I had shifted downwards from automatic, assistive technology to zero bells and whistles in the process. In the cacophony of modern life, we are compelled and prodded towards shiny new technology as a virtue. Sticking with the camper analogy, here I was taking the harder, verging on heretic path from automatic to manual. I can vividly remember fluffing mix after mix, first to my housemates enjoyment and eventually to their despair through thin flat walls. My mates coming down to a UKG-only club night I played at and grimacing as I cleared the dancefloor, all at sea with the new, old gear. In the despair of this thankless grinding, it was something I heard Theo Parrish say that drove me to carry on:

That’s the other scary thing, it’ll take you the better part of ten years to collect, in my opinion, the amount of vinyl that’s worthy of being presented to other people. Take you, what? A couple minutes? To download somebody’s whole collection. Now the question is, is it worth the convenience? Maybe. But are you missing out on all of the knowledge that goes into looking for those specific records? Specifically, because you know so-and-so played on this record, so-and-so played on that record, are you going to take that time and get your knuckles dusty, and go meet another crazy obsessed individual just like yourself? You got to take that time.
Theo Parrish https://www.redbullmusicacademy.com/lectures/theo-parrish-3-cheers-for-the-d

In the beginning, you experience raves and tunes with a childlike wonder. The uppers play a key role in all this, but there’s more to it than that. Feeling the ebbs and flows of energy in the room through the night, hearing that particular bass-line rattle through your chest properly for the first time, tasting 3am sweat fermented inside 5am sweat. Shouts to this week’s No Tags pod for introducing me to Nietzsche’s hot take about music being a way to access and express primordial Dionysian emotions with others. (Is getting spangled with your rave crew praxis?). There are moments on the dance floor I can remember vividly, to this day. Jackmaster (RIP) playing Burial’s Archangel at Outlook’s Pula fort (RIP) and Ben UFO spinning Blawan’s Why They Hide Their Bodies Under My Garage in the moat that same night. Cooly G unapologetically running Au Seve at Gala’s summer 2021 edition, just as nightclubs reopened after COVID restrictions. Mike laying down Pusha T’s Numbers on the Boards at Cosmic Slop in Leeds and Scratcha pulling up Frisco’s Bad ’N’ Clean at Amsterdam’s Lente Kabinet. The alchemy of factors that bubble up in harmony to create these moments are never an exact science, but it strikes me here and now that it was never a show of technical proficiency that lasted long in the memory (bar that DJ EZ Boilerroom). These moments activated a sublime, latent force of ecstatic oneness by way of understanding on a spiritual level which record begged be shared, which sounds belonged in that moment more than any other. In those moments, you are reminded that 13-year old you losing your shit with a simple Discman in hand had it all figured out.

This is me going around the houses to explain how I have ended up sat here today with a hulking collection of ancient technology, AKA a record collection and decks, alongside a steadfast commitment to keeping a heritage artform alive with them, in my own small way. In the intervening years, I’ve been listening intently to music in third places (record stores and clubs) and quietly assembling hundreds of slabs of acetate that each represent a two-way time capsule that can transport me back to the day I found it and the listener into a discrete sonic world. I don’t want to glamorise the collector aspects, especially the Supreme-style artificial scarcity imposed by limited presses and the consumerist impulse that can subtly barge its way into a hobby built around physical objects. I must steer clear of the ignorant path of hunting someone else’s “holy grail” records. I move towards a deeper knowing of the flawed, contradictory, awkward, deeply personal collection of music that I am but a temporary caretaker for.

For being and nonbeing
arise together;
hard and easy
complete each other;
long and short
shape each other;
high and low
depend on each other;
note and voice
make the music together;
before and after
follow each other.
That’s why the wise soul
does without doing,
teaches without talking.
The things of this world
exist, they are;
you can’t refuse them.

Lao Tzu, translated by Ursula K Le Guin https://archive.org/details/le-guin

Inaction, not doing, is central to how I think about DJing generously. It’s vital to remember that the pieces of music you are playing are always doing the donkey work of making people dance. Once you have come to terms with this, you are ready to countenance the fact that in many situations, doing nothing as a DJ is greatness. Let the record play out in full. Do right by Prince and leave the pitch alone. Refrain from Limmy’s advice and stop taking the bass in and out like a pinball wizard. It’s tempting as a DJ to believe that the “value” you are adding is an unknowable formula based on how many times you touched the buttons in a technically inoffensive manner. In many situations, getting out of the music’s way will enhance the level of connection and joy in a room. Tune out the bittersweet sensation of taste and experience, return to that unencumbered and playful approach to sounds like you remember.

How can one make mixing records flow like water? This feels in opposition to the traditional UK style of mixing records like the world is about to end, with cuts and scratches for days. Someone like Ricardo Villalobos springs to mind unprompted, a modern fable of minimal techno who doesn’t blink at putting out a 30-minute plus track or DJing all night (and morning) long. He blends pieces of music together like he’s gently reuniting long lost family. The goal is not to dazzle or showboat, but to gently tie the perfect knot before anyone even notices. On the surface, this could be mistaken as a lazy or fundamentally less skilled craftsperson at work, relative to the DJ as rock star setting off crazy VFX shows while simultaneously pulling off a crescendo of a Michael Bay type-beat three-deck blend. Who is being more generous, thoughtful and caring with their audience and the craft? Which path is like water, nourishing without trying to and is content with yielding?

There is a much stronger vinyl culture in minimal techno circles than in many niche sub-genre scenes, and I think there’s something in that. This scene prioritises groove over discomfort, flow over surprise and patience over action. I’m convinced that if you took Lao Tzu to a minimal rave he would cut shapes with the best of them. Funnily enough, when I started raving there was a big minimal techno scene around East London that Essex punters orbited, taking in Fuse all-daters @ 93 Feet East on Brick Lane, Saturdays @ Fabric, rounded off with an edition of Secret Sundaze. To be perfectly honest, at the time, this scene largely passed me by. The subtlety and restraint didn’t appeal to the teenage me. Today, I happily wake up early on a Sunday morning to go and bathe in a Villalobos set at Fabric on my ones. Some people get into fine wine, for others it’s prestige Minimal.

In many small yet pernicious ways, convenience kills the flow state. Convenience has been sold to us in the West (and elsewhere) as a universal good that offers us enlightenment and progress, yet it fails to make us feel more alive or in communion with anything sacred. Vinyl records are not efficient or convenient, they degrade and require care, yet the friction they entail helps produce a defining memory of everything I’ve picked up and connected with in any far-flung record shop along my travels. Equally, the self-imposed filter of needing to cart the bloody things around means that you are compelled to die on the hill of your pick-ups and the sharing of these gems with anyone blessing you with their ear becomes a small, generous ritual each time. When I DJ with vinyl records, especially after a period of digital DJing, I am humbled by the demands on my attention and listening. If I am not devoted in service of the next record and mindful of the outgoing one, everything reliably falls apart at the seams. The vinyls are made to be played with and cared for, and with each blend my respect and sincerity for this practice grows. Like uncut wood, the blemishes and natural flaws between the records and the craft itself are where the soul can be found.

