is there anybody in there, Kanye West?

is his life playing out a bit like a certain rock opera?

in this awards season, when the american culture industry indicates to the rest of the anglosphere what music, tv, and film is worthy of our attention, the best summary of the 2025 Grammys came from a now deleted tweet which commented on how the award ceremony felt like it came from a place where politician Kamala Harris won the united states presidency.

one person who reminded us that we are living in the alternate timeline was the ‘nominated for best rap song’ Kanye West, who paraded his ‘wife’ on the red carpet in a naked outfit while striking Zoolanderesque poses before leaving the show to bask in the toxic glow of controversy generated from the stunt (Variety).

then for an encore Ye then proceeded to have one of his social media induced meltdowns ‘experiments’ (HotNewHipHop). it’s the easiest thing in the world to spew antisemitic hate on Twitter, pretending you are edgelording through it all and that you are actually of sound mind. but is it so easy to keep avoiding the consequences of your actions?

that said, if there is an experiment at play, i’m calling it like this: i think there is a parallel between the way Ye is playing out his career and a certain character from a rock opera. and if i am even halfway right, it will end badly for him.

i would like to establish a couple of things before continuing:

1. while Kanye has some salient gripes against the worst excesses of the entertainment industry curtailing artists’ creative freedoms and wealth generation, the obnoxious antics he deploys to make them are indefensible.

2. he is a not a genius. Leonard Cohen was right (he is not Picasso), as was Barack Obama (he is a jackass). i blame the industry and his most loyal fans for inflating his ego. i have long argued with anyone who would listen to stop lauding him or any other pop star with the tag (the problems with the term ‘genius’ in popular music is a theme for another essay). he has had a remarkable impact on 21st century hiphop, and his musical excellence is certifiable. but he’s also been consistently destroying his legacy since Yeezus, a incoherent mess made by a man high on endless hype and praise. overfeed a goat and at some point it’ll only produce sh*t in between bleats.

with those points in mind, i am convinced that Ye has never truly worked on himself psychoanalytically in light of losing his mother Donda. any and all observations about his relationship with his mother – especially from that jeen-yuhs documentary – suggest that he never had a bigger champion, someone who made him feel like the god he thinks he is now.

in this context, i can understand his sorrow over the circumstances under which Donda died. i think there is a legitimate lifetime’s worth of beef Ye could take up with the surgeon who last operated on her. but i think that in the aftermath of Donda’s death, he has tried to find her in every woman he’s dated, which is Oedipal, to say the least.

this was evident in his marriage to Kim Kardashian. i can believe Kim when she says she loved him, and that’s a heck of an achievement: it takes something special to convince a billionaire heiress to care about anyone over and above money. so, at the risk of sounding like a low rent Sigmund Freud, i believe that with her support Ye had an opportunity to process losing his mother and gain an emotional maturity that could only make him stronger, to paraphrase one of his songs.

but it was never on Kim to play a surrogate parent to Ye’s childishness. he chose to fall in with unsavoury influences, and in some ways exceeded their sickest dreams.

when i first caught sight of Kanye’s rants, i was immediately reminded of the character Pink in Pink Floyd’s The Wall. and at least on the face of it, much of his history from the loss of his mother dovetails with the rock opera. for those who unfamiliar with its tracklist, we are on side four, the stage at which he’s emerged from a cocoon of drug-addled depression to present as a fascist. the rally-style concert he held in 2022 in which he wore a White Lives Matter t-shirt reminds me in particular of the song In the Flesh (Part 2), in which Pink holds a neo-nazi rally to find out ‘where his fans really stand’, before proceeding to fantasise shooting those he views as degenerate.

except, unlike Pink, all this is not a hallucination for Ye. the whole world is watching his delusions in real time, and it seems as though no one can reach him now, as he is left waiting for the worms to come.

in The Wall, Pink gets himself into such a state that he finds himself on trial for his actions, eventually ordered by a judge to tear down the wall he built for himself, exposing him to the outside world in a sobering way. at this rate, Kanye might well be headed down the same path.

shhh! tread carefully, for there are killjoys afoot!

