The John Robins Vibemail - Issue #30

Current Mood: Cricked

Hello friend!

I got a pretty catastrophic crick in my neck yesterday. Was I completing my 20th consecutive pull-up? Did I fall foul of “Lifter’s Tweak”? Was it 10k too long on the assault bike?! Alas no, in rather pathetic and humbling circumstances I effectively disabled myself whilst doing a big yawn. This is the worst neck crick I’ve ever had, quadrupling my blind spot. Twenty six hours on and it’s still wreaking havoc. Strange how often the most minor injuries cause us the most discomfort. And not just discomfort in the body, but how the mind rails also! The inner critical voice! “Why have you not done yoga twice a day for thirty years!”, “Why are you not fitter?!”, “Why did you not supplement your long haul flight with hourly shuttle runs and lunges down the aisle?!”, “Why, on a fitness journey of all things, is your body still fallible!”. Beneath this, as ever, is the arrogance of “Why do bad things happen to me when I’m doing my best?!” and, beneath this, the only fear some say we ever have: “I am ageing and I will die!”.

Morning!

So here he is. Back from Costa Rica with identical swipes of sunburn on his back like an angel who’s had a poolside prank played on him by the #Lads. Here is a photo of me, Luke and Lou kayaking to see monkeys and bats and CROCODILES. We are sat in order of handsomeness.

Crocs out for the crocs!

I’m not really much of a Long Haul Larry. My brain, ever keen on efficiency and error avoidance, does become somewhat overwhelmed when the regular checklist of “Keys, Wallet, Phone, Vape” is updated with an ever-changing merry-go-round of boarding passes, lockbox codes, ferry departures, check ins, seating plans, baggage allowance, gates opening, restaurants closing, hire car insurance and time zones. Luckily I was spending my holiday with three of the world’s leading chilled-out surfer dudes: Lou Sanders, Luke McQueen and Lucy Pearman. If, at times, my organising overspilled into some kind of military boot camp of barking out instructions and standing at the door harrumphing when it was time to leave, at least an apology was never far away and disaster was avoided. I do hope to one day let go of the efficiency drive and cling on to the friends. For now we will accept some form of balance where I both have a lovely time and get there on time.

On returning, jet lag danced its merry dance leading to multiple midnight Wordles and a fair whack of quiet hours alternating between the relaxing sound of my local owl and concern for a group of youngsters doing laughing gas in a nearby park. My annoyance at the late hour of their hi jinx somewhat diluted by relief that their shrieks and squawks came not from emergency or disaster, but from a kind of escapism playing out in a playground at 2am.

Oh those strange inter-years! Adult pursuits in childhood surrounds! Furnished with the paraphernalia of rebellion: weed, decanted vodka, lipstick and Lynx, but the doors to grown up places not yet open. And so whiteys are pulled by the ladybird bin, and early essays in snogging made on the rocket ship climbing frame. And maybe part of them, despite all their posturing, is not quite ready to leave the comfort of cartoon bugs and outer space.

Morning!

Anyway. Strap in for two completely contradictory Vibemail splurges and a tour plug.

How Do You Cope? - Bonnie “Prince” Billy Quote

I do hope you are enjoying the new series of How Do You Cope? We’re building up quite a library of incredible conversations and I’m really proud of how they’ve come out. Recent episodes feature Self Esteem, Gary Lightbody (of Snow Patrol), Rosie Jones and Professor Jason Arday. If you are interested by the videos I’ve posted on Instagram, please do subscribe to the actual podcast. I’m a bit concerned that the way in which we promote podcasts these days contributes to a habit whereby people only consume them via ninety second video clips, leaving the longer form discussion untouched. A bit like only reading the back cover of books. When podcasting is at its best, it gives us the chance to explore topics at a depth impossible on TV, or even radio. At its worst, of course, it’s thick white guys wanging on about freedom of speech like they haven’t just been speaking freely for three fucking hours.

LOL.

I wanted to share a quote from the episode with musician and hero Bonnie “Prince” Billy. I asked him why a lot of his music wasn’t on Spotify. His answer has stayed with me. It has made me reflect on how I consume things. It’s made me wonder whether, as modern technology increases efficiency, might it be removing some humanity? And how increasing ease and decreasing difficulty, may not be as nourishing an improvement as we are lead to believe. It is a long quote, for which I make no apology. And it’s edited only slightly for sense. That someone can just pull this kind of thing out of their mind on the spot just speaks to the incredible mind he has.

Here it is.

If your algorithm suggests AC/DC's cover of 'Baby Please Don't Go' and you think “I love this beat, I love this guitar part, I love these drums, I love the force and the drive and the timbre of this vocal delivery and the urgency of the vocal delivery so that's great, that's a good song for me algorithm thank you very much.” Not ever asking “why?”. Why is the timbre of that voice resonant to you? Why does it push you? Why does it move you?