I am humbled by how much letting go I have to do. When I am DJing in loving company, an internal battle can pipe up as one side wants to impress upon them my skill and the other wants to be a vessel for the piece of music that aches to be played at that moment. The ego is a MF. Funnily enough, Theo Parrish popped up last week with another nugget of truth that I’ll stick here:

So at about five years, you're still dealing with the technical part [of DJing], at ten years you're dealing with the technical part and your so-called sound. At 15 you're dealing with the ego of it all. It's not until much later that you actually start to play for and with people.
Theo Parrish https://ra.co/exchange/802

Everybody says my way is great
but improbable.
All greatness
is improbable.
What’s probable
is tedious and petty.
I have three treasures.
I keep and treasure them.
The first, mercy,
the second, moderation,
the third, modesty.
If you’re merciful you can be brave,
if you’re moderate you can be generous,
and if you don’t presume to lead
you can lead the high and mighty.
But to be brave without compassion,
or generous without self-restraint,
or to take the lead,
is fatal.
Compassion wins the battle
and holds the fort;
it is the bulwark set
around those heaven helps.

Lao Tzu, translated by Ursula K Le Guin https://archive.org/details/le-guin

“are you still doing the DJing, Ewen?” I’m just trying to be a vessel for the right record. That’s what I’ll say, next time (before getting rightly told to pull my head out of my arse).

Artificial Alchemists

Mon, 24 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This script was originally performed and published as an audio essay via the Side Missions project.

Introduction

In 1981, Japanese proto-cyberpunk author and certified real one Izumi Suzuki penned the short story Night Picnic. She tells us of four alien lifeforms attempting to reconstruct a nuclear family from the remnants of books and TV that the human race left behind. The “daughter” tries desperately to simulate teenage angst “correctly” but does it at the wrong time. The “dad” insists that “the man of the house” reads the morning paper, so cobbles together a makeshift gazette from scraps of old newspapers that he fetches from the mailbox at 5am each morning. These rituals and rights of passage are jarringly performed rather than felt, as the charade slowly unravels. Culture itself is reduced to a pose that can be embodied by not just anyone, but any thing.

Not long ago, I passed through The Call at London’s Serpentine Gallery, an exhibition put together by Holly Herndon & Mat Dryhurst featuring fifteen community choirs from all over the UK. Down to the Spectrum Singers of Penarth, South Wales, over to Belfast’s HIVE Choir and up to the Carnoustie Choir on Scotland’s east coast. Each of these choirs were put through a series of singing exercises and given a songbook of hymns to perform, with the recordings consensually fed into choral AI models as training data that exhibition visitors could interact with. Angelically enveloped in a pure white curtain, the call of my voice carried into a microphone plated with gold and self-importance. The response of the choir’s collective, generative pipes were echoed back to me. As audio played back, on a purely sonic level the results are close to well-trodden effects like the talk box or Auto-tune. As the one doing the calling, the experience I felt was closer to a seance.

In a pristine press release, the pair posit the work as a proposal for “new cultural, legal, and technical rituals for art in the age of AI.” What does that even mean, though? Breaking through the PR polish, I think they want you to imagine what an AI artistic practice with soul might manifest as. Rituals are community traditions that form the backbones of human societies, often sacred and not committal to logic. Choirs have quietly gone about preserving musical traditions from aeons past, so can AI models commune with them into the distant future? Can it be done with charm and with dignity for the humans involved? Wading into the AI art debate isn’t the one if you want to look after your peace, but there’s a thread I want to pull on today and see where it goes.

Timeless

There aren’t many phrases I find more squeamish than “multidisciplinary artist”, but Goldie is one of the few contemporary figures that might be able to claim it cringe-free. I first came across him in Guy Ritchie’s Y2K crime caper classic (at least in this house), Snatch. Here he is playing “Bad Boy Lincoln”, alongside Robbie Gee:

He briefly starred in Eastenders, too. Wouldn’t you know it, here he is performing with Robbie again!

Much later on, I discovered that Goldie was a notable “B-boy” in the 80s on both sides of the Atlantic, from Brum to the Bronx. Here’s a clip from a BBC TV debate, originally aired October 1987, which pitted him opposite Superintendent Fowler of the West Midlands Police to debate whether graffiti is art, crime or both:

In my late teens, I learnt that this same guy was also, incredibly, a Jungle/DnB pioneer in his own right. This was a headfuck of dizzy proportions, even beyond the realisation that Martin Kemp (AKA Eastenders’ Steve Owen) was in Spandau Ballet. 90s/00s Eastenders casting was the true avant garde.

Goldie’s debut album, Timeless, is critically-acclaimed and marvelled as a pioneering piece of music so unanimously that offering up my silly little words about it now feels almost distasteful. The record was released in 1995, at a time when Jungle had experienced a taste of mainstream crossover success but hadn’t yet reached coffee table book / Mercury prize consideration territory, if you get my drift. Timeless got everyone noticing this sound of the future, and leading the charge was a lead single taken from the gargantuan 21-minute album opener, Inner City Life featuring the late, great Diane Charlemagne.

30 years later, Goldie is still being pestered for the story behind Inner City Life. Here he is talking to DJ Mag about the glamorous, romantic shuttle runs he braved to and from Rob Playford’s mum’s house in Stevenage:

For someone intertwined with the development of a new musical genre, the man is a self-avowed technophobe and open about his lack of technical abilities in the studio. To quote:

Technology is a velvet claw. I hate it, but I have to use it. Technology is not my master; when I use technology, I take it for a joyride. I fuck it up and make it do things it was never designed to do.

In the Timeless days, he worked with engineer and Moving Shadow label-head Rob Playford to translate the unorthodox ideas rattling around his head into something material. In his own words, Rob describes their working relationship like so:

Goldie has a very vivid imagination, and knows nothing about the technical side of the process. Meanwhile, my imagination has been stunted by the familiarity I have with the electronics… The kind of music that I’ve been involved with didn’t need a music producer in the classic mould; it needed a technical producer.

To put it another way, Playford was holding the paintbrush and Goldie was dictating who, what, when, where and why to paint. Chatting to the Guardian, he was even more ruthless in his own assessment, saying of Playford:

He’s a phenomenal engineer, but he doesn’t have his own ideas, he doesn’t make his own music. But what he does have is a fantastic width and berth to throw loads of creative ideas at him.

Dillinja, Danny J, Tech Itch, Mark Rutherford and others would all take turns sitting in the engineering hot-seat for Goldie. He went on to develop an unmistakeable signature sound and never-seen-before production techniques. B-boy breaks like James Brown’s Funky Drummer and Dyke & The Blazers’ Let a Woman Be a Woman - Let a Man Be a Man made it into early records, likely a hangover from his stateside galavanting. He’s credited with the invention (or popularisation, at least) of “time stretching”, broken down for the masses in Channel 4’s “How Clubbing Changed The World” documentary by Fabio:

Goldie was able to express himself using cutting-edge of digital music production technology, despite being one step removed from the act of pressing buttons. When I think about how to approach new technology in an artistic practice without sacrificing one’s soul, there’s something of a parable to learn here. Admittedly, these creative swings didn’t always connect (see Noel Gallagher’s cynical cameo on 1997’s Temper, Temper, for example), but a mercurial spirit trying for masterpieces would rather shoot for the stars and miss than not take the shot.

