Hello. How are you? It’s been a while, hasn’t it? It has been for me, at least. You may or may not have noticed I’ve posted less on here than in the past couple of years (although I find when people apologise for not uploading or posting as much/sticking to a schedule, I’d never really noticed it to begin with, so I don’t expect you to care that much either). The reason is simply that I’ve been so busy – I severely burned myself out at the end of the last university semester, and now I’m at home recovering from a cold.
I’ve been writing lots of music articles in the past year for my university magazine, Vertigo, where I also work as an editor. You’ve probably seen some of them uploaded here, and I’ve got a couple more to roll out before my term finishes at the end of the month. Last semester, I also interned for 2SER radio as a Music Intern, which means they let me write articles and program songs and record feature karts. I’ve also been on the air a few times: twice to program songs (as detailed here) and another to talk about the Martin Phillipps obituary of sorts I wrote a few months ago. 2SER is a wonderfully welcoming space, and it genuinely guts me that I’ve been so burned out beyond belief that I haven’t been able to work with them as much as I’d like to. Not to mention that I’ll be spending virtually all of next year on exchange in France, so my options to work with Sydney magazines and radio stations will be quite limited.
My plan, though, is to keep writing here when I can. Burnout took a lot from me, including my desire to write or make zines, so it’s been some trouble getting back on this particular horse. I’m not sure if I’m fully there yet. But in the meantime, I’d like to ease myself back in with this series I started a while ago. I’ve finally given it a name: Letters From The Office. In instalments one and two, I wrote a series of mini articles about Gerry Rafferty’s Gen Z renaissance; tier ranking Top of the Pops hosts; comparing my Belle & Sebastian fervour to that of my Smiths hero worship as a miserable 13-year-old; reviewing albums and music exhibitions, as well as my experience sitting in on the radio.
This edition of Letters From The Office is a bit more topical – some of these things have happened in the last month or two that I’ve been mulling over in my mind. Starting with something a bit more lighthearted…
If you’re anything like me, then you probably love to sort and categorise and index your musical tastes into long nerdy lists or charts. If there’s a website that creates stats from your listening activity (i.e Lastfm) then chances are I’ve looked at it.
Receiptify is one such website, but it’s fairly simple in just letting you know your top songs, artists or genres over the past month, past 6 months, or past year. The software then presents this information in the style of a receipt - hence the name. Here’s my Receiptify for the past month:
You can also make custom ones, or create a receipt for an album you like. There’s no real reason behind it. It just looks nice. I also found out that they’ve made a BRAT version of Receiptify, which shows you just how far-reaching that album has become.
Here is a summary of my top ten tracks from the past month according to Receiptify, reviewed in 1-2 sentences each:
Smalltown Boy - Bronski Beat: I have mixed feelings on the songs that the Tiktok algorithm chooses to bless, but I cannot fault anyone for falling in love with this slice of 80s queer-synthpop-dance perfection.
I Still Do - The Cranberries: Despite the fact it’s supposed to be spring, it’s been rainy, cloudy, and reasonably cold here in Sydney. I think The Cranberries’ debut record suits this weather perfectly.
En Solskinnsdag - Postgirobygget: The only non-English entry in this list, this is a Norwegian folky-pop song that a Norwegian friend showed me a while ago and I only recently found again. Listening to it makes me happy, and in stark contrast to the Cranberries track, it makes me think of slow summer days.
When The Roses Bloom Again - Billy Bragg & Wilco: It is no secret that I love Mermaid Avenue or Billy Bragg, and this particular song soothes me.
Trees and Flowers - Strawberry Switchblade: An algorithm recommendation. Again, it’s no secret that I love lo-fi, jangly 80s indie music that sounds like it was recorded in a shed at the bottom of someone’s garden, and this song is no exception.
Bed Chem - Sabrina Carpenter: I am not immune to good pop music, and as such I refuse to hang my head in shame before any music snobs.
Juna - Clairo: Charm is undoubtedly my favourite album of the year (I even have a Charm tattoo) and this song is one of many reasons why. Very deserving of all the hype it gets.
She’s So High - Blur: I was listening to a lot of Blur whilst writing my Battle of Britpop rant earlier last month to get myself in the zone.
My Love (One Hand Clapping sessions) - Paul McCartney & Wings: I was supposed to go watch One Hand Clapping at the end of September with a friend, but I wasn’t able to make it. While I’m still holding out hope that I can go see it, I’ll listen to the soundtrack in the meantime.
