Annalee Newitz:
When we imagine future tech, we usually focus on the ways it could turn humans into robotic workers, easily manipulated by surveillance capitalism. And that’s not untrue. But in this story, I wanted to suggest that there is a more subversive possibility. Modifying our bodies with technology could bring us closer to the natural world.
The last few times I’ve seen Phil, I’ve really enjoyed chatting to him about the joy of singing together with others. I’m glad he’s written it all down here. It reminds me of Brian Eno’s philosophy on group singing.
See, about a year or so ago, I took inspiration from Kevin Smokler to set about listening through my entire music library alphabetically by song title.
I think I’m going to do this! I have a paltry 10,602 songs so it should take a mere 29 days of continuous listening.
This Is My Jam was a lovely website. Created by Hannah and Matt in 2011, it ran until 2015, at which point they had to shut it down. But they made sure to shut it down with care and consideration.
In many ways, This Is My Jam was the antithesis of the prevailing Silicon Valley mindset. Instead of valuing growth and scale above all else, it was deliberately thoughtful. Rather than “maximising engagement”, it asked you to slow down and just share one thing: what piece of music are you really into right now? It was up to you to decide whether “right now” meant this year, this month, this week, or this day.
I used to post songs there sporadically. Here’s a round-up of the twelve songs I posted in 2013. There was always some reason for posting a particular piece of music.
I was reminded of This Is My Jam recently when I logged into Spotify (not something I do that often). As part of the site’s shutdown, you could export all your jams into a Spotify playlist. Here’s mine.
Listening back to these 50 songs all these years later gave me the warm fuzzies.
The three-part almost nine-hour long documentary Get Back is quite fascinating.
First of all, the fact that all this footage exists is remarkable. It’s as if Disney had announced that they’d found the footage for a film shot between Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back.
Still, does this treasure trove really warrant the daunting length of this new Beatles documentary? As Terence puts it:
There are two problems with this Peter Jackson documentary. The first is that it is far too long - are casual fans really going to sit through 9 hours of a band bickering? The second problem is that it is far too short! Beatles obsessives (like me) could happily drink in a hundred hours of this stuff.
In some ways, watching Get Back is liking watching one of those Andy Warhol art projects where he just pointed a camera at someone for 24 hours. It’s simultaneously boring and yet oddly mesmerising.
What struck myself and Jessica watching Get Back was how much it was like our experience of playing with Salter Cane. I’m not saying Salter Cane are like The Beatles. I’m saying that The Beatles are like Salter Cane and every other band on the planet when it comes to how the sausage gets made. The same kind of highs. The same kind of lows. And above all, the same kind of tedium. Spending hours and hours in a practice room or a recording studio is simultaneously exciting and dull. This documentary captures that perfectly.
I suppose Peter Jackson could’ve made a three-part fly-on-the-wall documentary series about any band and I would’ve found it equally interesting. But this is The Beatles and that means there’s a whole mythology that comes along for the ride. So, yes, it’s like watching paint dry, but on the other hand, it’s paint painted by The Beatles.
What I liked about Get Back is that it demystified the band. The revelation for me was really understanding that this was just four lads from Liverpool making music together. And I know I shouldn’t be surprised by that—the Beatles themselves spent years insisting they were just four lads from Liverpool making music together, but, y’know …it’s The Beatles!
There’s a scene in the Danny Boyle film Yesterday where the main character plays Let It Be for the first time in a world where The Beatles have never existed. It’s one of the few funny parts of the film. It’s funny because to everyone else it’s just some new song but we, the audience, know that it’s not just some new song…
Christ, this is Let It Be! You’re the first people on Earth to hear this song! This is like watching Da Vinci paint the Mona Lisa right in front of your bloody eyes!
But truth is even more amusing than fiction. In the first episode of Get Back, we get to see when Paul starts noodling on the piano playing Let It Be for the first time. It’s a momentous occasion and the reaction from everyone around him is …complete indifference. People are chatting, discussing a set design that will never get built, and generally ignoring the nascent song being played. I laughed out loud.