(As an aside, Goldie has to receive partial blame for the nauseating trend of cutting-edge electronic music getting the full orchestra treatment to “elevate” it. Pete Tong, another serial offender here, happened to sign Timeless while an A&R at Polydor-owned London Records. What was in the water, these times?).

Ghosts in the machine

If Goldie is the prototype for AI art optimism, the resilience of ghost-writing might be the best case for declaring a Butlerian Jihad (AKA blowing up a few data centres). In all seriousness, hacks have been harvesting the creative juices of others since Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was out here. The Requiem was a composition that was left unfinished on his death in 1791, finished off by his Austrian pupil Franz Xaver Süssmayr in 1792 before being delivered to German aristocrat Count Franz von Walsegg.

The Count, who had a grubby reputation for passing off commissions as his own work, had requested Mozart make the piece for a service to commemorate his late wife, Anna. Legend has it that before he could claim this one for his own, a public benefit concert for Mozart’s widow Constanze scuppered the plans. Far from an isolated vanity project, wealthy aristocrats regularly tapped up gifted composers of the day to make something beautiful they could tell their mates, and themselves, they had gifted the world. That’s right, “cultural capital” or “clout” has been an obsession since at least the 18th century, bravely preserved until today by the vampiric elites of a decidedly creaking Popstar industrial complex.

There are obvious ghost-writing reference points amongst these circles, but more nuanced and relevant here is a case like Lupe Fiasco. Fresh off the first iteration of his “Rap Theory and Practice” MIT course, he hooked up with Google for a “Lab Session” to “see how AI might expand a rapper’s lyric writing process”. Here, Lupe contextualises the writing session with a potted history of Hip Hop innovation:

The creative friction between the technologists and artist are telling. One mentions thinking that Lupe would be interested in exploring how an AI assistant could write raps for him and gets coldly shot down. Instead, Lupe was interested in recruiting the tech to identify the “universe of possibilities” branching from a word or concept he might be meditating on. The geeks worked with him to build TextFX, a collection of tools built on fine-tuned Large Language Models (or LLMs) that provide a web of lexical possibilities from a provided “prompt”. For example, the “Fuse” tool finds intersections between two things. Given the words “Spain” and “troll”, I was told:

Spain and trolls both have a reputation for being mischievous—Spain for its history of pirates and explorers, and trolls for their penchant for playing pranks and causing trouble.

In the session, Lupe plays with these tools to lay down a rough track called Glass of Water. Here’s a snippet:

Imagine a continuum of creative oversight that extends from a serene solo writers retreat to heavy-handed robot overlords in the vibe of Microsoft Office’s Clippy. To me, Lupe’s experiment sits closer to the latter, with Goldie’s process in the former camp. A cynical read here is that Goldie used a studio engineer as a glorified translator, while Lupe is using AI as a creative crutch under Google’s careful watch. However, consider the relative experience and technical fluency of both artists — while Goldie was raw and learning the trade during these early sessions with Playford, Lupe is dabbling with a more invasive approach after putting in the proverbial 10,000 hours. Does this mean that he is better able to notice, and therefore consciously accept or reject, the invisible pen of the machine short-circuiting the right side of his brain? Or, is this a potential slippery slope into late-career laziness and derivative art?

Close

The digital tea leaves are saying that all roads are leading us towards a not-so-distant-future in which AI will be creating “art” that most people won’t be able to tell apart from the man-made equivalent. In a recent study published in Nature, most people couldn’t spot AI-generated poetry and actually rated those poems higher than human-authored ones. Scott Alexander ran an AI art Turing Test that demonstrated widespread inability to identify AI paintings from (JPEG approximations) of famous artwork. One critique to square here would be that poetry and paintings are arguably ”heritage” art forms without mainstream appeal anymore. Nevertheless, it’s undeniable that inflection points like this are hitting with increasing regularity.

Circling back to the nagging question I took away from The Call — what does an AI art practice with a soul look like — aside from predictably and pathetically wondering what Mark Fisher would’ve had to say about all this, I’m anxious to know how far along on the road to real craftsmanship in a given medium someone is. Until an artist has unlocked an unmistakeable clarity of self-expression and an intimacy with the creative act itself, working from idea to a real (or metaphorical) page with monkish dedication, my pound-shop Taoist advice is: be like Goldie. Prioritise the craft vigilantly and try to find your tribe like your life depends on it. As the neural pathways that carry your own creativity are strengthened through discipline and practice, something essential to your spirit gets fed at the same time. Remember at school, when the teacher would say, “if you cheat on the exam, you are only cheating yourself”? They might’ve had a point, you know. There may come a time when only you will know if you were the creator of art or just a puppet, at which point your own integrity and sense of meaning is what’s at stake. Learn to embrace failure, engage in play and trust your own voice before letting anything else get between you and your pen.

I’ve conveniently left aside the labour question in all of this, because it’s a big one. One component of Holly and Matt’s exhibition concerned how to involve humans in any AI project and practice informed consent. The moody, adolescent elephant in the room is that the post-AI, Goldie-equivalent of today might be in a bedroom somewhere trying to make magic with a Palo Alto tech companies robot equivalent of Matt Playford in lieu of a thriving “scene”. This isn’t a direction of travel specific to music, but it helps to “act local” when faced with systemic, societal problems. The “first ever” global study of the impact of AI on the music industry estimates that, by 2028, musician income will decrease by 24% and Generative AI music will represent 20% of traditional music streaming platforms’ revenues. History would suggest that no one is coming to save them.

It’s hard to think that “fine art” like The Call, with institutional support and high-brow editorial column inches, will be in the crosshairs of genAI. For this reason, I am dying to know what artists with less proximity to art institutions think about all this. I have a grain of (perhaps misguided) faith that “underground” music makers on the (relative) margins will see their creations elevated and celebrated harder as the artificial slop begins to swill. First to be buried will be the paint-by-numbers house bops and vacuous pop landfill that proudly provide window dressing for tech-bro coding sessions and yummy mummy spin classes. Is this all cope? I’ll end on something Mat Dryhurst says that does resonate with me:

AI [really, technology] just changes what we value about art.

Personally, I feel my own goalposts moving. I can no longer take for granted that the boring, moving or batshit art I stumble across was made by a real person. Be it a random Sunday digging on BandCamp, or maybe a painting I find in a charity shop in fifty years time. The moments when I get a glimpse into how a person was feeling when they made something, when they are generous enough to share that, are even more precious now. Keep making cool shit, for you and your mates, from the heart.

8-bit, 8-bar

Mon, 24 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This script was originally performed and published as an audio essay via the Side Missions project.

Introduction

It’s the 16th of October, 2019, and it’s a bit nippy out. Forgive me for wandering into British cliche territory this early, but follow me for just a second. Today’s sub-par weather report is barely noticed by Grime MC and Tottenham royalty Jamie Adenuga, best known as Jme, but also as an all-year-round shorts-wearing advocate. He’s bopping with purpose towards the legendary online radio station NTS, who dutifully transmit the city’s underground sounds live from their cozy East London shack-turned-homemade-sticker gallery tucked away in one corner of Dalston’s legendary Gillett Square. This community square, one of few remaining in the city, is described by Don Travis and Wayne Crichlow as “a space of radical history through the black experience”. Today is yet another entry in this wavey diary of certified dons.

