Some time ago I wrote a blog post about a tiny bit of a record that I really loved. I imagined it would be the first in a long series of tiny musical aperçu. So, without further ado, ten years later, here is the second one.
Got To Be Real by Cheryl Lynn has a couple of these supreme little moments. The first is the glorious shift in the vocals, where the lead voice shifts into the backing vocals and, somehow, sort of, into some sort of synthysound shriek that manages to be piercing without being shrill. It's ecstatic. You hear it first at the end of 'to be real' at around 50 seconds. And then again in an extended way at 2:42. And throughout.
And then there's the breakdown at 2:49. I love when a band switches into unison. But this is more than that, it's like a cutaway diagram. They slice open the track and show you the funky underpinning that's been bouncing you along all this time. Oh, you say, we've been riding this all along. And then they build the track back up around you. It's like being in a time-lapse of the construction of St Paul's Cathedral. So good.
"The work of the AgeLab is shaped by a paradox. Having been established to engineer and promote new products and services specially designed for the expanding market of the aged, the AgeLab swiftly discovered that engineering and promoting new products and services specially designed for the expanding market of the aged is a good way of going out of business. Old people will not buy anything that reminds them that they are old. They are a market that cannot be marketed to."
"This paradox is, well, old. Heinz, back in the nineteen-fifties, tried marketing a line of “Senior Foods” that was, essentially, baby food for old people. It not only failed spectacularly but, as Coughlin puts it, poisoned an entire category. The most perverse of these failures is perhaps that of the PERS, or personal-emergency-response system, a category of device—best known for the hysterically toned television ad in which an elderly woman calls out, “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up!”—designed as a neck pendant that summons emergency services when pressed. It is simple and effective. “The problem is that no one wants one,” Coughlin says. “The entire penetration in the U.S. of the sixty-five-plus market is less than four per cent. And a German study showed that, when subscribers fell and remained on the floor for longer than five minutes, they failed to use their devices to summon help eighty-three per cent of the time.” In other words, many older people would sooner thrash on the floor in distress than press a button—one that may summon assistance but whose real impact is to admit, I am old."
"The most effective way of comforting the aged, the researchers there find, is through a kind of comical convergence of products designed by and supposedly for impatient millennials, which secretly better suit the needs of irascible boomers. The best hearing aids look the most like earbuds. The most effective PERS device is an iPhone or an Apple Watch app.
Such unexpected convergences have happened in the past. Retirement villages came to be centered on golf courses, Coughlin maintains, not because oldsters necessarily like golf but because they like using golf carts. It’s the carts that supply greater mobility in and around the village. The golf comes with them. This process of “exaptation” has now accelerated. TaskRabbit and Uber and Rent the Runway—services that provide immediate help for specific problems—are especially valuable for an aging population."
"We’re doing a lot of work in the on-demand economy, which was made for millennials but is working better for boomers. Meals are delivered—these are amazing, assisted-living services that can come to anyone’s house. Older women in particular are saved from microdeficiencies in their diet. So, while the millennials want them for convenience, the boomers want them for care for their parents, or themselves.”
Every few years, in the advertising business someone writes a piece about how the advertising industry ignores old people. About how they're a massive target audience. About how we should get over advertising's obsession with youth. That is probably true. It's an understandable omission though, given that old people themselves seem to share the same attitudes.
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This Don Norman piece about how design doesn't take old people into account did the rounds earlier in the week. Also true. Also accurate.
I can't help thinking though, who designed all these door handles and utensils that are so ubiquitous now? Well, it was people who were successful designers, at the peak of their influence and power about 20 years ago. People who are old designers now. We did it to ourselves.
Don't design for old people. Design for your future.
That's the magic of magic. It's really impressive when it's completely reproducible and that means, for insiders, it's just routine. Maybe that's why there's something even more irresistible when someone gets the band to laugh.
Remembering Lionel Hampton, born on this day in 1908 in Louisville, Kentucky. Here he is performing a tom tom solo in Belgium in 1958. pic.twitter.com/S5tIKFI6Wp
Obvs one should be decrying the editorial philosophy on display here. OTOH 100% fire emoji for clarity. There is no doubt at all about what you should and shouldn't be writing.
I've been banging on to Anne for years about how much I disapprove of buskers who use amplification. It's just wrong. That's not busking, that's doing a gig. She has shown how much she agrees with me by rolling her eyes repeatedly. Then, the other night, she went to see Grayson Perry do a talk. Turns out he hates amplified busking too! Now, it seems, it's an acceptable opinion. The only question is whether we can get enough single-issue voters together to get me and Grayson elected to the European parliament.
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I love the enthusiasm and expertise Mr Floating Points displays here. More people talking about things like this please.
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More from the Big Up to the Enthusiasts Department.
I really enjoyed this lecture/interview with Peggy Gou. I especially like the format. Talking plus music/listening is a great combination. And there's something appealing about the decks being in front of her like that. It's like she's offering you a meal. It's more spontaneous, integrated into the conversation. Slightly different and better than a set of pre-prepared tracks being played in by an anonymous technician in the background. I guess it's close to my dream scenario for a show - Desert Island Discs LIVE.
