Music and AI Without Permission
From Show Trials to Silence: How Cowardice Evolves
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.
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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.
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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.
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Even Stalin's daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva, condemned Galanskov's trial, calling it "a wild mockery of justice."
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
What Nicky Hopkins Created and What Jimmy Page Took from Him:
A Case Study in AI Ethics.
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.
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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.
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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.”
Music Contract Law in 2025: AI Handles the Split. Lawyers Handle the Ego.
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.
On Alan Turing's Birthday
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.
Hopkins Got Paid a Pittance. Lennon Got Immortality. AI Noticed.
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.
You Can Call Him 'Sir'
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."
Not Justice, Just Revenue: The Future of Brian Jones’ Legacy
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.
The Final Frontier for AI: The Metaphysical Taboo
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.”
Rock journalism: Still Holding the Wristband
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).
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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.
The Beatles by Algorithm: When Others Define Your Culture
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.”
Training the Machine to Recognize the Devil
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.”
AI Doesn’t Care Who Sat Backstage at Knebworth
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.
The Last Rock Fans Are Leaving. Gen Z Isn’t Coming.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
The Stool Pigeon: Nothing Mattered, and That Was the Point
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."
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The band that didn't even want to be covered? Perfect. Even better.
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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.
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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.
Anita Pallenberg: Not Bad, Just Past Belief
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.
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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.
Peter Grant Was a Bouncer. Andew Loog Oldham Was a Strategist.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
What the Machine Sounds Like When It Prays
June 1, 2025
Vangelis wasn't naive. He knew exactly what 666 meant. Because after 666, the crossroads was no longer a metaphor.
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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.
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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.
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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.
The Denmark Street guitar shop guys
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."
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
From LSD to UX: How Silicon Valley Appropriated the Sixties
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.
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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.
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From Bowie -- shapeshifting without the existential cost: "Be your own brand," "pivot fast." No madness. Just updates.
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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."
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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.
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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.
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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.
Britain: When a Country Dares Too Much, and Loses It All
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
Exile on Main St.: From Basement Bars to Boardrooms
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.
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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.
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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."
Almost Famous
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".
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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.
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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.
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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.
A Camera is Not Enough
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
Kenneth Anger Risked Everything. Jimmy Page Risked Nothing.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
The Global Myth of Rap
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
A Culture That No Longer Tolerates the Unvetted
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
Classical Music Doesn’t Chase You. It Waits.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
Trump Didn’t Break the Kennedy Center. He Walked In Through the Door It Left Open.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
The Rebels of the 1960s Had Safety Nets. Oscar Wilde Had None.
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.
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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.
Locked Patterns, Safe Hands, and the Doors That Never Opened
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.
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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.
Lester Bangs: Common Sense Ethics in a Gonzo Voice
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!"
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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.
Say His Name: It Was Meredith Hunter, Not Altamont
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.
Nikki Sixx and Keith Richards: One Tells the Story, the Other Hides It.
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.
They Called It New. It Was Still Twelve Bars and a Chorus.
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.
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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.
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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.
Syd Barrett: Not a Madman, Not a Genius, Just a Man Who Refused the Game.
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.
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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.
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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.
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To give people back their humanity is to reject the industry's favorite trick -- turning complicated people into digestible stories.
Ginger Baker Wasn’t Difficult. He Was Accurate.
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.
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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.
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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.
The Death of Difference, One Liner Note at a Time
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.
What Happens When the Manager Joins the Party
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.
You Don’t Reach Crowley Without First Passing Through Hegel
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.
Brian Jones Went to Morocco to Listen, Not to Star
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.
It’s Only Rock’n’Roll—and That Was the Problem
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.
The English Tension
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.