Our hyperactive protagonist is on his way over there to link Elijah, DJ and co-founder of Butterz, one of the few record labels that championed Grime music defiantly through a relative downtime in the early 2010s. They are plotting an impromptu radio set, conjuring the fabled pirate radio settings that they once helped build. It’s the first bit of radio Elijah has done in half a decade and the first time that the pair have linked up on the airwaves. Knowing this, you would excuse signs of rustiness or a lack of chemistry. Instead, they went and made a slice of radio that washes over you with heart and soul in the same way that the best home cooking does.

Revisiting this set another five years on, I’m flung head first in to the room by the raw, inimitable feeling on full display. Jme’s energy is excitable and honest, Elijah’s mixing feels urgent and propulsive. The playfulness on show is infectious, witnessing two near-veterans in creative flow never fails to put a beaming smile across my cheeks. Barely five minutes in, Jme is compelled to shout out his audio engineer, MSM, congratulating him for finally completing Super Mario World. Something unusual is brewing. Around the 23 minute mark, Elijah achieves the unthinkable. Jme freezes as a beat selection enters his dome from a whole new musical universe.

Hold on a second, this isn’t grime…is it?

In case you missed what was going on there, that’s a legendary Grime MC spitting over Ryu, Blanka and Guile’s themes from Street Fighter 2. The booth is filled tightly with high emotion, enough to stop an ice-cold mic man dead in his tracks. Music is a powerful vessel capable of transporting the mind back to a specific time and place. Jean-Michel Basquiat once said that “music is how we decorate time”. It is capable of resurfacing and vividly colouring in our memories without warning or consent. Where did Jme go, where did these tunes take him, in this purest of moments? To answer this question, we have to take it right back to the start.

Grime 101

For the uninitiated, Grime is a predominantly Black, British and working-class musical tradition birthed on the council estates of Bow, East London in the early 2000s. Its family tree is dizzyingly tall, with meandering roots that trace musical styles echoed across the diaspora. Many of the scenes early participants are second or third generation Black Brits with Caribbean or West African heritage. Nods to MC-led sound system culture can be felt as strongly as more commonly cited hip-hop influences. There are stylistic similarities with darker strains of UK electronic music that made splashes in the 90s, like jungle and UK garage. Wiley, heralded as the genres “godfather”, once described why it’s the natural successor to punk, stating:

Punk rock was very rebellious against the Queen – they didn’t give a s*** and that’s what tip they were on. There’s that punk rock song “banned from the Roxy, OK, I didn’t much like it anyway!” We’re banned from places too – it’s the angry kid that these movements are based on.

All this chin-stroking about Grime’s heritage doesn’t help you to know what it sounds like, does it? As with any music made with sound systems in mind, you are best off taking it in somewhere that will rattle the riddims clean through your chest. Failing that, here is a burst of Pulse X by Youngstar that landed on earth in March of 2002, recognised as the first Grime instrumental.

One of the motifs of these early productions was the distinctive “8 bar” pattern. One arrangement plays for eight bars, then another plays for eight bars and the switch back and forth continues. This arrangement went hand-in-hand with the frenetic, pass-the-mic pirate radio sets that acted as a training ground for Grime MCs to hone their craft, a chance to experiment and play with the format. Here’s a taster of a Kano, Ghetts and Skepta radio set featuring an all-time sweet exchange over the Pulse X instrumental:

Grime’s formative years were pre-broadband, pre-Facebook and pre-SoundCloud. As a new musical genre it grew slowly and was unavoidably shaped by place. It’s arguably the last British genre that got to do this. Phill Dodds wrote on Grime being “distinguished by the intensity of its fine-grained, postcode-scale locality”. From the crews representing specific council estates they lived on together, to the prideful radio shout-outs for numbered London bus routes, the scene’s reference points were taken from everyday life. These mundane little details were moulded into poetry and evidenced a strong social fabric. Grime MCs telling stories of their lived experiences is a modern example of folklore, with important nuggets of information transmitted orally from one generation to the next. In this way, Grime is something of a successor to English folk music. A people’s history of being marginalised on multiple fronts in a city increasingly defined by inequality and excess, lives within the beats.

My own introduction to Grime came on the school playground. Like a contagious illness at the start of term, grime was passed around frenetically and making helicopter parents upset. Records were shared via BlueTooth, THE cutting-edge phone technology at the time, as files were distributed on emergent peer-to-peer sharing technology like LimeWire. Living in Essex, I was outside the pirate radio broadcasting range, but the relationship I had to the music shared similarities. Receiving loose MP3s like this was faceless and ethereal, the lack of context for what you were hearing meant your imagination could paint twisted pictures of the tales being spouted by mystery MCs. One of my fondest memories of this type of bamboozlement was hearing Roll Deep’s When I’m ‘Ere for the first time - Danny Weed’s devilish ‘gypsy accordion’, Scratchy’s hair-raising (and, at best, politically incorrect) ad-libs, every member of the crew hitting full stride on their 16s.

I imagined this lot as faraway superheroes, alien lifeforms. When I saw the artwork for their debut album In At The Deep End for the first time, it felt like an affirmation of these childlike fantasies. These wierdo cartoon critters spoke directly to this necessity of mystery and imagination, a time when conjuring up ideas about who might be on the other side of the tunes was the only context you had.

All these early examples of the art-form hint at an intoxicating duality at the heart of this scene. Early in it’s development, this music was part hyper-local gully poetry, part alien-like sonics, all while being cartoonish at the same time. Where did this cocktail come from?

Cool Britannia

It’s a cold, dark sound because we came from a cold, dark place. These are inner-city London streets. It’s gritty. (Wiley, 2017)

To understand grime, you best have a crack at understanding London, first. Get acquainted with the “informal city” built around high-rise tower blocks of council estates sectioned in places like Hackney, Tower Hamlets and Newham. These are the workshops and studios that Grime’s collective alchemy took shape in.

New Labour won a landslide victory in the 1997 general election after 18 consecutive years of a Conservative government. That same year, Tony Blair made his first speech as Prime Minister on the Aylesbury Estate in Walworth, South London. At the time, it was one of the largest council estates in Europe. He spoke about the estates residents as “the forgotten”, setting out a mandate of “regeneration”.

In practice, Tony would usher in a new inner city that suffocated the lives of Aylesbury Estate residents. A new, bold vision of an expensive, private and surveilled monoculture. A 2013 paper written by Professor Loretta Lees of King’s College London examined this shady gentrification of council estates through a case study of the Aylesbury. The human cost is felt to this day. Aysen Dennis, who lived on the Aylesbury Estate for 30 years, was recently forced to leave her flat after losing a 24-year long fight to stay there. In A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain, quoted by Lees, Owen Hatherly writes:

Regeneration was always ever a gentrification strategy, and we knew it. We knew it from Blair’s 1997 launch of New Labour’s regeneration policy from the stigmatised Aylesbury Estate in London where the desperate “70s class-neutral language of…regeneration was revived in the 2000s – a … friendly cover for class cleansing in the urban landscape.

In Terraformed Joy White describes how processes like this one have created social and economic segregation in her home of Forest Gate in East London. She writes:

The drive from Newham Council’s regeneration programme to create an urban village, with bars, cafes and creative/cultural outlets, flattens existing consumption and makes undesirable the consumer options that already existed there, including takeaways and cheap fruit and vegetables at £1 a bowl.