2025 may mark the year loud public displays of expression and creativity begin dying off, thanks to security

asides from more biopics, custody battles between corporates over (the progeny of) ai music, and rip-off ticket prices for purpose-built luxury venues masking the slow mass closure of small independent venues for DIY acts, one of the things to look out for in 2025 could be public spaces as they disappear from view.

i’m sure better people have written about this at length – it feels like Dan Hancox’s territory – but i worry that too few people care about the cultural geographies of urban spaces and fewer still about the implications of privatising them.

maybe you see both organised and spontaneous expressions of creativity in town centres as a threat to orderly patterns of behaviour. maybe you wish never again to be around a flashmob, an open air dance class, kids practising freestyle raps on buses, religious preachers, parkour, skateboarding, or busking if you can help it.

still, a space no one owns outright is necessarily one which everyone must share. and who are we to tell others how to navigate such a space? sure, we need rules to tell ourselves how not to act in shared spaces for safety’s sake; i do not endorse playing random pranks on unsuspecting members of the public. but i will assert that any objections you may have with the aforementioned activities speaks to a mild discomfort at best, which we should prevent from dictating authorities’ reactions to creative expression in shared spaces. otherwise we end up with paid security staff in shopping malls enforcing the will of commercial landlords under the pretence of preserving public safety. this thought was brought to my attention watching one of Lady Leshurr’s recent YouTube video releases.

Set Up Chicks is amongst the latest of a slew of music videos over the past decade in which Lady Leshurr acts out her song lyrics in a single take, often in outdoor spaces as others go about their business. in this episode, she is doing just that in a shopping mall somewhere, giving classic Leshurr energy. however, towards the end of the song, a security guard appears to approach her to try to stop her. she is just about able to complete her performance thanks to the interventions of a person i assume is part of her entourage.

the guard’s actions seem benign, but they left a chilling impression on me, still. i know that they were just doing their job. but what that represents irks me. my grievance is more than a ‘how could you not know who Lady Leshurr is?’ type complaint; i doubt they would have behaved differently if it were a musician they had heard of. it is the total absence of discretion in their actions that i find disturbing.

granted, it is almost certainly because their jobs depend on it. but i view it as the thin end of a repressive wedge designed to limit unpredictable, unusual-seeming behaviours in public spaces, especially loud ones; choreographing Lady Leshurr’s type of performance requires loudspeakers positioned out of camera shot but within close proximity of the performer(s), to sync the official audio (added in the editing process) with the video.

in other words, Lady Leshurr and her team were making a racket. to the shopping mall’s security team, this puts her stunt in the same bracket as the flashmobs, dance classes, freestyle bus raps, religious preachers, parkour, skateboarders, and buskers, that we brits have decided to silence somewhere along the line. in the last decade or so, our political class has successfully repositioned humans making noise as a polluting activity, whether via political protest where it ‘may result in serious disruption to the activities of an organisation carried on in the vicinity or have a significant impact on people in the vicinity of the protest’, or anything else under the guise of Public Space Protection Orders – introduced ostensibly for the purpose of shielding people from anti-social behaviour – which grant local authorities arbitrary powers to shut down over ‘ANY activity which they consider “detrimental” to the local environment’.

that the state comes down harder on noise than it does on exhaust gas emissions is testament to the nature of noise-making as an intolerable side-effect of some unproductive, even anti-productive activity, compared with, say, black carbon, the ill effects of which are a price worth paying for the eternal combustion that fuels modern living. and private security firms enforce these powers because what we would recognise as public spaces are increasingly privatised for the benefit of commercial enterprises. under the ancient british obsession with the sacredness of private property, he who owns the space makes the rules. hence security guards chasing musical artists around shopping mall spaces on the bidding of commercial landlords.

i find it utterly deplorable. deplorable that these killjoy merchants service the latent paranoia of faceless retail rentiers. deplorable that the creative expression of a Lady Leshurr – or anyone for that matter – needs permission to traverse urban spaces with a bit of vim and verve. and deplorable to prioritise sterile ambiences over joyous displays of raucousness. in cities, the absence of unwanted noise is not silence. it is the constant humming whirring and pounding of engines, cranes, diggers, and the like, all in service of some tedious consumer monoculture.