O Valencia! - The Decemberists: It wouldn’t be a 2024 musical list for me without my current favourites, The Decemberists, and I’ve been listening to 2006’s The Crane Wife non-stop lately. I even made a zine about the title track for a workshop I was running at USyd the other week.
“I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes.” – Joanna Maciejewska
I hate generative AI. I understand this is a broad and sweeping generalist take, and I recognise not all AI is bad. I literally just mentioned algorithms giving me songs to listen to and software to compile my music with. And yes, I like seeing what AI comes up with when I ask Dall-e to generate a Pokémon based on the prompt “Desmond Tutu wearing a tutu”. But nothing boils my blood more than talking to someone and hearing them say, “Oh, you’re a writer? Why would you write when you could just get ChatGPT to write your articles for you?” as if that doesn’t negate the entire purpose of what I’m doing. Yes, I’ll just strip my work of any personality or substance because a machine can do it faster. I love to write, and when it comes to writing about music, I love the research I get to do and the conversations that stem from shared experiences. The communities I have been able to be a part of because of my love of music – whether that be through writing, zines, or something else – is not something I would’ve been able to gain access to had I just gotten AI to write something for me.
Like many creatives, I think using generative AI is lazy at best and dangerous at worst. I don’t understand how people could think that automating creativity is a positive. The few times I’ve tried to use ChatGPT were stifling – I felt like I could do and say more than what it was supplying my prompts with. Similarly, some people argue that AI can make gorgeous artwork or write decent essays, but there’s this distinct glossy ‘sheen’ to AI-generated work that feels disingenuous. I love the human-ness of mistakes. I love drawings with crooked lines and scribbled out words, personal essays that go on tangents, the flow and cadence of human-written poetry. AI can replicate something down to the most minute details, but it’ll never capture the humanity threaded throughout art.
Hence why I and so many others were shocked and deeply put off by the cover artwork for the new Tears For Fears album, Songs for a Nervous Planet. In case you haven’t seen it, here’s a picture of it, along with the caption explaining their thought process (which is dubious at best).
Now, I don’t want to assume, but if I’m being completely honest, to me and to so many others in my age bracket, this album cover is so clearly AI generated that it’s laughable. Like I said, there’s this glossy fake sheen to it that feels so incredibly fake. Maybe Tears For Fears, being of an older generation, fail to see how blatantly ugly it is because they’ve spent most of their lives without AI art. Again, I don’t want to assume. Do older folks clock on to AI generated art as easily, or does it feel a bit harder to recognise? I’ve noticed it’s mostly Boomers and Gen Xers who use AI images unironically online, but I know I’m generalising.
Even if the artwork didn’t look terrible, it feels like a smack in the face to real artists who spend hours labouring over their work. It’d be like saying you wrote an album but in reality you’d just gotten ChatGPT to write some lyrics about the world or politics. It reeks of laziness. But it’s also baffling: how could you pour your heart and soul into writing music, or lyrics, and have those feelings visually represented by something a computer could generate in ten seconds? And why would you want to?
I watched Anthony Fantano’s discussion video on this, and he raises a good point: sure, even if the statement “we wanted vibrant artwork that evoked a sense of sci-fi, futuristic themes, and escape from what is known” rings true, what about that necessarily requires AI? Why not dress someone up in an astronaut costume and photograph them in a field of sunflowers? You could do so much with editing that, or even the lighting in the raw shots. What about AI will make it better?
It deeply irritates me that they decided to work with the so-called artist ‘Surrealist.ly’, whose entire “portfolio” is just AI generated art. Well then, if typing prompts into a computer and tweaking the images makes you an artist, call me fucking Michelangelo.
Why not pick an actual human being who could use their mind and their heart and their experience to put together something genuine and well thought out for you? It’s very telling that Surrealist.ly disabled comments on all his Instagram posts when the news dropped. The top comments on the Tears for Fears artwork statement are all criticising how soulless it looks. Some in particular have pointed out how ironic it is to title the record Songs for a Nervous Planet and then use AI, something that has not only made many creatives nervous, but also contributed to destroying the planet in its own way.