A painfully fitting tale of this split personality city is chronicled in Dan Hancox’s book on Grime’s origins, Stand Up Tall. When profiled in 2003 for the BBC to celebrate his Mercury Prize win for his debut album, Dizzee Rascal looked on from the 25-storey Crossway estate where he grew up. A financial district to rival the City of London was shoehorned into his neighbourhood in the late 80s and early 90s, called Canary Wharf. The 244m Canary Wharf skyscraper at One Canada Square was the first one to rise out of the docks in 1990. It was Britain’s tallest building for two decades, finally overtaken by the Shard in 2010.

“That is Canary Wharf.” Dizzee explained to the camera. “It’s in your face. It takes the piss. There are rich people moving in now, people who work in the city. You can tell they’re not living the same way as us.”

By the end of the decade, Dizzee had warmed up to the noisy neighbours, even naming that same skyscraper as his favourite building. During this time, he had moved away from the grime scene and into pop stardom. He would later be marketed as a feel-good story for the upcoming 2012 Olympics, another site of regeneration-come-gentrification. This snippet from another BBC interview always stuck out to me:

I remember when we were little, we had a conspiracy – we thought that thing on the top of it was like aliens, and they were about to fly off – loads of little theories like that. We’d blink and think they had lasers up there.

Dizzee and his peers felt like strangers in their own city, literally backed into a corner. Undeterred, they were able to channel this into what Hancox construed as a distinct blend of Afrofuturism, applying science fiction to these hostile surroundings as a way of imagining possible futures through a black cultural lens. When Dizzee was screwing at the Canary Wharf skyline, he was manifesting visions of space travel and alien lifeforms at the same time.

This vision oozes through Dizzee’s magnum opus debut, none more than Stop Dat. The intro rolls in with all manner of bleeps and zaps, like an alternate soundtrack to War of the Worlds. Then it gives way to a titanic, barrelling verbal rally that brings you back to earth with a bang and a half.

These visions in the cold night sky give us a glimpse into the dystopian state of wonder and restless creativity young pioneers would channel into something special, against all the odds. The futuristic, speculative leanings don’t start and finish at one blinking red light up on an office block, though, surely?

Cool Japan

I hate to divide the world – east and west. Where is the edge?
(Ryuichi Sakamoto, 1995)

Warren Stanislaus, a scholar who has dedicated himself to understanding and documenting cultural exchange across the UK and Japan, penned a 2022 study in the Japan Forum journal called From Cool Japan To Cold Japan: Grime Cyborgs In Black Britain. Much of the ground covered in this section is examined forensically by Warren, who has spent extensive time living across London and Tokyo. Check the video description for a link to this essay and make sure to go run it up.

Starting in the 1980s, Japan set off on a campaign to market their key cultural industries to the rest of the world. This included anime studios, manga publishers and video games companies. In a 2002 article titled “Japan’s Gross National Cool”, Douglas McGray surveyed the role of these sectors in expanding Japan’s cultural footprint across the globe:

Japan has made deep inroads into American culture, usually written off by the rest of the world as aggravatingly insular. Bestselling Sony Playstation and Nintendo home video games draw heavily on Japanese anime and manga for inspiration…Japanese anime-style cartoons currently fill the majority of time slots in the after-school and Saturday morning schedules on U.S. cable television.
Douglas McGray (2009)

This article helped make the term “Cool Japan” stick and, crucially, labelled it a purposeful, state-led policy rather than a happy accident.

80s and 90s babies formed the foundations of Grime as a cultural movement. As these impressionable young minds gained consciousness, Japan was hustling its artistic exports to them hard. It’s no exaggeration to say that they grew up together, intertwined. Streets of Rage landed on the Sega Mega Drive in October 1991, with Super Mario World and Street Fighter II: Champion Edition landing on the Super Nintendo the following year, in April and August respectively. To marry up these timelines, Wiley, AKA the godfather of grime, would’ve been 12/13 years old at this time.

The first Tekken game on Sony PlayStation arrived in 1994. The first Tamagotchis came to these shores in May of ‘97. The first entries in the Pokemon game series to hit UK shops, Pokemon Red and Blue, arrived in October of 1999 while the anime began airing earlier that same year. Dragon Ball Z first aired in the UK on 6th March 2000 via Cartoon Network (and later Toonami). All this is to say - British playgrounds were subject to a manic onslaught of Japanese pop culture that might as well have come from the far reaches of the universe.

In his essay, Warren Stanislaus revisits the idea of afro-futurism to describe how these technologies fostered a conscious “rewiring:

By reappropriating technologies and machines that seem to have arrived from some distant future beyond Western space-time, they can sabotage their subjugation and move out of a fixed place assigned to them by a dominant society.

As those brains got rewired and primed to absorb the sensory overload of Japanese media exports, how did this manifest in the music?

Production

A direct style transfer that manifested between Grime and Japanese pop culture was the sampling of video game music, sometimes shortened as VGM. In the hands of Grime kids, the chip tone FX and ear worm 8-bit melodies found in Japanese VGM would be taken and spun into frenetic, hybrid sounds of the future.

In 2005, Macabre Unit released Lift Off on Plastician’s Terrorhythm label:

Not only did the record feature artwork that looks like an entry in PlayStation’s now-defunct Syphon Filter series, complete with Sniper rifle crosshairs, those maximalist synths wouldn’t sound out of place in a stressful Metal Gear Solid scene. That same year, Geeneus would put out Grand Theft Auto under his Wizzbit alias. Listen carefully for a litany of GTA III samples:

In 2010, Devlin put out London City which sampled the Kingdom Hearts II OST:

In 2012, D.O.K. released Chemical Planet on Butterz, sampling Sonic the Hedgehog 2 in the process:

Champion and Terror Danjah made a track together in 2013 called Bowsers Castle, released on a label called Hyperdub (remember that name):

The tune features a 16-bit melody that is a clear homage to Super Nintendo era mario kart OSTs.

Here is a track composed and performed by Dot Rotten, Real Talk which samples Shinobi III: Return Of The Ninja Master on Sega Mega Drive.

Part of the power of video game music from this era is the subliminal and repetitive nature of its influence. Every time you boot up a cartridge or retry a level, the soundtrack clicks back in from the top. Rinse and repeat. As you progress, the music evolves and mutates, taking the same samples and contorting them into stranger forms. These feedback loops create patterns, and impact taste in unseen ways.

The music production exchange going on here gets altogether weirder when you consider that there is an “accidental” grime instrumental on the Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis platformer Wolverine: Adamantium Rage OST that was made a full 8 years before the first instrumentals recognised as Grime. The producer, Ian Beale (no, not that one), was part of a jungle duo at the time called Rude & Deadly. The limited sample space he had to work with on 16-bit game cartridges meant he leant into a spartan, digital sound that goes hard under a J Wing vocal almost 30 years later.

Was grime itself sent back in time by those aliens Dizzee was on about? I’m backing it.

