There is an obsession with people from the service industry who want to see their customers get their come-uppance in a revenge fantasy. This is mostly relegated to poor tipping, which, if I'm being clear about it, is something that they're allowed to be upset about. Not that they need my permission or anything, but I wanted to start this off by establishing that I'm a reasonable person when it comes to their grievances over their compensation.

Now with that out the way?

Can we PLEASE just lay this shit to rest? Finally?

Nobody is working their dream job, we're all here on this floating rock in space trying to figure shit out. And everyone has grievances at their job. So no, it's not on us to put ourselves in your shoes, working a double shift or whatever, unless you want to try out every other occupation in existence and share in their pain too. Like, I'm tired of service industry people thinking they have the monopoly over having a grueling, thankless job. There are grueling, thankless jobs EVERYWHERE and they didn't stop making them when they made yours.

Another day, another new post-punk band

We are in a post-punk renaissance right now.

Seriously, it seems like every day, there's a new post-punk band that comes out with a high quality album that's worth listening to. I mean, just peep at the lineage over the years - from the early 2010's "Big 3" of Preoccupations, Protomartyr, and Parquet Courts (P bands squad up..) to the explosion birthed by the likes of IDLES and Shame and Fontaines DC. At that point, the floodgates were open. black midi came out of nowhere and kicked all of our asses. Black Country, New Road shot to the top of everyone's attention. Dry Cleaning wowed us with talking vocals over very groovy, tangled up guitars. Geese wowed us with their theatrics and sheer creativity. Wet Leg and The Last Dinner Party questioned just how pop-oriented post-punk could be.

And now, we have arrived friends, with another phenomenal band.

They are called English Teacher, and they have a stellar debut out called This Could Be Texas.

With a black frontwoman, they look different than your typical, fully white male post-punk group. Shout out to Special Interest, who blazed that trail before English Teacher.

English Teacher sound like Arlo Parks fronting Black Country, New Road and they have a slew of highly intelligent, highly sardonic, highly catchy and highly cathartic songs. My two favorites at the moment are "The World's Biggest Paving Slab" and "I'm Not Crying, You're Crying" - a song so good that I abruptly stopped listening to the album just so I could have a moment to process the greatness that I just heard.

Elsewhere, songs like "Not Everybody Gets to Go To Space" addresses class inequality in a very poignant way, and R&B directly addresses the singer holding space as a black girl in a white dominant scene.

It's only up for this band, they have the opportunity to be huge when everyone stops sleeping on them. I'm excited.

Fabiana Palladino is amazing

2024 is shaping up to be one of the best years of music, and I have a very early Album of the Year in Fabiana Palladino's debut album.

Fabiana plays with this 80's/90s sound indebted to disco, R&B and synthpop that is just a joy to hear. Put Sade and Jessie Ware in a blender and you're pretty much there. There are several amazing singles on this album, but right now I'm fixated on "Can You Look In The Mirror" and "Stay With Me Through The Night." Also: Jai Paul produced it, so that just adds a whole extra layer of goodness on top. Also, not that it matters much, but Lorde said it was her album of the year, so if a person of stature would go out of her way to give a relative unknown artist like Fabiana a co-sign, it's

It amazes me when people lose their shit over the likes of TOPS and Men I Trust and I end up sounding like a hater. TOPS is fine!! Seriously, they're not a bad band. Men I Trust I don't need to comment on. But Fabiana Palladino re-creates those same sounds with the added studio polish that makes her sound more authentic. TOPS and Men I Trust sound like pretenders, they sound like indie bands that slapped a "cool" filter over their music and are just riding it out for as long as they can. Men I Trust moreso than TOPS, TOPS is totally talented and has some good songs in their arsenal. But on their best day, they can't even stand next to Fabiana.

These are bars right here.

First of all, Liz Lawrence who sings the hook on this song is phenomenal.

But what she was saying is, you know when you're talking to someone and you know you're the best they can get, but they pass on you?

She was blind to him. He wasn't looking her way, even though she was right there the whole time.

She's not looking up, but she *wanted* to. So she COULD have spoken up, but she won't really trippin on that shit. She was still doing her!!

But just because she won't trippin, doesn't mean she had no feelings. She STILL had feelings, but it was whatever to her. It was just the PRINCIPLE of the matter that she was trying to point out. To say all of that in two lines is crazy nice.

