Can Music Make You Sick?
LA Times: You’ve spent a minute in the music biz now. Does it strike you as a place where good ideas flourish?
Issa Rae: Absolutely not. It’s probably the worst industry that I have ever come across. I thought Hollywood was crazy. The music industry, it needs to start over. Conflicts of interest abound. Archaic mentalities. Crooks and criminals! It’s an abusive industry, and I really feel for artists that have to come up in it.
- Issa Rae on Insecure and the Music Business, LA Times, 2021
Joni Mitchell: The considerations of a corporation, especially now, have nothing to do with art or music, that’s why I spend my time now painting.
- Joni Mitchell, LA Times, 2004
I spent half my teens and all of my twenties either in or adjacent to the music business — sometimes as a musician, sometimes as a writer and critic. I bounced in and out of it after bouts of burnout or broken-heartedness, every time thinking my inability to find it emotionally, creatively or financially worthwhile was a personal failing.
Turns out it’s actually just awful. It’s short-sighted, exploitative and often run by mediocre minds who don’t love music as much as they love clout and money. “Can Music Make You Sick? Measuring The Price of Musical Ambition” is a fantastic (and free) book exploring how the music industry actively contributes to poor physical and mental health outcomes in musicians. Singer-songwriter Mitski has basically admitted the music industry pushed her to the brink and she would have quit it altogether had she not been contractually obliged to put out her forthcoming album.1
So, what’s the alternative? Some say it’s NFTs, but after spending a lot of time I’ll never get back reading about them, I’m not convinced it’s the way to make make the music biz more equitable.
”This is how NFTs make me feel: like the future is useless but expensive, and world-altering technology is now in the hands of a culture so aesthetically and spiritually impoverished that it should maybe go back to telling stories around the cooking fire for a while, just to remember how to mean something… And this is why the future, be it NFTs or Memoji or the howling existential horror of the Metaverse, looks so ugly and boring: it reflects the stunted inner lives of the finance and technology professionals who produced it. As the visual manifestation of cryptocurrency, NFT art combines the nuanced social awareness of computer programmers with the soulful whimsy of hedge fund managers. It is art for people whose imaginations have been absolutely captured by a new kind of money you can do on the computer.”
- “The Future is Not Only Useless, It’s Expensive” by Dan Brooks, Gawkwer“The reality is when you buy a device that requires proprietary software to run, you don’t own it. The money you hand over is an entry fee, nothing more.”
“In 2030 you won’t own any gadgets” by Victoria Song, Gizmodo
On a happier note, I loved this idea about the “long nose” of tech innovation using electric bikes as an example. I also enjoyed this piece about the small Victorian town of Yackandandah moving towards powering community facilities from a huge solar battery. I visited the town last year and my strongest memory of it was discovering golliwog dolls and lovingly framed Pauline Hanson posters in the local gift shop. Yak contains multitudes!
Reading
Someone very close to me is donor conceived and urged me to read Brave New Humans. Written by former ABC journalist Sarah Dingle, it is the most horrifying thing I have read in a long time. Seriously, some of the events documented in this book read like something out of a dystopian science fiction movie. Dingle herself is donor-conceived and doesn’t pull any punches about the fundamental human rights that donor-conceived people are deprived of, and how the fertility industry prizes money above ethics. If you’re considering fertility treatment, you must read this book.
I also loved Into The Rip by Damien Cave, which explores the Australian attitude towards risk, community and child-raising through the prism of being an American guy taking his children to Nippers in Sydney. It feels like a few books in one, but in a good way.
Listening
Miley can do no wrong!
This month’s playlist is all over the shop but I figure I’m doing ok if I’m only 6 months behind new releases. The new Angel Du$t album has been my favourite (check it out if you’re into bands with misleading names/Tom Petty but punk).