Sinogrime

As a related aside, during the early 2000s a sub-genre called ‘sino-grime’ began to formulate. The name was coined by Kode 9, founder of the blog and later seminal electronic music label, Hyperdub. First-generation grime artists like Jammer and Wiley were pulling from nominally “Chinese” sounds that were in their orbit at the time. Here’s a snippet from Kode9’s 2005 Sinogrime mimimix:

Wiley tries to break it down in a 2003 interview with Martin Clark:

I used to watch a lot of Kung Fu films. I just like the idea of the Oriental thing. I started that idea, then I stopped it and then went back to it. It just something I like. I like Chinese music.

Our old mate Dizzee Rascal once explained that he sampled the shamizen, a traditional stringed instrument from Japan that was derived from the Chinese sanxian, because it was ‘about as out there as they come’.

The Shanghai-based Swimful offers up an alluring alternative theory for the emergence of this sound:

Around the late ’90s there were a lot of hugely popular Japanese games like Shenmue and the Final Fantasy series that made heavy use of pentatonic scales, which generally sound more Chinese, and heptatonic scales, which generally sound more Japanese.

Mr Wong was a first-gen Grime artist with Chinese heritage. Here’s an instrumental he made with Jammer, called Chinkrasta, a nod to the meeting of Chinese and Jamaican identities throughout the prism of Grime:

These production patterns formed the foundations of a musical exchange that began with Cool Japan and continued to stretch outwards, gathering up collateral along the way to form an exoticised version of “the East”. As traditional music scenes go, the producers are arguably the nerdiest component (no offence). These kids were the ones who’s fascination with electronics and sound was directly and viscerally shaped by the video game medium. It set the scene for the mic men to fully geek out.

Lyrics

Whereas a reductive view of the production samples could be that the producers simply liked the sonics (like Dizzee and the shamisen), the MCs pen provides us with an indisputable first-hand folklore of Japanese influence from the source.

Here’s Wiley’s Crash Bandicoot Freestyle, taken from the first volume of his legendary Tunnel Vision mixtapes:

Our old mate Jme is one of Grime’s most certified MCs when it comes to living/mining Japanese pop culture exports. For example, Jme has a record that doubles up as a love letter to Pokemon, aptly titled The Very Best, which samples the classic (western) TV theme.

The video is playful and cartoonish, and the sample works as a useful conduit for Jme to translate Grime’s frenetic energy and confidence into a series of boasts about his link cable battle record and trading card collection, then lyrically draw a beautiful link between Tottenham’s Meridian estate (where he grew up) and Kanto’s Viridian City (where the final gym leader resides). (Quick aside - he isn’t lying about “shiny Charizard life”).

As mentioned previously, Dragon Ball Z hit our shores in the early 2000s and had many school-aged kids in a cultural chokehold. One of the memorable aspects of the series is the concept of Super Saiyan, a “beast mode” style transformation utilised by those with Saiyan heritage. Here’s Goku, the main protagonist, going Super Saiyan:

There are numerous examples of grime artists reaching into their dragon ball fandom for bars. Here’s Mz Bratt’s Get Dark:

Here’s Giggs featured on Man Don’t Care with Jme:

Warren Stanislaus speaks directly to this ‘impulse for transformation’ in his aforementioned essay, writing:

Whether it’s Super Saiyan charges in Dragon Ball Z or Evil Ryu and Violent Ken in the Street Fighter series, a change in eye color and a new crown of hair is a way of visually depicting possession and a sudden surge of power.

This picture that’s being painted reminds me of those supercharged instances where an MC is bringing energy so electric the DJ is compelled to bring proceedings to a grinding halt via a rewind, also affectionately known as a “wheel-up” in these parts. A signal that the Super Saiyan metamorphosis has been felt down to the rooms vibrations.

Back on the topic of aliens, Newham born-and-bred MC D Double E has an uncanny ability to halt proceedings in a dance (in the best way possible) that verges on extra-terrestrial power. Here’s an unrelated clip of D Double executing a famous ad-lib while surrounded by his peers, who are almost as gassed as the crowd in anticipation:

Clashes & Streetfighter

I would have used any excuse to get this clip into the video, but there’s a reason we’ve arrived here. In 2010, D Double E put out Street Fighter Riddim. Arguably the definitive example of the genres flirtation with the famous game series, the legendary MC is truly on job:

There are well-trodden grime ceremonies that mirror the format of Streetfighter. “Clashes” see MCs go toe-to-toe verbally (mouth-to-mouth?) over a series of instrumentals with a view to out-rhyming and out-cussing their counterpart. These clashes range from the silly and playful, right up to gladiator, cut-the-atmosphere-with-a-knife battles that boil over. Right down to the language of the clash - rounds, sparring, bodying - code these duels as in the realm of fighting games.

One of the most prominent, and well-archived examples of this rich tradition is Jammer’s “Lord of the Mics”. Originally shot on tape and distributed via DVD, this long-running series immortalised legendary meetings of minds in the clash. Watch one of these and it won’t take long to spot direct homage to the beloved fighter series:

The core of these clashes is competition, strategic verbal volleys and a dedication to the art of oneupmanship. Right down to the clash structure, taking turns to do your worst, feels like the trading of killer combos practiced endlessly. In a sense, the tense vibes and steel nerves of a professional one-on-one Streetfighter bout are transplanted into real life. As fate would have it, Logan Sama is a reknowned Grime DJ hailing from Brentwood, Essex who happens to moonlight as a professional Streetfighter commentator and online personality:

Here’s what the day job looks like:

This is no coincidence. These rituals in the grime scene are adaptations and augmentations of cartridges that beamed out into their front rooms. We are joining the dots between inner city London kids making Grime and inner city Tokyo nerds making video games. In a recent exchange for Resident Advisor, poet and musician James Messiah talked shop with Touching Bass’s Errol Anderson. Here they are passionately talking about this exact phenomenon.

Jamie - why don’t you detail your Street Fighter 4 credentials for the people, real quick?

Grime in Japan

I think it’s about time to circle back to where we started out. back to the cosy NTS studio on Gillett Square. You might have forgotten about Elijah, the man spinning Streetfighter themes for Jme to bar on. On a different evening, on the other side of the world, Elijah could be found doing the same thing with some of Japan’s finest Grime MCs: Here’s Elijah shelling and MC Dekishi earning a wheel-up in Shinjuku, Tokyo in 2014:

This moment emerged out of a slew of Japan tours he did alongside his DJ partner and Butterz co-founder, Skilliam. The consistently passionate reception they received for playing Grime records was something of a surprise. It led to one of the best curated examples of Grime in Japan, a Soundcloud mix titled Japanese Grime Allstars, put together by Elijah and Skilliam in 2016:

Boiler Room made a short documentary in 2016 called Full Circle: Grime In Japan that acts as a vignette of what was going on in the scene at that time. There’s a poignant moment when Chocola B, a DJ in the GUM crew, talks about what makes Grime special to her, having discovered the genre in 2011 through a Shystie mixtape:

Talking about the beats, Grime has so much freedom and aggression. However, old Wiley tunes have exquisite percussion and melody…Thats what attracts me most to Grime instrumentals. In terms of MCs, I like their aggression, hard rhymes and the realness.

Around the same time, Boiler Room invited Chocola B to contribute a mix to their Upfront series. In another full circle moment, she decided to open the mix with an edit of Dizzee Rascal’s I Luv U.

Close

What does it mean when culture is boxed up and sent somewhere far away? What does it mean for this culture to be refracted by a foreign music scene and to then make the return journey, completing the circle?