But then the next part of the hook flips that expectation right?

"Four, five years and nothing new" is a BAR. She's stagnant, but guess what? She's still not gonna change anything about her situation for this nigga.

BUT SHE WANTED HIM to look up. He's got his fuckin head in his ass and he's missing out on her.

LIKE, "I'm not looking up nigga, but YOU should have been smart enough to make your move on me."

It captures a specific part of unrequited love in such a simple and catchy way.

Easy 10/10 song. One of the best songs of 2024 and one of the best and catchiest songs I've ever heard in my life, period.

You're damn right, I'm skipping it.

Yet another IG trend designed to train AI with freely volunteered photos.

My not so bold prediction? These prompts are going to start asking for very specific conditions very soon.

The type of conditions I'm talking about would make it so that AI can adapt to create more specific content. For example (and this is just an example) "a photo of you when you were sad" would train the AI on how to either transform or identify when the human face is sad, what changes between that an a normal face.

I've also seen "A photo of you when you were blonde" which would help identify appearance changes (such as someone who is on the run from law enforcement and changes their hair).

All of this stuff is happening way faster than anyone realizes.

My advice is to just skip it all. Stop giving them what they want! Lol. But it preys on "me culture" so it's never going to stop....

I've been all around the world musically

And, having seen pretty much everything there is to see within popular music, I've come up with a rather definitive maxim that I'd like to share:

The best music available is underground music within a popular genre.

It's really that simple. We see how this maxim is easily applied to indie rock (because there is a whole devoted following to it) and we also see how this applies to underground rap as well.

But underground pop and R&B is also brimming with talent that will never get a shine. I've been spending a lot of time within that sound and have discovered so much. A compilation will be coming soon, when I get the time, but damn. My challenge is, just how much do I want to justify someone being an underground artist.

Take 3 underground R&B artists: Abra, NAO and Kelela. In terms of recognition, Abra is the most underground of those 3, with NAO having a pretty firm middle ground, and Kelela being underground but known well enough to sell out venues like the 9:30 Club. So if I tout Kelela as underground, it's a bit of a stretch, but she's certainly never going to be as popular as SZA, so does it swing back to being accurate again?

You see this in the pop world too. Take Madison Beer, Kim Petras and Charli XCX. Madison Beer - it's still very puzzling why she's still underground. NOBODY listens to her! Her music fits well within the Billie Eilish/Olivia Rodrigo framework and she absolutely clears both of them in her songwriting. It's not even close. And she has the physical appeal too, I mean she looks like a model. But she's still massively underground and might never get radio play. Kim Petras has the middle ground here - very popular among enthusiasts, but also will never see much radio play (outside of the semi-popular song she did with Sam Smith). And that story is similar for Charli XCX - she actually was on the radio a time ago - but now seems destined to be the biggest underground pop favorite.

For the sake of content, I think I'm going to just include everything though.

Coming soon...

I've been reviewing a lot of movies lately and one of the biggest takeaways I've found is that you can understand that the artist does something with a certain intention and still dislike it. I feel like a lot of times people would go into criticize something that's meant to be there for a reason, for example - the fast pace and quick cuts of Requiem for a Dream - and people would try to explain it to you like you don't know what you're talking about. Like, "You missed the point, its fast pace is meant to simulate drug use!"

No, I didn't miss the point, the point was fairly obvious actually - but its breakneck pace does get repetitive after a while. It felt like I was watching the same scenes over and over for almost two hours.

Saltburn is a great recent example of how style and vibe can be intentional and meant to evoke a certain mood and the film still be terrible despite the intention, lol.

There are times when a certain style totally works for me, though. Switching to music: When Allie X repeats "I was the life-" 13-14 times on her brilliant song "Life of the Party" - her repetition is meant to simulate that she's drunk at a party, repeating the same thing over and over to anyone who will listen. This is brilliant to me, and underscored by the fact that in the second verse, she starts off, "I made so many friends last night, did I say that part already?" which further reinforces the fact that she is losing track of what she already told people. But you can still understand that her intention makes the song repetitive - and that would be your perfectly fine opinion.

Bottom line: Don't assume that the intention of the artist can be free from criticism. There are certain times where it lines up perfectly and you get great work. There are other times where you're watching a movie or TV show and you're like, "Ok, I get it, but it's still bad" lol

I gotta take better care of my things.

*Lil Wayne voice*

I don't smoke cigarettes anymore.

