Quick Shots - 10/May/2026
Seeing Orange
Orange is the New Dumb
I was going to write about the global trend where Trump-ian, rabble-rousing politics seems to have made advancements in the UK and in Australia. It’s frustrating. The root of this defection to lunacy is economic inequality and the gap in education. There are a lot of disenfranchised people with low education locked out of advancement in society. It is a global problem. None of the traditional mainstream parties want to deal with this, so rabble-rousing anti-intellectual parties have stepped to the fore selling their snake oil ‘policies’.
It has now been a decade since Brexit happened and Trump was voted in the first time. Neither of those two breakthrough events proved to be good or productive or commendable in any way. Somehow we are back to this situation wherein electorates are voting in Reform in the UK and Pauline Hanson’s One Nation in Australia. It’s strangely reminiscent of the 1930s whereby people are claiming to be so disaffected by mainstream politics that they want to give these ratbag third-pole fascists a go.
It goes without saying that the economy is challenging, and it has been made worse by the cumulative weakness of successive governments that refused to take on the vested interests that distort the economy. In Australia, the ALP under Bill Shorten ran on changing some of the policies and was somehow defeated - mainly because Queensland voters decided they liked the incumbent regime promoting the economic distortions. In other words, the same sort of voters who complain about how mainstream politics sidelines them, voted against the candidate who offered to make changes in their favour, and then danced on his political grave.
The disintegration of the traditional conservative parties in Australia and UK can probably be sheeted home to the conflicting nature of the demand for fiscal conservatism and the demand for social conservatism. If you want the kind of fiscal conservatism you need economic growth and to that end, both Australia and the UK need to import young workers through immigration. Without it, it is going to be hard to sustain fiscal policies that align with traditional conservative goals. But then you have the social conservatives who don’t want immigrants and blame them for the problems, giving rise to the mythic migrant who is at once taking jobs and pulling down welfare.
Clearly the ratbag third-pole fascists are pushing the social conservative line without paying any heed to what the economy looks like absent of immigration. More bluntly, they don’t have economic policies worth spit except to do a dummy spit. If the Farrer by-election and the recent UK outcome can teach us anything, it is that Orange is the universal colour for political buffoonery.
Spotify Once Again Demonstrates It Sucks
Spotify’s coming up with other arbitrary rules and definitions saying if an artist doesn’t have 10,000 monthly listeners, it’s not a real artist. I imagine that’s most of the artist putting up their little DAW creations. The alleged reason they're doing this is to stop AI content - which seems ludicrous because they could have just labelled AI content as AI content and left the humans alone. But no. It’s a fresh round of abuse towards human artists that aren’t on a label, so now I am no longer a ‘verified artist’. What they’re saying is that my stuff with all the human bum-notes and glitches and mistimed bits is pretty much the same as AI content.
Yeah I laughed too.
Spotify is in many ways a terrible experience of music that exists to mitigate piracy. The one thing it cannot - but does - claim to be, is that they are in support of artists. Spotify actually hates artists and does its best so they do not get fair access to the ‘market’ that they created and then distorted in favour of the labels. This latest declaration is something that is there to suit the labels who will use their marketing power to leverage some kind of AI content to earn money while further disenfranchising independents artists. It is exactly the kind of hostile act you would expect from Spotify.
Of all the things about Spotify that rankles, the one that rankles the most is that nobody investigates them. This is because compared to some easier criminality to target, the whole structure of royalty payments that rip-off artists signed and unsigned, is in line with other rapacious exploitative capitalist practices that governments tacitly support. The US government would not want to investigate Spotify and find them guilty of an exploitation, only to have to prosecute Amazon or Facebook/Meta or Google or Apple for the same kind of exploitative action about how they pay musicians on their music platforms. They’re just not going there.
It is my contention that music is actually without worth beyond the experience itself. It’s a long story as to how I get there but the short version is this: For the vast parts of human history, nobody really had the novel thought of paying musicians anything. But then European kings realised if they did pay them something, they got better music in court. And so from the 17th century onwards, it became reasonable and customary to pay musicians to come to court and play their thing. For most of history before then, music was just this side entertainment that people did for themselves. There’s a very long human history of not rating musical work as payable work.
If paying musicians is a relatively modern phenomenon, then we shouldn’t be surprised when we go back to the long-established, historic model where musicians don’t get paid for their music. Labels after all, get paid on product. The fact that music comes out of the speakers when you stick their product in to the machine, is ancillary to the commercial exploitation. And it is on this axis of reductio ad absurdum that Spotify sits and decides it won’t pay artists. All I can say is that Daniel Ek better watch his back if he keeps insulting musicians around the world. One of them might just come find him to settle their score. That’s not a threat - it’s just a prediction.
What’s Spinning This Week (in no particular order):
Concrete Blonde - Concrete Blonde
Dehumanizer - Black Sabbath
Feline - The Stranglers
Packed! - The Pretenders
Blondie Live Disc 1 - Blondie
The eponymous debut album by Concrete Blonde is pretty solid. 1986 was still in the era of New Wave afterglow where songwriters were busy making angular songs. There might be an edgy sound or an odd chord progression that is repeated like it’s a new discovery. Considering the era, ‘Concrete Blonde’ exhibits a very mature and developed songwriting sensibility. It’s not my fave bunch of songs, but it’s also not the most boring bunch of songs. You can see how this band would develop into the band that delivered the rest of their catalogue. It’s hard not to like.
‘Dehumanizer’ unexpectely reunites the lineup that produced ob Rules, with Ronnie James Dio on vocals, Geezer Butler on bass and Vinnie Appice on drums along with Tony Iommi. It’s not half bad, but the lyrics once again veer towards heaven and hell and revolution and genocide and a bunch of other portentous apocalyptic gobbledygook. The playing is tight and the guitar solos are inspired and let’s face it, that’s what makes a Metal band worth its salt. This one’s okay despite its ponderous take on existence. In one sense you can’t slam a band for tackling the big subjects and coming up short. They won’t be teaching in this in Philosophy 101, but they will probably be playing this in Utopia Records in 2,376 AD.
I had never listened to ‘Feline’. It came out in 1983 and I have to say I saw the jacket in lots of stores but I never thought of buying it back then. Probably a good idea - because it is so not the kind of music I was into at the time. I can’t say it’s well produced either. The best thing might be the jacket cover with a big black cat. Today it sounds like they made it with a budget-end drum machine and a Casiotone, with not much else going on. Time has not been kind to this album.
‘Packed!’ is interesting. As I was grumbling about Black Sabbath getting straitjacketed into their style and being unable to breakout, I detect the same problem with this album. The Pretenders have a well established style by this album, and suddenly they find themselves trapped by it. There’s something about it that sounds very stale and the songwriting doesn’t impress. It’s not bad, but it’s certainly not great. Some of it is good but some of it misses the mark by being monotonous.
I came across an old interview with Johnny Ramone this week and he dismissed Blondie as just another pop band but somehow the Ramones were punk. Judging from the September 1977 recording of Blondie ripping it up at the Old Waldorf in San Francisco, I tend to think Johnny Ramone has no idea who he was talking about. This live disc shows Blondie at their feral best. This is laudable punk and it’s certainly a lot more energetic than the Ramones.