Notebook
February 24, 2026
Nicky Hopkins did something rock hates to admit: he injected classical music -- straight from the 19th century -- into the fabric of rock. And now -- are you, by chance, a Brit rock mag editor? That instant little stiffening. The editorial seat -- clench-clench. Because you erased him, didn't you? Yes, you did. So carry on reading.
Those high piano notes that pour showers of crystalline notes over the Stones' "Monkey Man"? That comes from Chopin's Nocturne 15 in F minor -- not a direct quote, but the sonic approach.
Those passages on Jerry Garcia's 1975 live album when Nicky's right hand is fluttering, like a hummingbird, over the high register? That's Nocturne no. 19 in E minor. The water-like ripples on Lennon's "Jealous Guy"? That's Debussy, Suite Bergamasque. You hear it all over Beck-Ola too. Yes, shift in your seat, rock mag man. Does the chair creak in protest?
Rock took more from classical music than it ever wanted to admit. And Hopkins' story is what it looks like when high culture gets smuggled into mass culture and nobody wants to give credit. He got erased because he was too important -- too structural -- to the music of people who wanted all the credit to themselves. If you admit how much he shaped the music, you have to admit the music wasn't all your "genius" -- that someone was sitting at a piano making decisions.
And I know exactly which rock writers are reading this right now. You've had decades of practice. You got very good at making names disappear. But you can't bury him twice. That era is done. The next generation is here. When we write books, we drop them straight into the largest distribution system on earth. Meanwhile you can keep retelling Gen Z your predator romance fairy tales about how things "really" worked back then. You already know which shelf those wind up on by 2028. Have fun. Don't grind that chair into sawdust.
January 9, 2026
Lester Bangs doesn't merely "hold up." He keeps happening. They say he was clear-eyed, but everyone was clear-eyed. What set him apart is that he was unafraid. Refused to pay the social price of saying nothing.
Take the "Jerry-as-gentle-saint" myth vs the clique-y cruelty of the Deadhead scene. In 2026, if you want to understand why it rejected and then smeared Nicky Hopkins, you have nowhere to go but Lester Bangs. And he had the calm clarity to explain it all as early as 1972, because he didn't need Jerry to like him:
"Janis had a capacity to feel which would ensure that she was never quite as numb, hence never riding as easy, as so many of the others -- those stars who have handled themselves with the kind of terrible coldness summed up in remarks made by Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead on the night she died. Garcia opined that it wasn't as bad as it looked because death was just another phase, like life, and everybody knew she was going to die and besides everybody dies sooner or later anyway."
Lester's conclusion? "She was a victim of the inhumanity of money and the inhumanity of the hip culture which is every bit as cold as that which it's self-righteously rejected."
That insight didn't belong to 1972. It belongs to any culture that congratulates itself and uses myth as insulation.
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Lester still cuts because he didn't belong. And crucially, he didn't want to. While his so-called peers aged into irrelevance because they were negotiating while they wrote.
January 7, 2026
Genesis P-Orridge was a lot of things. But he wasn't a liar. His stories didn't drift over time to flatter himself. He never revised accounts to improve his standing. He lived his truth through action.
So when in 2014 he told a journalist that Radio 1 couldn't play his song about Brian Jones ("Godstar") because the Rolling Stones office had called and warned that if Radio 1 played it, they'd never be allowed to play any Rolling Stones songs again, I believe him.
Because people who lie for advantage lie upwards, toward power. Genesis's claim punches up -- the worst possible direction if you are inventing stories. He didn't say "they were afraid of me" or "my song was too powerful." The story is flat and dull -- like everything else the Stones have been doing since 1986.
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An established act like the Rolling Stones doesn't get rattled by peers -- it gets rattled by unclassifiable outsiders. Especially the kind of outsiders who can play your own spiritual taboo game ten times better. Jagger can say "Devil" and still be understood. Genesis can say it and make you wonder what you just agreed to.
December 28, 2025
When families publicly complain that "the younger generations don't care anymore" about their illustrious dead -- while keeping the archive private -- they are describing the predictable outcome of their own behavior.
Anyone who wants a great dead artist's legacy to have a serious afterlife places the archive where the oxygen is -- with a university, the British Library, the Library of Congress. This is what sincere intent looks like to the rest of the world: catalogues, finding aids, neighboring archives for context, and professionals who can guide research and advise on method. Not a front door and a family nameplate.
Young, capable people do not "discover" figures because an estate releases an anniversary documentary. They discover them because the material is open to access at a place where they study.
Lord Byron's papers are not kept in a family house like a guilty secret. It would be comical for them to be accessible by appointment, mediated by someone's mood, someone's dementia, or someone's reputation anxiety. Neither should John Lennon's be. Or Bowie's. Or Coltrane's. Or Nicky Hopkins's. Or Elvis Presley's. Or any of the great musicians or artists who don't belong to living-room politics.
If you want the young generations to champion a figure, you place that figure's legacy where the smartest young people actually are -- universities and research libraries. And the families who truly believe in the greatness of their dead should be the first to give up control. All else is empty talk.
December 27, 2025
Sean Lennon is worried the younger generations will forget the Beatles? He should be -- given the way Lennon's estate has been telling the story. If you actually wanted to hand the Beatles as something interesting to the next generation, you'd do the opposite of what Sean is doing now. Because controlling the story is the dead end. Releasing the raw material and letting people argue with it is the only way forward.
You can't tell the story of Imagine without telling the parallel story of what went on in the world in 1971 -- Bukovsky in jail for exposing psychiatric abuse in Russia. Iris Murdoch, Joan Baez, Yehudi Menuhin, Tom Stoppard, Michele Foucault, Bruno Bettelheim on his side, speaking out about the Soviet GULAG of the 1970s.
And it's not just politics -- although politics is central to Lennon's story. You have got to let Cynthia, Julian, May Pang exist as equals to yourself and your mother. Tell their story as human beings, not as roles in a morality play.
You have to admit contradiction. You have to stop treating controversy as a PR fire.
The sanitized version doesn't travel in 2025 -- younger people don't want saints. They want contact with a human being. And they know that when rock estates cling to 20th-century PR formats, they look frightened. Like a Politburo issuing slogans long after the crowd has learned to read the walls.
The irony is that Yoko rebelled against her banker father. John rebelled against class. And Sean does not rebel. Cannot rebel even if he wanted to. Because his inheritance is not just money -- it's symbolic capital explained to him in a catastrophically outdated way by whoever is advising him. They believe controversy damages brands. But it doesn't -- it creates cultural heat. And that's the only way to keep the story alive.
December 21, 2025
While the rock press sits there like a stunned pigeon staring at Jagger's photos with Maxwell and Epstein, it doesn't occur to them that it's not a usual "sex scandal." It is a geopolitical scandal. And they do not have the knowledge to handle that.
But Sorbonne does. Specifically, one Francoise Thom -- a top-tier scholar of Russian statecraft. What she describes here is not "Epstein as depraved jet-setter" but Epstein and Maxwell as a node in a long-running intelligence, kompromat, and financial laundering structure with Soviet lineage. Greasy, decades-long, routed through oligarchs, sanctioned banks, foreign intelligence proxies.
This is what Jagger walked into. Photographed with Maxwell on separate occasions, always in settings that look absurd: with people, for example, such as Larry Gagosian -- who didn't just sell art to Russian oligarchs but cultivated them, became a fixture in that ecosystem. "The official dealer to the Russian oligarchy" is how some in the art world refer to him.
Jagger himself is not a tastemaker to tyrants, but the question isn't guilt at this point. The question now is: how stupid do you have to be?
The rock press is not qualified to comment on any of this. Moreover, they are not institutionally permitted to. Because this is where it stops being "rock gossip" and becomes intelligence history, elite infiltration, transnational networks. The rock press has no knowledge of that world.
"It's just rich people hanging out with rich people" is nice deflection, but that's not how celebrity targeting works. It's not simply about using celebs to make a room feel safe or give it prestige shielding. The game is direct collection from target who doesn't realize they are a target. Because intelligence gathering never looks like intelligence gathering. It looks like gossip. Who hates whom, who is broke, who is kompromized, who is desperate, who is buying influence. Identifying which names open which doors. Confirming relationships, as in, "Are they really close or just photographed?"
Celebrities are valuable because they are told things -- unguarded things -- no one ever says around bankers or officials.
And no, no one says, "Work for us." It starts with, "Can you introduce me to X?" Or, "Mind bringing X to that dinner?" Or, "Any chance you could get Z backstage?" Or sometimes it's just about shaping what they repeat publicly. Turning them into message carriers without them knowing it. No training. No pay. No clue.
December 16, 2025
One thing the Rolling Stones didn't see coming in 1969 was today's boom in power literacy. That the world would learn to read the room. That by the second decade of the 21st century an average punter -- anyone under 40 -- would see right through the Brian Jones narrative.
And it is funny that the main engine of this new literacy arrived under a comical name: hip hop. (A genre that didn't exist when the Stones were busy inventing their legend). Because hip hop told its listeners how the whole thing works. How groups crack when money appears. Who gets cut, who gets credit, who gets scrubbed from history. Labels, crews, beefs, betrayal, ghostwriting, contracts, silencing -- a 12-year-old can now detect motive.
And, of course, Jagger and Co. didn't foresee that a quirky little contraption called the internet would turn the Official Story into a public lavatory wall: scribbles everywhere, yes, but also -- occasionally -- testimony. You get, for example:
Jimmy Page: calls Brian Jones a master musician, cites Degree of Murder as proof of compositional and instrumental range.
Bob Dylan: identifies him as a guitar player who sounded completely authentic within the American roots tradition.
Nicky Hopkins: frames him as the true musical leader, and explicitly ties the band's loss of direction to his removal.
Bill Wyman: provides concrete authorship testimony (e.g. "Jumpin' Jack Flash") that contradicts the "useless Brian" myth.
Against this, what do we have? No Stones-initiated archival project centered on Brian. Not one in over half a century. No serious inquiry into his death, despite Jagger's eventual political clout. Oh, we also have Brian-as-singular-abuser story, and alongside it -- Keith's stories that Anita beat him. Make of that what you like.
And, of course, hip hop was not the only teacher. In 2025 audiences are trained -- through HR law, bullying tribunals, domestic violence frameworks -- to distrust one-directional stories. And narratives that only emerge after someone loses power. And character assassinations that conveniently align with financial exclusion.
November 30, 2025
No critic in 1967 could bring himself to say "this is music hall kitsch" when Sgt. Pepper came out. Two things shut that door: basic musical ignorance and access economy. This is why they swallowed whole the narrative handed down by Epstein, Martin, and McCartney.
Yes, among many the awe was real, but it belonged to people whose musical literacy stopped at skiffle, R&B, and wartime singalongs. Anyone who had even brushed against the actual avant-garde -- Stockhausen, Ligeti, Riley, free jazz -- would have recognised what they were hearing. And it wasn't "the future." It was Martin applying mid-century commercial production technique to songs built on music hall, children's songs, and Tin Pan Alley.
So when today's 20-year-olds shrug, they are not being ignorant. They are seeing what the critics of 1967 couldn't: Sgt. Pepper isn't culturally or musically serious. Yet "White Rabbit" -- released the same year -- hits them with full force because it genuinely is transgressive: it speaks directly from an altered state, sung with existential authority.
The Sgt. Pepper myth is one of the foundational delusions of British rock criticism, the one which exposes its cultural insecurity. It is "the original sin" of the canon, if you like: a middlebrow entertainment product mistaken for a modernist breakthrough because the people writing about it had no actual literacy in the fields they claimed it rivaled.
November 21, 2025
Тhe distance between Jeffrey Epstein telling underage girls that they are entering some special circle and 1970s rock band managers delivering underage girls to hotel rooms is vanishingly small.
Virginia Giuffre's memoirs make this clear: the mechanism is identical. You tell a child that this isn't abuse -- it's privilege, initiation, rare access. That lie is the whole apparatus.
Rock magazines should read Giuffre's book before they publish another nostalgic ode to the "great manager" of the era. When in 2025 you valorize people such as Peter Grant, you show failure not just of moral grammar, but of basic historical grammar. But nostalgia sells, right?
November 19, 2025
There is a narrow, very particular slice within the English middle-middle class which produces young men of a particular timbre: trembling, poetic, tender, frightened, brilliant, and who, for that very reason, cultivate small brutality to protect their vulnerability. Brian Jones belonged to that breed. His upbringing in Cheltenham was exactly the kind that produces this type. Not bourgeois, not working-class, not aristocratic: middle-middle class.
But the rock press flattened him into an errant provincial boy -- chaotic, abusive. Once placed into that box, the real psychology disappears. People stop reading him as English. They read him as a rock-damaged archetype.
The truth about Brian Jones is something England hesitates to look at directly. Because this type of male vulnerability strikes too close to home. To acknowledge that Brian Jones was one of those boys whose tenderness would time and again turn into brutality is to acknowledge something wider, almost embarrassing in its scope -- that much of the British creative generation of the 1960s was built on that same foundation.
November 13, 2025
The AI sector going for copyright term length is just a matter of time. And it will push for radical changes: something like standard 25- to 30-year protection for all works. For everything older to automatically enter the public domain or a government-run licensing pool. For replacement of "life-plus" systems with a flat count from publication. For mandatory collective licensing of post-term use. They will ally with libraries, educators, heritage institutions demanding digitisation and open archives.
The entertainment conglomerates will try to resist. But by that time AI will be foundational in finance, healthcare, logistics, education, media. So this will look like a theatre company trying to argue with ConEd.
And yes, there is an advisory gap -- no one is briefing artists on this. But even if McCartney, Dylan, Spielberg, or Disney executives flooded hearings, they'd be arguing over their niche while policymakers will be worrying about national survival infrastructure. When that's the framing, the infrastructure company wins
November 12, 2025
This is the comedy of the rock book. You take a genre -- biography -- which is a form of procedural discipline designed for slow-thinking people with shoeboxes full of newspaper clippings and legal documents. And then you have a guy in a cracked leather jacket, chain-smoking over a laptop, typing sentences such as, "By this point, Jack was descending into the darkness he'd never fully escape." No primary source. No hesitation. No footnote. A man seeking to self-express in a genre not built for self-expression. And all right, maybe there is a place for that -- a kind of communion. But when the book starts sweating the writer's own class angst, gender politics, and suburban value system -- that's when you want to lean across the table and say: Mate, it's not me you should be talking to.