It's like eating ultra-processed food - I like salty I like sour, and it's hitting all those things so I just ate a meal - and your gut eventually telling you, and your interactions with the world and yourself eventually telling you, you did not eat a meal. You did not eat the meal you thought you ate. You put things in your body that allowed you to move on with your day but it's tearing you apart, it's destroying you, it's eroding your experience of life...

It's the same with a musical experience. You can have the easy, button pushing experience that an algorithm might help you with, but, the first person to listen to that AC/DC song probably heard it on a radio played by a DJ. And the kind of human labour that it took to make that radio station active and existing and functioning, informed the position of the disc jockey in front of the microphone in prescribed hours that he or she is doing as a job and knows that he or she needs to relate to an audience and relate to his or her employers in the process of delivering music to a needing, hungry, appreciative audience.

If they want to hear the song again they have to make all these decisions about, well, do I listen to the radio because they'll probably play it again in an hour and a half because it's a hit song? Or I can save up my money and walk, bike, get a ride, drive, get my parents to drive me to a record store to see if they have the record? Talk to the record clerk, learn about other music while I'm doing it because AC/DC is there. In which section? Where alphabetically?...And you're flipping through and learning about other music in the record store. You're also probably hearing other music on the bus or in the car that's informing your appreciation of that music. You take it home, you put it on in a space. You've carved out a space in your room or in your living room where you're gonna put on this record. You've carved out time. You've made decision to carve out time. It wasn't like the algorithm just sort of hitting you with it, you've actually made a decision: I'm going to listen to the song that I heard that moves me. And all of these things make you a better person. And the algorithm is hitting all the right deeply ingrained subconscious markers that we've evolved to say that we need – which is human connection.

So an app has been created which mimics human connection and they call it Facebook or they call it Instagram – and it isn't human connection on almost any level except the most microscopic superficial level. It resembles human connection but it isn't human connection. And listening to music through a streaming app resembles listening to music but it isn't really listening to music in all of its incredible multidimensional ways that we've evolved to value the experience of listening to music, which is ultimately a sustaining human activity of communication and we think 'no, it's easy and it's entertainment', not realising that each time you listen to music you are checking in with all of humanity.

Every time I read this back, or listen to him speak it, I am reminded of the power of music in my early life. And I am reminded that the power of music in my early life was, on reflection, indistinguishable from the power of life itself. I am reminded of the many ways in which the effort needed to discover that music, effort that technology has now removed, is what made my pre-tech life so rewarding and interesting and full of coincidence and discovery.

I remember trips to Imperial Records in Bristol, and discovering the wild miscellany of Frank Zappa album covers that jumped out of the racks like images half-remembered from a dream. I remember bumping in to people and arranging to meet. I remember falling madly in love with the woman at the counter. I remember how much it mattered because I could only afford the bus fare and one CD and the bus took an hour and I had asked my friend to meet me there. I remember the chance discovery of gigs and bands and ‘scenes’ that came about through conversation and posters and groups huddled around speakers. I remember coming home with one £7.99 CD and heading to my room to listen to it in full, then taking it with me to a party I only knew about because someone I met through this music invited me.

And here I am, now, with all this fullness replaced by an app that tells me what I might like. The people are removed from the process, the chance and hardship and effort smoothed away. And only to deliver me music I might like. What about music I don’t like? When was the last time you sat and listened to an entire album you don’t like. How important might the things we don’t like be in shaping who we are? Might I extrapolate from this that a social media app that only shows me things I might like removes from me the vital human capacity to understand and engage with things I don’t like, to see other points of view, to empathise?

Just as I revel in the fact that the battery I ordered from Amazon yesterday evening HAS ALREADY ARRIVED (incredible). Might I also reflect on what that speed, that ease, has cost me? It has not only cost me the community of interactions in my local area which would have lead me to finding that battery in the real world. It has also cost my physical community the existence of shops that sell that battery at all. They’ve all gone now, replaced by endless fucking coffee shops, because hot coffee is one of the few things left that technology cannot deliver to our door.

I have shared this thought with a few (younger) people, and they have quite understandably retorted with some version of “This is a privilege talking! What about people who can’t afford to buy music? What about people who live a long way from their nearest town?”. These are people so young that they don’t remember a pre-tech life, a life that I (and Bonnie “Prince” Billy) lived. We couldn’t afford new music! We lived a long way from the nearest town! And we still believe overcoming those challenges had value. Having a long way to travel to the nearest town was a good thing! It took you out of your house! Elis used to charter minibuses from rural Carmarthen in order that he and fellow fans could see Gorkys Zygotic Mynci in the pubs and venues all around Wales. It was an enormous ball ache that had to be saved up for and paid with pocket money and summer jobs and sweat and punctures on the hard shoulder, but you could not wrestle that experience or those memories from him with a cattle prod.

