Good afternoon gorgeous email friends. The democratising effect of the internet killed the printed word. This amateurisation made it harder for papers and magazines to recover from their inevitable mistakes. Once everyone became a publisher, the demand for even well-loved titles dwindled until they could no longer see a point in continuing.
At least, for a while. The internet has been around long enough for us all to understand the effect of giving everyone a publishing platform: many benefits but also considerable drawbacks that were initially obscure.
But the smoke is clearing, and traditional publishers are beginning to see their role anew. They’re realising they can’t churn out crap, because: (a) they can’t get away with it, and (b) everyone’s churning out crap already. So instead, perhaps drawing inspiration from recent social movements, even the most obsequious rags are becoming scathing of those they previously celebrated. I am choosing to nickname this the Clapton Effect.
Eric Clapton has enjoyed a long and highly successful career, appropriating black America’s finest blues musicians and then turning out his own bland, soft, boring, slow, inoffensive pastiches. I used to think I liked Eric Clapton, until I began to realise everything I liked about him was the work, directly or indirectly, of someone else (like that glorious screaming riff in “Layla” by Duane Allman).
Clapton is a celebrated guitarist. He is also, by his own admission, a wife-beater, alcoholic and heroin addict. But hey, rock ’n roll, right? Yeah, rock ’n roll. When you write bland folk songs and play lead guitar and are mostly shitfaced, you get to be a famous racist, tweed-suited bloodsports enthusiast and anti-vaccine campaigner.
Rolling Stone has featured Clapton on its cover eight times. But now it has realised it can no longer get away with mediocre sycophancy. This is proven out by a scathing attack on Clapton and his supportāvocal, musical (if you can call it that) and financialāfor anti-vax claptrap. The Washington Post too is wondering happened to Eric Clapton before slowly reaching the realisation that he’s pretty-much always been pretty-much terrible, but in previous times we were all happy just to care about how well he played guitar.
Perhaps Clapton’s only positive contribution is as a sort of wearisome musical signpost; ushering those in search of blues greatness towards the true masters. Muddy Waters. Brownie McGhee. Big Bill Broonzy. John Lee Hooker. Robert Johnson. Skip James. Blind Boy Fuller. B. B. King. Little Walter. Chuck Berry. And as for previously toadying traditional publishers, these are positive signs. They’re slowly uncovering the value they could bring to a chaotic, divisive media landscape: abandon the myth of tortured genius and offered a balanced view of how things really are.
š The vinyl issue: Delays, costs, pandemic, booked up pressing plants, and Brexit: Demand for vinyl LPs is now far outstripping supply. The UK’s small-capacity vinyl pressing plants, just six in all and one hundred worldwide, are unable to turn out records fast enough. Most of the vinyl sold in the UK is shipped from Germany. But following Brexit and then a pandemic, independent labels and artists were already being crippled by the costs and delays to their vinyl releases, now they have been compounded by major artists block booking pressing plants. See also: UK’s last cassette shop reels in nostalgic music lovers.
šŖ¦ Largest cemetery: Wadi al-Salaam, the Valley of Peace, in Iraq is the largest cemetery in the world; more than five million people are buried there.
š¶ Are you sure you know what emotions are? If you ask someone to explain to you what an emotion is, they will probably start by offering a few examples, listing mental states such as happiness, sadness, anger and fear, hoping that you’ll get the general idea. And for everyday purposes, this is a reasonable way to proceed. But for scientific purposes, more precision is needed.
š Countdown to ecstasy: how music is being used in healing psychedelic trips: Jon Hopkins timed his upcoming album to the length of a ketamine high, while apps are using AI music to tailor drug experiences. Welcome to a techno-chemical new frontier.
š Japan’s Skyscraper Factories: Starting in the late 1970s, Japan’s large construction companies began investing huge amounts of time and money into construction robotics research, culminating in the creation of automated building factories designed to construct entire skyscrapers. Rather than the “conventional” industrialised building approach, where construction work is moved into an off-site factory, these systems moved the factory onto the jobsite.
š„ Violence and mental health are likely to get worse in a warming world: Heat doesn’t just affect physical health. It can have equally serious effects on mental health conditions. Research has shown that rising temperatures are associated with an increase in suicides and in violent behaviour, as well as exacerbating mood and anxiety disorders.
š£ A Change to the Sound of the Voice Can Change Your Very Self-Identity: Our voice is the only musical instrument that is both a string and a wind instrumentāas the breath causes the vocal cords to vibrate. It is almost an orchestra unto itself. All this gives each of us a particular, unique vocal imprint; there are seven billion humans, seven billion different voices.