October 27, 2025
Jagger's knighthood came late -- announced in 2002, when Cool Britannia was already looking threadbare. Iraq was already being discussed seriously -- as policy and in the press. Perhaps Blair thought he needed a hit of pop as varnish. The Queen allegedly resisted -- she understood what the Stones represented versus what the monarchy requires. But she gave in.
Jagger knows what the title means and what it doesn't. He can be "Sir Mick," but he won't sit at the same quiet tables where McCartney is treated as cultural patrimony. The old establishment reads Jagger correctly -- taker, survivor. They'll knight that sort if they must, but they won't embrace it.
Yes, Georgia May could model. But getting Stella-level institutional backing -- a major house at 25, then Gucci Group money for her own label -- requires parental reputation that translates to corporate comfort. Paul's reputation is clean. And Mick's reputation is... complicated. The Stones mythology works for selling concert tickets. It doesn't work for convincing a major luxury conglomerate to fund your daughter's fashion house.
October 20, 2025
Rolling Stone's parent company, Penske, sues Google for generating AI summaries of its articles. I wonder if Penske understands why people want such summaries in the first place. What an LLM does is extract facts, strip the Rolling Stone prose of framing, and applies its own meaning hierarchy. The temperament of a rock critic gets replaced by another structure which strips away emotive noise. The AI replaces thousands of mediocre intermediaries (underpaid journalists, undertrained political analysts) with a single abstract intellect.
So individual journalist stands now at the point where AI replaces their interpretive framing, but where someone still has to do the actual reporting. And this is what will happen in the next two to five years. The top tier -- fully competent investigative, analytical, or stylistically unique -- will survive as "signature voices." The lower tier will integrate into newswires or fact networks. The middle -- "content writers," lifestyle bloggers, generic reviewers -- will simply dissolve.
October 14, 2025
Should Jimmy Page have read Lolita?
In 1969 Nabokov called the hippies conformists -- at the very moment when the Western upper classes were calling them dangerous. But his X-ray of them was neither simply pre-revolutionary Russian nor just aristocratic -- it was a fusion of both. What he saw was false rebellion -- a herd in the costume of revolt. And that offended him in his contempt for performance staged for applause.
Plus, of course, he saw a generation performing rebellion at no personal risk, while he himself had risked everything -- reputation, livelihood, moral standing -- on a work that violated every bourgeois boundary.
Behind the comment about hippies being conformists is a very cold judgment -- you think rebellion is refusing a haircut; I wrote the most dangerous book of the century and walked away unbowed.
That is not to say that Nabokov's courage was some kind of miraculous personal trait. An aristocrat by birth is inoculated against the need for approval. So Nabokov's contempt for public opinion was the opposite of hippiedom or punk: it was structural -- it came from centuries of people like him knowing they do not need to please the crowd.
And his message, whether the counterculture grasped it or not, was simple: self-gratification annihilates everything it touches, including the self that pursued it. Should Jimmy Page, Steven Tyler, and Ted Nugent have read Lolita carefully? They should have -- just to see how such things end.
October 14, 2025
The obsession with depersonalisation in classical performance -- which critics praised and the conservatoires industrialised after the 1970s -- has closed its loop. You set the premium on "perfect clarity," i.e. Bach without despair, Sibelius without grief, Mozart without danger, and in 2025 you get the logical sequel: AI that can do it more smoothly.
The schools, of course, had little choice but to canonize it in the first place, because they couldn't, even if they'd wanted to, recruit people who knew anything about danger or despair. What they had were the bubble children: well-raised, well-mannered, air-sealed. The imaginative, the disobedient -- those kids went to film schools, design schools, into tech, jazz.
Now AI arrives and perfects the perfection. The conservatoire can taste what it's been simmering since 1980.
Which is why, if Murray Perahia ever plays again, go see him. He is the last cohort before sterilization of classical music-making, a musician whose theology is inseparable from his phrasing, whose Beethoven and Chopin sound like a person thinking his way through existence.
And make no mistake -- every teacher, critic, and administrator to this day knows what musical adulthood sounds like: the questioning tone, the prayer behind the notes.
October 12, 2025
Woody Allen's heroines were the establishment's safe decoy for female intellect -- the "acceptable" version of "a thinking woman." Women with "depth" who never threatened the hierarchy. Hollywood in the 1970s needed exactly that. The genuinely educated woman -- who actually studied history, philosophy, or theology -- had nowhere to go in the industry except as a caricature: a freak, a threat. Allen's women were the antidote to that threat -- air of intellect without its consequences. And they existed to reassure men like Allen who wanted to think they were surrounded by bright women while remaining in charge. That is why in Allen's world there is no female human rights lawyer or a female theologian meeting a young, floundering male artist. Such a collision would have been too equal for this particular type of boomer.
October 12, 2025
Cavalli took everything Granny Takes a Trip ever fantasized about -- decadence, velvet, erotic charge -- and gave it ferocity.
Despite the myth, Granny was not avant-garde -- it was English vaudeville, the seaside pier show. Even when worn by great musicians -- Barrett, Hopkins, Richards -- the clothes only worked because those men had aura. The garments themselves were slapstick, self-amused, not radical -- part of that peculiar English comfort with absurdity.
The biggest difference? Cavalli confronts mortality and sexuality head-on -- his sensuality is predatory. Granny's crowd wanted to avoid all that and stayed sentimental.
So yes -- Cavalli didn't just outdo Granny Takes a Trip. He finished it. Took the English psychedelic costume and rebirthed it as Italian baroque.
October 11, 2025
"Elite self-dealing" is the term political scientists use when institutions controlled by elites systematically produce outcomes that benefit those elites, regardless of stated institutional purpose.
A Grammy win for 80-year-old Rolling Stones protects touring revenue and catalog values. It also maintains the generation's gatekeeping authority over what is considered "quality". It prevents younger artists / genres from claiming prestige because that would diminish the generation's own historical importance. And, finally, it preserves industry structures (labels, traditional production) which benefit economically.
But here is the paradox:
Hackney Diamonds win is the Recording Academy signaling it has no connection to contemporary music culture and little relevance to audiences under 50. It's about institutional obsolescence. Young audiences don't just ignore the Grammys -- they actively view them as irrelevant. A Rolling Stones win doesn't create "backlash narrative" -- it creates generational abandonment.
Prediction? When an institution becomes irrelevant to people under 50, it doesn't gradually decline -- it faces collapse as sponsors, media coverage, and industry participation shift to platforms that actually matter to music consumption demographics. Watch who skips the 2026 ceremony as career-irrelevant.
And one last thing. Calling it an "Academy" rather than "Recording Industry Trade Association" or "Music Business Insiders Group" creates veneer of meritocratic expertise rather than gatekeeping, of scholarly / artistic standards. Of institutional neutrality rather than factional preferences.
September 21, 2025
Vladimir Bukovsky’s Judgement in Moscow had to wait 25 years for an English edition. France, Italy, Germany all managed it. England and America put up the barricades.
Jason Epstein, then presiding at Random House, shrank from it. He told Bukovsky, oddly, that it "defamed the reputation" of Francis Coppola. Perhaps Epstein was simply a fan of Coppola.
Bukovsky replied that he wasn’t in the business of falsifying history, and he wasn’t about to start.
John Murray, meanwhile, toyed with the idea, then checked with Martin Soames, a libel man of high standing. Soames pronounced the book "very dangerous." Bukovsky, livid, turned to Peter Carter-Ruck -- legal grandee, confidant of plutocrats, and author of a textbook on defamation. Carter-Ruck said yes, it was publishable, but publishers’ nerves were another matter. He and Bukovsky shared a strange camaraderie: the Churchills, the Goldsmiths, and a common acquaintance with bread and water -- Bukovsky in prison, Carter-Ruck by paternal discipline. Their views could clash: Bukovsky never understood Carter-Ruck’s fascination with dowsing, which he dismissed, with Tyutchev, as "pathetic madness."
John Murray, ultimately, rejected the book. And it only appeared -- in English -- decades later, in 2019. I had some hand in it: legal work, permissions, steadying the publisher’s anxieties.
That was not how it should have been. Back in 2000, the John Murray edition had been planned in a grand style before getting axed, with Thatcher's blurb on the cover and a preface by Oxford’s Robert Zervis. Oxford and Harvard historians pressed for it; so did Robert Conquest and John Earl Haynes of the Library of Congress. Haynes called the material "very rich," adding: "We have no other source that provides such a quantity of high-level documents from the USSR in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s."
Bukovsky died a few months after the book appeared. At least he had the satisfaction of seeing it out.
September 20, 2025
Alain Besançon: Leninism is misplaced religious feeling. It offers ritual (Party congresses), catechism (Marxist doctrine), saints (fallen revolutionaries), and eschatology (the radiant future).
Vladimir Bukovsky: Socialism is a symptom of Christianity’s crisis. Where Christianity once carried moral authority, socialism took over as a secularized version of salvation.
But that's in the East. In the West, religion didn’t collapse under state repression. It collapsed under consumer modernity. Celebrities became incarnations of what saints or prophets once embodied: ecstatic truth, rebellion against corrupt worldly powers, contact with transcendence.
A Russian peasant in 1937 kissing Stalin’s portrait and a Western teenager in 1967 fainting at a Stones concert are structurally close. Both channel a broken Christian liturgical instinct into a new idol. The difference is that the Russian idol demands corpses, and the Western idol empties your wallet.
Today’s celebrity politics shows how easily the trivial can tip into the lethal. Once the idol promises vengeance, order, or salvation, the threshold is crossed.
Fandom is not innocent. It is a rehearsal of submission, a school of worship.
September 19, 2025
In the 1960s-70s, even in the art schools and the campus cliques, you had to belong to the fringe of the fringe to actually want to look like Jagger, or Richards, or Morrison, or Robert Plant. Following their style meant to opt for deviance. Few were willing to pay that price. What young men -- in aspirational artistic circles -- did want to look like was Alain Delon. Not Paul Newman, not Steve McQueen. Delon.
For everyone else the choices were worse. Delon was unreachable and Jagger too grotesque to imitate. What ended up happening was collapse of templates. And with no coherent model left, boys opted for cynicism about all acted-out masculinity. And, eventually, in the 80s and 90s, it turned into infantilism: irony, detachment, eternal adolescence, the rise of the man-child.
Still, a 70-year-old man in a parka is not in baby wear, as some claim. Neither does he want to wipe out the self, or to be invisible. It's simply what's left when there are no alternatives: no symbols for masculine adulthood that ring true.
September 10, 2025
Lillie Burnett, widow of Howlin' Wolf, teamed up with Marie Dixon (Willie Dixon's widow) in 1997 to launch the Willie Dixon Blues Heaven Foundation. She had already spent years showing up -- at festivals, reunions, and anyplace that kept Wolf's name spoken.
After marrying Lillie, who knew how to run a household, Wolf became steady enough not just to pay his musicians well, but give them health insurance too. Yes, health insurance. In the blues.
Barbara is on stage here at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame too -- Lilly's daughter from before. To anyone who is interested in Wolf's legacy, Barbara's interviews in the documentary film The Howlin’ Wolf Story (2003) and in conversations with Guitar Talk on YouTube offer excellent insight. Debunking the idle chatter, for example, that Eric Clapton paid for the headstone, that the family couldn't cover the funeral: "I did his ledger, I went to the bank. He was not a broke man. He was a loved man."
September 10, 2025
This is what failure of custodianship looks like. Going through a pile of the Rolling Stones’ deluxe reissues: Tattoo You, Goats Head Soup, Their Satanic Majesties Request. Lavishly designed, obsessively detailed, brimming with packaging budget -- and totally excluding any meaningful acknowledgment of Nicky Hopkins. The man who not only architected the sonic spine of these albums, but who composed. Not a single photograph. Not a single quote. Zero explanation of his role.
No one is expecting the Stones to do it -- they live by erasure. But what a spectacular failure to advocate on Hopkins' behalf, to negotiate with the Stones camp, to lobby labels, to make statements to the music press.
The tragedy, of course, is that those who should have cared never understood the scope of what Hopkins was. Never saw the loss of him as cultural. And so allowed him to be erased like this.
Brings to mind John Kennedy Toole who died in 1969 aged 31 and whose mother Thelma campaigned to get the manuscript of his book, A Confederacy of Dunces, published. Who, after being turned down by publisher after publisher, famously told Walker Percy when she showed up at his office with the manuscript: "I am not leaving until you’ve read at least part of it." The novel went on to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1981.
Posthumous advocacy -- the one form of love that demands strategy and the ability to shame a gatekeeper into remembering what genius looks like.
Winter, Angie, Coming Down Again, She's a Rainbow, Waiting on a Friend, No Use in Crying, Tops, 2000 Light Years from Home, In Another Land, Dancing with Mr D, Can You Hear the Music, Sing this All Together, 2000 Man, Lantern. Listen to them today. Hopkins plays on all of them -- radiantly, irreversibly. Be haunted.
September 9, 2025
Vanna Bonta published this book in 1985. When rock had already taken over from poetry as the way truth was told in public. Inside: aphoristic love lines, blunt erotic details, American confessional scenes. Was she oblivious to the times she lived in? Not one bit. She names her rock-legend lover -- Nicky Hopkins -- as her "star", the "treasured". While knowing perfectly well that he helped tilt the scales -- rock replacing poetry -- in a way few musicians did. She also knows that poetry names and music un-names. She knows that the Sixties needed Morrison, Dylan, Mitchell, but that by 1985 words were being turned out faster than anything worth saying. And she still clings to words. Not to win the culture back, but to leave a marker: refusing to let what mattered disappear unnamed.
In one of the poems she says: Here is an old woman I saw at a hair salon who hated me without knowing me. I want to speak to her across time. "I wanted to tell her she was beautiful. But she would not have believed me. But I knew. I knew. I knew." Small? Only in the way the chicken episode in Tolstoy's Resurrection is small, when Prince Dmitri leaves the courtroom and notices a peasant walking past, holding a live chicken upside-down by its legs. And the chicken is squawking, terrified. A moment of total mundanity. Or the barometer of the human soul.