This call and response is what moves art forms forward, together. Brian Eno used the term “Scenius”, or “Communal Genius” to describe the extreme creativity that groups, or “scenes”, can produce. The art of peer pressure, you might say. Drawing on this theory to describe cultural exchanges like this one helps to counter the Lone Genius myth and blurs the lines where one scene begins and another ends.

Eno states that in healthy artistic scenes we bear witness to mutual appreciation across mediums and a rapid exchange of tools and techniques. Ever seen someone make a Grime beat using a PS1 game? Here’s Benga making a Grime beat on Music 2000, to ram this point home with a sledgehammer:

This cross-continental exchange has helped to create beautiful moments, both small and significant. Finding obscure Japanese Grime artefacts from artists who have long been inactive exist gives me straightforward joy. In that same Boiler Room doc discussed a moment ago, we get to hear briefly from Elijah who talks about what Grime music’s relationship with Japan has done for him in a material sense:

The music and stuff has allowed us a level of freedom, like, allowed us to travel. I’d never think that we could just come to Japan for music. Before the music, I didn’t leave the ends, bro.

I still don’t know exactly why Jme was so shook from hearing those Streetfighter themes in the booth, but it must be emotional to deep how intrinsically tied your childhood memories are to your craft. How you’ve taken this Grime thing around the world, yet never really left the bedroom.

Sharing your art is one of the most generous and open-hearted things you can do with your time on this mortal journey. You can’t control who it touches and where it goes. That’s the leap of faith that keeps you a bit more human and brings us closer together.

I wanted to close out on a Grime set I took in earlier this year that says something about the long tail of this tradition of cultural exchange. Kibo, an up-and-coming MC from around the corner from where I’m recording this, had himself a birthday bash on Pound and Yam radio (itself around the corner from NTS). For the last half hour or so, while Nammy Wams and Chamber 45 hold it down on the decks, the mic gets passed frenetically around a room of MCs that includes the Master of Inane Conversation AKA M.I.C. He calmly breaks down the first two generations of Pokemon in a solitary 8 bars. This story isn’t finished, far from it.

barbie and bell hooks

Fri, 04 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0100

The function of art is to do more than tell it like it is – it’s to imagine what is possible.
bell hooks https://collectiveliberation.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/hooks_Love_As_The_Practice_Of_Freedom.pdf

I thought Barbie was a solid film. Powerful tonal shifts, a mostly banging soundtrack and emotional heft in the right places (my gf was in bits after five mins). There’s the whole franchise/sequel dark age critique that has been done to death, although Blindboy found an angle wondering when millennials will finally be marketed to as middle-age instead of “young people” that I lapped up. Here, I just want to do a little vent about the ending and why it felt pessimistic to me.

Full disclosure: I read my first bell hooks book, The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love, earlier this year. It’s maybe embarrassing to admit as a man approaching middle age, but my internal feminist logic before this was back-of-a-fag-packet, hr-diversity-and-inclusion-seminar level stuff. I enjoyed the MORE 👏 WOMEN 👏 DRONE PILOTS 👏 meme and nodded along when podcasts would deliver “respect women” platitudes, perhaps while detailing Megan Thee Stallion being shot. On occasion, I may have even comforted myself by sincerely thinking “I’m an ally” or, another cringe-fest, “I’m Doing The Work”.

I’m likely in dicey “reads bell hooks once” slash “33 YO man REACTS to bell hooks for the first time!” territory here but as a Geezer reading this book I learnt:

the extent to which male spiritual suffering is guaranteed under patriarchy
without an anti-patriarchal mindset, feminism is prone to reproduce a logic of
domination
how solidarity between men and women, rooted in love, is necessary to
dismantle patriarchal forms
that spiritual healing and nurturing of men is possible, and necessary, within
a radical feminist vision for change

Here’s a related anecdote. My first stable, short-lived job out of university was a recruitment consultant in Nottingham on 16k a year (and if you’re thinking I got juicy commissions instead, I was unbelievably shit at this profession). I worked in a very small (~10 ppl) office that was almost exclusively women. Very progressive and cool, I thought! As it turns out, the standard tools of domination were routinely wielded over my precarious, pathetic employment contract with absolutely no bother. I was targeted on the number of cold calls I was making every day, given the dreaded personal development plan (AKA we want to sack you, nice and legally) and even taught how to skim money off the top of our contractors pay packets via umbrella companies. The “floor” had an ultra-competitive, money-obsessed air that frequently bubbled over into confrontation and hostility. It turned out this matriarchy didn’t create a healthy workplace by osmosis, it was giving disciplinaries and trauma. To make it abundantly clear - on a personal level, I had time for almost everyone in the building. I rate recruitment as a realistic avenue for working class, often non-graduates to make a decent living (eventually). My lasting observation is that a traditionally hierarchical, toxic, macho culture reasserted it’s exploitative practices via women who had learnt well from the patriarchs that came before them. As hooks says:

More than ever before in our nation’s history, females are encouraged to assume the patriarchal mask and bury their emotional selves as deeply as their male counterparts do. Females embrace this paradigm because they feel it is better to be a dominator than to be dominated. However, this is a perverse vision of gender equality that offers women equal access to the house of the dead. In that house there will be no love.
bell hooks https://archive.org/details/willtochangemen00hook

(Oi!!! Barbie spoiler warning ahead 📢)

Much of Barbie is set in a fictional, sugary sweet kingdom called Barbieland. One of the film’s central tensions is how the “Kens” are made to occupy the role of the dominated under a matriarchy and experience oppression from various social and decision-making spheres. A tag-line used all over the film’s marketing is “Barbie is Everything. Ken is Everything Else”. As the film progresses, it elegantly tees up an opportunity for the Kens to rebrand the kingdom as “Kenland” and establish an overt, trashy patriarchy. Through this process, both Barbie and Ken have first-hand experience of living as the dominated gender in society. Barbie comes to regret the exclusionary, psychologically damaging cultural practice in Barbieland of “every night is girls night”. Yet, despite the unique opportunity to establish an equal society with a true coalition across genders staring them square in the face, the film ends with the full restoration of Barbieland to it’s default matriarchal arrangement. U wot, m8? I can’t read this any other way than being deeply cynical about relationships between men and women, as well as the prospects of an equal society across lines of gender.

I get that this is one of the films the whole industry is banking on to bring ppl out. I wasn’t expecting a radical feminist agenda to be front and center of a hollywood blockbuster. Maybe Mattel insisted on an ending that upheld the status quo of the Barbie universe. Still, the film was explicitly about patriarchy which seems to have baited out Piers Morgan and the like already. At worst, the film becomes counterproductive and invites patriarchal men to understand feminism as a cause external, even harmful, to themselves.

That’s it rly! I should acknowledge once more that this is principally a fun, nostalgia-drenched film that was not made for me. Lots of people love the film, and good on them. I would recommend it to a pal, still. Thank you for letting me scratch this itch, pls go enjoy life again.

