David Emery Online

Hyde Park, November 2022

So Much Wine by Phoebe Bridgers

Global warming is such that it’s likely that we’ll never get snow at Christmas in London again. I’m wearing a t-shirt right now and it’s late November.

But here we are, and this is another great addition to Phoebe Bridgers’ slowly completing Christmas album.

Everything old is new again

What I realise, now, about getting old is that it is possibly less about the old, and more about the getting.

To experience something is often the only way to truly understand it, and sometimes that just takes a while. Or it takes being in the correct place at the correct time. I was fortunate to have been an eager twentysomething around that social media took off, deeply invested in the possibilities and potential. I’ve been on Twitter for 16 years, as of this week, which is less time then the going rate for defrauding people out of billions of dollars.

Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and those that followed have not exactly lived up to the wide-eyed potential that I hoped they could fulfil, sacrificing so much at the gods of engagement and growth.

Back to base principles, then. There’s two sides to social media: connections, and content. Blogging was—and remains—bad at connections, but having your own home for “content”—writing, photos, links, not so much video—that is not at the whims of bankers and billionaires is feeling like it might be a good idea again.

So here we are. I’ve dusted off the design so it works for things that aren’t big long articles, and am typing in the compose box like it’s 2001.

For the “connections” bit Mastodon seems like it… might work? But we’ll see. Follow me if you’re on there, or just add this site to your RSS reader. Those things still exist, too.

Actual Life 3 (January 1 - September 9 2022) by Fred again..

It took a minute—and sometimes sounds a bit like Moby?—but I have got truly engrossed in this record. It’s the only thing holding back Taylor Swift from dominating my Replay 2022 mix…

The Fluid Passing of Time

My three-year-old has trouble with pronouns. The cat gets the worst of it. He will chase her around the house, picking her up whenever he has her outmanoeuvred, which is surprisingly often. She is very patient. A disgruntled meow is generally the worst he will get, whereas if the rest of us were to do the same blood would, no doubt, be shed.

“Could you put her down, please? I don’t think she likes it.”

Meow.

“He does like it daddy.”

Meow.

“I don’t think she does and also, she’s a she not a he.”

“No daddy, he’s a he.”

There’s a glint in his eye and a cheek in his grin that tells me that he is aware of his mistake, but is going to double down regardless. Everyone at the moment is a he. People, cats, dinosaurs, elephants; he is at least consistent. The reading I’ve done recently indicates that generation alpha is supposed to be more aware of gender identity, but I guess you can’t believe everything on the internet.

He is also workshopping a rather fluid understanding of the passage of time. Everything before today is yesterday. His birthday in January: Yesterday. The last time we saw Grandpa, which was about two weeks ago:...

Three Lessons

I have, like most vaguely sane people, a love/hate relationship with the idea of giving a talk. The “love” bit typically consists of everything after I come off stage without completely screwing it up. The “hate” makes up the rest of proceedings.

There’s a certain mist that descends about five minutes before hand that fogs the mind, dismantles your thought processes and dismembers your vocabulary. Preparation – extensive, or nonexistent – seems to bear no relation to this process. It is as if your brain is trying to distance itself from your mouth and body, lest they do anything too embarrassing.

For me, this mist reaches its peak “can’t even see the front of the car, we’re going to have to pull over” intensity exactly 10 seconds after I’ve started speaking. It’s at that point where, having managed to actually say something, I start thinking about the fact that I’ve actually managed to say something and then completely forget what I was going to say next.

Anyway, a couple of weeks ago I gave a talk.

The brief was good – 10 minutes on “What I Learned From…” a specific campaign I’d worked on recently, so I – foolishly, see above – said yes....

Fake Hits

I remember having a conversation with a manager a few years back. It wasn’t an easy meeting. Throughout he was leaning forward in his seat, rocking slightly back and forth, his dissatisfaction with the situation physically manifesting with every sentence.

We’d already talked about the problem at length, tried several different ways to try and change it, but still it remained and here we were. By this point he was not the only person in the room on edge.

“So explain this again,” his voice was raised, but not yet shouting “how we can be getting so many plays on SoundCloud, but we can only sell a handful of records?”

It was a fair question.

***

One of the internet’s core strengths is its ability to create communities on a scale that were never possible before. People from around the world can loosely group together around a topic remarkably easily. What used to be a niche interest can suddenly be shared with millions of other people.

This has obviously had something of an impact on the music industry.

You could make a strong argument that Napster was the first music social network. Disparate music fans around the world connected together and shared what they loved. And...

Transitions

When I started my career in music I worked in what was then known as the New Media department. “This new internet malarkey” we collectively thought “is probably something we should pay attention to. Let’s separate out the people that seem to understand what it is hope they don’t cause too much fuss.”

This was a while ago now. The iTunes Store was but a year old in the UK. YouTube didn’t exist yet. If you wanted to watch a music video your best bet was to wait for it to come on MTV. Your other option was to watch a postage-stamp-sized, sub-VHS quality Windows Media or Real Player streaming link.

All of the talk then – at least in the New Media Department – was of the digital transition. At this point this referred to the transition to legal digital downloads from CDs and Napster. It was a format shift. Vinyl to cassettes to CDs to downloads. The concept was the same as it ever had been – buying music. And the overriding thought was that if the industry can make digital download sales work, and litigate like crazy, then the Napster problem would go away.

In hindsight, it’s pretty...

Music Stories

Last week a new band came in to play us their freshly delivered debut album. There is protocol in these situations. Everyone must sit in rapturous contemplation and laser focused attention. Heads must bob. Feet must tap. After every track you must make some gesture that indicates that, yes, that track was good; a smile, a nod, maybe even a quick, muttered “Great”.

Mid way through the second track, one of them gets up, stretches over to the stereo and turns the volume up.

“So, what did you think?”

The one universal constant shared by all the artists I have come across is the wash of nervousness that descends upon them in the split second of silence that follows that question.

Fortunately the room agrees that it is a great piece of work, and even more fortunately they’re not just saying it to avoid an awkward situation (and potential job loss). In the conversation that follows the band go into the ideas behind the record, the context, and also how much time they spent getting the track listing just so. You can hear it, as well; listening from start to finish the album ebbs and flows, building up tension and weight, only to release...

How to Survive 2017

Let’s take stock, shall we? By all accounts, the world has gone crazy. Not as bad as when it’s been really bad, but, you know, bad. Facts are dead. It is entirely possible that some people genuinely think up is actually down, and to say anything different is unpatriotic. In an effort to prove that politics is just as cyclical as fashion, by different turns we seem to be simultaneously reviving the Nazis and the Cold War. We are metaphorically wearing a Hugo Boss suit with leg warmers, and look just as stupid.

Let’s put all that to one side though. It is, I think we can all agree, too much. But what I want to write about is how to best handle the year ahead, and to ignore the looming doom of the modern political landscape would be remiss. The elephant is there; let’s all look at it, puzzle for a second at quite what it’s done with its hair, and move on.

After all, we have records to sell.

Of course, I don’t just mean records. And of course – of course! – I don’t mean sell. Such simplicities are the luxury of a different time. I have written at length...