Dawkins, Christ

I like looking at bass guitars on the internet. People playing said bass guitars: not so much.

This makes sense when you remember that de-education is really the point of a lot of big tech. To stop anyone have the *need* to think about or know anything, and of course that comes from the top down.

It’s the entitlement of the Reform loons that gets me. They decide there’s a cultural crisis happening, and when actual elections disprove that, they blame it all on a conspiracy and mutter darkly about repercussions. Proof they’re straight up dishonest, and cannot campaign on the real issues.

For fuck’s sake

Ha ha fuck Brewdog. Roughly about as punk as Michael Gove

The will-he won’t-he go stuff is quite funny if you consider that in a matter of months, Starmer and pals will be taking their place in history as the gang that destroyed the Labour Party once and for all

NEW SHOW: May 16th - New River Studios The None, Thee Alcoholics, U & haemoGOBLIN Early bird tickets £12, full price £17. On sale Fri, save the ticket! link.dice.fm/j518c83b471a

I think it would be really helpful if everyone posting their very cool takes on the state of music journalism this week would also encourage people to subscribe to worker-owned outlets & support independent writers trying to make new things happen

Inexplicably, this response to a @gregk.co.uk post is doing the best numbers I’ve ever done on here

'#TheStoneRoses were built on Mani’s tiptoe-light touch – something delicate but propulsive, an anti-rock energy that had heart, and was dreaming of something, borne of an internal rhythm and beauty that burnt a trail from itself outwards.' Remembering Mani, by Gordon Moakes buff.ly/qIeC0K4

Me, on Mani for @thequietus.com:

AI slop is in part for people who don’t have an imagination, right? I can imagine Marilyn Monroe smoking a hookah pipe: I don’t need a computer to draw that for me

Spotify is running ICE ads. I went to cancel on mobile and saw that this isn’t allowed on mobile. They make you cancel on desktop. You think that’s gonna stop me, Spotify? I will erase you and forget you ever existed. THOU SHALT CANCEL SPOTIFY!!!

Out today in record shops: numbered black sleeve 12” of THE NONE’s double EP ‘MATTER AND CARE’. idol-io.ffm.to/thenone_matt...

Muting the words ‘Bari Weiss’ but somebody tell me when she does eventually crash and burn

They fuckin’ better not try and replace Melvyn Bragg on In Our Time with Amol Rajan

Of course these clowns haven’t read any Orwell, except at best the last line of Animal Farm, which presumably they take to mean: it doesn’t matter who you vote for, you always get pigs

Mandelson is the firing gun on the last lap for Starmer. And it is of course in part because a certain cadre of journalists has decided it must be so.

Mandelson should be toast at this point, but there’s no better example of the rot at the heart of Labour than that he’s been allow to repeatedly rise, like pond scum, to the top of the party machine

The Starmer project’s disinterring of undead Blairism is of a piece with the Oasis reunion. One will be vastly more successful than the other (for certain wallets at least) but both come from the same grave

This album is the first long-form physical record I’ve been involved in since Young Legionnaire’s ‘Zero Worship’ in 2016. There’s still a handful of vinyls left on bandcamp. Fans of Jesus Lizard, Unwound, Silverfish, Brainiac should enjoy thenone.bandcamp.com/album/matter...

The outcomes we’re going to see for the Labour government were baked in the moment the right of the party took over the Starmer leadership campaign. There was *never* a future in it politically. It was always a case of taking turns at the wheel until the plane inevitably ploughed into a mountain.

The deep irony at the heart of this moment, where certain groups are viciously demonised for supposedly stealing our culture, our sovereignty, our jobs, blah blah blah, and clowns like this (and those behind the tools they use) are celebrated as ‘democratisers/disruptors’. The world’s upside down

I can’t with these bloviating fash-huggers anymore. I was at Trans Pride, how much coverage did the media give tens of thousands of people peacefully protesting government legislation? Have a guess

Morrissey got absolutely railed in the music press for waving a Union flag in ‘92, yet five years later it had come into vogue. Something definitely broke in the brains of the commentariat in between. illnessasart.com/2020/11/26/n...

While Philip K. Dick et al are increasingly being vindicated for their dystopian predictions, they assumed it was authoritarian states who’d drive this stuff, not the trust-fund Palo Alto huckster class

HAHAHA ‘AI shaming’ - these people are so soft in the head. AI Shaming! Get a fucking grip

Some of your most inventive dystopian sci-fi writers (think Philip K Dick, Robert Harris, Norman Spinrad) may never have come up with an artificial intelligence that imagined itself to be Hitler reincarnated but here we are

Sad news. I grew up in Milton Keynes in the 80s: everything was fresh and new and a bit stark, but I saw many films here. Got turned away from Dick Tracey which was one of the first 12 certificates: I must have been 11. Got into Batman though.

One of these days I will flesh out my thesis that Limp Bizkit—far from being the jock-rock villains of Woodstock ‘99—were in that moment a flashpoint for a generation of gaslit, ignored teens, enabling them to correctly channel their rage into destroying an edifice of the 90s culture industry.

One thing that gets me about this Labour government is they can’t even govern by ‘vibe’. Of course there was never going to be an ideological break from managed-decline Toryism, but you can still govern like that and make it *feel* like centrism. Blair was a master at that.

It’s going to get very tiresome very quickly so let me be the first (or rather the latest) to say Oasis are, and always were, complete shit

The logic has been for about 40 years that punk rock was contained, co-opted by capitalism, folded into the culture industry. But if any kind of music performance has come to be deemed ‘high risk’ in 2025 we must be doing something right.

Lol. McSweeney is clueless about parsing what real voters want, let alone robo-voters. The slop is going to explode in his face just like it will all the other tech-first clowns

As far as I can tell Israel are making a mockery of the vast majority of western governments by forcing them to say up is down, genocide is a good thing actually, we’re all about to be destroyed by nasty brown people with nuclear bombs, and everyone is total agreement about all this

I love this. Using the tools of the tech-bro fascist complex against itself.

"Fascism was a counter-revolution against a revolution that never took place." —Ignazio Silone (1938).

A few of THE NONE ‘At Hope’ limited seven inches are still available at Rough Trade www.roughtrade.com/product/the-...

Definitely this. So often a sound engineer employed by a venue is determined to make you turn down or otherwise defang your band’s sound for the simple reason that they’re getting paid to ‘know better’. I love a sound engineer who says ‘didn’t need you in the PA. You’re already loud enough’

For those not on the evil picture place, here are some shots of me and my brother-in-arms Matt Tong picking up our Ivor Novello Awards. Free Palestine. 🍉

‘Pro-fossil degrowth’ is an interesting framing for what Trump/the US is trying to do right now. It’s not the actual ideological root (it’s way too coherent tp be that) but its spirit at least totally taps into that MAGA aspiration about being a great industrial power again

Nobody seems more intent on driving America face down into the end-of-days (not to mention killing people) than RFK

Hail, hail new Stereolab stereolab.bandcamp.com/album/instan...

RIP Dave Allen - one of the true heavyweights of post punk bass playing

Talking of records that came out when you were 21… there’s new Prolapse!

What great albums came out when you were 21?

In light of current polling figures, that the Labour government continues to mash the ‘be more right wing’ button speaks to the paucity of ideas that the Starmer project has always been about

“AI increasingly feels inseparable from Silicon Valley and the specific disdain the tech industry reserves for society and culture, for a body politic with needs and aspirations beyond those that feed the machines…” thebaffler.com/latest/high-...