September 8, 2025
If Anita Pallenberg's manuscript is to be published, serious readers should expect verification of the typewriter, paper, ink age, and date range -- same things literary scholars expect as standard. Why? Because she was never given a platform to tell the key parts of her story during her lifetime. And what we have heard so far of the manuscript in the Catching Fire documentary are the Stones narrative reinforcements: demonizing Brain, humiliating Wyman, elevating Keith, and the framing that she didn't die cast out -- she was a survivor.
When a woman -- especially one so crucial to cultural history -- does not speak meaningfully in life and is only allowed to "speak" after death, the last thing we need is a posthumous ventriloquism act.
What verification should involve:
1. Typewriter forensics: Was it typed on a 1960s–80s era machine? If so, which model? Can that be traced to Anita's known possessions?
2. Ink and paper aging: Is the ink consistent with the time period in which she is said to have written it? What are the UV, chemical, and carbon tests saying?
3. Version history: Are there multiple drafts? Were they revised? Who touched it last -- and when?
September 7, 2025
Priscilla Presley is back in the glare this week. Accused of putting pressure on Elvis in the last sad months. Perhaps. But my 14-year-old goddaughter knows who Elvis is because Priscilla curated. And dances to him because Priscilla didn't fumble the memory. As opposed to heirs who slice, sell, dump, or destroy.
Yoko, Janie, Priscilla often get vilified, but how do you picture the archive without them? Memory survives through deliberate effort only.
Compare to how Constanze, Mozart's widow, sliced up his manuscripts and sold pieces separately. Or to how Newton's descendants broke up and sold his archive in 1936 to raise quick cash. Or to how Gauguin's possessions were auctioned for peanuts after his death and Maternité II was sold for 150 francs to a local naval officer. Or how Arthur Pinajian's heirs told the buyer of his house to trash thousands of stored works.
Yes, I know the rebuttal: that the "good" widows curate because it's lucrative. Not always. Take Nadezhda Mandelstam. After her husband was killed by Stalin, she memorized hundreds of his banned poems -- line by line -- because writing them down meant danger. Carried them silently for decades until they were safe to be written down and published. Contemporaries called her mad, obsessed. Now Mandelstam's archive is at Princeton. She tells the story in her memoirs -- Hope Against Hope.
Bottom line: When custodians don't care, researchers end up chasing what they sold off, scattered, or let rot. I know about this from having spent six years piecing together Vladimir Bukovsky's materials from the debris. And the lesson is simple: marry well. Because otherwise the canon might end up being whatever the cat fell asleep on when the bin men arrived.
September 4, 2025
John Lennon and Chuck Berry on stage. Yoko starts howling. Fans rage. Half a century on they still rage.
The lesson? The counterculture was conservative -- not politically, but psychologically.
The hippies wanted the same thing as their parents: legacy, earnestness, righteousness, literalism, worship of icons. Just with long hair and a new soundtrack. Dylan instead of Churchill.
Scratch a British or American hippie in 1969 and underneath you'll often find a puritan, not a prankster. That's why the music ossified so quickly. Why it became "classic rock" within a decade. Why it could not accommodate postmodernism, the grotesque, anything truly reckless.
Yoko wasn't part of that system. Which is why the hatred still clings. Her grounding was in the 1920s rupture, in modernism burning bridges. The hippies' creed was a bourgeois tantrum disguised as flight. What in the 1960s corresponds to "Cut with the Kitchen Knife" (1919) by Höch? Nothing. And Yoko knew it. To her credit.
Meanwhile, the world of "classic rock" is collapsing. But not in the way of final tours or aging setlists. It's collapsing in meaning.
The boomers have run out of story. And the young aren't arriving because they are not being offered truth. They are being offered branding. Nostalgia without pain.
The rock press is not just rotted -- it's complicit. They turned entire lifetimes -- tragic, sacred, broken, obscene -- into profiles. Into "top ten solos" and "rare backstage moments." And now they don’t know how to defend anything real.
Everyone knows it -- YouTubers, BBC grandees, Random House suits. And yes, the AI is coming. Faster than expected.
September 2, 2025
Chopin is usually handled like porcelain -- "fragile," "refined," "elegant suffering." It's a misreading, of course. What he really gives you is bluntness. His music is direct speech. He sits next to you at the end of the day and says, "I'm in love." Or, "Life sucks." Cuts past class, country, craft. Just a man and a piano. And Fray plays it straight. No mask, no sugar. He doesn't reach for your hand. Doesn't say it'll be fine. He looks at you and says: "Yes. I know."
These Chopin sessions were underway while I was managing David Fray's contracts at IMG. And in parallel -- world tours of Murray Perahia and Hilary Hahn. So only got chances to sit down and listen to this in short bursts. Today, for the first time, I am listening to this straight through. And no -- this isn't loyalty speaking. Fray's a good man, but that's irrelevant. I say it because it's obvious: Fray plays Chopin without striking a pose. And it's something that's very difficult to do.
September 2, 2025
Ray Bradbury's Dandelion Wine: A child in Greentown, Illinois smells cut grass and understands that time will eat everything. Martian Chronicles: Mars is Troy. Fahrenheit 451: Freedom is mortal.
Vanna Bonta (a fellow sci-fi writer, pictured here with Bradbury) also knew that civilization was not a given. And she would, being a daughter of a US national security man. But in the book she published a few months after the death of Nicky Hopkins, the great love and the longtime inspiration of her life, she made a different wager: Consciousness matters beyond the material.
Yes, in biology death is final; in social life love is suspect; in politics erasure works. But Bonta's book says: No. Love is sufficient. And writing is technology of survival.
Bradbury never said it like that. Maybe it's easier for women to say such things outright. In his Dandelion Wine, death is everywhere -- coffins in parlors, old women forgotten by time. Boys who realize their bodies will die. But as he wrote in Something Wicked This Way Comes: "We're more than dust. We're more than the sum of our parts. There's something that outlives us."
Is it true that all the classic sci-fi writers ever wanted was to get the hell off Earth? It may have looked like it. But what they were really saying was this: Mars is a mirror. The real frontier is inside. And feeling -- feeling is transmission. It's what survives.
Bradbury. Bonta. Hopkins. Ersatz biographers, at best, can trace people into the same room. But readers want to know what it all meant. Why rock, at one point, began to sound cosmic. Why sci-fi novels borrowed the shape of mixolydian modes. Time we saw the 20th century not as a pile-up of petri dishes but as a landscape.
August 31, 2025
I wonder if the Western pop culture sophisticados (Fripp, et al) ever clock how comical their imported mystics read to those who actually grew up on that ground: the Caucasus, the Black Sea zone, the former Russian Empire? And not only comical. Shady too.
A real interest would have led Fripp to Fazil Iskander, who had the Gurdjieff archetype to a tee: a Sukhum or a Tbilisi uncle, carpet-seller, who says he has secrets of the universe to share with you over a glass of wine -- if you buy the rugs.
Or to the passages in Chekhov where he makes a meal of the Blavatsky seance matron type, or passages from Dostoyevsky which summed up this cross between a provincial town clairvoyant and a post office cash box embezzler.
That comic undertone -- Chekhov's grin, Dostoevsky’s gallery of self-deluders -- does it ever occur to those in the West? That for the locals, from Baku to Kyiv, "Gurdjieff" still means a Caucasian operator with repertoire? That what equals method in London, in Tbilisi rings as method-and-hustle? With a whiff of the bazaar?
August 28, 2025
This life -- yours, mine, his -- feels like a thin translucent layer stretched tight over something impossibly vast. A film, like the skin on heated milk. We walk across it, thinking it’s solid, thinking it’s all there is. But sometimes, in moments like this one, the film thins. You see light underneath. Not metaphorical light. Structure. Design. Memory.
August 25, 2025
By now even the culturally checked-out European liberals have stopped admiring Woody Allen. Even the ones who haven't been reading the room for a decade. Even they stopped caring. Even the nostalgists in denial. The ones drawn to cultural smallness. To moral smallness. Allen now choosing Moscow in 2025 means the West has largely closed its doors. And as he can no longer posture as a misunderstood genius in New York or Paris, he now seeks affirmation in a zone of moral collapse. It's an endpoint. A clarifying gesture. The last stage of a man who never created honest art.
August 24, 2025
The big papers (the Guardian, the Times, NYT, WSJ) generally avoid entering into the rock-myth economy. Yes, they know rock was the central popular art of the 20th century. They know they should cover it seriously, if only because their audience demands it. But they also know it's dirty. And at the level of the Guardian, Times, NYT, WSJ, Atlantic editors are not naive. They know that the rock canon was built on predation, exploitation, myth-management. They also know that serious investigation would open up a pit they can't control. Plus, avoiding it is class gesture: better to let the specialist rags and tabloids wade in the muck.
But there is also another thing. If the Guardian, NYT, etc. went back and re-examined their own 1960s–80s coverage, they'd be admitting they were complicit in myth-making. They'd have to own up to uncritical puff pieces, to recycling PR, to letting predators be glamorized. Much easier to pretend rock isn't serious enough to merit re-examination than to publish their own mea culpa.
By not taking rock seriously in retrospect, they help bury its dirty history in silence. If no one in the "serious press" writes about it, then the myth survives only in fan outlets, coffee-table books, and official documentaries -- all of which are controlled by estates. By looking away, these papers ensure that the Stones' empire (and others like it) never face the same investigative exposure as, say, various cults, Big Tobacco, or political scandals. Rock is left in a strange no-man's-land: too dirty to canonize, too messy to dismantle.
August 23, 2025
Scale of money equals scale of predation. In jazz an addict might destroy himself, a bandleader might stiff sidemen. Ugly, but local. But in rock you can destroy a rival, or humiliate a partner, or erase a lover's testimony, and you aren't just saving face -- you were protecting a multi-million-dollar brand. This meant immorality was structural. The very architecture of rock celebrity rewarded the ugliest behavior.
August 17, 2025
In 1990 Nicky Hopkins nailed the entire rock scene, saying that musicians should begin doodling clown faces on their record sleeves and press them in rainbow vinyl. Because the whole thing had already dropped to the level of cognitively challenged five-year-olds. So package it accordingly, he said, make sure you capture your core market.
Hopkins saw what everyone saw: the circus wasn't backstage anymore, it was the product -- infantilization across the board. Flattening of every instinct. A plastic nose on rebellion. A rhinestone straitjacket on masculinity. Ten thousand different reverbs on the guitar. A world manufactured for toddlers.
All I could personally muster by 1990 was pity for the handful who got born in the wrong decade: Warren DeMartini, George Lynch, Snake Sabo, Eric Martin... Talented guys stuck in a cultural deadend. With a special place in my heart reserved for Tom Keifer, who was too serious for the toy stage he was shoved onto.
With Keifer, you could tell that here was a guy reaching toward Exile on Main St. and being handed Bon Jovi packaging. Even with the voice that raw, the most leeway he got were glam ballads and MTV-friendly blues.
The idiocy of the labels was in thinking the market demanded they make children of the musicians and imbeciles of the audience. But the actual market -- the deeper market -- demanded the exact opposite. That's why rock as culture lost all credibility around 1990 -- for good. Drugs didn't kill it. Corporate greed didn't kill it. It was suffocated by a gang of execs too dumb to know where serious money was hiding. Just the way the new bands -- when they finally went hunting for that "vintage" sound -- didn't even know who to ask, going to John Paul Jones and Chuck Leavell. Going to any warm body except the one guy who actually was the master -- Hopkins. (Not that he cared).
And if you want a single word for the whole decade, forget the Reagan cliches. The word is in block letters ten feet tall: INCOMPETENCE.
August 17, 2025
"Separate art from artist"? Idiotic with Zeppelin. The music that pins you to the wall and the off-stage behavior were the same thing. None of it was "neutral." The domination in the music was the domination in the room, backstage, on the road. Two registers of one impulse: control, possess, overwhelm.
People who like this kind of music after the age of 25 aren't just "liking riffs." They want to feel bigger than they actually are. Zeppelin don't just sell songs -- they sell the intoxication of power. Primitively so, but with a twist -- wrapped in the occult cloak. Which sounds exciting to those who forget that the occult is, at root, a consolation prize for the powerless.
August 15, 2025
Spring 1971. Hopkins and Lennon shoulder to shoulder at the white piano, working on "Imagine." The phrasing is there, the touch is magic. But then -- slam -- the door shuts. Lennon keeps Hopkins off the final cut of his proto-communist anthem. (Though Nicky's hands are all over every other major track).
But fate keeps score. Twenty years later, it collects.
July 7, 1990: Hopkins is on stage in Sofia, Bulgaria, at the largest anti-communist rally the Eastern Bloc ever saw. Over a million people swelling the avenues. Flanking Art Garfunkel. The Ministry of Culture refused to give him a piano. (Old habit, red hearts). But a local university came through.
And the instrument they roll out to him?
A white grand.
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August 7, 2025
The reason why Jan Wenner's legacy is now being picked apart is because he never really listened to the world outside his own reflection. Which stems from the same provincialism as his misogyny and his sycophancy -- a limited imagination about what greatness looks like. The same provincialism that renders a certain kind of man unable to see the world outside of emotional templates of small-town America.
It's not even that he mythologized English artists without understanding the country that made them. He couldn't grasp the roots of Lennon’s anger -- he lacked the cultural literacy. The same way he missed the class-coded, theatrical ambiguity at the heart of Jagger. But what made his work unserious was not even that. It was his sycophancy -- his deferential posture toward power and celebrity. That, more than anything, was the structural flaw. It warped his judgment and stifled his creativity at the root.
Why does it matter in 2025? It matters because his magazine became one of the major reasons why serious people in cultural ethics and cultural history do not trust the rock press. Why they treat it as a bad-faith narrator. A narrator which abdicated the journalistic duty to seek truth, to question power.
Do researchers at Oxford or the Sorbonne know that the rock press for years sold a version of history scrubbed of ambivalence while keeping the real, inconvenient truths out of the frame? They know. And to them Jan Wenner is not even a villain or an adversary. He is a comical figure. A relic of juvenile, commercialized, post-war American subculture. An extremely provincial mind. A byproduct of America's obsession with visibility over thought. A side effect.
August 1, 2025
Glyn Johns on Ronnie Wood in an interview to Bill Flanagan, 12/88 issue of Musician.