but here we are in 2025, finding more ways to give creative artists outside of the 1% grief about unauthorised live performances, while accepted forms of protests become parades and parades become weak sauce corporatised guff of no consequence to anyone. think of an Ed Sheeran soundalike contest in your local town centre as the only acceptable form of busking left, or a La Senza sponsored bra-burning act of feminist independence outside of one of their stores. in these local environments, mime might be the only interesting type of street act left to us.

this may be the year we begin to notice loud and proud public displays of expression and creativity withering away, thanks to britain’s many private security armies. but we won’t be safe from noise. the dull thrumming of engines, cranes, tinny speakers playing chart pop fodder, and – worst of all – the sound of inane chat on smartphones will still fill the air. and we will be worse off for it. the future of public activity in our outdoor spaces should not resemble that Dom Joly joke!

pop culture picks from 'one of the most transformative years in pop music history'

here's some stuff from 2024 that i liked enough to want to share

hello,

what a year, eh? so many things happened. again! and yet, here we are, still facing impending collapse amidst ever greater chaos and conflict. lol.

indeed, this year’s turmoil has made me less inclined than usual to seek new pleasures. hence this year’s list will be relatively short. but i did still try, because i must for my sanity’s sake, or something close to that.

watching

my favourite live show this year was Tife Kusoro’s new play, G, which debuted at the royal court theatre.

The Arts Desk review billed it as ‘everyday realism blitzed by urban myth’. perhaps it wasn’t quite gritty enough for their liking, but i’ve had my fill of grit, so found the surrealist scenes that presented the mythical aspect of the play rather mesmerising. i’m not usually given to the ‘dancing’ expressions of the characters in non-musical theatre, but it worked supremely well in G, thanks to superbly directed choreography, which gave the characters’ movements a haunting quality consistent with the general mood.

and the story itself? i won’t describe it fully – there were a lot of ambiguities for a relatively slim plot – but the play centres on the characters’ obsession with a pair of pristine white trainers left abandoned over a telephone wire, allegedly the property of a dead Black teenager called ‘Baitface’, according to urban legend.

i’m glad i managed to see G. it was the sort of play that deserves to be described as spellbinding on a poster somewhere.

looking back at my previous years’ choices, i am reminded that i am partial to a hate watch (i’m thinking Succession in 2021). so it follows that the improvised conditions of sporting events can generate a drama as compelling as any tv show, and in the world of football i have indulged in a hate watch for a while now, which this year has continued to produce hilarious outcomes.

allow me to explain. i am a millennial aged Arsenal fan, and those who share this demographic know all too well about the traumatising years of losses to various Manchester United teams of yesteryear, especially the Arsène Wenger vs Alex Ferguson days. well, if you’d told me after the infamous 8-2 drubbing in the 2011–12 season that a time would come when Man United sides would get thrashed silly by all sorts, i would have had you sectioned.

and yet, a symbolic yuletide defeat for the second year in succession has proven this crazy notion correct. in december last year, AFC Bournemouth routed them by three goals to nil at old trafford. Man U they were in the top six of the premier league at that point, but the manner of such a defeat felt like a tragic moment for the club. it’s the mighty Man United! who are they anymore, when they get walloped by a plucky little south coast club whose full stadium capacity’s of fans wouldn’t fill more than a quarter of old trafford at best?

the then manager, Erik Ten Haag, tried to initiate a fresh start this calendar year, and even led the team to glory, winning the fa cup by the end of season. but while i lamented an average Man U side still managing to win a trophy, it was far from a vintage season by their lofty standards, and it was pointed out to me by a Crystal Palace FC fan that this was in fact the funniest possible timeline, because the illusion that they’d have improved as a football club would get shattered on contact with the 2024/25 season. perhaps they caught something of that truth in the end-of-season drubbing the Eagles gave the Red Devils, because Ten Haag did so badly he got sacked in november. replacement Ruben Amorim was hired to implement his philosophy, methods, values, principles, and all of that guff new hotshot football coaches are meant to bring to the premier league these days.