Lastly, Fantano rightly pointed out the hilarity behind the statement “the sunflowers are a joyful nod to classic Tears For Fears imagery”. I myself am not hugely familiar with the entire discography of Tears For Fears, but this again felt laughable to me. What does that even mean? I struggle to reconcile the symbolism of sunflowers with a band from Bath who looked like they were dressed by their mums half the time. (No, seriously.) Many people have said that the band’s statement reads like it was whipped up by ChatGPT, and as much as I’d like to give them the benefit of the doubt, I can’t blame people for thinking that way at all.
“What are you talking about?” jeers Fantano. “Like, the [Sowing the] Seeds of Love [single] cover, where the sunflowers are like… just there for a little bit?”
Ironically, the Seeds of Love album cover itself is gorgeous, a beautiful mixed media collage of different images and art styles. I’ve loved Tears For Fears since high school, especially Songs From The Big Chair, which I used to listen to religiously. I adore ‘The Working Hour’. One of my favourite stories to tell people is how my dad went to school with Roland Orzabal (albeit in different form groups). But I can’t deny I’ve lost a fair bit of respect for them, even if they don’t think there’s anything wrong with what they’ve done. Oh well. In their words, I find it kind of funny, I find it kind of sad.
When you’ve been raised on music that was released before you were born, it’s very easy to fall into those Old-Man-Yells-At-Cloud-type generalisations about current pop music. It all sounds the same! Too much autotune! Where’s the soul, the authenticity? Indeed, when the foundations of the music you love are based on guitars or typical four-piece rock groups, it’s hard to get the appeal behind what’s in the charts these days.
Throughout most of high school, I could not name you most of the Top 40. This is in part because I didn’t recognise most of the names found there, and also in part because I didn’t want to, either. Literally everything sounded the same, and compared to the artists I was sinking my teeth into – The Cure, XTC, The Replacements – they seemed so utterly boring and dull. Pop stars all looked the same, too. Nobody looked visually interesting. Anyone who piqued my interest aesthetically was far more left of field, dressing the way I wanted to dress and styling themselves in cool, unique fashions. I didn’t understand the sex appeal of mainstream artists, but then again, my type has always been less Harry Styles and much more They Might Be Giants.
Around Year 10, my dad bought me socks that said “Giant Music Snob” on them, and I wore them every now and then because, well, I was. And still am to an extent. But I also think my defensiveness around music and my personal tastes was because I didn’t have anyone to talk to about them at the time. In primary school, I was made fun of for liking old bands where the men had long hair or the songs were too complex and “weird” (It was just prog rock, so not the most insanely experimental thing in the world. But then again, trying to get a child to listen to ‘Supper’s Ready’ or ‘2112’ after all they’ve ever listened to is One Direction or Taylor Swift is a bit like asking a Year 6 maths class to make sense of a quantum physics textbook). And after instance upon instance of hearing people my age say, “I’ve never heard of that” or “that sounds terrible”, I began to mock them right back. Stupid pop music. Why does this two minute song with three chords need seven songwriters? Blithering idiots, the lot of them.
Today, I was watching a couple of Rick Beato videos where he reviews the Top 10 Global Hits on Spotify. I don’t usually watch “older” people on YouTube react to current chart singles, but I was curious to see what a musically learned man such as Beato had to say about Chappell Roan. To my surprise, he liked ‘Good Luck, Babe!’ a lot, as well as the numerous Sabrina Carpenter hits that have racked up streams since Short n’ Sweet came out last month. He was also very complimentary towards ‘Birds of a Feather’ by Billie Eilish, but it’s not the first time I’ve seen older fans of hers.
What surprised me more, however, was the fact that I recognised almost every song in the Top 10. Even more than that – I liked a lot of them, which led me to reflect on the past year. I realised how much pop music I’d consumed this year: Sabrina Carpenter, Chappell Roan, Olivia Rodrigo, Charli XCX. My 2024 playlist features all of those women, including stuff like ‘Lunch’ by Billie Eilish, ‘Let The Light In’ by Lana Del Rey and ‘Pain’ by PinkPantheress. To paraphrase David Byrne: how did we get here?