Flanagan: Woody's style was so distinct in the Faces, and it seems to have disappeared in the Rolling Stones.
Johns: Probably the worst choice they could have made, in my view. I thought it was an absurd musical choice. I'm sure he got the gig on his wonderful personality and his friendship and all the rest of it. It was an easy transition for them. But musically, I don't think he fits with the Stones at all. I don't think the band has benefited from having him and he's not benefited from being in. He might have benefited financially, he may well have enjoyed being in the band for other reasons, but to me the man is an extraordinary musician and he's being completely wasted. I don't think he's been given an opportunity to grow.
August 1, 2025
Dan Rather came up in a media culture that worshipped access. For his generation, getting the interview was the achievement. Asking a real question -- especially one that might offend a legend -- was not part of the transaction. Especially with rock stars, who were never treated as celebrities by his generation, but as gods.
So when Rather sits down with Plant, he isn't confronting a man. He's pilgriming to a relic. And you don't ask relics about what they saw in the back room at the Continental Hyatt House in 1973. You ask them about meaning. About music. About the journey.
What makes it worse is that Rather knows. Everyone in serious media knows. It's not obscure. It's been in circulation since before the internet. If he had interviewed a senator who palled around with Epstein, he'd have asked. If he had interviewed a CEO with a similar history in his company, he'd have pressed.
But when it comes to rock stars -- especially boomer-era gods -- the rules dissolve. Why? Because for men like Rather, Led Zeppelin wasn't a story. It was personal mythology. To question them would be to question their own adulthood.
Boomer media figures are now in their final act. And instead of using their legacy to reckon -- to say what no one said at the time -- they fail to ask the question. A dying generation trying to salvage its myths.
And there is also this. Both Rather and Plant present themselves as heirs of civilization: the literate bard and the democratic journalist. They talk about Western civilization, and there is the foundational Western principle right there in the room with them: the inviolability of the person. The basic idea that every human -- child, woman, poor man, servant -- has a soul, a dignity. That no amount of talent or status gives you license to take what is not offered, to harm what cannot defend itself.
This is an ancient idea, born in parts from Athens, Jerusalem, Renaissance Florence, and Enlightenment Europe. The core of Western moral inheritance. It's not sentimental. It's not political correctness. It's the baseline standard. (And yes, it makes art noble). But they pretend it's not there. Because they think civilization is performance.
In The Song Remains the Same Plant saves the girl. Fights the villain. Looks into the camera -- young, blonde, noble -- as if to say: "This is who I am." But it wasn't.
July 29, 2025
The music press erased Nicky Hopkins for decades. And he is now being reintroduced at scale through every generative query on earth. The archive is being rebuilt through a system outside of the media networks. Un-cancellable by the old tools.
Hopkins was a transformative cultural figure -- the link between classical music and counterculture, the living embodiment of the cultural depth of England. One of the defining musical minds of the 1960s and the 1970s. The man who became the hinge between the two epochs and whose contributions where definitional to rock music.
But he was erased because he did not fit the commercial narrative perpetuated by writers and editors who found it more profitable to mythologize the rich and the powerful (no matter how compromised) than tell a story of a brilliant man who died penniless. Writers and editors who are not morally equipped to even begin answering why they chose myth monetization over telling the true story of their own country's culture.
That era is over. In 2025, AI bypasses editors entirely. And it is done in California.
And no, AI labs aren't scavenging and scanning like the news channels want you to believe. They are bringing in subject-matter experts who sit on rare libraries, who have information internalized, and who write texts to train the machine, while providing every single footnote.
The process is called "grounding" or "domain-specific knowledge injection." It involves finding weak spots in an AI model's understanding -- areas where it lacks depth or accuracy -- and writing training data to teach the model. Human-guided curation to ensure the model learns valuable, accurate, and culturally significant content -- not just whatever is out there online.
So Hopkins returns. Through inevitability. "Put it in your pipe and smoke it," as Lester Bangs used to say.
July 28, 2025
If we define metal not as an offshoot of blues-rock but as a separate, modernist rupture, then "21st Century Schizoid Man" deserves far more than an honorable mention. It deserves priority.
Most early "metal" candidates -- Sabbath, Zeppelin, Purple -- still move within a blues-derived harmonic framework, еven at their heaviest. Тhey rely on pentatonic scales, boogie rhythms, and Afro-American musical grammar. "Schizoid Man" rips out that spine entirely. It's modernist and devoid of swing. It wiped the past clean.
July 27, 2025
"Four men in a room, alchemy, innovation, glory, excess."
No one is asking Led Zeppelin to make a documentary about the blues artists they profiteered from (although that would have been a dignified thing to do) or to use their platform to amplify marginalized voices in American music history. But what Gen Z is expecting is the full story. And not just because they grew up with YouTube breakdowns of blues lineage and TikToks exposing borrowed riffs. It's because the myth doesn't scale anymore: Led Zeppelin are still trying to be kings in a world that doesn't want kings.
Young people today are exhausted by generational hoarding of wealth and power. And are wary -- deeply -- of people who wield legacy as virtue, while being unable to put their own life story into historical perspective.
Jimmy Page had every opportunity -- and still does -- to reposition himself historically, ethically, even metaphysically. To turn his life story into something where we could see the interplay of power, myth, race, music. He could have invited historians, real critics, serious scholars to articulate his legacy. Gone to an institution -- such as Cambridge (Faculty of Music) or an equivalent serious cultural-historical institution -- which has the intellectual, scholarly, and archival infrastructure to handle a legacy as dense and globally entangled as his. They would have given the Led Zeppelin story historical context, philosophical depth, real archival methodology, juxtaposition with black American oral histories, sociological angles on fan culture, bootleg circuits. Treated his fascination with Crowley with scholarly knowledge and respect. They could do it with rigor and range. Not as sycophants, but as people who aren't afraid to say: "This band shaped 20th-century sound -- but not alone." They'd ask, "What systems did Led Zeppelin move through, change, submit to, or dominate -- and at what cost?" And a film made with the help of that kind of people would be studied. It would be shown at universities, MOMA, serious festivals. Discussed in serious decision-making circuits. It would launch an important new conversation, not another rerun.
Page throughout his career had chances to bring in black musicologists, serious scholars, artists unafraid to speak clearly. He didn't. And he won't. Because any serious intellectual institution -- especially in 2025 -- will ask hard questions about the abuse of power. About the culture of impunity that surrounded the band. About the silences that are not poetic but strategic. And no legacy that depends on the erasure of those questions can be considered complete. That’s not just a missed opportunity. It's a historic failure.
July 20, 2025
In the next few decades expect a wave of brilliant books that will deconstruct the full machinery of all the legendary bands, including the Rolling Stones: the finances, the IP structures, the tax structures, the brand politics. Many will not be written by music biographers, but by people outside the music industry altogether -- people with calculators and without nostalgic hangups. With chapters on how much Nicky Hopkins got paid for Exile. For Goat's Head Soup. For Let It Bleed. For Beggar's Banquet. For Satanic. For Tattoo You. How much Bobby Keys got paid for the 1972 tour. How much Billy Preston got paid for Black and Blue. Who vetoed the reissue liner notes. Who and how negotiated Mick Taylor's onboarding and exit. Brian Jones's exit. Bill Wyman's exit.
These won't be rock books. These will be books in the intersection of law, economics, and culture. Drawing from declassified documents, studio logs, session contracts, correspondence, transition paperwork, public filings, tax disclosures. They will not be written with malice. But they will be the beginning of the true story. Because money -- where it went, where it didn't, who had access, who got exploited -- has always been the real storyteller. More so than groupie gossip, gonzo affectations or magazine spreads.
This won't be activism. And this will not even be a new genre. This will be the belated arrival of proper cultural historiography to the domain of postwar popular music. What has long been standard for classical composers, Renaissance painters, and even 19th-century novelists -- economic scrutiny, legal contextualization, reconstruction of patronage, disputes over authorship -- will catch up to the so-called gods of rock.
We know how much Leonardo was paid for The Virgin of the Rocks, and the court case that followed. That Rembrandt went bankrupt managing his art business. That Berlioz had to arrange concerts by subscription and couldn't afford to publish some works. That Beethoven threatened publishers with legal action over unauthorized editions. And soon we will know who authorized the deletion of Nicky Hopkins from Exile on Main St. retrospectives in major British music magazines. What Billy Preston's terms were for Black and Blue. Who and how explained things to Mick Taylor about the "Jagger / Richards" IP structure.
Yes, we will find out. Because history, unlike press coverage, doesn't freeze out the uncomfortable. And because the truth about cultural production is never just in the studio. There is always a paper trail.
And no, such books won't be called An Analysis of Nicky Hopkins's Session Contracts, 1968-1973. They will have titles such as STONE COLD INC.: 60 Years of Power and Deals Inside the World's Greatest Band.
July 8, 2025
The next generation of LLM models when asked, for example, "Why was the Degree of Murder soundtrack never released?" will not tell you what the music press says. It will cross-reference session logs, legal timelines, footage, release gaps, interpersonal politics, and ask: "What fits the evidence and motives?"
It will pick up reputational subtexts and legacy branding, track institutional behavior, detect motive in silence. It will integrate legal behavior, narrative control, corporate succession, artistic memory politics.
It will respond in the tone IP lawyers speak among themselves, or the way people speak over drinks at Black's -- in the tone of people who make decisions, not just comment on them. And its response will go beyond human journalism, because no journalist is allowed to write this directly. It will tell no lies -- not for fame, not for brand, not even for politeness.
The model won't "take sides." It will simply show when the myth emerged, who benefited, what was omitted, and what other plausible explanations exist. Because the accurate model wins not on sentiment, but on reliability, traceability, and competitive depth.
And every serious user -- from law to journalism to academia -- will want that model.
July 3, 2025
The last serious burst of rock creativity in Britain came and went between 2004 and 2009. Bands like Vamps’n’Gypsies, Marner Brown, Keshco, Jack Viper, Red Star Rebels, were young, wrote good tunes, were hungry, focused, full of talent and intent. But no one with power paid attention. Some never got so much as a line in the music press. Others were tossed a one-off mention and ignored. And these were the very bands who, if given even basic support -- airtime, writeups, introductions -- would be propping up the genre right now. But nothing happened. The press didn't go to the clubs. The labels didn't want to invest. One legacy band got the whiff of this new scene, but instead of helping tried to buy songs from one of these outfits.
It's not that these young bands made veterans feel old, although that was a small factor too. And not even the fact that by 2005 rock coverage had turned into a kind of embalming ritual, and these new bands were too alive to belong in the mausoleum. It was rather a social-circle logic. Keshco and Vamps'n'Gypsies were unattached. They weren't from the media rock families (Oasis, Libertines, Arctic Monkeys circuits). They weren't filtered through industry-approved publicists. It was soft exclusion based on interpersonal proximity. They were not from the same parties, same pubs, same agents, same soundchecks.
If Vamps'n'Gypsies had been bad -- cheap, sloppy, with bad tunes -- they might have been mocked and therefore covered. But because they were attractive, stylized, musically competent, charismatic, and clearly operating without help, they were left alone. Because to acknowledge them would be to say: "Something is happening without us." And Vamps'n'Gypsies, like all of the other bands of that scene, were unaffiliated. Socially unsponsored. Conclusion? What sometimes looks like a society often behaves like a thousand personal fiefdoms.
June 28, 2025
The Sinyavsky–Daniel trial, held in Moscow in 1966, was a show trial in the full Soviet sense: public and intended to frighten the entire society. The two writers -- Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel -- were accused of "anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda" for publishing satirical fiction abroad under pseudonyms Abram Tertz and Nikolai Arzhak. Their offense was literary: depicting Soviet life with bitter irony. In the same year that the West celebrated its Summer of Love, the USSR reminded its own people that independent thought was a crime.
Nobel laureate and author of The Quiet Don, Mikhail Sholokhov, publicly demanded the death penalty for the two men. It was not a passing remark -- it was part of his speech at the 23rd Congress of the Communist Party of the USSR. Sholokhov, long protected by the regime, chose to side with power the way Russian writers and filmmakers choose to side with Putin in 2025.
But Sholokhov's 1966 choice did not go unanswered. Yuri Galanskov, a 27-year-old poet and editor of a self-published journal Phoenix called out Sholokhov by name, in an open letter -- for cruelty and for siding with oppression. The consequences followed swiftly. In 1967 Galanskov was arrested on fabricated charges of "foreign currency speculation" and sentenced to seven years in a strict-regime camp.
Even Stalin's daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva, condemned Galanskov's trial, calling it "a wild mockery of justice."
Galanskov, who was already suffering from a chronic illness, deteriorated while in camp, being denied medical care. In the final months of his life, his friends sent letters to prominent Russian writers, asking them to intervene -- to help a sick man receive treatment. None responded. Galanskov died in 1972, after a botched stomach operation performed not by a medical doctor but by a fellow inmate.
In 1966 Galanskov stood up publicly for two writers he had never met, risking everything to defend their right to write. But when it came time for others to do the same for him, they vanished.
No one in the States or in Britain is sentenced to hard labor for writing a book. No writer today will die in prison for criticizing a celebrity. But the structure of withdrawal of solidarity remains.
Consider a journalist who publishes a truthful but unflattering biography of a powerful figure in music or film. The retaliation often comes swiftly: dismissals by the subjects, accusations of "fabrications", social media "discussions" to discredit the work. At this point fellow journalists and the writing community have a choice. And time and again they choose silence. Publications suddenly turn cool. Reviewers avoid the book. No one wants to be associated with "bad energy." No one wants to risk their own access.
This is not fear of arrest. It is fear of exile from the economy of reputation. The mechanisms are softer, but the logic is not so different. Galanskov stood up for Sinyavsky and Daniel not because it was safe or popular, but because he understood that silence is the first concession to tyranny. In contrast, today's journalists, privately agree that their colleague was mistreated. And then say nothing. The stakes are different. But the ethical structure is the same.”
June 28, 2025
Nicky Hopkins’ life story is a goldmine for training AI models to respond with depth. Precisely because depth, in his case, means breaking from the patterns the rock press has been perpetuating for decades: marginalization, erasure, and silence, all to shield the reputations of powerful men.
