Good morning. Hello. How are you? #1044
Fighting the doom, Jezebel, Tumblr, Olivia Rodrigo, 80's videos for songs from film soundtracks, involuntary rock god cancellation, Alaura O’Dell and PTV, Colin Furze, Blackpink exhaustion
Good morning. Hello. How are you? All “well” here, in this world of such terror and devastation. Everything just fine, yep, yep. Not sad at all, not depressed about the state of the world at all. Not spending inordinate amount of time thinking about what it means to lose in Ukraine. Not spending large amounts of time thinking about dead children, nope, nope, no siree.
I have a bunch of topics in my notebook that aren’t about that, though, because I am trying to live a life here, ya know?
First off, a few days late here, but RIP Jezebel. Always sad to see a storied site leave the internet, especially one that was so successful, so influential. Brian Morrissey has a take on his newsletter viewing the loss through an ad lens and the (very real) changes in the ad industry, and I think there’s some truth to it. But I also wonder about other aspects of the situation: what was Jezebel’s traffic even like these days? The site used to be really big. Is it anymore? How does the interplay between a union and private equity ownership change things? What was Jezebel’s (god help me) TikTok strategy? I just…
I just bet a scrappy bunch of… people (normies? true believers? hungry people who cared?) … could have kept that site going.
All it takes is one person who cares.
Speaking of which, thank you, Matt Mullenweg, for pouring all that money into Tumblr, and keeping it fresh and modern. The news is that Automattic is going to put Tumblr into “maintenance mode” which means it will live on, but they will no longer try and feature-design their way into a larger Tumblr. I am okay with this. The news takes have been unkind but I think that is the wrong take. As someone who spent, oh, god, nearly a decade of his life keeping a beloved internet property alive, I can tell you, people really just take it for granted. There is this expectation that they’ll last forever, but as we see with Jezebel, that is not always the case. It takes a string of people to care and a string of people to let them care: Yahoo! doesn’t get enough credit for not shutting Tumblr down, for letting Matt take it. G/O Media could have done the same for Jezebel, and, heck, maybe it was willing, maybe there was no one trying. Takes two to Tango, and when those two meet and work something out, we should all be thankful.
There really aren’t many sites left like that on the internet. And maybe we don’t use them anymore — Flickr is still awesome but none of us use it. Livejournal is still there, cranking away, but none of us use it. But other people do, other people rely on it. Tumblr is still a vibrant and fascinating place, as weird as it ever was, even if every journalist got bored of it.
Olivia Rodrigo released a new video last night, for her new off-album single, Can’t Catch Me Now, off of the (presumably) forthcoming Hunger Games: Book of Shadows soundtrack (deep joke cut). I happened to have just hit Youtube as the video was just getting premiered, there were only like 1k views on it when I saw it (there are half a million now, 10 hours later).
I just want to say: fuckin props to you and your video director, Olivia Rodrigo, for making a 100% authentic 80’s music-video-for-a-song-from-a-film where you intersperse footage from the film into the video, and try and make a video that fits visually with the movie, even though it is so obvious they’re two different shoots and no one is quite sure why you’re doing this and even to the point where you reuse clips from the film multiple times, multiple times. That part is just so gloriously 80’s no one does that anymore. It’s like they gave you a Youtube link to the trailer and said “use whatever footage you want from the trailer” and it wasn’t enough to fill out a video so you just reused that scene of people walking in a rotunda like three times. Freakin awesome, Olivia Rodrigo’s commitment to 80’s rockers is absolute, admirable.
While we’re on the topic of music I am hereby announcing that I don’t really care about the Beatles anymore, or at least right now. I don’t care about that new song, it’s a good melody and chorus but whatever. The cover art is atrocious. The AI is upsetting. The new Sean Lennon is better. I don’t care about the remasters of the blue and red albums. I don’t know why I don’t really have anything against the Beatles. I feel bad for Paul and the way he lost Linda. I kinda think John was probably a pre-Yoko wife beater. Julian got a raw deal. Ringo’s hilarious, I have absolutely no Beatles-era opinion about George but I do love All Things Must Pass and the concert for Bangladesh, but, I don’t know. Somewhere around 2014 I was re-obsessed with another Liverpool band, Echo and the Bunnymen, I cared about them again so much. Just completely obsessed. Convinced “The Back of Love” was the greatest song ever. Then one day… poof. Just gone. I barely care about Echo and the Bunnymen again.
Music is a fickle friend. It’s always there but it’s always changing. It is mysterious and unknowable, exactly, what you love about it.
