Midnight Train, Fine Food Market, Very Fine Records (2024)

During a recent conversation with friends, we eventually arrived at the topic of food.

“I like to eat,” someone said.

It seems like a given. But along with breathing and sleeping, eating is rapidly becoming a luxury that fewer can afford.

Ile de France, 31 July 2024

The décor on the 9^th floor of the recently refurbished Eaton’s Centre is as cinematic as a Stanley Kubrick movie location. The service from the staff, smartly uniformed in smocks and jeans, is impeccable. And the food is fantastic — and not outrageously expensive, either.

Hats off to Chef Liam Hopkins as well, who patiently explained the ingredients and preparation techniques of every single dish on the menu, and whether or not they could be prepared Vegan, and without salt, or without sugar, to my infamous dinner partner, Sally Albright.

Hwere, with Mue, Robyn Gray, and Personal Records DJs, Casa del Popolo, 30 July 2024

I didn’t know Mark Fisher. We followed each other on the social network formerly known as Twitter. We might have on occasion faved one another’s tweets. And Fisher co-founded Repeater Books with Tariq Goddard, the talented British novelist who commissioned, edited, and published both Mad Skills and The Limits of Control.

Now that Goddard is stepping down from Repeater, it’s high time to acknowledge that I half-owe them both a career, and feel it is incumbent upon me to at least attempt to carry on Fisher’s project of resisting capitalist despair and imagining an alternative to the neoliberal disaffection and consciousness deflation that ultimately claimed him. Although this project must be a collective one, Fisher bore its cross and crown of thorns more than most.

Resistance might not be the proper strategy, however. Because like Nicky Santoro, Joe Pesci’s character in Martin Scorsese’s Casino, capital one-ups every weapon, ending ultimately when all else fails with all-out war. America’s recent prisoner swap with Russia, an explicitly hostile superpower against which they have invested tens of billions in military aid, proves that no power is as super as capital.

If leaning out means non-participation and marginalization, and leaning in spells complicity with the system that enslaves us, then the best we can do is stand upright.

collectif9, Théâtre de Verdure, 1 August 2024

They can polish their medals and sharpen their
Smiles, and amuse themselves playing games for awhile.
Boom boom, bang bang, lie down you’re dead.

—Pink Floyd “The Fletcher Memorial Home”

Unpopular opinion: I don’t like fireworks. They frighten children and animals. They are a useless waste of capital resources. They trigger distressing memories for anyone who was ever a witness to war. And, perhaps least forgivingly, they disrupt outdoor concerts of sublime post-classical music which both audiences and performers had been anticipating for ages.

Big|Brave, with Spiritual Poison and Efrim Manuel Menuck, Bar Le Ritz PDB, 2 August 2024

O Come, let us sing unto the Lord: let us make a joyful noise to the rock of our salvation.

—Psalm 95:1

Immediately after 9/11, an undercurrent of seriousness and apparent philosophical sobriety pervaded Western cultural production, ostensibly abandoning the trivialities of post-millennium excess and the unself-reflexive approval of poptimistic currents such as The Spice Girls and The Backstreet Boys.

Suddenly, a self-conscious embrace of a spate of new and introspective Indie Rock bands like The Strokes and The White Stripes supplanted shameless pop culture.

A similar shift occurred following the early ‘90s recession and George H.W. Bush’s Gulf War in 1991. The rise of Alternative Rock, which Nirvana characterized, was poised in direct opposition to sickly sweet trends that the New Kids on the Block represented, or the hedonic bombast of, say, Guns N’ Roses.

A parallel rejection of frivolous pleasure-seeking took place concurrently in ostensibly Black American music as Gangsta Rap replaced the positively upbeat stylings of Young MC or DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince.

A generation earlier, the Beatles’ acrid acid-tinged 1968 single, “Revolution,” a direct response to the political protests around the Vietnam War, succeeded their bubble-gum, mop-top, Fab Four era. That decade ended not with the upstate-New York peace-and-love antics of Woodstock, but rather with the Hell’s Angels murdering a young Black man during a Rolling Stones performance at the Altamont Speedway in Tracy, California.

We can draw the obvious conclusion that traumatic economic, social, and geopolitical times compel artists, especially musicians, to harden their aesthetic sensibilities.

The reaction time taken to return to saccharine indulgence, however, is a tertiary bellwether, and worthy of consideration.

Carol King’s Tapestry, which won the Grammy Award for Album of the Year in 1971, signalled an end to the 1960s protest music movement and ushered in a new era of Easy Listening in American Pop.

Cooleyhighharmony by the American vocal group Boys II Men captured the Grammy Award for Best R&B Performance in 1992 and signalled the rise of Mariah Carey’s brand of apolitical balladry.

Kylie Minogue’s Fever was released less than one month after 9/11 — featuring the catchy-yet-innocuous “Can’t Get You Out of My Head,” her biggest-selling single — and continued winning Grammys until 2004.

And following the Covid crisis, the much-promised return of Punk never really materialized, the world instead ensconcing itself in the narcissistic comfort of Taylor Swift and Drake.

Now, as the conflict in Gaza surpasses its 300^th day, and Russia has occupied Ukraine for more than two years with no end in sight, donor fatigue setting in, and an increasingly grim American election on the horizon, not a single song on the Billboard Hot 100 mentions much if any of this. The topic of conversation in music discourse continues to be whether or not 2024 was indeed the year of Brat Summer.

Global mass culture has seemingly run out of fight, leaving the heavy lifting to hyperlocal artists who are admittedly smaller in reach but far bigger on bravery.◼︎

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_{Cover image: Efrim Manuel Menuck performs at Bar Le Ritz PDB, 2 August 2024. Photographed for NicheMTL.}