and yet, only a few matches into Ruben Interim Amorim’s reign – and 12 months on from that defeat to AFC Bournemouth – history decided to repeat itself as farce. another three nil loss has left Man U worse off than last season (bottom half of the table, lol) and many of the same players somehow look worse now under the new regime. i mean, Amorim talks about suffering a lot.

and suffer they do. even Arsenal scumbagged a victory against them recently, in much the same way that they used to be on the receiving end of. so for all these reasons, it’s been fantastically entertaining to watch Man U lose football matches repeatedly. theatre of dreams? stuff of nightmares, more like! it couldn’t happen to a nicer club. don’t come for me reader, i never said i was good person.

usually the most controversial live tv performances of the year make for the best ones. so no amount of Netflix advertising will make me watch any half-time super bowl special until that happens. whatever Beyoncé did, she failed the assignment because it generated no controversy.

whereas metalcore act Knocked Loose performing their GRAMMY-nominated song Suffocate on Jimmy Kimmel Live did so by accident. they weren’t the first act of their ilk to appear on the show, so the fact that some of the social media reactions to their performance went viral came as a surprise. perhaps it was a publicity stunt, but it got me interested enough to want to watch it, and… it’s a solid tv performance by a regular modern hardcore band simply going about their business. the band’s playing is tight, and the song itself is well crafted according to the conventions of its genre, resulting in something typically unpalatable to those used to pleasant harmonies and melodies. i thought these metal tropes would be familiar to mainstream audiences by now, but i guess these types of acts can still have a strong visceral impact. it’s just that the negative publicity from this performance has turned it into an iconic moment for modern hardcore / metalcore.

i sorta like the song, although i found lead vocalist Bryan Garris’s particular shouting tone a bit grating compared with contemporaries such as Soul Glo and Turnstile. just as well that guest vocalist Poppy complements Garris neatly then. the bit where she skips on stage just before the start of the second verse, looking all fly in white compared with the band in all black (great choice, btw… block colour says ‘i’m a team player’, but white says ‘i’m also a special guest’), just to start screaming diabolically, is wonderful to see. and then the song becomes a duet i never knew i wanted. Islands in the Stream this ain’t. honestly though, the final chorus they scream together is metalcore’s answer to Sonny and Cher’s I Got You Babe, i swear. and i will forever enjoy the fact that prime time american television had to endure the full-on pig squeal that came just before it. Graham Norton needs to book them next.

reading

as ever, i read little, and remembered even less. my usual interests are plagued with the question of whether artificial intelligence will ruin change everything. meanwhile life gets worse in many other ways.

only one book i read this year tried to explain the feeling i get when the present feels bad and the future even worse: philoshoper Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi’s Quit Everything: Interpreting Depression.

Bifo engages with the possibility that what we call depression might actually be a perfectly sensible reaction among many young people in materially rich nations to ‘the chaos and collapse of a seemingly unchangeable and unliveable future’.

i won’t pretend that this book has the answers to this rut, but i appreciate that Bifo takes the issue of depression in this modern age (in this economy?) seriously where others simply write off the sensation of impotence in the present and lethargy towards the future as divorced from reality or out of touch with the stats. the sort of approach which dismisses young people’s anxieties about the less savoury aspects of modern life as feelings which facts don’t care about is coming unstuck against present-day social, economic, political, and ecological problems. so for someone like Bifo Berardi to legitimise these concerns by trying to understand the resigned spirit of the age and the actions young people take to divest themselves of their dwindling stake in societies across the world is relatively refreshing. i welcome more thinking like this.

listening

2024 was ‘one of the most transformative years in pop music history’, according to Musicboard. i think this translates as ‘loads of streams’ in the case of the Lamar vs Drake beef, plus Taylor Swift’s Eras tour becoming the highest-grossing ever. even Charli XCX went mainstream. all good from an industry perspective, then.

outside the bubble, few music artists seemed best pleased at the accelerating rate of closure of smaller music venues, the inflated costs of performing, and the rising threats of so-called artificial intelligence making their chosen profession more precarious than ever. transformative might translate as ‘chaotic’ for them.

as a listener, i’d mostly retreated to the comforting sounds of 20th century radio. but when i dared to sample the sounds of today, i was occasionally rewarded. thumbs up to Milkweed setting old folk tunes to hip hop beats, Natasha El-Sergany’s shoegaze sheen on the somesurprises album Perseids, and some of the neat tunes off young indie rock act Hello Mary’s second album (0%, for example).

