“The mural I’ve painted is a twist on the mythology around Celtic mother goddess Danu, combined with the river Lee running through Cork alongside my piece on Sullivans Quay which reflects the Milky Way on clear nights. I like to think that even today, no matter who you meet or cross paths with on the streets, they could be gods in disguise. These ‘modern classics’ are a lot of fun for me to do as a take on that. The woman I’ve painted is a bit anonymous with just the sliver of her face visible, adding to the notion she could be anyone, passing through the streets of Cork. The stars and galaxies are spinning out of her red hair as a nod to the movement and flow of the river, the heart and soul of Cork City shaping and defining the energy of the city.” KITSUNE JOLENE, courtesy of the ARDÚ Street Art Project.
Home At Last
Greetings from Cork City, Ireland!
When we arrived on the 15th, our main concern was the state of our furniture, which had been in storage for almost a year. We were delighted to find our stuff free of damage, mold and creepy-crawlies; the piano was out of tune, but I expected that. With the help of a few stout Irish lads, we managed to set up our new home in a day and a half. Dad did a great job turning the cottage into something closer to a house, giving each of us a small den for alone time and (knowing our sexual proclivities), a big fucking bedroom cleverly designed so that any visitor would find it difficult to discern our kinky orientation.
We’re about a kilometer from the city center, close enough to walk if we feel like shopping or experiencing the nightlife. Once there, we can take a short bus ride from the city center to the train station if we want to explore the country. We sold our car when we left Nice and have no intention of buying another, in part because we have no experience in left-side driving, but largely because the Irish are terrible drivers. I can’t remember a day in the last six months when there wasn’t a headline about a fatal car accident in either the Irish Examiner (Cork) or the Irish Times (Dublin). One recent report attributed the spate of car accidents to distracted drivers watching Netflix. What the fuck, people?
Road dangers aside, I love the vibes here—much more positive in comparison to France. Bitching has always been the French national pastime, and they even came up with a flexible verb (“râler”) that covers all forms of bitching: complaining, whining, moaning, groaning, grumbling and criticizing. The French râler even when there’s nothing to râler about, and now that they have plenty to râler about, it gets on one’s nerves after a while. In all fairness, the tendency to engage in râler has a positive pole: the French have high standards when it comes to food, wine and culture. Lucky for me, I’ll be traveling to Paris at least once a month, so I can enjoy the good things without getting caught up in the negativity.
In the latest survey of Happiest Countries in the World, Ireland is #17 and France is #27. Hooray for me! I’ve gained ten points on the happiness scale!
Unwelcome Validation
One of my friends in Seattle subscribes to The Atlantic, and occasionally she sends me articles likely to pique my interest. Her latest gift was a piece by Spencer Kornhaber titled, “Is This the Worst-Ever Era of American Pop Culture?” I should note that the author would answer that question in the negative, but the evidence he offers is weak at best. Hip-hop mingling with electronic music is hardly an innovation. Like all critics, he wants to live in an era of cultural excellence, but he tries too hard to make something out of nothing.
The article covers most of the arts, but much of the narrative focuses on music. The first person Kornhaber spoke with was Ted Gioia, the great jazz critic and musical historian:
America’s “creative energy” has been sapped, he told me, and the results can be seen in the diminished quality of arts and entertainment, with knock-on effects to the country’s happiness and even its political stability.
He’s not alone in fearing that we’ve entered a cultural dark age. According to a recent YouGov poll, Americans rate the 2020s as the worst decade in a century for music, movies, fashion, TV, and sports. A 2023 story in The New York Times Magazine declared that we’re in the “least innovative, least transformative, least pioneering century for culture since the invention of the printing press.” An art critic for The Guardian recently proclaimed that “the avant-garde is dead.”
The chaos of TikTok, the disruption of the pandemic, and the threat of AI have destabilized any coherent story of progress driving the arts forward. In its place, a narrative of decay has taken hold, evangelized by critics such as Gioia. They’re citing very real problems: Hollywood’s regurgitation of intellectual property; partisan culture wars hijacking actual culture; unsustainable economic conditions for artists; the addicting, distracting effects of modern technology.
“Music is turning into a rights-management business,” Gioia said. “There are vested interests now that don’t want new music to flourish. The private-equity funds just want you to listen to the same songs over and over again, because they own them.” The ultimate effect, he thinks, is to discourage true, daring artistry. If Bach were alive today, “he’d spend a few weeks trying to break into the L.A. music scene and say, ‘Ah, I’ll be a hedge-fund manager instead.’”
