Today I’m going back to looking at the Sublime app, and there were a couple things I wanted to talk about.

One was about “feed bankruptcy.” Yeah, I used to love feeds, too, but there is just so much content to consume now that you’re never really able to “keep up” with all the sites you end up subscribed to. It’s why I left Substack; I couldn’t be subscribed to more than a handful of people. Interestingly enough, I subscribed to some people and never saw their emails come in, so I’m not sure what’s up with that, while others I get two emails somehow… and I can’t seem to fix that. I’m even considering unsubscribing from the couple I have left, plus the ones I keep seemingly keep getting added back to… like Stacked Marketer seems to keep adding me back and they are so late-capitalist-coded I can’t bear to read them anymore.

There’s also this, actually two things from the same article:

“Culture isn’t stagnating; it’s evolving in ways that we’re struggling to recognize and appreciate. The challenge lies not in reviving what’s dead, but in developing the language to understand what already exists.”

AND

“In just under one generation, we moved from appreciating albums as cohesive works to consuming individual tracks, and then to music becoming reduced to muzak: background noise for gaming, viral videos, or endless scrolling. Disappearing is music as an art in its own right, which commands sustained attention and deep engagement. A song’s success is measured not by critical acclaim but by whether their song goes viral or becomes the “soundtrack” to someone’s life.”

Katherine “Default Friend” Dee, “No, Culture is not stuck”

https://wisdomofcrowds.live/p/no-culture-is-not-stuck

Before I say any more, I’m going to actually read the article. I know, what a concept… She’s absolutely correct that it’s no longer just “old man yells at cloud” – I prefer the term “old lady shaking a stick at those kids today” because that’s what I feel like most days…

This part stuck out to me too: “…maybe we’ve simply grown accustomed to digital photography’s age-concealing effects —a contrast to film photos that more readily showed signs of aging. (Interestingly, makeup trends have evolved more distinctly, perhaps because they adapt better to the nature of social media.)”

It actually drives me nuts how complicated and over the top makeup routines are now. Like the lengths Sabrina Carpenter has gone too over the past couple album cycles… it’s why I have pictures of her with minimal makeup that I keep around to remind myself, you know there’s a naturally gorgeous woman under all that product… people have turned themselves into products (yes, even men, too!) I look at these more natural photos of Sabrina to remind me there is still actually beauty in the world, but people forgot what it looks like!

So now that point she made about music vs “muzak.” This isn’t a new thing. It’s just that we’ve been fortunate to have artists that are able to break the mold and keep the industry from entirely stagnating. I look at music today and, yeah, there’s plenty of music being made, but most of it is just echoes of past successes. Even the new Bon Iver album didn’t really catch much attention; and there are good tracks on it. It seems like Sabrina has the chance to absolutely dominate the Grammys this winter; I mean she has six goddamn nominations! She absolutely deserves them, but shit, she just doesn’t have competition! [And she didn’t win ANY of them…] 

Right now, Music is just… blah. Man’s Best Friend isn’t even as good as Emails or Short N Sweet, but it’s still better than anything else I’ve heard… including Life of a Showgirl, which quite ironically includes SABRINA on the title track and is the highlight of the whole damn album. Fortunately for Tay, LOAS is ticketed for the 2027 Grammys, so with its massive commercial success, she should be on her way to extending her Grammy record… unless Sabrina drops yet another album, or the Alice in Wonderland film dominates the charts like recent musical films have (which I haven’t enjoyed, but this one I will because, well, it’s SABRINA!) But I digress. Taylor is still the Industry, but we’re all living in Sabrina’s world right now and I love it! (And I’m sure Tay is fine with that too!) [I never saw OR3 or Ella’s Dandelion coming though, so there’s EXTREMELY tough competition for Showgirl, which I’m not convinced is better than either of those records.]

But yeah, TikTok is what drives music now. Does it go viral? Well, TikTok is the reason Espresso blew up. And I hate that. Sabrina shouldn’t have needed TikTok to become a megastar, but this is how it happened. It makes me extremely sad. (Emails did pretty well on TikTok too, btw.) The difference with Sabrina, and she brings this up herself a lot, she just makes music that she enjoys and doesn’t focus on making hits. That’s why while Man’s Best Friend really only had Manchild as its big hit, it’s clear that it’s something she loved making. Same with emails and short N Sweet, although Short N Sweet was definitely pushed towards hit-making (it was massively overproduced). Still, Sabrina is just THAT good and THAT DEDICATED to the art form of music that it’s transcending everything else at the moment, ironically even TAYLOR of all people!

I absolutely agree that culture still exists. Just somehow it’s no longer mainstream. And like I’ve been doing with Gemini, what we need is new language to describe what’s actually happening, how while big studios keep beating dead horses, innovations are happening constantly under our noses. Eventually, these novelties break though, like Chappell Roan and, of course, Sabrina <3 The sad thing is it took both of them a decade for people to recognize their talent for what it is.

“The Internet-Personality-as-Art is ephemeral, challenging, and doesn’t even register as a performance to most critics.”

I figured that out years ago. I just never figured out how to capitalize on it…

Also I just learned Fifty Shades of Grey was originally Twilight fanfiction. But the names were changed after the erotic content had the original version taken down. You gotta be shitting me. How did I not know this? Well, this came out in the Colorado years so I guess I have to forgive myself for that…

Kyla Scanlon has a long newsletter and fortunately she reads them out on substack. It’s very interesting and a lot I’dlike to write about when my eyes recover. Also her book I did order already and should be at the post office when we check tomorrow… she brought up what I said to Emily recently: China is now getting nvidia chips and they have a way better energy grid than the US does. China could beat the US in AI very quickly and they will control the future. Fun times. For her to say it too really scares me. She calls out the casino economy and the financialization of literally everything. Commodity fetishism is rampant. Oh boy. 

I agree with every single one of her conclusions because I came to all of them myself a couple years ago. And things are playing out as I predicted. But the best part is the little Jimi Hendrix anecdote she mentioned at the end; that he always made his music for people with transition radios, not the new fancy FM that was just starting. His thinking: meet the people where they’re at. And that’s just not happening anymore, just a bunch of overwhelming “bad vibes” and TMI stressing us all into oblivion.