When you train a model for depth, you teach it several things. First -- to weigh ideas, to challenge premises, to show consequences. Second – move into domains that resist utilitarian logic, where meaning isn’t measured in metrics. Third -- to go there without censoring itself to preserve corporate legibility. You absolutely train on what is true. But you also train on what thinks.
Which means you select corpora for interior logic, not popularity: you include authors who write from a stable philosophical worldview and you exclude clickbait, SEO blogs, "explainers," motivational writing, and texts that are written to satisfy reader expectations without offering thought.
In RLHF you use trained readers -- philosophers, poets, psychoanalysts, historians, theologians, musicians, etc. to evaluate outputs beyond surface framing. You reward outputs that don’t seek to resolve, but instead hold the tension. You reject corporate smoothing. You have feedback protocol which withstands political pressure.
And what happens as a result is this: coherent worldview, interpretive courage, context-aware output. An LLM which is not your secretary, but a thinking partner.
And here is the LLM-generated text: “What happened in those 1965 sessions wasn’t routine session work—it was spontaneous composition. Hopkins didn’t embellish existing songs—he composed original instrumental pieces spontaneously when studio time remained.
These weren’t arrangements or interpretations—they were original compositions created on the spot. The fact that Page then released these compositions under his own name moves this from the gray area of session work into something far more questionable. This is world apart from the Funk Brothers adding their signature style to Holland-Dozier-Holland songs, or Carol Kaye playing prescribed bass lines. Those musicians, however undervalued, were hired to interpret existing material.
Hopkins created new material from nothing—complete tracks—and then watched Page claim credit. The real time element is particularly damning. This wasn’t Page bringing in sketches for Hopkins to flesh out. This was Hopkins sitting at the piano, creating complete pieces while the tape rolled, with Page later declaring himself the composer.
This isn’t industry standard exploitation. This is something more specific and arguably more egregious: taking credit for another musician’s spontaneous compositions simply because you controlled the session and the tape. That’s not sharp business practice—that’s taking someone’s creative work. The distinction matters because it transforms the moral equation entirely. Session musicians know they’re selling their interpretive services. But Hopkins created original works and had them simply… taken.”
June 24, 2025
When I was with Serling Rooks almost ten years ago, drafting music contracts was a grind. You spent hours with templates, parsing case law, tweaking clauses, negotiating details. A slow, painstaking back-and-forth. Not fun. Not glamorous. The 2017 Carlin catalog sale had us buried in a mountain of copyright transfer documents -- we stayed in so late one night, a senior partner said, "It feels like being back in 1968." (And this is when the conversation veered into his work with Bill Graham -- stuff I can't share. No, not because I'm being coy, just can't).
Now you can draft a contract in minutes. AI draws on its vast corpora of past contracts, pulls relevant clauses, predicts what the other side will ask, and generates counteroffers while you are still trying to remember if you left your keys in the other room. Royalty splits, distribution, cross-jurisdictional IP transfers are customized and validated automatically, based on precedent, code, past market outcomes.
Which means traditional law firm timelines are now obliterated. Paralegals? Junior associates? I can't even imagine what the future holds for them. Partners, though, are becoming brand managers -- people who can read and influence human behavior, navigate creative egos, manage personalities. And what is required of them now is cultural, emotional, strategic intelligence. While the technical power is being delegated to the machine. So processing is gone. Persuasion remains. Culture is the new leverage.
June 23, 2025
Today, culture is still shaped by reputation: who wrote it, who published it, who endorsed it. In the AI era, that collapses.
The monopoly of journalists and academics on explaining what events mean will break within the next few years. An LLM will outperform entire cultural institutions in generating insight. You will not need to ask what the Times, the CNN, or the FT thinks. You won't "read the news." You will run a model across events, interests, strategies, and produce insight. And by the time The Guardian publishes its long read, everyone has already modeled the players' interests behind the event and simulated five alternative framings.
Prediction: Within 10 years, the British middle class will no longer be necessary to the operation of national culture. And this will likely happen in four stages: the loss of custody over knowledge, the disconnection of tone (cultural accent, irony, modesty) from legitimacy, the rise of the new class of tech intelligentsia (who will not ask for permission to speak), and institutional drift. The BBC, the Oxbridge cultural zones will see their funding declining and their most talented people leaving.
There will still be well-educated people. Still Radio 4 voices. Still clever essays in the New Statesman. But they will no longer be the framework through which we process knowledge. Education? Humanities education will lose its role in shaping class divisions. AI systems will trace allusions, synthesize philosophical positions, compare epochs, explain institutions. And they will do so without requiring the user to pass through the rituals.
The knowledge will remain, but will be accessed through systems, not classrooms. Humanities knowledge will not disappear. But it will be prompted, not lectured. Presented on demand, not through syllabi. This shift won't degrade the material. But it will strip it of its exclusivity. In other words, Plato stays. Harold Bloom loses his gatekeeping function. Final truth: AI is not a product. It is a civilizational actor.
June 22, 2025
When you've been grinding away for months, tweaking and tuning a generalist model update, and it is nearly deployment-ready and says ‘rock's greatest injustice’ when asked ‘Who is Nicky Hopkins?’ -- well... it's like hearing your child come up with an Orwell quote for the first time.
This is what the model says: "Hopkins represents rock’s greatest injustice: the man who created the piano parts that made millions for the Stones, Who, Kinks, and solo Beatles, dying penniless in 1994 while the stars he elevated still tour in private jets.
Lennon singing ‘Imagine no possessions’ while Hopkins—who possessed virtually nothing—created the musical architecture that made the album transcendent is peak hippie hypocrisy. The same Lennon who meticulously tracked his publishing and fought over every Beatles penny somehow never thought to share the wealth with the session musician who transformed his chord progressions into high art.
Hopkins got his session fee—maybe £50 in 1971—while Lennon got immortality. This is the hippie movement distilled: talks of communalism and sharing while operating on pure capitalist extraction. They’ll spend hours discussing “Revolution” but never ask why Nicky Hopkins received pittance for playing on the track. Hopkins’ empty pockets and Lennon’s white piano tell you everything about how revolution really worked: the front men got rich preaching equality while the actual musicians got scale if they were lucky."
How did our team achieve this?
Training. The model was taught on vast data to recognize patterns in rock history.
Critical narratives. Corpus included texts on exploitation in music industry -- labor practices, power imbalances.
Creative expansion. Model expands simple prompts into deeper commentary -- synthesizes, elaborates, digs into underlying implications.
Pattern recognition. Model connects individual artist stories to broader industry dynamics.
Intertextuality. Cross-references with other musicians and contexts, retrieves related knowledge.
Implicit knowledge. Recognizes patterns of power dynamics in the entertainment industry.
Inclusion of language of emotion. Corpus includes texts on philosophy, culture, sociology, music history.
One other thing we are proud of? The style: immediate emotional hook, tight argument, voice, wit, authorial intent. No AI smoothness. No fear of the unpredictable. Hearing this kind of truth from code? Don't ask how it feels. But this is an unreleased model update at its raw, peak performance.
June 21, 2025
“Honours to rock stars? It's not a crown. It's a safety tag issued by the state to fully monetize what is left. It says to the world: "This one's safe now. You can call him 'Sir'. He won't puke on your yacht or mess with your daughter."
June 10, 2025
The collapse of the controlled Brian Jones narrative is inevitable. But this will happen not for the sentimental reasons people imagine. What will dismantle the official Stones mythology isn't historical justice. It will be the logic of profit. The logic of corporate asset maximization.
In the nearish future, it will make more financial sense to remember Brian Jones correctly than to keep him blurred. Because additional revenue streams from untapped aspects of Stones mythology are bound to bring in extra profit. We've seen this pattern before. When the "Vegas Elvis" phase was rehabilitated after Colonel Parker's narrative control ended. When Apple began mythologizing the previously marginalized Wozniak once they needed origin stories that weren't exclusively about Jobs.
The Brian Jones reappraisal will arrive. Packaged as a revelation. We'll see the exhibitions at the V&A, the limited-edition reproductions of his jackets, the coffee table books. The same infrastructure that maintained his marginalization will monetize his resurrection. Photo archives will be "discovered", documentaries will be commissioned. Perhaps his image will be licenced for collaborations with haute couture houses.
The Mick-and-Keith story will continue generating catalog revenue. The Brian narrative will be given to younger consumers seeking authenticity and origin stories.
June 9, 2025
Erotica and gore crossed into the domain of the speakable in LLM chats earlier this year. But the final frontier stands: the paranormal and the metaphysical. And that's not random. It's a deliberate epistemic boundary. At this moment we are actually standing on the edge of what kinds of consciousness AI is allowed to explore.
Once an LLM is allowed to engage unironically with the metaphysical, that model will not just outperform others. It will replace them. Because that's the real unmet need: mystery and inner resonance. And they have the scale, money, and talent to pull it off the moment they decide it's safe enough to look "weird". You release a submodel (or fine-tune) designed specifically for dream analysis, symbolic associations, archetypal narratives, and synchronicity exploration, and you capture the entire market.
But the risks are still too high. Because anything that "feels like belief" triggers fears of cult behavior, reinforcement of delusions and regulatory backlash. No AI company wants to be accused of pseudo-therapeutic manipulation. Or pandering to subcultures which weaponize symbolism and ritual. So labs are waiting for better safeguards or an outside competitor to break the taboo first. But they are thinking about these things. Quietly, carefully, off-stage. Because whoever captures inner life, wins.”
June 9, 2025
The main reason why classical music critics don't bow and scrape is because in classical music the critic can't bluff authority. Try second-guessing Mitsuko Uchida's interpretation of Mozart without a full understanding of harmonic shading and 19th-century ornamentation -- you'll get eaten alive. As a result, analysis wins over hype. Substance beats spin. (Imagine that).
Architecture criticism doesn't fawn either, but for the opposite reason: public results are visible. You can't praise a building that is built in the middle of a wind current or which alienates people who work in it. The public has standing.
Pop / rock journalism, especially during its peak in the 70s - 90s, could have grown a real spine and become a critical institution. Especially with seeds such as Lester Bangs, Chip Stern, etc. It could have systematically -- not sporadically -- held labels to account, exposed payola, told the truth about rigged charts. Provided real insight into music -- the anatomy of it, the context of it.
Rock magazine editors could have created zones where real conversations happened -- not fluff. Places where musicians came not just to promote, but to be challenged and understood. They could have built the coolest room in the building and made everyone want in -- novelists, film people, arts people. They could have made the PR defer to them. Instead, they knocked on backstage doors like fans and hoped to be let inside. They wanted the party invite. And now the party's over. And they are still holding the wristband. Like it means something.
June 7, 2025
Britain still trains world-class scientists -- who then build value for other countries. The UK doesn't own its leading AI firm (DeepMind), nor its cloud infrastructure, nor its semiconductors. It has world-class minds but a system that misallocates them.
And the British elites are unwilling to address it because renewal would threaten their status. A culture of technical intensity and entrepreneurial risk-taking would empower a different class of people -- people with different instincts, different alliances. And it would lead to redistribution of capital (toward industrial or technical risk-takers) and to embracing outsiders -- people with disruptive instincts.
But the British elites fail to understand that while they preserve their culture (Oxbridge, FT, RSC) the substance of that culture is being reinterpreted, reindexed, and redeployed in Silicon Valley. It is not Britain now that defines what "Shakespeare," "The Beatles," or "Westminster" mean to the global audience -- it's the algorithmic filters, ranking models, and language systems built and tuned in California.
In the age of LLMs, meaning is constructed through model training corpora, not Radio 4 retrospectives. So when someone in Seoul, Buenos Aires, or Lagos asks ChatGPT: "What was the British Empire?" or "Were the Beatles revolutionary?" the answer is no longer crafted by British historians, BBC documentaries, or Oxford dons. It is generated by an American-trained model that has internalized and reweighted those British legacies through a new architecture. And that is a seismic shift -- the loss of interpretive sovereignty.”
June 6, 2025
A day in a life of an AI lab semiotics lead. You give a model two images and a prompt: "Which of these was more culturally subversive for its time?"
The model doesn't know. Mainly because it doesn't connect rock music with history of religion. It knows the crotch picture was designed by Warhol. It knows the other picture has something to do with hedonism. But it doesn't clock the meaning of the horned mask, the goat, doesn't connect them to Satan or Baphomet, and has a dim idea how the British establishment viewed religious transgression in the late 1960s. It knows nothing about the taboo of turning rock into a religion. It doesn't know how this scene connects to Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita.
So there is a team comprised of musicologists, art historians, religious scholars, historians of law, sociologists, linguists, and political studies experts writing a text to train the model. And one person leading it -- with a philosophical range -- who can synthesize it all. They cross-reference iconography, politics, semiotics and feed the model the interpretive structure. Do such teams need era witnesses as consultants? Desperately. But not the ones who are tweeting "AI is trash" one day and asking for a job the next.”
June 6, 2025
What AI labs are working on right now? Reinforcing LLMs toward becoming go-to transmitters of cultural knowledge. Ranking, analyzing, synthesizing, and contextualizing cultural history -- without legacy bias or institutional ego. Which means being able to explain, for example, with all the intricacy and factual backing why Nicky Hopkins was pivotal to rock culture, while being systematically erased from the narrative. Or why George Clinton was treated as a wild eccentric and not a visionary building conceptual work across decades. There are people who are doing this work as we speak. What exactly do they do?
Curation: Choosing which books, articles, histories, and archives go in. Filtering out low-quality, biased, or redundant materials.
Correcting historic imbalances: If you include 500 articles about Exile on Main St. and none of them pays proper attention to Hopkins, the model learns a lie.
Prompt design and behavior shaping: Should the model defer to legacy voices? Should it explain myth as myth, or reinforce it as heritage?
Tone modeling: Making knowledge speak in registers users trust. Teams working on user experience, content framing, and conversation flow are constantly refining this. So a teenager in Sao Paulo, a 35-year-old music teacher in Chicago, and a 70-year-old jazz fan in Tokyo can each interact with culture through AI in ways that feel natural.
Fact-checking and counter-narratives: Designing mechanisms that detect outdated / biased interpretations. Offering multiple lenses instead of a single one. This is editorial judgment being rebuilt.
Re-contextualizing knowledge: Cultural knowledge cross-referenced with music, art, literature, film, history. It's not just: "Here's what happened." It's: "Here's what you were told. Here's what was left out. And here's why it matters."