The same YouGov survey that found Americans to be so unhappy with the state of movies, TV, and music found that people also generally feel that this is the decade with the worst economy, the least moral society, the least close-knit communities, and the most political division.
Kornhaber also spoke with indie musician Jaime Brooks to get her take on the situation:
Best-known for her work under the aliases Elite Gymnastics and Default Genders, Brooks has long been a “bedroom musician”: someone who uses a home computer to make high-quality recordings. In the early 2010s, as a 20-something immersed in the hipster party scene in Minneapolis, Brooks collaborated with a friend to release a few ethereal dance songs that drew the acclaim of music bloggers. She was soon dating the similarly buzzy artist Grimes and living in Los Angeles, getting a close-up look at the modern pop ecosystem.
But these days, her mics and guitar are packed up in boxes, gathering dust. Spending time working on new songs just doesn’t feel right given her belief, articulated in widely circulated tweets and essays, that the music industry is doomed. Like Gioia, Brooks feels that tech and business interests are strangling the arts; like (art critic) Dean Kissick, she believes that most of the new work that gets made today just flat-out isn’t good. But Brooks’s view is even darker than either of theirs, and more explicitly personal. She described the future of music to me in one word: wreckage.
Many musicians believe that Spotify’s business model is predatory, forcing artists to participate in a system in which they make only a fraction of a penny whenever a song is played. Brooks agrees, but her concern runs deeper than the money itself; she argues that music’s role in society has been corrupted. Streaming encourages artists to play an enervating game of scale: The more songs they release, the more chance they have of going viral and turning pittances into real income. Artists are thus motivated to record as quickly and cheaply as possible. All of this, Brooks believes, has led to a glut of music—both popular and obscure—that is plainly bad: less distinct, less soulful, and less skillfully made than the minimal standards of previous eras. “Nobody can get the resources to develop their craft,” she said.
This decline in quality has created the conditions for what Brooks fears will come next: a flood of AI-generated songs that further devalue music as an art form and an economic enterprise. Already, streaming platforms have inculcated a huge demand for “utility” music, such as white noise to fall asleep to and “chill beats” to study to. Cheap AI tools can now conjure credible versions of such music, and over time they’ll only get better at imitating other styles. Listeners’ standards have become so diminished that they won’t be able to tell the difference.
I covered these issues in the Chick Riffs, “The De-Evolution of Modern Music” and “AI Resistance Via Live at the BBC.” No, I don’t deserve a pat on the back, and while it’s nice to know that I’m not an out-of-touch loony, the decline of the arts is nothing to celebrate.
The views expressed by Gioia and Brooks do explain my decision to explore the music of yesteryear (when innovation was celebrated) and wait three years after release to review any contemporary album. My primary goal is to discover music that qualifies as timeless or represents a significant step forward in music history, and I’ve learned not to count on 21st-century music to provide timeless music or much in the way of innovations that advance the art. When people talk about innovation in music today, they mostly talk about technological innovation and ignore the importance of craftsmanship.
The good news is that most Americans think their movies, TV and music suck, which suggests they are open to something better. The bad news is that when you combine the decline in artistic quality and innovation in the USA with the Trump/GOP attack on “left-wing” artistic expression, it’s more likely that American creators will double down on playing it safe. Because Americans are fundamentally miserable, you can expect more dreary apocalyptic movies, dark comedies and plenty of blood, guts, guns and gore—and a whole lot of repetitive music.
Kornhaber’s USA-centric orientation assumes that the United States remains the center of the artistic universe. Given America’s declining influence in nearly every field—science, education, economics, diplomacy and the arts—such a perspective is painfully out of date. Since Europe also suffers from Spotification and the branding fetish, if innovation grounded in craftsmanship is going to make a comeback, it’s far more likely to emerge elsewhere, hopefully from one of the Trump-tagged “shithole countries” where musicians don’t have skin in the industry game and couldn’t care less about their “brand.”
The Genius Challenge
While we’re on the subject of innovation . . .
When I finally had time to come up with a review schedule, I decided I would do Thelonious Monk first and Ray Charles second. It was only later that I realized I had placed two musicians commonly tagged with the “genius” label back to back. As I find the label problematic on many levels, I thought it best to lay out my concerns before publishing those reviews.