I guess what Bonnie “Prince” Billy is trying to say is that he has lived both lives and is suggesting that maybe within the difficulty and cost, be it financial cost or time cost or energy cost, lay more nourishing experiences.

Because, increasingly, when all difficulty is removed, when my shopping arrives in my porch, when my meal arrives cooked at my door, when my music is streamed to my bedroom, when I no longer have to visit the cinema, or the theatre, or the shop or the library, when AI thinks and researches on my behalf - when all the trouble has been removed it is worth asking "what else has been removed?”

Might a future in which all difficulty is removed result in the very present problem of Hikikomori, not just in Japan but increasingly elsewhere, a phenomenon in which younger people do not leave their rooms for months, even years at a time, because, in part, they no longer need to.

You may well say “old man yells at cloud” (or, perhaps more accurately, old man yells at The Cloud). And the last thing I’d want was to place myself alongside those people who run Facebook groups sharing memes about how it was better in the 70s when you had Salt ‘n’ Shake crisps and everyone was racist. But I worry for those kids doing laughing gas in the park at 2am. Not just because of the laughing gas but because of the future they will find themselves in where essential human interaction is removed for their convenience.

Anyway, long story short: don’t people spend a lot of time on their phones these days?!

Some Recommendations From Spotify

MEGALOL ALERT.

Yes the old man is lapping up his next day batteries and algorithmed playlists. The above tract doesn’t mean I’m throwing all my toys out of the pram, just a little more conscious of the sky above my pram that the toys are distracting me from (he says, sat at his laptop for three hours on a perfectly beautiful summers day).

Who knows, without Spotify maybe I would have been introduced to the below by some impossible girl on an impossible night back in the 90s when things were better because there were only four channels and people didn’t complain when they died in horrific industrial accidents.

Following their exposure to John’s Problematic Walk-In Playlist at the most recent Dancing With Dave event in Manchester, some people have asked me to share said playlist. Because of the wonderful power of technology this is possible without me having to burn you all CDs or photocopy handwritten lists which would no doubt have enriched our lives beyond imagination.

So if you go on Spotify my profile is “@john_robins” and you can find the problematic playlist there. It’s “problematic” because the songs are ones I like that aren’t suitable for a disco (not Dave’s kind of disco anyway), and not because they are politically or culturally problematic in any way (I hope).

I am quite unsure of what my Spotify profile looks like to a user other than myself and also don’t fully understand how Spotify works as a sharing platform, so please let me know if I’ve somehow uploaded my iPhone’s “hidden” folder or my national insurance number. Also, should Spotify change and make the mistake all apps inevitably make in trying to become a one stop shop for all human interaction, please don’t message me on there or add me to things or request collaborations as that will stress me out and spoil the thing that Bonnie “Prince” Billy’s wise words have already par-spoiled. [smiley winky face].

(I hope that doesn’t sound mean-spirited or ungrateful. I just fear everything will one day turn into #AnotherBloodyWhatsappGroup and it’s nice to protect your notification free corners!)

Also on there are a couple of other playlists, one called ‘Songs I Liked’. These are all the songs I have ever liked on Spotify, painstakingly copied from the ‘Liked Songs’ playlist which, bafflingly, you can’t make public. There’s a playlist of ambient music I use for mediation and chilling (general). It’s also nice to go to sleep to. There’s a Kora playlist of Malian and Malian-inspired Kora music which I find supremely graceful and moving.

I’m not sure what else is on there but do check out Cameron Winter’s new album Heavy Metal, the incredibly eclectic releases of Phil Cook, and a new interest of mine ‘Zamrock’. Zamrock grew out of Zambia in the early 70s following its declaration of independence. To promote Zambian culture 95% of all music on the radio had to be made by Zambian artists, and because all the Western music they listened to was the likes of Cream, The Rolling Stones, The Doors etc, the result was an amazing new genre of African-infused psychodelic rock music. Its popularity increased with the price of Zambian copper, as rising prosperity made electric guitars affordable to budding musicians. When the copper price fell, and the AIDS epidemic hit in the early 80s, the movement sadly petered out. I was only made aware of these new / old sounds because one of the leading proponents - a band called WITCH - recently reformed and signed to Cameron Winter’s label Partisan Records. I heard them via algorithms and instastories which it would now seem both ruin and enrich my life.

OH WELL.

Elis and John Live

Sales for this autumn’s tour have plateaued at a pleasingly high level. However, tickets are still available for Glasgow, Sheffield, Leeds, Liverpool, Llandudno, Swansea and Portsmouth. Some holds will be released for other venues in the coming days. Links to all and sundry are here

https://elisandjohnmerch.com/

Love you to death!

J