But this whole culture around people borrowing cigarettes is fucking lame.

If you're a cigarette smoker, and you don't have your own cigarettes, tough shit. You shouldn't have gone to the bar without your cigarettes. This idea that other people are supposed to fuel your cigarette habit out of pure altruism is lame as fuck.

"Oh, can I borrow a lighter?"

Motherfucker where is YOUR lighter?

The whole culture around smoking cigarettes is around people just borrowing shit because they were unprepared and it's starting to get to me. If I smoked cigarettes, I'd be denying people cigarettes left and right. BRING YOUR OWN.

Hardcore sucks

The sooner people stop acting like that shit is cool and participating in the scene, the better.

That shit's always been a Fight Club for toxic white males. The inclusion of women and people of color doesn't negate this, because if you ask the gatekeepers of hardcore (who are these toxic white men) they don't fuck with any type of progression in hardcore lol. Like they don't give a fuck about Scowl or Gel. They're legitimately frightened at Turnstile being popular. Hardcore has pretended to be inclusionary and open to everyone but it's really not. I mean, I don't give a shit about it anyway because it's not like I even give a shit if I'M accepted into hardcore or not. But at the same time I just want to point it out because I really feel like those dumbasses need a wake up call.

Ion mean no harm bro. Really, I don't.

I met this girl when I was down in North Carolina. Cute, friendly, a little annoying but not overwhelmingly so. We ended up talking through about 3 or 4 sets after having met at a nearby skate shop or whatever. Me and my friend didn't think anything of it, and we all got her instagram that day thinking yeah she was cool but we're never gonna talk to her again.

Fam, I've been watching her stories EVERY SINGLE DAY. She does not work. She just travels around going to concerts, EVERY DAY. (it's a nice life, don't get me wrong HAHA). but it's starting to get to me.

Now, I don't know her situation. Maybe she worked hard and can take a year off. But in this economy?! Post-covid? I'm gonna say it's not that likely.

I've only encountered a few trust fund kids in my life but this has all the trappings of one. Devil-may-care attitude towards EVERYTHING. Everyone else is the problem and not her. Only showing the highlights of her life. Asking in the middle of the week what last minute state she wants to jump in a car and drive to?

Ma'am, you don't have a job. There's no way. You're sitting on a nest egg, SOMEHOW. But throwing it in everyone's face.... that's the problem with social media these days.

Take it with a grain of salt though. There's always more than meets the eye.

By now, most of the criticism with Taylor Swift is incredibly misogynist ("I hate it because women enjoy it") or at the very least short sighted ("She has no talent whatsoever").

Not liking an artist doesn't mean they're not talented. Taylor Swift is at the very least talented. My criticism would lie in the fact that she's not exceptional in the way other artists are, and I'm waiting for her to do something challenging.

A couple weeks ago I read some kind of Easter Egg thread on Taylor Swift and it was like - I kid you not - that one of her songs, Maroon, was a sequel of her song Red, because Maroon is a deeper color than red and the song Maroon was deeper than the song Red, or something. I was like, really? That fake deep shit is what you're passing off as brilliance? It's as if, if she were to release a song called 32, 10 years after she released 22, signifying 10 years of growth. And yall would probably lose yall minds if she put it as the TENTH song on the album.

This number game/fake poetic bullshit isn't brilliance. It's at best, something that you'd come up in high school in a creative writing class. It's like those dumbass word puzzles where the word Stand is drawn with a line and you put the letter I underneath and your solve the phrase by saying "I - under - stand!" Like no.

Mostly, I see Taylor Swift as playing it safe. Sure, she dresses up her albums in fake poetic shit, but if she wanted, she truly does have the power to make challenging music. She could easily link up with St. Vincent or Weyes Blood and make a huge art pop statement. She could work with Arca and the PC Music guys and make cutting-edge hyperpop. She could do ANYTHING different and it'd be better than what she's doing now.

But no, she's sticking with this level 1, "Karma is a cat, karma is a dog, karma is the rain on your windshield, karma is the fog!!" nursery rhyme bullshit that she keeps trotting out and fans keep eating up.

THAT'S the real criticism. That's what people seem to miss when they criticize her. Because other people are criticizing from a place of ignorance. I at least have tried to understand her but keep coming up empty.

I love a good musical engagement bro.

But this "pick 5 bands" thing has run its course.