On that note, I listened to the club mix of “Get Off” last night and I think I am pretty much done with Prince for a while that dude is always going on about ripping ladies clothes off and boning and it is boring and I know he doesn’t always sing about that sort of thing but all that combined with the chapter in the Sinead book and he is going back in the icebox for a good while. It’s not really weird to me when social progressives ignore the moral failings of their artistic idols. Provided they’re dead, who really cares, I guess. There is one very loud progressive voice on social media who has a sideline as a world class Prince expert and goes on and on about every moment of their lives, what they were doing on such-and-such a day, etc., yet I have never seen them acknowledge in anyway the Sinead incident. It is mysterious.
For me, it’s kind of moot. Sometimes news of the moral failings of an artist I love just ruins them for me, involuntarily, whether I academically agree with this or not. It has now happened with Prince, Bowie and, I think, John Lennon. But if you told me, like, Travis Ryan of Cattle Decapitation was a 2FA nut or something, I’d be like, yeah, checks out. When’s the next record.
It is weird how we judge people for what we expect of them, even if we expect wildly different things from different people.
Oh yes wow, you know, I didn’t realize prior to now how well all these outstanding topics on my topic list fit together, but speaking of:
Paula P-Orridge, aka Alaura O’Dell, ex-wife, band mate and band manager of Genesis P-Orridge of Psychic TV, has finally spoken out after decades — decades! — of silence, now that Genesis has passed. This now makes the second of his ex-partners who has claimed that Genesis was abusive, primarily of the emotional variety. Would this stuff stand up in a court of law, nah, no, probably not. But it definitely effects me and my relationship with Psychic TV. I mean, it did, past tense, I already knew the outlines of Paula’s story through the PTV grapevine. It is unfortunate and sad. It does not, weirdly, effect my relationship with their music, though, because as much as Genesis probably would have disliked this, I always viewed PTV as a band: there were many PTVs through the years, as the lineup changed, and my relationship with each of those bands is different, but they are independent of Genesis. The garagey drone band of the 21st century that routinely played in Brooklyn was a great band, just a great lineup. The Fred era was awesome, the Paula/Sleazy bad was great, these all woulda been great bands without Genesis, I think.
Man it is all so irrational.
Anyway, great read, check out her words, and of course her comments about misogamy in the music industry, more true back then but still hella true, I’d wager.
Speaking of props and lots of video views in a few hours (okay, that was a few paragraphs back but work with me here), I’ve been thinking a lot about Colin Furze, the wildly talented English engineer who is currently building a network of tunnels underneath his house that will now include a car elevator in the driveway where the car will lower down into a secret lair. Mind you, this dude is doing all this mainly band, at a normal English row house, not, like, those big rig fanatics on mysteriously large properties in Montana. Anyway, this tunnel thing is taking years, and in the meantime, he still does his other viral engineering videos, but people are always like “what’s up with the tunnel” and for years he’d be like “when there is progress I will let you know” but recently he decided “fuck it, you know what, if people want to see endless tunnel tedium, fine, let them. I will set up a second channel that’s just boring tunnel behind-the-scenes updates” and my god have people eaten it up. More tunnels! More tedious rock digging! One video he posted on his second channel got more than 1 MM views in nine hours — twice what Olivia Rodrigo’s new video got!
Dude made a lark of a business decision and it has paid off ridiculously handsomely. Dude’s only posted 3 videos on that site so far and they have 8 million views, which is about $150k of extra pocket change.
Small decisions can have giant ramifications sometimes.
Today at 2:30 I pick up Jane from school, then go straight to the airport to get Emma, then bring them back home, then go back to the airport and pick up my mom and aunt. Lotta driving. It also marks the end of my week of solo parenting, which I have successfully navigated. yay me. Cats didn’t starve, robots didn’t break or attack me, kitchen is clean, kid dressed appropriately for three different special dress-up days, I even got a few other chores done.
But, man, dance party has descended into the same two Blackpink songs and then one or two Taylor songs and… I am over it. I miss Robyn and the Linda Lindas and the Breeders and Cocteau Twins and Fuzzbox I need to broaden her horizons again. I have waken up three mornings in a row with “Ice Cream” by Blackpink and Selene Gomez in my head and I want it to end.
It is also becoming increasingly clear to me that that song is a secretly encoded homage to semen so, you know, I can’t stop thinking about that now and I do not enjoy it one bit.
Moody and quiet playlist for you today. N.B. Annie Hamilton is the singer from Sydney, not the cult-favorite actress, and not Annie Clark, and not the playwright Annie Baker, whom I always confuse with Annie Clark, whom I always confuse with the two Hamiltons, whom I always confuse. Also why is it “playwright” and not “playwrite” that is weird. AC Marias’ name was Angela, so that is not confusing.
Thank you for your time and consideration in this matter.
I think about the Sinead chapter everytime i see or hear Prince. I don't think that will ever go away.
(Also i can't imagine car pickup lines at school!)