rarely am i moved to purchase music almost immediately upon hearing it, though. Liberate made me do that with their debut ep, The Tide. they identify as a hardcore / metalcore act, but the riffage is so slick, it felt more like groove metal to me, like Pantera, minus Dimebag’s solos. in fact Liberate groove so well, they can hold a single chord with ease, as the last couple of minutes of the title track demonstrates.

i often say that one of my favourite types of albums involves the auteur inviting me into a world that runs by their logic, and i have to figure it out. Martha Skye Murphy hits that target on her album Um. her voice barely rises above a whisper for the best part of an hour, but the sonic world she inhabits suits it perfectly. you can tell she worked extremely hard on her craft, and i think it pays off if you are willing to be absorbed.

at some point this year, i slipped into another vaporwave coma, and got lost in a signalwave concept album (what is signalwave? this article explains things). Road to Nowhere features taped radio broadcasts accompanying a series of truck journeys. for me, CT57 achieves the feat of producing content as enjoyable as the form it takes: several of the tracks are longer than most albums, but i listened to them all, and would do so again.

another type of album i like is the sort where a band, armed with the same instruments as everyone else, somehow manages to develop a coherent sound quite apart from their peers. Still House Plants are an art school grad trio on their third album now, walking the tightrope between precision and looseness. the drummer refuses to play regular rhythms, and the guitarist appears to want to play in between accents (neither wish to keep time in the conventional way), and the vocalist sings set phrases triggered by the other two’s patterns with a technique that sounds sort of aleatoric. if you don’t like this description of their sound, then i urge you to skip the clip below… the Rolling Stones are still here for you. as for me, i’d love to make an album like If I don​’​t make it, I love u. actually, i think the right bassist would make them even better. so hmu haha

my favourite album this year was Being Poor is Expensive by Bashy. grime legend Bashy has retained his storytelling ability in the 15 years between albums, while forging an acting career. the flawless production is a perfect match for the album’s central themes, namely the dilemmas young people growing up in poor urban areas have to face in britain, how poverty stunts your character growth, and how much the luck of choices made or not made can determine the course of your life. many words spoken during the course of the album, not one wasted.

how about you? what have you done lately?

*reads last year’s resolutions*

i quite liked the monologues i published… i may try to publish more stuff like this in 2024. the dream would be to complete a longer form piece, but that’ll be the promise i most likely break if i make it.

and break it i did! i let the professional side of me win out over the latter half of 2024. i will try to publish more creative outputs next year, but i make no promises because i doubt it will help. carving out time to better decide what to do with my many half-finished projects would be a start. plus, who knows what time we have to do anything creative for ourselves before events overtake us? save yourselves!

all the best, friends.

one year in: the fall and rise of Ken Bruce

PopMaster general thrives in post-BBC life at a radio station crafting a relatively novel take on popular music nostalgia compared with its rivals

at this time of year, the prevailing winds of some trend in popular music catch me and i'd normally get caught up in the hype of an album release from a breakout (or primed) chart act of the year, or i'd anticipate an industry-adjacent issue and speculate how it might change the future of music as we know it. 2024, however, has presented nothing interesting of note, even in this ‘brat summer’ (no, not even the Drake vs Kendrick Lamar beef, one of the least interesting battles in rap. who was thinking Drake would win that? when has he ever said anything that was worth paying attention to outside of your weekly shop at the local mall?).

besides, so-called AI and the looming litigation feuds that come with it continue to suck all the vibrancy out of the industry at the commercially elite level.

to escape this sterile landscape. i have sought the soothing retrospective sounds of 20th century music radio, in particular the rising popularity of a relatively new commercial station spearheaded by a familiar name.