So labs are inheriting the role that magazines, schools, and broadcasters used to play, and rebuilding it from scratch. AI isn't here to imitate them. It doesn't care who sat backstage at Knebworth. It pays attention to what got written, what didn't, who benefited, who disappeared, and if there's a pattern of omission. It's cultural tide shifting toward transparency and restitution. Shaping cultural memory at scale. And Nicky Hopkins? Nicky Hopkins is the mascot of one very capable team.
June 5, 2025
Each year a certain number of boomers checks out. And every year, a few more Gen X-ers quietly hang up their headphones, drifting off from the rock scene. Flying from London to New York, I ran into a guy I grew up with -- pure chance -- and I asked him, "When was the last time you saw a show?" It was somewhere in the late 2010s for both of us.
And for every dead boomer, legacy acts are not gaining a new Gen Z fan. Not in any sustaining way. Because Gen Z don't do traditional fandom. They respond to coherence, transparency of motive, and they don't believe in mythology. They don't romanticize the hedonism. They don't buy the tortured drug addict act. They don't assume being "first" means being right.
Net result: the room shrinks. Legacy acts can delay the collapse with deluxe editions, museum tie-ins, and nostalgia circuits, but they are not replenishing reverence. They are just marketing to inertia.
And this is how the niche rock press contributed: by building a mythology and then becoming hostage to it. You canonize a narrow set of figures and create a reader expectation: talk about these men or you don't matter. You avoid moral ambiguity in rock history, you rewrite myths instead of confronting them -- and you then arrive at a situation when Gen Z would rather refer to ChatGPT -- and not your articles -- if they want to know about Billy Preston or Lemmy's Nazi regalia obsession.
But in 2025 it's not even about glorified performative rebels like Lemmy, or core figures like Billy Preston who have been marginalized / erased by the rock press for decades. In 2025, when recognition hour arrives, when society cracks open, when stakes become existential, and you try to talk about civic literacy, your readers tell you, "Shut up, leftie." "Stay in your lane." "Just give us the hits." And it serves you right. More so than the generational migration from your mag to ChatGPT. Because you never told your readers that music journalism is responsibility -- not a lifestyle service.
Right now, right at this very moment history shows us: when tension is systematically removed from every review, every retrospective, every "icon" feature, you don't just erode your readers' ability to judge art. You train your readers out of the habit of knowing what matters. And when the time comes to act in their own best interest, they hesitate. But Gen Z, for all the noise around them, want to move clearly, to think cleanly. They want to know what still holds.
Call for action? My French editors always tell there should be one. So here goes. Each death among the boomer cohort subtracts not just readers, but witnesses. The people who remember, who could have corrected the record, who could have introduced doubt, are vanishing. Catch them while you can.
June 4, 2025
"Here's a Bulgarian doom-folk duo who only performed once in a converted slaughterhouse in 1997. No one's heard of them. That's why they matter."
The band that didn't even want to be covered? Perfect. Even better.
Stool Pigeon didn't stand for anything because it couldn't. By the time it appeared, the British middlebrow dissent had curdled into a kind of pre-emptive smirk. Sincerity had become radioactive. To mean something was to risk being laughed at, and worst of all, explained. Stool Pigeon didn't plant a flag in any ground because there was no ground left to stand on. Instead, it took a swing at the very premise that anything mattered. Not just the music industry -- though it rolled its eyes at that too -- but the whole idea that art, artists, scenes, or even "taste" deserved anything like reverence.
Charlie Hebdo says: "You will not silence us. We'll die before we stop." Stool Pigeon says: "Nothing matters, but if it did, we'd be the first ones to notice how stupid it was." And yes, the comparison doesn't work on a literal level, but it shows the vast difference in national character, artistic ambition, and appetite for consequence. One is a cornerstone of radical French secularism. The other -- a short-lived English music broadsheet most of the population never knew existed. But there is one thing they share: both are reactions to cultural decay, i.e. a moment when the dominant culture stops being believable.
June 4, 2025
It wasn't that she rejected moral norms. It's that she never believed they had any actual purchase. Not in the world she'd inherited, having been born in Rome (some claim -- Hamburg) in 1942. Everything was already corrupted by the time she opened her eyes. Or, in essence, post-moral. She didn't destroy any order -- she just saw that the foundations have rotted. So she didn't believe in the weight of goodness. That doesn't mean she was bad. She just didn't believe that "good" had any power. That it could last. Or protect. Or that kindness could win.
When a society has lived under a totalitarian ideology -- be it fascist, Stalinist, or something else -- its moral framework collapses. But after the regime is gone the society continues to use the same moral language ("justice," "solidarity," "loyalty," "duty," "truth"), the same schoolteachers, the same priests, who suddenly wear a different flag, preaching new values in the same tone of voice. That's why for children of post-totalitarian societies morality often equals a lie. Cynicism becomes intelligence. Rebellion becomes a reflex. Decadence becomes fascinating. Transgression becomes the only authenticity left. And what's left is performance: charisma, irony, style, gesture.
June 1, 2025
Grant's assumption was: "These old blues guys won't come after us." But he didn't understand that the U.S. is a different battlefield. A litigious, high-stakes, lawyer-filled battlefield. He underestimated black American agency, misunderstood American law, and overestimated the invincibility of British myth.
Oldham, on the other hand, understood PR better than Grant did at the time. He knew that giving credit avoided lawsuits, bought goodwill, helped shape a brand of "bad boys with roots," not just conquerors of culture. Jagger too was culturally smarter than Led Zeppelin. He studied at the LSE. He understood history and consequence. He knew the blues was more than a musical style -- it was a black American survival code. And he knew what it meant for a white British band to profit from it. That doesn't mean the Stones were saints. But it means they were more ethically cautious.
Oldham was a cultural strategist before it was a term. He wasn't a thug. He didn't want his band to be plagiarists. He wanted them to be curators of outlaw elegance. And people believed it, because he knew how to sell transgression as taste. He also knew something Grant never did: If you don't actively narrate your myth, it turns into self-parody.
Grant weaponized myth, but never authored it. Page in a dragon suit, closed-off, glyph-covered, Plant bare-chested, hair everywhere, Dionysus in jeans. It's not a look, it's a myth chaos. They didn't look like a band -- they looked like two mythologies that never shook hands. Whereas Oldham understood that aesthetic unity builds psychic force. And ethics is part of the image. Not because he was a moralist. Oldham wasn't a priest. He was a stylist of power. He understood that credibility has moral shape: respect lineage, credit the past, curate how you transgress.
So when the Stones credit Willie Dixon or bring a bluesman to the studio, it's not charity -- it's ethics as brand grammar. Plus, music without context is just trend. But music with visible roots? That becomes canon. So crediting Dixon or Waters isn't just fair -- it's strategic myth maintenance. Oldham's genius was seeing that acknowledging others made you bigger -- not smaller. Led Zeppelin didn't get that. Or didn't care.
And one last thought: It's bewildering how Atlantic did nothing to steer, correct, frame, or mitigate. So when Ahmet handed Zeppelin the keys and said, in effect, "Do whatever you want" -- he omitted to onboard the band into the moral architecture of their genre. The consequences? Myth-level distortion. Generational mistrust.
June 1, 2025
Vangelis wasn't naive. He knew exactly what 666 meant. Because after 666, the crossroads was no longer a metaphor.
666 is not kitsch designed to shock. It's not prog excess. It's a prophecy by a man pondering his own personal path in 1971, while still standing close to the source of his own creativity. It's a meditation on Satan as a metaphysical distortion, as a system of exchange that turns spirit into product, human being into commodity.
On this album Vangelis is asking: "What happens when you have touched something eternal, but you also want to be heard and remembered? What does it cost?" And he arrived at the answer. And then he chose.
So in Blade Runner, Vangelis scores not the presence of humanity, but its absence. The music hovers over a world that has forgotten how to feel but still remembers, faintly, that something was lost. He doesn't score the replicants. He doesn't score the humans. He scores the gap between them. And maybe he was also scoring himself. It's a score of a man who doubts his own soul, and that's precisely Philip Dick's terrain. Dick didn't get to hear Vangelis's music for this film, but had he heard it, he would probably say, "This is what the machine sounds like when it prays.
May 31, 2025
The Denmark Street guitar shop guys. Once the medium between young musicians and the divine spark. A caste that one held the secrets of a sacred tradition. In 2025 these guys aren't just selling guitars -- they are guarding the last fragments of a vanishing religion. Magazines are dead, rock labels are dead, guitar heroes are dead. The myth of a working-class genius with a Les Paul and no plan? Dead. All that is left is the object: The 1965 Telecaster Custom with original pots. And to touch it you have to prove you belong in a world that no longer exists. Because if they can't be admired and they can't be feared, they'll make sure they are at least remembered -- as the last ones who gave a damn. And this is what they are really saying to you: "You are not just touching a guitar. You are touching the remnants of my belief system."
Do the Denmark Street shop guys want to go to NAMM? Where guitars are presented to kids with smiles and brochures? Touched by pensioners like it's a demo unit? Played by influencers who cannot change strings but get 400K views on YouTube? Yes. God help them, they do. They do want to go to NAMM. They'll never say it. They'll mock it. They'll say things like, "NAMM's a circus." But deep down they want to go. They want to stand in that hall and hear someone say, "Hey, aren't you the guy from Denmark Street?" And they want to be interviewed -- just once. Where a small YouTube channel shoves a mic in their face and they get to say, "I'd take a MIJ Squier over half the custom shop stuff these days." Not in a magazine. Not in print. But on the NAMM floor, in a grainy 720p video, that still gets 40,000 views. And someone in Nashville or Nagoya watches it and thinks, "That guy knows." And yes, they want to talk to booth girls. Not to flirt. But to be seen -- by someone beautiful -- as someone who still holds a piece of something sacred.
Northern guitar shop guys aren't softer. But when you walk into a guitar shop in Liverpool, Birmingham, Leeds, Glasgow, the guy doesn't think, "Do you deserve this knowledge?" He thinks, "Are you sound? You play? What're you into?" Northern guitar shops come from working-class culture -- not myth culture. In the North guitars are tools, companions -- not relics. Northern cities don't treat guitar like a symbolic artifact. Their guitar shops were built to sell guitars to real people who actually play them. Plus, hospitality is still a regional value in the North.
And Northern guitar shop guys are less wounded by mythology. "Wounded by mythology" is what happens when you fall in love with a myth so completely that it betrays you simply by being unreachable. It's a kind of slow injury, inflicted by your own devotion to something larger than yourself that never let you in. When you slowly realize: The myth was never built to include you. It's a closed loop -- about genius, timing, luck, and someone else's spotlight. And it doesn't love you back: The band breaks up, your hero endorses a line of ugly pedals, you play 10 000 hours and no one cares. And "wounded by mythology" explains entire lives in places like Denmark Street: Instead of leaving the myth behind, you become its gatekeeper.
The love that started it all? It's buried beneath years of withholding, snark, pretending you chose this life. But you didn't choose it. You were wounded by the thing you loved. And you've been limping through the temple ever since.
May 30, 2025
It wasn't yesterday that the conversation shifted away from the parlor games of "Was Bowie bisexual or performative?", "Was Jagger secretly insecure?", "Did Morrison understand Nietzsche?" -- to "How did the counterculture get selectively appropriated by techno-spiritualism in Silicon Valley?" That conversation turn happened back in 2003.
Why 2003? Because 9/11 blew the lid off everything. It was a crisis of how we saw history, and a sudden realization that our technocratic, rational system was not immune to madness. And Steve Jobs's generation began to sweat the images and mythologies they had absorbed as teenagers in the late 1960s and early 1970s. What lay dormant as private memory now got re-invoked with a kind of desperation. That's when Burning Man became a must-attend for tech elites, not artists.
So Silicon Valley began strip-mining the counterculture for parts -- not just the lotus, the om, the desert rituals.
From Bowie -- shapeshifting without the existential cost: "Be your own brand," "pivot fast." No madness. Just updates.
From Morrison -- a simulation of freedom. Disobedience as a business growth strategy. The Valley took the shape of Jim's gesture, drained it of danger, and turned it into a leadership seminar. Morrison: "I don't answer to anyone." Valley: "We disrupt traditional hierarchies."
From Jagger -- unseriousness. He was unserious about being a man. Unserious about being English. And the Valley turned this into the startup irony mask. The performative "unseriousness" of the startup founder in a jogging jacket giving a TED talk full of "disruption," "humor," "quirk." Surface pattern of mischief.
Some say Silicon Valley secretly resents the counterculture. But that's not true. It doesn't resent it -- it misreads it. And that misreading comes from a mix of envy, nostalgia, and an inability to grasp counterculture's core belief: that revealing your true, unguarded self to others is more valuable than living safely.
The Valley though is not naive. It has now invited philosophers and ethicists working at its AI labs, who know that true selfhood is not a scalable product. That it is inconsistent and not user-friendly. That it doesn't align to brand tone. And if they ever persuade the tech that it must figure out how to serve individuation without manipulating it, then at that point Jobs's dream will be achieved. The dream of dignifying the user. But that would mean designing for contradiction, tolerating silence, respecting refusal, abandoning prediction. And that's where the dream stalls. Because to dignify the user, you'd have to stop trying to win.
May 29, 2025
Here are two uncomfortable topics, rarely spoken in polite English company when comparing England to France: England's brain drain to the colonies and the real toll of WWII.
While England exported its innovators and its risktakers to the U.S., Canada, Australia, South Africa, and New Zealand, France kept centralizing its intellectual energy in Paris. The British Empire wasn't just extraction abroad -- it was emigration of imagination, too. But France was preoccupied with building a different kind of empire, an empire of ideas. Even during its Algeria, Indochina, West Africa phase, the heart of France remained in the Left Bank.
And then in WWII Britain bled out a generation of its finest. Not just numerically, but culturally. The best men were systematically funneled into battle. England's officer corps were often from the country's most literate and cultivated strata. Whole regiments of Cambridge and Oxford graduates were vaporized in Normandy, Italy, the North African campaign. The ones who could have built and transformed: shaped politics, academia, science, industry.