Another thing I am easily annoyed at.

(And believe me. This is petty. I'm not oblivious to how damn petty I am)

When your friends who turned into realtors get on Facebook and just start spewing realtor talk.

"Yeah haha my client did this, my client did that. I just helped my client close in on their first home! Interest rates were very favorable to my client! Hit me up if you need a home, I'd love to make you my client! Client client client"

Like shut the fuckkkkkkk up lol damn

Like fam, I'm not "tapping in" lol. Leave me alone

"Let's see you when you were 24!"

"Let's see you when you were 23!"

"Let's see you from last year!"

"Let's see you from the summer time!"

"Let's see you from 5 minutes ago!!!"

Like can yall STOP doing these Instagram prompts PLEASE. All you're doing is training AI recognition. That's literally all you're doing.

"Let's see you when you were 24!"

"Let's see you when you were 23!"

"Let's see you from last year!"

"Let's see you from the summer time!"

"Let's see you from 5 minutes ago!!!"

Like can yall STOP doing these Instagram prompts PLEASE. All you're doing is training AI recognition. That's literally all you're doing.

This whole Pitchfork thing

Disclaimer: I know people are gonna disagree with this, but I'm speaking from the heart, as someone who grew up with Pitchfork. My tastes were shaped by their reviews with my early brushes with indie music back in 2004-2005, and this continued all throughout high school into early college. I also owe Pitchfork for influencing my own editorial voice, and elevating the way that I review music recreationally.

With that being said, can we all just calm down and stop speaking like the sky is falling?

Yasiin Bey, formerly known as Mos Def, who has been in the media recently for his comments about Drake, has a very poignant intro to his 1999 classic Black on Both Sides. It's still relevant to this day:

Listen—people be askin' me all the time "Yo Mos, what's gettin' ready to happen with hip-hop?" (Where do you think hip-hop is goin'?) I tell em, "You know what's gonna happen with hip-hop? Whatever's happening with us" If we smoked out, hip-hop is gonna be smoked out If we doin' alright, hip-hop is gonna be doin' alright People talk about hip-hop like it's some giant livin' in the hillside Comin' down to visit the townspeople We are hip-hop Me, you, everybody, we are hip-hop So hip-hop is going where we going So the next time you ask yourself where hip-hop is going Ask yourself: where am I going? How am I doing? Till you get a clear idea

And even though he's speaking about hip-hop, this totally applies to indie music, too.

So relax. Indie music is not some giant living in the hillside. WE ARE indie music. Indie music is never going away. People aren't going to stop making music tomorrow. Indie music existed LONG before Pitchfork existed, and will continue to happen LONG after Pitchfork is gone.

The fact that punk music became the cultural phenomenon that it did WITHOUT the help of the internet should tell you something. The fact that independent music continued in the 80s through post-punk, through college radio and record stores and zines and all the early DIY mechanisms of sharing music, should tell you something.

Indie music and indie music media isn't just going to die without Pitchfork. It's going where we are going.

And where are WE (millennials - gen Z and beyond) going? Well, a lot of that stuff is happening through stuff like Tiktok and and Twitter and Youtube (Fantano) and Spotify radio. Like, do you think Gen Z is selling out Steve Lacy and Mitski shows just because they read a review in Pitchfork? Fuck no. They're getting that shit off Tiktok. And they're getting older shit too, like shoegaze and Duster and Kate Bush and shit like that off Tiktok too. They completely skipped the idea of reading Pitchfork and thinking that shit is cool or useful to them. Now, as a curmudged ass millennial that doesn't fuck with Tiktok, do I like the fact that that's where things are going? Fuck no, but the objective fact is, this is one huge example of how music discovery is still happening outside of Pitchfork.

Reddit is my primary mode of discovering music, with Rate Your Music being a close second. Through specialized hubs like indieheads, popheads, and hiphopheads, I'm kept up to speed on a lot of news and releases. Now, I am leaning on my own expertise as the music guru to sort this shit out, so I can see how it might be overwhelming for others. Rate Your Music may be even more overwhelming, because it's mainly self-guided discovery. There is no single editorial voice on Rate Your Music. It's all user-based content. I can spend hours just hopping through reviews, forums, genre pages, lists and guides etc. But still, my point is that there are more places where indie music is allowed to be shared and discovered.