This is the best picture in it. By far. Captioned "Joggers, Eugene Oregon, 1969". Real pioneers. People doing a thing before the there was gear for that thing.
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DelightOps. I'm writing that first, before anyone else does. It's going to be a thing.
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This tweet from Rachel is bang on. Spare me from the attentionistas.
"I’m v uncomfortable saying that some ways of paying attention are better than others. “Time well spent” is too close to the idea that individual productive flow is nirvana, rather than, say, psychological safety, escapism, idle curiosity, relaxed time with loved ones, etc. etc."
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I have some Apple AirPods. Big fan. You can skip a track by double-tapping on them. I do that a lot, I double tap my way through my Spotify recommendations while walking to work on a Monday or Tuesday. I've noticed that I tend to do it in time with the track. Normally on the 4 and the 1. The upbeat and the beat. Once a former percussionist always a former percussionist. It's a small thing but it makes me happy. I often feel I have to wait until the end of a measure and that gives me a fraction more time to listen to the track and to decide not to double-tap, with my finger hovering next to my ear, like a close-protection officer not sure if they want to be summoned to take a bullet.
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The honesty and clarity in this interview is fantastic. Imagine if footballers talked like this. Or business people.
It makes me want to try harder. Or at least make sure every bit of writing I do includes an extra pass where I try and think about this stuff.
'Caro’s own prose makes me think of waves: in the paragraphs roll, grandiose as anything, crashing against the shore as he winds them up with a last, very short sentence. “Well, that’s from Paradise, um…” He shakes his head. “I don’t compare myself with Milton, but great works can be models. He [Milton] has these long lines about Satan falling and falling and then, suddenly, the rhythm changes. I try to do things with rhythm. In the second volume, Johnson is campaigning in Texas in a helicopter, and he’s so desperate. I wrote on an index card: is there desperation on this page? I meant in the rhythm. I want to reinforce the reader’s understanding with that rhythm.” '
On the other hand, it seems like Robert Caro might have a blind spot about LBJ's treatment of women.
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I've been going to the same barber for about 17 years. Every haircut happens in total blissful silence. Then, yesterday, he asked me if I'd been on holiday. I said 'no'. End of talking.
I've run out of opinions so all I have left is memoir. Be warned, this is only of interest to me. And not even me.
I've had four DJ moments in my life.
DJ INCIDENT ONE
I first played records in public in the basement of a kebab shop in Cambridge. My friend Ben and I did it a few times. It was 1986 or so. We called it The Tufty Club. The idea was to get punters dancing to Go-Go* but, if I recall correctly, the most popular records were a megamix of Kool And The Gang's greatest hits and an extraordinary 12-inch mix of Dance and Shout by The Jacksons. DJing, for us, consisted of playing one record after another without too much of a gap in between. Though I do remember seeking out records with drumless intros and outros so they could be faded over each other with a little finesse.
*Go-go side note and minor celebrity addendum: In 1986 I was convinced Go-go was the coming thing and it's compelling combination of rolling percussion, hip hop beats and call and response shouting would clearly sweep the world. Especially compared to the metronomic weediness of 'house' music**. I built up quite a collection of go-go, mostly through indiscriminately buying every TTED 12-inch that found its way to R.E. Cords in Derby. I once lent that collection to Acyde of No Vacancy Inn. (We sat next to each other when I worked at Nike). As far as I know he's still got it.
**Interestingly, before Ben and I played Trouble Funk and the Jacksons, two properly trend setting other people played a set of, probably, cutting edge house and electro. This Brutal House. Every week. I couldn't understand it. What an idiot.
DJ INCIDENT TWO
Ten years later Anne and I got married. On New Years Eve. We had a do in a scout hut on the Wirral and I played records then. I remember that night very fondly, for obvious reasons, but also because DJing seems very suited to my particular position on the introvert/extrovert spectrum. I was able to say 'hello' to everyone, briefly, before popping back behind the decks to do something with a record.* It was the perfect combination of showing off and being on my own.I played Love Train by the O'Jays at midnight as a sort of funky Auld Lang Syne. I was very pleased with that.
*It is interesting** to note that the two extent pictures of me doing DJing, reproduced above and below, both show me studiously refusing to engage with anyone beyond the records.
**Not interesting***
***Though I do like the evidence, in the picture above, of my lifelong obsession with safety orange.
DJ INCIDENT THREE
1997 or 1998. We'd moved to Portland. My boss, Chris, was a big cheese in various Portland arts organisations. He asked me to provide the music at a couple of art show things. (This was probably the result of me bigging up my previous DJing experience to an unwarranted degree.) Being a reasonably remunerated advertising executive in a cheap town I was not short of disposable income so I immediately dashed out and bought two SL1200s and a little mixer. And the next Sunday I was playing records in a massive white-walled warehouse in the white-walled warehouse district of Portland. The art elite of Oregon were peering at tiny scribbles and sculptural interventions and I was playing Transglobal Underground and Afro Celt Sound System. Dance-y tracks but with that soupcon of authenticity you get from funking up some cultural appropriation. Again, there was limited actual, proper mixing. I mostly just crashed things together. It was fun.