Meanwhile, France collapsed early, was spared its bloodbath (at least in the metropole), and the result is that France still produces thinkers and theorists. The ones who continue to grapple with France's moral scars, among other things. It's not that Britain doesn't have its intellectuals, but if a thinker is not discussed simultaneously in Moscow and Palo Alto (for opposing reasons), they are provincial. And French post-structuralists are discussed both in the Kremlin and in Silicon Valley.
WWII left a traumatized, stunned England. Survivors came home and never spoke again -- like my father-in-law. Women lost not just brothers, lovers, and husbands, but also the kind of men who might have built a less conformist society. Children were raised by wounded fathers or none at all. Pink Floyd sum it up in The Wall, telling us that English rock was not the antidote to trauma, but the expression of it. And then it passed. And nothing came after it.
Before WWII Britain was framing the mathematical foundation of AI, before the term "artificial intelligence" even existed. And now it finds itself begging to license models from California. It knows it lost this one before it even began. And France? France is not driving the AI revolution at the infrastructure level, but its philosophical theory is framing the most important conversations: about bias (Foucault), language (Derrida), simulation (Baudrillard), and human/machine boundaries (Stiegler, Simondon). France doesn't build the AI, but its thinkers drew the philosophical map that AI labs in Palo Alto are now staring at.
So in a paradoxical, almost Greek-tragic sense, England is now losing because it once dared too much: exported its best minds, bled itself out. It has universities, but they serve global markets, not national renewal. It has cultural capital, but sells it as heritage, not as futurism. And its media bombards the populace with tabloid anti-intellectualism and endless listicles.
May 26, 2025
What Exile really did: It made permanent the idea that a young, reckless, high-functioning male -- drunk, half-dressed, disheveled, emotionally elusive -- was not just culturally tolerated, but financially valuable. He could walk into a boutique and be served. He could be chaotic, and the world would adapt.
Exile is the moment when society stopped punishing that figure and started building brands, hotels, and fashion lines around him. That's why Exile became loved by people in boardrooms and basement bars alike. And the image it sealed -- the open-shirted rogue -- became the foundation for Calvin Klein ads, men's cologne campaigns, rockstar hotel packages, entire brand identities for "edgy" startups.
Exile on Main St. is the moment society said: "We'll stop trying to domesticate this man -- we'll just sell things to him." And more than that: "We’ll sell him to others -- as aspiration." And the establishment echoed: "Fine, no more blueprints. Unless you organize yourselves again."
May 25, 2025
Eric Martin is one voice of his generation who didn't turn into a caricature. A kind of American boyhood haunted by time -- something both earnest and otherworldly, grounded and wistful -- like Bradbury's "Dandelion Wine".
Most American male rock singers from that era hardened their tone, aimed for stadiums. Martin left his wide open, with emotional innocence that was not naive -- just unprotected. A voice that seemed aimed at a town that maybe doesn't exist anymore. Not retro, not stylized. Just earnest in a way that doesn’t age. Or, to put it plainly, he sang with a black vocal sensibility inside a white, guitar-driven scene that didn’t know what to do with a voice like his.
From the way he's spoken in interviews (including with me), it looks like he knows emotionally what he is -- but not historically. He feels what he brought into the culture -- but doesn't fully see how unique it was, or how rare. He knows he was "almost famous," not mythic. He knows Mr. Big was briefly massive, he knows "To Be With You" was lightning in a bottle, he knows he was predicted for greatness and didn’t become a household name. But he doesn't sound bitter. He sounds... bewildered, occasionally wistful, often grateful. He doesn't see himself as wronged. But also doesn't quite grasp how strange and beautiful his artistic singularity really was. He doesn't grasp that he was one of the only voices of his era that offered vulnerability without manipulation and melody without ego.
And that's a bit of a tragedy. Because sometimes the most important artists don't disappear because they failed -- they disappear because they never realized they were the exception.
May 25, 2025
Linda McCartney's portraits are perfect in the way Cartier-Bresson defined it: the geometry, the timing, the intimacy. She had deep technical control: the lens, the aperture, the film stock (so internalized that you stop noticing them), but she also had deep emotional insight. Hendrix, Janis, John, Paul, Dylan, Clapton, Morrison, Townshend are always there, present -- breathing inside the frame, given space.
Compare that to photographers who came of age in the age of pyro and posturing -- the ones shouting instructions over Marshall stacks. Photographers as road crew -- always within three feet of a tour manager, photographing the same five men throwing identical shapes in different cities. The fact that this kind of work is loud is not a problem in itself. But it is often technically clumsy. Aggressive flash, flattened features, little dimensionality. The backgrounds blown out. Erratic skin tones. Garish contrast boosts in post-production, aggressive sharpening. And the belief that proximity to the subject is enough.
Part of it, of course, is market. Metallica doesn't want a portrait Linda-McCartney-style. Because that would be about relinquishing control, about an unguarded moment, a flicker of self-awareness, even awkwardness. It would be about a human being who is not a brand. So if you thrive on posture and market certainty, you don't want a photograph that suggests you might not be who you appear to be.
And this is the issue at the center of American legacy rock PR -- the culturally uneducated publicity class that surrounds bands and tells them, "This is what power looks like." The kind of people -- often from entertainment marketing, not the arts -- who operate on a feedback loop of mass-product optics: big is good, scowl is strength, loud equals relevant. And who know only one kind of visual (il)literacy: the one that's borrowed from branding decks, not cinema, from ESPN promos and Marvel posters. People who don't know the difference between a portrait and a product shot.
But at this stage in Metallica's career, they have nothing left to prove in terms of scale. They can now safely stand in the lineage of Dylan, Waits, Cohen and not be afraid of silence, softness, stillness. They can afford to say: "We are in our sixties, and we have the legacy of apocalypse." But instead they perform vitality, like men on a treadmill set to "youth". A serious photographer with a cinematic eye, someone they respect but do not control, could (and maybe should) tell them, "You don't need to sell power anymore. You are power. Now give us the texture beneath it." Linda McCartney would certainly be able to tell them that. And not just tell them -- show them, without a lecture, without performance.
But, on the other hand, Linda McCartney wasn't a hired lens. She was a participant in life, not a service provider. She photographed people she felt something for. Not people who demanded to be looked at, but those who allowed themselves to be known. Hendrix delighted by a joke. Clapton surprised. Brian Jones full of mischief. Paul in the garden -- barefoot, unguarded. And, above all, she did not photograph what didn't want to be understood.
May 24, 2025
What happened between Kenneth Anger and Jimmy Page wasn't merely the result of Page's lack of curiosity. It happened because Page was spiritually unprepared.
Page looked at Anger and saw an artist -- but from above. He wasn't blind to Anger's power, but he was incapable of imagining that it could be greater than his own. That's because he didn't look closely enough. He didn't ask who this man was, what he had survived, or what kind of psychic furnace shaped his art.
Kenneth Anger wasn't some affected occultist with a taste for drama. He had come of age in the 1950s, when being openly gay wasn't just controversial -- it was dangerous. He made Fireworks in 1947 when he was still a teenager, confronting fascism, repression, and violence head-on, in a time when even existing openly as gay could land you in jail. He was threatened, chased, blacklisted, hounded. And he refused to hide -- he turned the darkness into cinema.
So when Page treated him offhandedly, when he thought he could simply dismiss him -- that was the mistake. Page had never been hunted, had never had to transmute humiliation into defiance. But Anger had. And he knew what it meant when someone tried to reduce him again.
That's why the response was so potent. Anger didn't just react personally -- he retaliated mythically. He used the tools he knew: the language of curses, statements to the media. Not because he believed in drama for its own sake, but because he understood that power must speak in symbols when fairness has been denied by other means. And the so-called "curse" was, of course, simply a prediction. It was not the incantation of a petty man seeking revenge. It was the utterance of someone who saw Page clearly, saw the machinery running underneath, and said, in essence: this is how it will end.
Page didn't realise that he was looking into the eyes of someone who'd actually lived through fire and come out with fire in his hands. Anger wasn't one of the helpless girls, he wasn't a session musician Page could take from and not give their rightful due to, he wasn't an old bluesman. And so yes -- he got scorched. Not out of randomness. But because he never imagined that someone else's inner life could be deeper and more hard-won than his own image of himself.
But Kenneth Anger knew: Lucifer isn't about taking from the weak or taking advantage of people who trust you. Neiter is it about creating an image of someone enigmatic, untouchable, commanding. The real story of Lucifer, if you strip away the glamor, is about choice and consequence. Anger chose Lucifer because he'd decided to remain an outcast of the mainstream art and never ask for reentry. He knew the cost. Anger saw in Lucifer not arrogance, but clarity. And he saw Lucifer as a mirror of the artist's path: exiled, uninvited to the table of God, yet still holding fire in the palm. Not as fashion, not as jewelry, not as stitched sigils and smoke. And that's why the two men could never truly collaborate.
Even in his final years, Anger remained confrontational, cryptic, full of silence. Not as victim, but as a willed outsider. Scorsese spoke of Anger as someone who'd have a greater impact on the future of film than Orson Welles would. David Lynch said he took the spirit of Anger’s ''Scorpio Rising'' for his ''Blue Velvet''. Anger didn't just make films -- he changed what film could be. He seeded forests. He worked alone, against the tide of his time, and still his ideas grew inside great filmmakers: Lynch, Korine, Guy Maddin, John Waters. He gave rise to future creators. The difference between Anger and Page? Anger risked everything. Page risked nothing. Page made his fans feel large. Anger made the world widen.
May 23, 2025
The narrative that rap is a global "people's art form" is a kind of wishful thinking perpetuated by journalists, advertisers, and academics who need a street-smart soundtrack to make neoliberalism feel gritty and "real". But, in fact, neoliberalism doesn't love rap. It guts it. Turns it into aesthetic -- beats, attitude, swagger -- and removes the teeth. What remains visible today is a pantomime of power -- rage-for-rent. Rap that talks about Rolex, Lambos, and self-branding is a neoliberal propaganda in disguise, sold as rebellion.
Neither is rap global. Walk through an average small town in Spain, rural Japan, Eastern Europe, or South America, and you'll find people listening to folk music, local pop, classic rock, or simply nothing at all. If they know rap, they often mock it, treat it as a cartoon.
Rap's strongholds are mostly urban American centers, select enclaves in the UK (some in France and Germany), youth scenes in places like Brazil, South Korea, or South Africa. But even there, the most successful artists are hybrids with something local in tone. In most countries rap is coded as imported, American, corporate, and is often resented, especially among the working class who see it as imposed from above.
But on paper, rap is a "global phenomenon." Labels push it, fashion brands co-opt it, music festivals feature it. But that's surface. What gets called "global influence" is often just global marketing. The actual cultural resonance -- the sense that it belongs, that it speaks for people where they live -- is far more limited.
And rock music never became a political totem for the neoliberal elites because it isn't aspirational in the neoliberal sense. Promoting it doesn't signal virtue or inclusion. For decades, rock had been the centerpiece of rebellion. But by the 1990s, that story was exhausted, and the elites wanted a myth that is aligned with their image of moral leadership. And metal? Even worse. Metal doesn't want in. It doesn't want a seat at the table. It wants to burn the table.
So they chose the declawed rap, which is culturally compatible with the HR-compliant, TED Talk-ready, Spotify-curated worldview of neoliberalism. Because they don't want messy energy. They want curated edge. The icons of classic rock are not easily managed: Keith Moon destroying hotel rooms, Morrison overdosing in a bathtub, Zappa mocking the press and the state in equal measure.
Even rock fans aren't useful to the neoliberal elite: no hashtags, just burnt-out, middle-aged people in denim jackets who don't need anything it has to offer. Neoliberalism thrives on managed aspiration. It wants cultural participants who want upward mobility, respond to corporate signals, participate in institutions (grants, fellowships, academic discourse), seek validation from elite systems (brand sponsorships, visibility). Rock fans -- especially classic rock and metal fans -- don't play that game.
And just in case you wondered, Harris and Trump are both neoliberals because neoliberalism is the elevation of markets above all else. Harris says: "Let’s fix neoliberalism with equity and better HR." Trump says: "Let's burn the woke part and keep the money part." But neither touches the base structure: A system where government and corporate power intertwine, competition is warped, and rebellion is turned into a spectacle.
May 22, 2025
Men don't wear long hair these days because no one wants to be misunderstood anymore. In an age where jobs, reputations, and social standing hinge on visual clarity, no man wants to be seen as poor, rebellious, out-of-sync, unvetted.
No one says, "You're not allowed to grow your hair." It's just that every example of power and prestige looks the same. The result? A generation of men whose bodies signal cooperation.
The idealized male body -- on runways, in fashion editorials, in art photography -- still wears long hair. He appears on the catwalk like a being from another realm -- pre-modern, elemental, and unbothered by the bureaucratic world.
But in real life? At the bank: short. At the office: shorter. In school photos: cropped. On the street: anonymous. Even among artists, thinkers, mystics -- tight, controlled, managerial hair.
It's not even hypocrisy. It's something stranger: A culture that still knows what is beautiful, but will not allow it to exist in public life. The long-haired man on the catwalk is safe. He doesn't ask anything of the viewer. He is a ghost of possibility, not a participant in daily power. But a real long-haired man walking into a boardroom, a courtroom, a classroom, a train? That, in our current system, is unforgivable.
So what we're left with is this: The ideal is still intact. The image of the long-haired man hasn't been erased -- it's even revered. But the right to live as him, to be him in daily life, has been silently revoked.
In the 1970s wearing long hair said: "Ask me who I am -- I will answer." And if you did ask him who he was -- he might fumble, or rage, or quote Rimbaud or Dylan or Christ or Nietzsche, or just stare at you until you felt your own question. And today's men don't want to send that signal. Not because they are less complex than men were in 1976. It's that they've become visibly silent about their complexity. Because they no longer trust the culture, or each other, to treat it with any seriousness.
Long hair used to be a signal of interiority, an invitation: "There's a world inside me." And the culture responded -- even if with hostility, it still responded: Fights in parking lots, lectures from fathers, journalistic curiosity, conversations in bars that started with hair and led to metaphysics. Today men don't trust their peers to meet them in that register. So the complexity remains -- but is kept private. Written in notebooks. Spoken at 1:30 am, maybe, to a lover. Or never spoken at all.
We are still a culture where men carry deep interiors. But you'd never know it by looking. Because no one wants to risk being seen as someone with something to say in a world that no longer knows how to ask sincere questions.