The term “genius” has been freely and inaccurately applied to many musicians by critics who have trouble controlling their emotions or are determined to increase readership by kowtowing to a popular artist’s fan base. Hence Rolling Stone titled one of their issues “The Genius of Eminem,” whose simple and repetitive rhyming hardly places him in the same tier with Keats, Yeats or Emily Dickinson. Kanye West is considered a genius for two reasons: one, he told everybody he was a genius; and two, he used samples from the works of other artists in clever ways. Sorry, Ye, but putting together a musical jigsaw puzzle from other people’s work doesn’t qualify you as a genius . . . but you might qualify based on the common perception that most geniuses are first-rate assholes.
The genius tag was first attached to Monk and Ray by their respective record companies. Blue Note released two Monk compilation albums titled “Genius of Modern Music, Vols. One & Two.” Atlantic Records went even further for Ray, with three albums bearing the g-word in their titles. ABC followed the pattern with Ray’s first album with the label, titling the effort as The Genius Hits the Road. If you advertise the same message over and over again, some people will accept it as the truth and pass it on to others: “Yes, tests show Tide is better than Cheer.”
There is no universally acceptable criteria that determine whether or not someone is a genius. Some define genius as exceptional intelligence, i.e., having a high IQ. Others define it as a combination of originality, unbridled curiosity, and the ability to approach challenges in novel ways, in defiance of expectations and norms. Author Walter Isaacson, who has written several books about geniuses (including Elon Musk, confirming the genius = first-rate asshole hypothesis), wrote a piece for Time where he argued that “Being a genius is different than merely being supersmart. Smart people are a dime a dozen, and many of them don’t amount to much. What matters is creativity, the ability to apply imagination to almost any situation.”
So . . . do we believe Ray Charles and Thelonious Monk were geniuses because they were promoted as such, or because they possessed the ability to apply imagination to almost any situation? Let’s see what the artists had to say.
Ray found the label somewhat intimidating, as described in his autobiography, Brother Ray: “. . . it was the boys at Atlantic who started using the genius label. It wasn’t my idea. Calling someone a genius is some heavy shit, and I’d never have used the word in regard to myself. I think I’m pretty good at what I do, but I’ve never considered myself a genius. Yet between Atlantic and the public, the name stuck—that and Brother Ray. I saw it as a high compliment, and I certainly didn’t complain. If the public accepted that, fine. On the other hand, I tried very hard not to let myself feel pressure; I didn’t want to feel compelled to live up to the name. And I haven’t thought of myself as a genius before or since.”
Unsurprisingly, Monk took a more philosophical approach in the handwritten pages of “Monk’s Advice.” “Whatever you think can’t be done, somebody will come along + do it. A genius is the one most like himself.” Monk believed that achieving a genius-level state involved a journey of self-realization, and I think Ray would have agreed with him.
There’s no question that Monk was the more innovative pianist and composer. Still, few vocalists could match Ray Charles when it came to evoking a deeply emotional response from his listening audience. Given the degradation of the term, I’m uncomfortable pronouncing anyone a genius, but I will say that both Thelonious Monk and Ray Charles were two of the most influential and innovative artists in music history, and I won’t argue with anyone who believes they deserved the genius appellation.
Oh! One more thing—I’ve updated my bio to reflect recent developments and life changes.
Cheers!
I agree with one of the previous posts that said “good stuff” is out there, it’s just incredibly difficult to find.
Word of mouth is probably still the best way to find out about “good stuff” and by that I mean recommendations from someone whose judgement you respect, no matter the method of delivery.
Of course, given how expensive touring and gigging have become there might not be many opportunities to hear the music you’ve been given a tip about in a live setting. Couple that with venues becoming so unwilling to pay even local musicians, you might not hear much live music at all. So what do you do?
Make art yourself. Don’t expect to live off of it, but make it anyway. Be your own guitar hero. Or whatever kind of “hero” you want to be. Someone will notice, I guarantee it from my own experience. Jeez…you’ll make a new acquaintance at worst or a good friend at best. And if it takes a while, who cares? The journey is often more fun than getting to the final destination, which in the creation of art doesn’t really exist, anyway.
Congratulations on your move, but my comments here have no relevance to that move. Instead, I wanted to comment on a comment from June 6, 2013 in your review of Preservation Act I & II by the Kinks, the review that introduced me to your marvelous site & reviews. Perhaps comments are closed for that posting. I can’t figure out how to comment in that space so I’m using this more current posting to contact you. Mark referenced seeing the Boston production of Preservation but I was there for one of those fantastic dates in 1998 and I’ve saved the program, flyers, and Boston Globe articles and would like to send jpegs of them to you, if you’re interested.