I then turn around and feed all my hard-earned music discovery to Instagram. Now, I don't think I've told many people this, but my whole reason for posting music on Instagram is not because I aspire to be some kind of big media personality or anything like that. It's true that I do fashion myself as the local authority and tastemaker around here. But in reality, I simply do it because I am concerned of how much we are losing the human touch to algorithms like Spotify (more on that in just a second) and I want to be able to tell people what to listen to rather than letting Spotify tell them what they should be listening to. If nobody's reading it, I don't really care - it is as therapeutic to me as it is useful to others. But at the same time, I'm always surprised at just how many people ARE checking for my music posts. It's a LOT more than I realize. When people come up to me in real life and tell me they're following my music posts, it makes a difference and it does encourage me to keep going. It's cliche, but even if I'm able to reach one person through these posts, I'm going to continue doing it.

And I'm not Pitchfork. But I'm still sharing indie music. I hope you get the theme here.

Now, I'm not saying that losing Pitchfork is miniscule or it's not going to have a big impact. I just talked about the human touch with music and Pitchfork was a big part of that curated human touch. So I absolutely get how huge of a loss this is. BUT TWO THINGS CAN BE TRUE AT THE SAME TIME THOUGH, and that's what YALL are not getting. YALL are very one-sided with this doom and gloom about what Pitchfork has done for the indie scene and how things are never going to be the same again. And while it's perfectly fucking understandable to mourn - I'm kind of in mourning too - It's not time to sit back and fucking throw your hands up and keep parroting that it's over and indie music is over and how Conde Nast killed indie music. WE ARE INDIE MUSIC. We are not going any-fucking-where. Start thinking about the space you occupy in the culture and how YOU envision it moving forward, because it's going to take a fucking village.

And it's going to take a lot of fucking work. I'm not saying that it's going to be easy. I'm not saying we can snap our fingers and get another Pitchfork overnight. To be fair and to be completely honest, l believe we might never get that sort of central hub - that "giant living in the hillside" ever again. But again, it's okay, because indie music is not a giant living in the hillside! Indie music started with DIY methods of communication before Pitchfork was ever even thought of, and it will continue that way. I cannot stress enough that there was a world without Pitchfork and people still listened to indie music.

However, Spotify and algorithms have fundamentally shifted how many, if not most people listen to music these days. It's become so individualistic, so playlist driven, and such a feedback loop that it's going to take some creativity to figure out how to break out of that mold. Like, it sure does feel like everyone is listening to some sort of starter pack of like, Tame Impala, Men I Trust, Turnstile, Frank Ocean, Tyler the Creator, and... I don't know, let's just throw in Radiohead for shits and grins. So you fire up Spotify and your algorithm playlist is nothing but that. Or, you know, whatever you listen to. If you listen to hardcore, all you're going to get is hardcore. You might never get like, Kali Uchis on your playlist. You see it with this "For You" radio shit and the "Daylist" shit (I like Daylist - Daylist is fun - but it's still an oversimplification and neat packaging of everyone's tastes). I've been railing against algorithm radio since the Pandora days - I NEVER liked the idea of a computer deciding what EYE get to listen to. Spotify should be a SUPPLEMENT to your music discovery and not the main tool.

So whatever comes next has to be for the people for it to be impactful in some meaningful and culturally enriching way. People CANNOT keep listening to these damn starter pack bands like that's the end-all, be-all of good music. A few years ago, I was musing on Twitter about how there needs to be a microblogging platform like Twitter but completely for music. You could log in, a few minutes each day, and scroll through what your friends are listening to. Maybe even have a quick little write-up OR EVEN a longform if you like longform. I'm on MusicBoard and it's sort of what I think could get popular if people committed to it and it had better features. But it has to go where we're going, right? People are going to Tiktok - so it's gotta look and feel like Tiktok. You've gotta be able to satisfy these very short attention spans in order for people to give a shit about music now. You've gotta gamify it - Maybe the more content you put out there gets you a badge or more visibility or something. I don't know - I don't have all the answers. But we have got to put our thinking caps on to fucking figure out a way to ditch the algorithms and get back to a collective community of music listeners again.

Right now, many people are still in shock and disbelief. Right now, it doesn't seem like we can get there, but I'm sure that we really didn't envision any of the ingenuity of the internet before it happened. It's just one day you wake up and boom you're on the next big thing. And I know we can get there, but damn, people just need to have a little faith about it.

That's all I got.