Oh, and read more bell hooks, always.

on Shenmue

Tue, 22 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0000

At my big age, being a Dreamcast kid once upon a time feels almost too achingly Y2K to believe. No word of a lie, I haven’t met anyone else who went home to that silly, lovable (and bizarrely lightweight) cube. As a cultural artifact it perfectly embodies the pre-millennium optimism that every early 90s baby remembers being in the air those times. In the same vein as 9 PM (Till I Come) and New Labour, these relics formed a giddy tapestry of utopian possible futures. Sega really went and launched a console with internet capabilities in 1998, a time when most of us had to convince mum to unplug the phone so we could get half hour on MSN messenger, along with a controller that housed a virtual pet inside it. The Dreamcast was the byproduct of an idyllic, hubris-heavy time of Things Can Only Get Better type vibes.

My whirlwind Dreamcast romance feels oddly personal, because it lived at my dad’s house. I didn’t have any friends where my dad lived, so when I played it I was almost always on my ones. I had never owned previous-gen Sega consoles, so my reference points were limited to the odd turn of Sonic or Aladdin after school at mate’s houses. The fact that so much of it’s functionality was beyond my own (and my dad’s) comprehension gave it a mystical appeal, like a premonition of future wonders the new millennium was to bring. Because I didn’t get to play it much, I tended to rent out games (maybe the most accurate prelude to the new millennium we ended up with - rentier capitalism) for a night or two. The time-boxed nature of the video game rental lent itself to intense, transfixed play sessions that I have trouble filing away as “good” memories. The game usually had to be returned the next day, when I would then be returned to my mum’s house too. I can’t imagine that these kinds of weekends were the ones my dad most enjoyed spending with me, and I think I intuitively understood this as I dropped the Dreamcast game jewel cases into Bishops Stortford Blockbuster’s post box and snapped back to reality.

Returning to Shenmue this past month, 20+ years on was a chance to slowly play a game that I had memorable dalliances with during that time. Shenmue was developed and published by Sega for the Dreamcast in 1999 (but it came to the UK in 2000) and “remastered” for the PS4 in 2019. It was created, produced and directed by Yu Suzuki of Virtua Fighter and Outrun fame. The development cost was unprecedented in it’s time, holding the production budget record ($70 million) for 9(!) years until GTA IV ($100 million) was released in 2008. Ironic that basically everyone I know played and gawped at GTA IV, but if I brought up Shenmue in the same rooms there would be crickets. Unfortunately, groundbreaking technical feats like this are really difficult to appreciate later (“you had to be there”, basically). If you show someone Blade Runner for the first time today, they will probably enjoy the film but think that the special effects are goofy. When I first traipsed around Shenmue’s streets and realised I could go into the arcade to play other Yu Suzuki games, or phone someone up (with tinny voice acting, not Simlish or whatever), or collect toys from gacha machines, something felt different. This was a level of immersion and simulation that made every other game world before it (and after it, for a little while) seem shallow.

Shenmue is talked up as the first “open city” game ever made (the title for first “open world” game might go to an early DMA Design effort for the N64, Body Harvest, which I also rented). I don’t really know how much meaning I ascribe to this term but I can talk about what “living” inside Shenmue feels like. You play as Ryo Hazuki, living in the city of Yokosuka (where Yu Suzuki grew up). Your alarm clock goes off each morning, then you get on with your day as you please. You carry around a notebook that tracks progress through the main story, but for most of the game you can engage with the critical path pretty loosely. As you familiarise yourself within neighbourhoods of Shenmue, not only do you begin to see familiar faces, you learn their routines. When you’re not badgering citizens with scatter-brained detective work, you ask them normal things like “how’s business”, and they might observe that you “always look so healthy”. Despite Ryo being an awkward, generally pre-occupied soul, it’s hard not to feel warmth and comfort from these reliably dumb interactions (apart from when people are walking around - they will fob you off with unsettling regularity). These characters live somewhere in the neighbourhood and you can actually go and find their homes (in a non-creepy way) because their names are written on the post boxes. There’s a US military base right next to Yokosuka IRL so many of the in-game shops sell military surplus and the like. You can find mementos around the Hazuki family home like family photos and playable cassette tapes. These are touches that aren’t even a given in open-world games today. Back then, this stuff made my 10 year-old mind go bananas.

Quick-time events (QTEs) are another innovation credited to Shenmue. You know the one, where you have to press buttons on the controller during action sequences that play like cut scenes. I usually find these to be uninteresting distractions and I don’t really understand why they caught on. In this game they tend to accompany scenes where Ryo is chasing someone or is in a fight indoors. It’s curious that these became a hallmark of AAA games (which Shenmue undoubtedly is), maybe because they are just expensive and extraneous segments that smaller studios wouldn’t bother with so it has become an ongoing weird flex. What’s strange here is that the whole virtua fighter engine was transplanted into the game, yet there actually isn’t that much active fighting. The decision to incorporate QTEs that replace potential fighting opportunities contributes to the slower pace of the game that can feel jarring 20 years on. Imagine The Last Of Us making you sit and wait for half of an in-game day while you wait for the only story-line task to progress. Shenmue does this a lot and makes me wonder if these are design choices are simply the rough edges of a pioneering foray into environmental storytelling and a world that feels lived in.

I haven’t really talked about the story because it’s pretty shit tbh. Your in-game dad is killed by Lan Di and you are out for revenge, basically. However, towards the end of the mainline story you end up working down at the warehouse district by the docks to try and get intel on the Mad Angels, a gang with links to the big bad. Somehow, a section of the game devoted to manual labour comes out smelling of roses. After your first day on the job, your boss tells you to come back in the morning an hour before work starts. The alarm clock that goes off every single in-game day dings an hour earlier, and the game fades up to a queue of forklift trucks with Ryo bringing up the rear. It turns out that you now take part in a forklift race every day before work with your dockworker pals and receive a different toy truck depending on your finishing position. If you’re asking yourself “why?” at this point, perhaps AAA seriousness has led you to miss the point of great video games - they are GAMES. Shenmue uses dev trickery and production techniques to imitate aspects of cinema, but it doesn’t pretend for a second that it isn’t a video game. This creates charming set pieces and encourages playfulness (you are the “player”, not the “audience”!). I’m still here for all of it.

This game remains painfully of it’s time, good and bad. It’s innovations probably won’t be fully appreciated by newcomers who’ve already played modern AAA open-worlders like Red Dead Redemption II, through no fault of their own. The writing is frequently hilarious in a bad (but sort of good) way. The controls are comically janky, to the point where I wondered if the forklift section of the game inspired how Ryo should move in game. It’s charm is still off the scale, though, and so much of the imaginative heavy lifting for future open-world games was done right here. This is “slow” art that should be sipped. It doesn’t make sense to dash through because you have to return the game in the morning. I’m still grateful that I got to experience something groundbreaking in the moment, don’t get it twisted, but the atmosphere Shenmue bathes you in is what makes it a lovely time today. Nice one, dad <3

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UK Twee & The American Gaze

Exit to America

Debuting UK Twee

Lost in Translation

Nothing Great About Britain

DIY Will Never Die

Outro

The Way to DJ

Artificial Alchemists

Introduction

Timeless

Ghosts in the machine

Close

8-bit, 8-bar

Introduction

Grime 101

Cool Britannia

Cool Japan

Production

Sinogrime

Lyrics

Clashes & Streetfighter

Grime in Japan

Close

barbie and bell hooks

on Shenmue

Footnotes

Screenshot reel