Crowd reaction: someone came and asked me to turn it down.
*Picture above shows my DJ setup in the basement of our house in Portland. What a splendid opportunity, you might think, for me to actually practise DJing and get good at it. Didn't happen. It's a pattern I've repeated many times. Got into something relatively early. Got myself the gear. Had a go at it. And then stopped. My life has been lived in opposition to the Helsinki Bus Station Theory. I've explored every route, but I've only ever gone one stop.
DJ INCIDENT FOUR
A few weeks ago Ben from the Tufty Club asked me to rejoin him behind the wheels of steel. He runs a jazz night in Hastings and I went down to play an hour of the Modern Jazz Quartet (and associated artists). My only actual knowledge of the MJQ is that I've bought quite a lot of their records* so planning for the event was a pleasure. I actually had to listen properly to what I'd bought and plan a journey through a selection. So I dug the Technics out of storage and practised a few times. You can listen to one of those practises if you'd like an hour of vibraphonic jazz meandering.
This was also tremendous fun. Another basement. Another failure to get people dancing.
*Another website that needs updating.
DAYS TO NEXT DJING
Incident Four really reminded how fun playing records can be. And I recently got a friend to show me how to actually do beat matching, which is very satisfying. I've been practising that. So who knows? Maybe it won't be thirty years before it happens again. Let me know if you fancy, for instance, an evening of records for which Paula Scher designed the covers.
"I was once in a meeting about a software project. It was like meetings I’d been in my whole life - aimless, drifting, pointless. Then suddenly one of the developers said “Hang on we’re bike-shedding”. “Ah yes” said another “we are”. The meeting immediately shifted gear. Decisions were quickly taken or dismissed and we all got back to work. I was a little shellshocked so I went back to my desk and googled “bike-shedding”. Reading that wikipedia entry was one of the things that convinced me that the practises of agile, user-centric software and web development will eventually displace those of most creative industries. “Bike-shedding” comes from a story by C. Northcote Parkinson (he of Parkinson’s Law). He tells the tale of a committee that has to approve the plans for a nuclear power station. Since they know very little about nuclear power stations they talk about it briefly and then just approve the recommendation put in front of them. Next they have to approve the plans for a bike shed. They all know about bike sheds. They’ve all seen one and used one. So they talk about the bike shed for hours, arguing about construction methods and paint choice and everything. This is why bike-shedding is also known as The Law of Triviality: “ members of an organisation give disproportionate weight to trivial issues”. I’m sure this observation is familiar to you. Most branding conversations seem, to me, to be one long bike-shedding session. It’s not so terrible, it’s human nature. The difference is that software people have identified and named the pattern. That naming is an organisational hack that allows them to break out of it and get on with something more useful. (See also: Fredkin’s Paradox)"
As I say above, it seems to me that most conversations about 'branding' drift into bike-shedding pretty quickly.
Then, the other week, I was preparing for a panel I'm going to be on and I thought I remind myself of some history, so I dug out John Murphy's book about Interbrand and the weekend when he invented brand valuation. It's a great read.
And I was reminded of a story from the beginning of the book, a naming project he did while at Dunlop. He recommended the name Denovo and then recounts the story of his boss telling him about the meeting:
"...He then expanded on how the decision had been taken. He told me that the Dunlop Pirelli Union, which was still nominally in existence, was proving so disastrous that Dunlop was having to write down its huge investment in Pirelli to zero. The extraordinary board meeting had been called to write-off hundreds of millions of pounds, possibly £5 billion or so at current values. He told me that the special board meeting had lasted for two hours and that the board had taken five minutes to write off the hundreds of millions and one hour and fifty-five minutes to approve the choice of the name Denovo.
My business idea was born."
Interbrand, the company that coined the word 'branding' (in a non-cattle context) and invented brand valuation, sprang from a textbook 'brand-shedding' session. Nice.
As previously discussed I'm a devotee of the horribly unfashionable and widely discredited practice of counting steps per day. For 2018 I set myself a target of 15,000 steps. I failed. I was doing OK until the middle of the year when I changed jobs and walking to and from work became just too far. Also, all that walking was really starting to eat into my time. Walking 7 miles a day takes quite a while. And, around about August, I damaged my knee.
So, here's what last year looked like:
I averaged 14,636 steps. But, realistically that's not going to happen in 2019. So, to give myself a little stretch target, I'm going to aim for 13,000.
My 'most listened to tracks' used to be heavily skewed by stuff I listened to while working. I don't really do that at the moment so now all my top tracks are from my 'bed' playlist.
They're the things I listen to while reading in bed. Atmospheric, not too intrusive, don't make Anne complain about 'weird noises'. These are all lovely, but I don't think I could hum any of them for you.
