033! Mini Digest: The future of indies, platform capitalism & Bongology

Sorry, I am going to weigh in on *Geese*

via @prepschoolstreetteam

I flew out to LA last week to work in the studio only to be taken down by a vicious flu and spend most of my time in bed. At least I got to listen to some music and catch up on some reading, and the latest discourse.

It’s been a few weeks now since the band Geese became the subject of the biggest ruckus of the music industry this year to date. In case you missed it, Billboard journalist Kristin Robinson interviewed music marketing agency Chaotic Good, in which they revealed that they were running meme pages, flooding comment sections and generating not-so-real viral trends for their clients (which did not only include Geese).

From there, the story spiralled. The takes ranged from nice and nuanced right up to “hey, idiot, this is how marketing works”, to “this is all a psy-op” to “actually you’re just insecure”. Ironically, it sort of became like the Substack version of clipping.

Frankly, I get all the sides - it is exhausting to wonder if anything is real anymore. Even that band that you thought were impervious to the system. But, maybe nothing is. Or at least, no-one with ambition is. It’s hard to have that fantasy punctured. Nothing is sacred.

If this conversation revealed anything, though, perhaps it’s that we’re all behind the curtain far too much, deeply over-exposed to the mechanisms. We’ve started to care about the roll-out more than the product, we’re listening to the podcast about the album for more minutes than we listen to the actual album.

Perhaps this is the inevitable conclusion of art under platform capitalism? In the monoculture, there were clear moral distinctions: the mainstream was set against the underground, you had authenticity and selling out. But in the contemporary system, if everyone uses the same platforms - brands, politicians, oil companies, the Estate of Michael Jackson, the experimental noise artist with 18 followers - aren’t we all playing the same game? In this system does all art start to resemble e-commerce? Where there was once a fence with sides to choose from, now there is none. Platform logic has universalized our behaviour.

In a sense, though, little has changed. Media has always been a hackable machine. Virality has, for decades, been manufactured. Malcolm McLaren manufactured outrage for the Sex Pistols, Michael Jackson paid people to faint in the crowd, KISS used faked crowd noise on their live album. We don’t mind when KATSEYE is openly engineered, but using similar tactics for Geese creates outrage. It turns out we do still have strong ideas about who gets to be commercially ambitious.

But now that the machinery has been unveiled and we’ve become obsessed with the rollout as a primary text, can we put our skepticism aside long enough for any mythos to build? Are we able to even encounter culture innocently anymore? If we can see the content calendar and the social media manager and the marketing agency, and we’re left just thinking about the machinery, how can the myth thrive?

How can an artist balance the need to strategically engineer visibility while also appearing to transcend strategy?

For more on artist myth-making, music industry scamming, and platform culture, read some of my other pieces!

But now, LINKS:

Sound

• Crespi Drum Syndicate are a Miami based duo “inspired by the proto-techno of '60s and '70s Italian library music, motorik kraut grooves, Latin dance music, orchestral percussion pieces, dancehall riddims, and dub engineering.” Say no more. Love this one.

• UK artist Lancer has me with his sample work and production. Also using the word “porkies” in the lyrics did make me homesick.

• Homesickness related: Dean Blunt x Celeste and Babyfather x Tyson.

• A big new riddim is taking over Kingston for the summer, this time it’s Di Genius on the buttons with the Hill & Gully Riddim (built on a folk melody that’s been used a bajillion times in the last ~70 years of Jamaican music).

• More French-language fire, from (D)Juno.

• Ice Spice posted a snippet from an unreleased song that uses a “Bongology” beat (a self-declared genre name by a group of UK/French producers blending rap, coupe décalé, logobi, underground production). Keep those 808s fried.

• Sao Paulo producer RHR put together this menacing and seductive mixtape for Resident Advisor.

• NYC fave Livwutang put together this seamless 90 min mixtape of femme vox in dubstep.

• Here for the bassline in this song by British-Egyptian-Ethiopian artist Alewya.

Vision

• Things that are back #1: long rollouts. Tove Lo just dropped the announcement for her album in September (!). Posters are all around town for Madonna and Tyla’s albums, neither of which are out for another two+ months. Drake has been rolling out his next album for about a year. And, Tyla, Zara Larsson and Madonna are all going for hot pink in the process.

• Things that are back #2: VICE. I don’t know when this happened or how I missed it, but VICE appears to be making good content again. Case in point, this mini doc about Underground South African Taxi Raves.

• Things that are back #3: MIA. She made a Christian record and there’s a visual for every song.

• Olivia Rodrigo shot a recent video in the palace of Versailles. Here is a breakdown of the cameras they used (hat tip to Catchdini!)

• Apparently legendary designer Peter Saville listens to “ambient gravitas” in his office.

• Kelela has a new album coming on Warp. Produced in part by man of the moment Oscar Scheller. Can’t wait:

Thought

• The Guardian on the “chaotic future” of indie music companies. It’s not hard to tie this right in to the Geese discourse, and the challenges of modern artist development. There’s some great insight here, even for those already on the inside. Relatable, and a little depressing.

• Ticketmaster & Live Nation were found to be operating a monopoly; maybe we’ll see some ticket price drops soon.

• Related: a pretty cynical take in Bloomberg talking about concert “underplays” as a nefarious strategy. It’s not completely untrue, but many artists are booking smaller venues for better fan experiences and/or a better touring lifestyle. Drake famously played smaller venues for the fans, not just so it could sell out.

• Is afrobeats stagnant? Africa is A Country asks.

• A few weeks ago I went to see Annahstasia in concert here in NYC. The woman standing next to me was enthusiastically taping it on her voice notes app, and writing notes to commemorate the tracklisting and what the artist said in between songs. I really dug the enthusiasm. Anyway I was reminded of her when reading this piece about a man that taped 10,000 concerts he went to, and uploaded them all.

• Finally, the world is more bananas than the music industry. Patrick Radden Keefe with the bonkers real-life Better Call Saul story for The New Yorker.