Oh crap! I forgot to reopen the comment feature on all pre-2025 reviews! Stand by!
I feel that the megalomania of the United States is catching up to the country. The bloated budgets, the obsession to minimize risk, and the pursuit of four-quadrants’ appeal at all costs are the big issue here. Ironically, they want to minimize risks while spending ludicrous amounts of money, which means that the work has to have mainstream appeal to generate profit, and that’s a snowball. Martin Scorsese, who is a massive fan of cinema from many countries, genres and wildly different approaches across history and the world, has been very critical for years of the Hollywood blockbuster, not because he is an old fogey who hates fun (he loves James Bond), but because of how much these films have come to dominate mainstream cinema, and how little artistic freedom is ever possible within. There are stories of directors in the MCU films talking of how it’s producer Kevin Feige that really calls the shots. Marvel loves to hire promising young directors from indie cinema, only to crush all of what made such young directors be distinctive and special to begin with, it’s a rare that a director can actually put any of their stamp on an MCU movie. And yet, many still take the job because the money can help a lot with future, more personal projects, so I’m not accusing anyone here of selling out, I respect the pragmatism. Scorsese has always made clear that his criticism is against mainstream american cinema, while he absolute loves the american independent scene.
I’m talking about film here because I’m more knowledgeable about the situation than music in the american mainstream, but I think a lot of the same points can be applied to how the music industry operates nowadays, and I believe that something’s gonna give eventually, and these big companies will be forced to accept more artistic innovation eventually, after the formulas have been beaten to the ground so much that the profits only keep shrinking.
And yet, even in the direst circumstances in America, the human spirit for creating art persists and always will. That said, it really needs to be more encouraged. I think that Europe, while far from perfect (no place has ever been, the life of an artist trying to get financed has always been hard), is able to better support their artists. Taxes that aren’t as abusive (do you that taking a whole film crew and build sets to shoot on Hungary, for example, is actually cheaper than just crossing the street and filming in the studio lot in Hollywood?), public financing of different countries. The movies are very cheap, but that also means that they don’t need to have wide easy appeal to all demographics, they are allowed to be more weird and niche. Flow, the winner of Best Animated Feature in the last Oscar, is a perfect example of this. A movie with no dialogue and minimal clear plot, focusing on animals just trying to survive a flood, and made using free and open-source software as well, is not something a mainstream american animation studio would ever dare to do.
About AI, I’ve said before and I will say again: my concern with it is because of all the people who do stock music and stock footage to pay the bills, or anything that is meant as not much more than background noise really. As bland as all this stuff is, definitely not classics, they still are helping someone pay the bills. My concern is also due to the countless stupid businessmen who don’t get anything about art and what these AI softwares can actually do, these people could try using AI to “replace” artists, and these executives are going to be horribly short-sighted and be looked upon in shame by history for even thinking that art is something that can be made 100% safe and reliable as if it was water or a washing machine. Art is always going to have a factor of risk. However, with all the downsides of AI I mentioned, one can hope that live performance becomes more treasured and valuable than ever, so I don’t think that all art will be devalued. If anything, AI art couldn’t have less lasting value in popular culture, especially now that it has ceased to be a novelty and the internet is flooded with so much slop, so much low-effort trash. It’s bad even for memes. I think that the devalue of AI art is not too different from how your average photo taken on a phone doesn’t inspire the same awe as one shot on film or with actual great care put into it, the kind you actually want to print and hang on your wall. Long are gone the days when photography in itself was special. To make it feel special, resonant, and to also actually give it any money value in capitalism too, you need the artists, the effort, the care. A top-tier photographer will do much better with an IPhone camera than us could ever hope to with the best cameras, and I’m not even talking about the very best photographers, what I’m saying is true even for not significantly above average ones.
Your instincts are spot-on: the decline of quality in American films mirrors the similar decline in music. I’ve been corresponding with a friend in L.A. who is trying to get backers for a start-up entity focused on bringing quality back to American cinema and though it hasn’t been easy, he’s still plugging away. Very few American films in the last quarter century have moved me like the great films of yesteryear and I miss that experience. And thank you for mentioning the decline in photography standards, which is very troubling indeed. When I was researching my Great Depression/WWII reviews I viewed the work of Dorothea Lange and Don McCullin and their photos of the suffering moved me as much as any great movie ever did. I never want to see another fucking meme as long as I live.