Rajar listening figures suggest disc-jockey Ken Bruce, once of the mid-morning slot at BBC Radio 2 with his flagship pop music quiz PopMaster, is revelling at his new home on Greatest Hits Radio, attracting 1.6 million more listeners (+73%) a year into the job (Guardian, 16 may).

if, dear reader, you identify with the ‘who listens to radio anymore’ streaming playlists camp, allow me, a man who is allergic to today's preferred audio medium to explain: every now and again, britain's national broadcasting corporation faces the dilemma of deciding when to axe its television and radio presenters, partly for ratings, partly to reduce the wage bill. nobody ever thinks they get it right, and typically there is outrage among the fanbase who grew up and old with the deposed when it happens.

it felt particularly odd to let Ken Bruce go though. for what little i know, i'd rarely (well, never) come across an mor music show quite like his. Bruce seemed to strike the right tone of warmth, calm, and gentle quirkiness that kept a non-regular listener like me tuning in from time to time.

ever the music savant, Bruce appeared to be interested in the canon of pop through the ages too, rather than what he had to say in-between songs, which was hands down better than whatever went on across the hallway at BBC Radio 1.

but most importantly, he had a wildly popular pop music quiz. this is the hook that made him seemingly indispensable*. you might think the BBC could have kept the show and swapped in a new host. but if you listen to past episodes presented by other djs standing in for Bruce over the years, it feels like something is lacking. much like how Stars in their Eyes wasn't the same without Matthew Kelly, or like when Phil Collins left Genesis and they brought in some other guy called... well i forget who he even was... and the whole enterprise folded after one album. maybe sometimes a person can be bigger than the band.

so Ken Bruce upped and left – taking PopMaster with him – for Greatest Hits Radio, which i started listening to a few months ago, and it has already replaced the likes of Smooth and Magic as my go-to station for chart music. it's on the recall list alongside BBC Radio 3 if i'm feeling posh, Rinse FM if i'm feeling street, Resonance FM if i'm feeling daring, and a couple of talk radio stations if i want to wind myself up.

the remit of the station seems straightforward enough: it feels as though the djs are free to play pretty much any songs that made the uk top 75 chart from 1967 to 2000. what you get is a mix of smash hits and excuses to play lesser-known songs and one-hit wonders you forgot existed and overall a pleasant reminder that popular music at its best is really rather varied and full of surprises and that the british record-buying public has helped make this possible.

in doing all this, Greatest Hits Radio never forgets its core business: to comfort its audience with a soundtrack to memories past. indeed, one of its taglines is 'good times sounds like this', and they make sure you know about it on the odd occasion when an ad break rolls into a song from a particular decade, and a voiceover says something like ‘remember bouncing along to this on your space hopper?’ or ‘remember writing the name of this tune down in your Filofax?’. nostalgia's not just the preserve of millennials, it seems. we all want better times, and we kinda know we ain't getting them any time soon.

so, with Ken Bruce at the helm, steering us through the uncertain waters of the present, we are transported to pop's past. listening over the course of a day, you'll hear him voiceover some of the in-house ads, and glean more references to his show than any other. there are other well known names on the Greatest Hits Radio roster: Simon Mayo, Martin Kemp, Jenny Powell, Kate Thornton, to name a few. but the sum total is like one of those 1990s premier league football sides where the team is built around one mercurial figure. think Eric Cantona at Manchester United, Steve McManaman at Liverpool, or Gianfranco Zola at Chelsea.

and that feels like vindication for the PopMaster general, who is more in demand than ever after leaving the BBC. having the foresight to trademark the show's name, the shrewdness to keep its format simple, and a genuine belief in pop music as a ‘great unifier’ of the people (Radio Times, 20 june 2023) that comes across in his presenting style, Bruce is reaping the rewards, not only with his Greatest Hits Radio slot but also a televised version of the PopMaster quiz on Channel 4. meanwhile, Vernon Kay presents the mid-morning slot on BBC Radio 2 featuring a pop music quiz called Ten To The Top. Kay is familiar to the millennial generation – i remember him presenting T4) back in the day, so i understand the move in that sense – but again, listening in, it feels like something is lacking. Bruce may be as good an example of the cult of personality as any dictator. and he never needed to coerce anyone into thinking he had something special about him either.

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* to a type. the sort that wants to know in what year Sultans of Swing by Dire Straits, Never Let Her Slip Away by Andrew Gold, and I Wonder Why by Showaddywaddy, all charted. i am that type. it was 1978.