The most obvious answer is social media – yes, a lot of these songs are used in reels and Tiktoks and what have you. But there’s also a lot of buzz around these artists. When a lot of the media you consume online is music related, these names are inevitably going to come up. I see all sorts of content created around the current pop mainstays: artwork, reels on how to do your makeup like Sabrina Carpenter, covers of ‘Pink Pony Club’, video essays on Hit Me Hard and Soft. And don’t get me started on BRAT. I genuinely don’t think there’s been a single day since that album’s release in early June where I’ve gone without seeing a BRAT reference on my timeline. I’m not being dramatic - Charli XCX has just managed to craft a cultural movement that keeps snowballing. Tiktok is a blessing and a curse for music and I’ve never exactly been able to fully untangle why that is. There are songs I love because of Tiktok (‘Duvet’ by Bôa; the aforementioned Eilish songs) and Tiktok songs I would love to destroy all the master tapes to and then launch its legacy into the sun so it may burn an unpleasant fiery death (‘i like the way you kiss me’; ‘Mamushi’).
I do think the other primary reason I’ve listened to so much pop music this year is because a lot of my friends have been listening to it. Everyone in my uni circles blasts Chappell Roan and Charli, and I’ve met a lot of Olivia Rodrigo fans in the theatre spaces I’ve occupied this year. All these pop buzzwords – Sweat tour, BRAT, Midwest Princess, “that’s that me espresso” – are on the tips of everyone’s tongues because it’s the cultural zeitgeist of 2024. And I’m no exception.
But the key difference here is that I think a lot of the pop music that’s been released this year is actually good. In the past, I’ve ignored most of the chart slop that hits the airwaves because it sounds boring and repetitive with little substance to hold my interest. Even in my first and second years of uni, I didn’t really pay attention to the Top 40. But I really love a lot of pop music that’s been released in 2024, and I’m coming to terms with that. There is still a part of me, a stubborn music snob, that recoils at the thought of listening to anything but semi-obscure C86 jangle pop groups who released one EP on Postcard Records and then called it a day. Alternative indie stuff is a big part of who I am, after all.
Yet at the same time, I know I need to approach this situation with some empathy. A big reason why this snob character appeared and manifested into something ugly in the first place is because I felt hurt by people who mocked what I listened to in school, isolated and lonely because I literally had nobody to talk to about my favourite music besides my dad or strangers on Tumblr. It wasn’t until the tail end of high school and my first year of uni that I met people who loved the same stuff I did. I bonded with other students at bars over XTC and Squeeze, and the first conversation I ever had with my now-partner was about Talking Heads. When music is one of the most important things in your life, I think having people to converse with about it is so vital. I love talking to people at record fairs and in record shops. There’s an innate level of music nerdery that I can’t find anywhere else, and for a long time I didn’t think it existed beyond the dinner conversations my dad and I would have as a kid (“What five acts would you choose if you were organising the lineup for Knebworth 1978?” “Which Genesis album would you remix if you had the chance?” “Would you rather interview Stewart Copeland or Neil Peart?”).
I think it’s the same thing with pop music. I now have people in my life who I really like discussing pop albums with, from the mainstream to the more left of field. I still think I hold strongly to my opinions though, and I like chatting to others who do the same. I don’t think I’ll ever like Taylor Swift, Ariana Grande, or some of the “pop girlies” Twitter adores. They’re just not for me. But I don’t think pop music or even music today in general is that bad – you just need to know where to look. In high school, I discovered Beabadoobee, Clairo (both of whom have put out exceptional records this year), The 1975, dodie, The Japanese House, Declan McKenna, Her’s, and so many more. While a lot of them aren’t pop per se, most of them are still putting out brilliant records that myself and many of my friends really love.
Yes, there’s some absolute garbage out there. Yes, some of the stuff in the charts is astoundingly piss poor (the second Beato video I watched confirmed that). But I also think hating pop music can be a miserable business. A lot of it is justified, but a lot of it stems from close-mindedness and the nostalgia-tainted belief that everything was better when you were a teenager. I was definitely a misery guts at the peak of my music snobbery, and I think accepting that you like a certain pop song will make your life a lot better instead of denying yourself that enjoyment.
That being said, I also think there’s a larger discussion to be had around 2024 pop, music snobbery, internalised misogyny and the current faces of the pop industry. Women are on top more than ever, which is exciting! But for now, I shall leave you with some of my favourite pop songs from the last year and a half:
Espresso - Sabrina Carpenter
Super Graphic Ultra Modern Girl - Chappell Roan
Obsessed - Olivia Rodrigo
Von dutch a.g. cook remix featuring addison rae - Charli XCX
LUNCH - Billie Eilish
Taste - Sabrina Carpenter
get him back! - Olivia Rodrigo
Good Luck, Babe! - Chappell Roan
Don’t Smile - Sabrina Carpenter
No posts
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.