There’s another moment when George brings in the song he wrote the night before, I Me Mine. He plays it while John and Yoko waltz around. It’s in 3/4 time and it’s minor key. I turned to Jessica and said “That’s the most Salter Cane sounding one.” Then, I swear at that moment, after George has stopped playing that song, he plays a brief little riff on the guitar that sounded exactly like a Salter Cane song we’re working on right now. Myself and Jessica turned to each other and said, “What was that‽”
Funnily enough, when we told this to Chris, the singer in Salter Cane, he mentioned how that was the scene that had stood out to him as well, but not for that riff (he hadn’t noticed the similarity). For him, it was about how George had brought just a scrap of a song. Chris realised it was the kind of scrap that he would come up with, but then discard, thinking there’s not enough there. So maybe there’s a lesson here about sharing those scraps.
Watching Get Back, I was trying to figure out if it was so fascinating to me and Jessica (and Chris) because we’re in a band. Would it resonate with other people?
The answer, it turns out, is yes, very much so. Everyone’s been sharing that clip of Paul coming up with the beginnings of the song Get Back. The general reaction is one of breathless wonder. But as Chris said, “How did you think songs happened?” His reaction was more like “yup, accurate.”
Inevitably, there are people mining the documentary for lessons in creativity, design, and leadership. There are already Medium think-pieces and newsletters analysing the processes on display. I guarantee you that there will be multiple conference talks at UX events over the next few years that will include footage from Get Back.
I understand how you could watch this documentary and take away the lesson that these were musical geniuses forging remarkable works of cultural importance. But that’s not what I took from it. I came away from it thinking they’re just a band who wrote and recorded some songs. Weirdly, that made me appreciate The Beatles even more. And it made me appreciate all the other bands and all the other songs out there.
Here are five songs that came out in 2018. I enjoyed hearing them. Maybe you will like them too.
I wrote this song while my colleague Tim Berners-Lee was inventing something called “The World Wide Web” a few offices away. The song was published in 1993, when less that 100 websites existed.
The first image ever published on the web was of this band, Les Horribles Cernettes …LHC.
If you were at Patterns Day and you liked the music that was playing during the breaks, here’s the playlist. All the artists are based in Brighton.
Absolute genius! I’ll never hear Sgt. Pepper’s quite the same way again.
This geography lesson makes a nice companion piece to Johnny Cash has been everywhere, man.
Today was a Salter Cane practice day. It was a good one. We tried throwing some old songs at our new drummer, Emily. They stuck surprisingly well. Anomie, Long Gone, John Hope …they all sounded pretty damn good. To be honest, Emily was probably playing them better than the rest of us.
It was an energetic band practice so by the time I got home, I was really tired. I kicked back and relaxed with the latest copy of Spaceflight magazine from the British Interplanetary Society.
Then I went outside and watched the International Space Station fly over my house.
4 million songs on Spotify have never been played. Not even once. Let’s change that.
Modern pop songs retold as Shakespearian sonnets.
I hereby declare that this song is my official anthem.
I want some files that last, data that will not stray.
Files just as fresh tomorrow as they were yesterday.
Song-a-day Mann closed out this year’s Brooklyn Beta by singing this song (number #1381 in his ongoing series). We all sang along. It was pretty damn great.
A blow-by-blow legal analysis of the second verse of Jay-Z’s 99 Problems.
In light of the recent death of Ray Bradbury, I think we should all honour his memory by revisiting this song (featuring some future-friendly headgear).
I’ll feed you grapes and Dandelion Wine and we’ll read a little Fahrenheit 69…
Bravo, Bruce, bravo.
I heard Glen Campbell’s “Like A Rhinestone Cowboy” on the radio and began absent-mindedly singing “Like a rounded corner” to it.
We played at the bottom of the art-deco staircase in Bexhill’s De La Warr Pavilion. Sounds pretty good, if I do say so myself.
