spuck fotify

Khaya here for my first ever blog post. I want to make writing these a regular thing for myself. As it always is, the topic spinning around the forefront is my mind is: how do I be a rockstar? But (as my mother says) I am self destructive. So even though I want to be a rockstar, I want to become one while somehow not participating in the very capitalist systems that define who the rockstars are.

I think a large part of my existence as a human being on this spinning orb is accepting that I can’t have my cake and eat it too. wait. What the fuck does that phrase mean? If I actually think about that sentence it is so fucking stupid. What else would you do with a cake besides eat it?

But if I for some reason couldn’t eat the proverbial cake that I have acquired (the nonsense of which is fitting for the weird ass time we’re living in), for the sake of this thought spiral, it would mean: I can’t be a rockstar without participating in the bizarre, insular, stale corporate-ness that is late stage capitalism.

I’m reading this book by Liz Pelly called “Mood Machine; the cost of the perfect playlist,” which is an expose all about the rise of Spotify, and how it contributed to the sterility of this corporate time we live in where apparently we all want to be treated like robots. Spotify’s only goal, like any big corporation, is making $$$$$$$. Obviously. They didn’t set out to be a music platform. They wanted to sell ads, and music was the ‘traffic’ that brought people to their ads. So they don’t give a fuck about music. They give a fuck about money, and this has evolved to mean keeping people streaming, ie. boosting easy listening, play listing in-house-made-royalty-free-songs, and other manipulative tactics that trap the casual “CONSUMER” into spending more and more time using their platform, so that they can collect their data and feed it back to them in the form of music that gets more and more boring and two dimensional. And as a result, music sucks now. Thanks spotify! You have altered the way that people listen and the way that artists create.

So. If I want to be a rockstar. If that were ALL I cared about, here’s what I could do. I could study the thousands of editorial (ie gate-kept) playlists on Spotify and literally replicate the songs in order to get on those playlists. My song would then stream super well, earning me enough to buy half a sandwich. Then because it proved itself to be very un-risky (boring) it would get bumped up to the next playlist, and then the next, and the next, until maybe it’s on a top chart somewhere, and I’d actually be making a livable wage. But before that happens, I’d sign to a major label that takes half the cut even though I did all the work, because, see, even though I have all those streams, no one would show up to my shows and I couldn’t have a real, lasting career. Because streams are mindless, robot listeners, not real people who like music. Those don’t exist anymore because we’re all robots, remember? I’d also have to keep making that flattened out easy listening bullshit in order to keep getting streams.

Obviously, being a rockstar is not all I care about. I want to be a rockstar on my own terms. I want to make art that is not always easy to listen to. I want to be a human, not a robot, and not a product either.

Rant rant rant rant rant. All we do here at TC HQ is complain. It just feels like the world is fucked because of big tech companies like these that use our own data to flatten us out into culture-less robots who don’t go listen to live music anymore unless it’s at some big venue where there’s an opportunity to get a clip of the show to post on social media to try to prove that I’M NOT A ROBOT EVEN THOUGH MY LIFE ONLY EXISTS ON THE CLOUD.

We do a lot of ranting here, but we also take action. Which is why people think we’re fucking weird. But whatever, losers. Here’s what we’re going to do: Write a song called fuck spotify and delete everything else on our Spotify except that song. who knows, maybe it’ll fucking go viral and we’ll be rockstars. just listen to us on band camp. or email us and we’ll mail you a cd.

i’m gonna go buy a fucking cake now. and then i’m going to eat it, like a normal fucking human.

hi computers

we’re not so big into the tech field. it radiates a kind of… negative-ish force that is strong, addictive and useful when framed up against other simple means. it carries the weight of something twice its size. we’re kinda into it and kinda not but you found yourself here if you are reading this.. maybe wondering why you are or not, but you are HERE now. so what do I have to say to you? hi. just hi.

we’ve lived OFF GRID like hermits or whoever you want to label us as. but we’ve come from big cities and normal towns and now we live in a small city call3d Portland (the maine version). GREAT! love the electricity and cars and great running water. nothing here to complain about. but as our need to focus on basic needs becomes a part of the background, our desire to express grows. money takes precedence more than we like, that’s for sure, as you may know. But we try not to let it take CONTROL any more than it has he power to do so.

we create a lot and will never stop TELESCOPE CLUB is one of the facets, sure.. and working on some visual stuff, personal sounds and songs, and now some sewing––making clothes cooler and more fun. we are also runners and ran a marathon together last year.

but now we’re in a different mode because it’s winter and it’s dark. we are in the annoyed artist mode, maybe more than ever. in a world of social media, AI, and big tech, we have struggled; as I believe many have. but we are growing with it (or against it). BEcause we’re not WITH it at all. we are growing in spite of it. getting rid of our home internet: because why have it? and getting rid of instagram: because why have it?

we’ve weighed the ups and downs and know exactly what we are missing. but we love to talk about it and certainly have heard our share of the other side: the pro-insta-pro-AI world of things. the dialogue is the most important thing.

so for now I begin writing a dialogue in preparation for something big: an earthquake maybe? which we did actually experience the other day in Portland (maine of all places).

we heard and felt the rumble. it was pretty cool.

-ng(tc)