When something is too easy, it really needs the artist, the human element, the care and the hard work to give it value. The average photo in the old days was far more valuable because the limited film stock and the long wait to actually see the results meant that people in general had to put much care and attention in their pictures. With phones now, taking a photo has become banal, so one really needs more than ever the human element, the care and the hard work to make it special and give it value, not only emotionally but also even in the cold logic of what is value in capitalism. And with how all these AI tools work, even without taking into account that they are anti-ethical in using other people’s work without their consent, I don’t think that any of these Gen AI tools as they exist (just a button press) are capable of delivering value no matter how hard one tries, how elaborate a prompt could be. The people who love these tools are clueless tech bros and businessmen, not artists, because it’s painfully obvious for any artist how fucking useless these tools and their approach actually are for artistic creation, how little control you have, and how these tools can’t give actual value, emotional and/or in capitalism, to what one “creates” with them. These tools don’t have any thought, they are just an algorithm for what’s most likely, hence why their output is so generic and hard to get what you want.
In the 1960s, film director Jean Renoir said “when technique is primitive, everything is beautiful. When technique is perfected, everything is ugly, except the work of artists that can transcend technique”. He was talking about the art of tapestries, but I also think it’s true for the art of photography, art in general really, to varying degrees. The point here is not that technique isn’t important: great technique is vital to help one to express themselves better and see more creative possibilities, adjusting every detail. This is why someone who actually knows the technicals of photography will do much better with an IPhone than us with the best cameras, not to mention why the approach of these AI tools can never give one the level of fine control one needs, hence why so much AI art has also significantly been tweaked with Photoshop to make it more presentable and exact. The point that Jean Renoir was making was about how the human individual element of expression is crucial if an artistic work is to stand in a world where so many techniques have made your medium easier and cheaper than ever, with less limitations than ever.
After I wrote my comment about how, in a world that has banalized photography through the phones we have with us, the human element is how a photo (or any artistic work in any other medium too) can stand out and have value (as also explained well in that Jean Renoir quote I shared), I see the news that brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado, one of the greatest in the world, a legend of the artform, died today at 81 years old!
How about a silver lining attitude. I think there is more creativity than ever, but it isn’t evident. There are some things so large they often get overlooked. Like the land, the sea, the air. The core revolutionary aspect of the internet – transforming a society of about 100 publishers and a billion consumers into one of a billion publishers and a billion consumers – has made finding quality creative a very difficult thing, as you pointed out. That doesn’t mean it isn’t there. But it is like trying to find your car keys when you accidentally drop them into the sea while boating. And then there are also those joyous moments when you discover something that has been around for years but you were unaware. Like Irish session music! (Try and get to Doolin.)
Congrats on the move to Ireland. Hears hoping it lives up to its rating.
I completely agree. The commentators focused mostly on the music embraced by the system, which is pure boilerplate and explains why Jaime was so frustrated. When I was reviewing contemporary albums—largely those released by indie labels—I discovered several promising and creative artists who couldn’t break through the muck. Most of those artists eventually gave up and moved on when they realized that originality was not valued by the big labels.
I haven’t been to County Clare but I’m looking forward to exploring all the provinces!