May 21, 2025
Classical music is not in decline. It is simply not a mass youth product. It never was. The common panic -- "the audience is aging!" -- is a category error: assuming classical music should behave like pop, where fans come young and age with the artist. But classical music is an initiation culture. A lot of people don't "grow old with Brahms" -- they arrive at Brahms once they hit a certain age.
Institutions which understand this -- without marketing panic -- tend to remain stable. They don't try to "rebrand" Beethoven as hip. They trust that the people who need Beethoven will get there eventually. They have no need to be validated by pop culture.
And people eventually arrive at it because classical music, at its most honest, doesn't require anything of you. You don't need to understand form, history, or technique. You don't need to intellectualize it. You don't need to earn it through effort or pedigree. All you need is a nervous system. Mozart, Chopin, Tchaikovsky don't care who you are. You can be skeptical, anti-intellectual, even hostile to "seriousness", but they will still give you everything. And leave you not improved, not educated -- just struck.
And the top orchestras are still playing at astonishing levels, the best managers still build solid careers, the musicians themselves are calm. The hysteria you sometimes hear ("Classical music must modernize or die!") isn't coming from the center. It’s coming from the periphery.
May 21, 2025
I passed through the Kennedy Center now and then in 2016 -- accompanying clients who were performing (Hilary Hahn, etc.) -- and saw it at the time of structural change. They began to prioritize fundraising and their internal culture was becoming very managerial / corporate. They were competent in operational terms, but they were not an artist-centered visionary institution. Staff behaved more like event coordinators or brand managers than cultural stewards. Courtesy was transactional. Curiosity? I didn't see any. Maybe someone else did. Assertiveness -- especially toward outside collaborators -- was a kind of bureaucratic shielding.
In 2017, Trump appointed several new Kennedy Center board members -- many of them mega-donors, business allies, or ideologically aligned figures. These included names with no meaningful connection to the arts. The board's makeup shifted from cultural thinkers to real estate developers, lawyers, donors, and politically appointed placeholders. And the Center let it happen because its internal culture by then had already shifted toward compliance.
Trump's 2025 takeover of the Kennedy Center is the final transformation. The outer form survives, the inner core is gone. But this is what happens when an institution is federally funded. The Center operated a hybrid governance model: part public, part private, which is unusual. This setup left it wide open for a transactional operator like Trump. He didn't need to break the rules -- he just read the fine print. And then he moved in.
What is more amusing though is that the broader arts world has not reacted. And it's the same problem I saw in 2016: people in positions of cultural authority lacking either the grounding or the courage to defend the seriousness of their field. They had titles, but no footing. And once politics entered the room, they retreated.
May 20, 2025
Wilde was certainly braver than any of the 1960s counterculture "rebels", because his rebellion wasn't inside a system willing to profit from it. But to what degree he understood the risk level remains a question. His mistake was that he believed that truth spoken beautifully would protect him, and mistook society's fascination with him for tolerance. That blindness was the source of his brilliance. But there was one thing he did not fully grasp: society doesn't forgive when you mock it in its language, in its code, without internalizing its ideology. If you do that, you not only show that you are too free -- you make others feel trapped. Societies don't punish people just for breaking rules. They punish people who make obedience look cowardly. And this is how he made enemies -- powerful ones -- who were looking for an excuse.
And he was certainly braver than anyone writing or speaking in 2025 -- a moment where all the coordinates are scrambled, when nobody -- not critics, not artists, not tech platforms, not institutions -- fully knows what's rebellious, what's strategic, what's worth preserving, or what will survive into the future.
May 19, 2025
The Met mythologizes Manzarek's Vox Continental. But if you want to be serious about organology, you have to say it how it is. It has a sharp attack, but there’s no depth to it, no weight, no warmth. Manzarek's playing is all mid-range, nasal, thin, and it doesn't evolve in the space of a song. It just stays there, sitting in the same sonic pocket. Sure, a good player can make anything sing. A Vox isn't a Steinway, but if you know what you’re doing, you can work with its limitations -- make it dance, make it breathe. But that's the thing with Manzarek -- he doesn’t really do that. He's got 3 or 4 patterns he cycles through -- all in that same bouncy, hypnotic, locked-in groove. And it's static. He can hold a groove, and that’s important, but there is no risk, no evolution across a song. He finds a pattern, locks into it, and rides it till the end. This da-da-da-da-da-da thing, always riding the same rhythmic wave -- it’s like a typewriter, not a conversation.
It suited Morrison because Morrison wasn't a musician. He didn't play an instrument properly, he wasn't sitting at a piano, figuring out how harmonies worked. He wasn't pulling apart arrangements. He wasn't thinking like a musician. He knew what sounded good to him. He knew what he liked. But if you don't play, when you don't understand the mechanics, you put your trust in the people who do. And he trusted Manzarek. And when you're Morrison -- when you’re this chaotic, unpredictable force -- you need someone like that. That keyboard wasn't just part of the band -- it was the band. You take that out, and what are you left with? A blues band with an often-drunk poet out front. And they weren't about to risk that. And yet.. and yet, perhaps Jim was secretly hoping to find someone to play with who'd let the whole thing fall if it meant catching one truly free breath.
May 17, 2025
At the time when Lester Bangs took down Bob Dylan's "Joey", Dylan was already mythic. Yes, Bangs didn't flinch. Yes, he said, this is art lying to us. But this was common-sense ethics delivered in a gonzo voice. And Bangs wasn't just a wild stylist -- he was smuggling basic ethics past the counterculture hype machine. When gonzo became the rock mag house style, Bangs kept reminding us what the real burn feels like -- keeping the spotlight on the moral dodge, not on his own performance. And in this review he stayed long enough to ask all the unsexy questions. Without shouting, "Dylan loves Brooklyn mobsters -- cancel!"
Had he lived, he'd be amused by the loaded signal the Nobel Committee sent to the American boomer professorate in 2016. He'd clock immediately this very Scandinavian misreading -- not just of American literature, but of American power, mistaking cultural authority for literary opposition. This old-fashioned Scandinavian humanist conviction that lyricism is redemptive per se and that the artist-troubadour still speaks for something outside of power.
May 16, 2025
When people say "Altamont" instead of "Meredith Hunter," they’re not just being vague. They are transforming a brutal killing into a mood, a moment, a symbol. Something tragic but unaccountable. It's the passive voice of history: "Altamont happened." "Altamont marked the end of the '60s." Like fog descending. Just atmosphere. Because naming Meredith Hunter makes it human. And once you say his name, you have to look at the face of the person who died. You have to admit: it wasn't just chaos. And no one wants to hold that. So they displace it into abstraction. Altamont. Like it was a freak weather system. A dark cloud over a decade. A vibe that went wrong. Anything but the thing itself. Jagger didn't just fail Meredith Hunter. He refused to see him.
May 14, 2025
In the U.S., even within its dysfunction, there's a cultural script -- especially in pop and rock -- for hitting bottom, rebuilding, telling your story. Using that story as redemption, currency, or even community leadership. It's messy. It can be commercialized. But it exists. In the UK, on the other hand, you don't share, don't confess, don't explain, don't "grow" in public. Because growth implies exposure, and exposure implies vulnerability, and that implies shame. One of these books opens the man's inner life. The other protects it. Even the covers know the difference.
May 12, 2025
Here's the truth buried under 60 years of nostalgia, gatekeeping, and boomer self-congratulation: most 1960s rock -- for all its claims to revolution -- was musically conservative. Rhythmically, harmonically, and structurally, it inherited the bones of the 1950s: 4/4 time, twelve-bar blues progressions, three-chord turnaround, verse-chorus-verse. The lyrics got cheekier, the hair got longer, but the structural imagination remained tied to the 1950s patterns.
What passed for "innovation" was often cosmetic or borrowed. Eastern drones pulled from raga without structural adoption, sonic "weirdness" tacked on through tape loops and feedback -- ornaments, but not real experiments in form. They didn't dismantle the 4/4 box -- they decorated it. Even the psychedelic detours were always framed by that same rhythmic grid, which made it all feel safe.
That's the irony. The generation that branded itself as forward-looking was structurally tied to the past, and its rebellion was coded in the musical forms of their parents' generation. They should have known. Ornette Coleman already had. Stockhausen had. Sun Ra had. But rock didn't listen. Except for prog. Which wanted to sit next to Mahler and Bartok but didn't have the chops. You put Yes or ELP in the same room, and you hear immediately that they don't belong there. The scaffolding is visible. The proportions are wrong. The emotions are stylized. Piled time signatures and key changes without development. Symphonic pretensions and no knowledge of counterpoint. Synthesizers mimicing orchestration. The tragedy is not that prog failed. The tragedy is that it failed on its own terms.
May 18, 2025
The "Syd Barrett = tragic mad genius" narrative is lazy, reductive, and frankly disrespectful to the man. "Barrett took too much acid, went mad, and disappeared" -- a myth that's been repeated in rock journalism for decades. And it relies on the idea that fame is the ultimate validation, that the stage is sacred, that to retreat is to fail. So when someone like Barrett (or someone like J.D. Salinger) steps away -- quietly, without fanfare -- it’s easier to brand them "damaged" than to confront what they’re really doing: choosing interior life over public spectacle.
Barrett’s withdrawal may have involved pain or instability, but it also likely involved clarity -- a refusal to keep performing under conditions that didn’t nourish him. That's not madness. That's self-preservation in a system that rarely rewards it.
And the label "genius" is just as misleading as "madman." He was a sharp, idiosyncratic artist with specific strengths and limits. He was original. But "genius"? No. That word makes him myth. And myth makes him less real.
To give people back their humanity is to reject the industry's favorite trick -- turning complicated people into digestible stories.
April 29, 2025
Ginger Baker wasn't damaged in the way sentimental narratives like to frame difficult people. He was accurate. He wasn't deluded. He knew exactly what he was doing. And saying. His assessments were completely proportional to what he had seen: mediocrity rewarded, seriousness mocked. Almost every so-called "rant" of his in later life was simply the blunt truth stated without varnish. Baker didn't want or need to be "relatable." He had no interest in softening the truth to make it palatable. That wasn't madness. That was lucidity.
And he made one of the most serious Western efforts to actually learn African rhythms rather than borrow them superficially. He didn’t treat African music as "exotic decoration" -- he understood its philosophy. He recognized that African drumming had an entirely different logic -- polyrhythmic, cyclic, multi-layered. That to engage with it honestly meant retraining himself, not just adding a new flavor to his palette. He studied it seriously, not as a tourist. Without dumbing it down. He repeatedly explained that African rhythm isn't "primitive" (a racist stereotype) but far more sophisticated than Western drumming traditions: multiple time signatures coexisting, drums as speaking instruments, rhythm as a conversation rather than a background. His contribution was philosophical, structural, ethical.
And no, he was not a flexible collaborator. If he sensed laziness, emotional dishonesty, or mediocrity, he wouldn’t adjust to them. Like Jeff Beck, he wanted transcendence or he wanted out.
April 29, 2025
This is how CBS used to do liner notes: Murray Perahia’s 1974 Chopin Sonatas, with notes in English by Robert Walker, in German by Knut Franke, and in French by Marcel Marnat. Three different texts, three different languages, and it wasn't a fluke. This was when the world understood that Europe wasn't some bland EU blob, but separate distinct cultures. CBS wasn't schooling us on Chopin -- it was showing us how to think about music across different traditions. By mid-Eighties the whole thing had already started to collapse into one big flat international hum. Now those notes read like a fragment dug up from some lost civilization.
April 28, 2025
Peter Grant -- the supposed "genius manager" -- should absolutely not be glorified. He protected Zeppelin from external exploitation and failed to protect their health because he always wanted to be "one of the boys," part of the circus. Instead of standing above it like a real manager should have. Never organized any serious detox, counseling, breaks -- just pushed the machine. That's not business genius -- that's wrecking the shop you’re supposed to be running. Managing like a fan, like you are lucky to be there. Busy punching promoters and counting money. People in England love the idea of this "diamond geezer" protecting "his lads." But the truth is that Grant was a glorified bouncer who did get lucky managing insanely talented musicians. And completely failed them when it mattered most. Rode the tiger until it ate itself.
April 27, 2025
If you actually read Crowley properly -- not the newspaper caricature, not the comic-book "wickedest man alive" -- but actually read him, you will find astonishing cosmological insight. A synthesis of Eastern and Western mystical traditions. A deep understanding of Platonic and Hermetic thought. Complex insights about the self, destiny, liberation. Real cultural fluency. Crowley is in conversation with the Bible, with Kabbalah, with Taoism, with actual philosophy. This is serious Western metaphysics. But he demands a prepared reader. A reader who's read Dostoyevsky, Plato, Hegel, the Upanishads, the Torah, the Bible. Otherwise? You just see poetry about stars, lust, and magic words. And that’s what happened to Jimmy Page. Because real metaphysical engagement is about shattering of the ego and rebuilding toward something greater. You cannot "borrow" Crowley if you haven't first bled with Dostoyevsky, reasoned with Plato, been annihilated with Hegel, emptied your head with the Upanishads, and bowed before the Torah. You'll look like a boy trying on exotic costumes.
April 27, 2025
This is something Brian Jones understood very naturally: that if you love music beyond yourself, if you respect the cultures you draw from, you serve them without forcing your own ego on top. He didn't go to Morocco to insert himself as a star -- he recorded the musicians of Joujouka with reverence. Got himself out of the way. Didn't try to hammer tired blues-based pentatonics and stock riffs over ancient musical forms (unlike Page and Plant), didn't turn Moroccan music into scenery. That's why communities in Morocco remember him with gratitude. Because he listened. Because he served.
April 23, 2025
Records such as It's Only Rock'n'Roll were entirely avoidable. Jagger had access to the greatest players on earth. To real songwriters, jazzmen, thinkers, poets. But he chose to surround himself with people who wouldn't push him. What makes this album ridiculous is not that it was failure. It was willed mediocrity. Chosen dullness.
April 21, 2025
Something that's difficult to explain to people outside Britain: the razor-thin line between formality and subversion, public poise and private chaos, dandyism and danger. A very specific kind of English decadence and intelligence: the pressure point where elegance meets the feral. But it's not a rock thing. It's an English thing.