Glad you made it! There’s a lot of interesting thoughts in this post to process, but I’ll just quickly (or maybe not quickly at all) comment on a couple. I’m a lot younger than you – I’m about to graduate from high school – and I definitely feel a little out of touch with the popular music of today, which my younger sister listens to quite heavily. Some of it is alright, but most either seems to me simply mediocre and/or quite annoying. But as I’m starting to find out, even as I continue to dig deeper into the classics of yesteryear (partly with the help of your excellent appraisals), I’m also finding some really good new music that’s either just below the surface (critically appraised and with a big cult following, but not mainstream) or way below the surface (a lot of which will have the sad fate of never really finding the success it deserves). You do you on the three-year limit, an admirable line to hold to, but in the near future I probably plan to start my own music review website, and I don’t expect to hold to that rule, even if 80% of what I end up reviewing is still very old. Anyhow, I mentioned a few modern artists in a comment a little while ago, and I’ll highlight a couple more now. Big Thief is a fantastic indie-folk band that’s gotten a ton of critical acclaim (and even a shout-out from Obama a few years ago, I think), and they deserve that acclaim and then some. Their lead singer and songwriter Adrianne Lenker, who also has an excellent solo career, is extremely talented and fearlessly idiosyncratic (her vocals, like a female Neil Young, may or may not be an acquired taste, but she’s undeniably a masterful lyricist), and the band has a wonderful, warm sound to support her. All of their albums are worth listening to in order – their first album, Masterpiece, has a different drummer than the rest and has a generally heavier, rougher style, while the pinnacle of their career is either the two records they released in 2019 (U.F.O.F. and Two Hands) or their most recent album, 2022’s (hey, it’s eligible for you to review now) Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You, a sprawling double album with – amazingly – hardly any filler despite its length and having been recorded in 4 different studios with 4 different engineers in the midst of the pandemic. Another, very different, indie-ish band that’s been getting a ton of critical acclaim is the British band Black Country, New Road, who I saw open for St. Vincent (my first time seeing her; she put on an incredible show – I know you gave a glowing review to one of her albums and then the follow-up disappointed you, so I don’t know if you would’ve liked the show, but my mom and I sure did) on Friday. BCNR emerged a few years ago playing a distinctive blend of post-punk and prog-rock, and got a ton of acclaim for their first two albums, but then their lead singer suddenly left the band on the eve of the release of their second album. The band immediately dropped all of his songs from their set, wrote a bunch of new ones, shared lead vocal duties among several bandmembers, and came out with a live album less than a year later. Quite impressive, and then they went into the studio and recorded a whole new set of songs entirely, with no overlap from that live album. The new album (called Forever, Howlong) is fantastic, and it was astonishing to see them pull off some of its songs live, because they’re incredibly tricky – instrument switching, time signature changes, complicated lyrics, gorgeous harmonies, and big dynamics. I know their most recent album is too recent for you to review, but I encourage you to check it out and then maybe consider reviewing it three years from now if you’re still around by then. Their older stuff is more of an acquired taste, kind of like if King Crimson were a punk band with a really morose lead singer, but they’re good too if it does end up being up your alley. That’s all I’ll say for now on the topic of new music – there’s still good stuff if you know where to look, but it can be overwhelming to sort through what’s good and what’s not, so I respect that you’ve stopped making yourself do that. And by the way, for many reasons, I have never used AI for anything – writing, image generation, anything – and I will not allow the music that I enjoy to be touched by it.
Anyway, I wanted to briefly touch on Monk and Ray Charles, and connect you with a resource that could be helpful in your reviews. I won’t touch on the genius question other than to say that I think you have solid reasoning on it. Anyway, I’ve been following the blog of music professor Ethan Hein for a while, and he’s fantastic. He’s a lot more positive on hip-hop than you are, and thanks to him and some of my peers I’ve started hesitantly appreciating the genre as well, but he also just has excellent, omnivorous music taste and deep knowledge of music theory and history across the board. He just started a podcast and one of the first episodes is on the Ray Charles version of You Are My Sunshine. It’s very worth the 15 minutes it takes to listen to it: https://ethanhein.substack.com/p/you-are-my-sunshine. And then I’ll just link you to the Monk tag on his blog so you can browse at will: https://www.ethanhein.com/wp/tag/thelonious-monk/. Hopefully these resources will help inform your wonderfully thorough research process, and I’m looking forward to the reviews!
Gretings from Australia, number 11 on the scale, where the steering wheel of the car is located on the only sensible side.
Orwell wrote about music creation in 1984: “The tune had been haunting London for weeks past. It was one of countless similar songs published for the benefit of the proles by a sub-section of the Music Department. The words of these songs were composed without any human intervention whatever on an instrument known as a versificator.”
But people have complained about the decline of culture for as long as they’ve been around, so much so it’s cliche. The next musical cultural phenomenon could well come from Africa or Asia, outside the music manufacturing centres.
I definitely see genius in your writing. I love that kinky sex is still number one in your order of passion, even over music, and you are unafraid. Beauty and sex are still a core locus for myself. And did I ever love smoking! I just quit last year after a years of creating my own delicious blends. I am sooooo glad you doing this more frequently and I look forward to reading about Cork. Mark Pritchard / Thom Yorke and Richard Thompson and lots of jazz for this Sunday. And maybe some friggin’ off. Lol.
The artist who drew the mural reminds us that we are always crossing paths with godesses and gods. You, Arielle and Alicia, are proof. Ongoing thanks for changing ‘Sunday’ to ‘Altrockchick day’.
Congrats on your move. I am extremely jealous. If you haven’t already, now would be the ideal time for a deep dive into Cork’s very own Microdisney (“An iron fist in a velvet glove”- John Peel).