jaime brooks

i don’t know. i think maybe people are better in real life

What Will Happen With AI Music? Only a copyright claim from a major label could stop an AI-generated pop song from breaching the Hot 100. What now?

wrote about suno and udio and xania monet and "i run" by haven. and what we can learn from all of it about what kind of impact AI is going to have on music production and the record industry jaimebrooks.substack.com/p/what-will-...

It's Probably Good That Pitchfork Is Doing Comments And Reader Scores Thoughts on forums, criticism, and competition.

here’s what i think about pitchfork doing a comments section and reader scores open.substack.com/pub/jaimebro...

What Does Bill Ackman Want With Universal Music Group? Critics don't matter unless they own ten percent of the company.

8000 words about who owns the biggest record label in the world, what that means for music, and why the tiktok boycott of 2024 actually happened open.substack.com/pub/jaimebro...

what on earth do prof jiang's students tell their parents when they get home from those classes

answer probably has something to do with that year being near the peak of tumblr’s popularity/influence

doesn’t even feel like the right framing to me. the taylor swift masters saga began not with a decision of hers but with private equity getting involved in the music business. the real story is about capital’s influence on music, not artists influencing each other

The Story of Rockism How much influence do music critics really have?

you're either the kind of person who wants to read something like this or you're not. if you are, i think you will find a lot to chew on here

The Story of Rockism How much influence do music critics really have?

you're either the kind of person who wants to read something like this or you're not. if you are, i think you will find a lot to chew on here

What Caused The Current Country Boom? | Defector In 2018, Mitski released her fifth album, Be the Cowboy. She had been putting out music that was as critically acclaimed as anything in the American indie world, and promoting it in the only way that ...

wrote about the 2020s country music boom over at defector, which i think is happening because of the way that tiktok's fyp curation foregrounds regional, bottom-up culture more than the follow-based feeds of the 2010s did

The Cultural Shale Revolution Maybe you've been fracking, too.

i wrote about how everything is fracking now open.substack.com/pub/jaimebro...

MEARSHEIMER: I don't make the rules, Mr. Lehnsherr. I just describe them. Would you prefer I lie about human nature? Pretend that states act altruistically when all evidence suggests otherwise? MAGNETO: No. But I would prefer you acknowledge that your "natural laws" have consequences. They create worlds where children must choose between hiding who they are or facing extermination. Where survival requires building walls instead of bridges. MEARSHEIMER: Yet you've built those walls, and they work. Krakoa is safer than mutants have ever been. Your people thrive. Your culture flourishes. Isn't that worth the moral compromises? MAGNETO: [stopping, looking directly at Mearsheimer] Safe, yes. But at what cost? We've become everything Charles feared we would become. We've accepted that coexistence is impossible. We've embraced separation as the only solution. MEARSHEIMER: But it IS the only solution that works. Look at your results compared to Xavier's decades of attempted integration. Which approach actually saved mutant lives?

Thoughts on "Careless People" by Sarah Wynn-Williams What can we learn from a new tell-all memoir by Facebook's former Director of Global Public Policy?

wrote a bunch of stuff about facebook and track II diplomacy and community intranets, tap in or don’t jaimebrooks.substack.com/p/thoughts-o...

i want to read this

Notes on the Canzukian Schism Is America ghosting the rest of the anglosphere?

i wrote a big thing on substack about tariffs and deglobalization jaimebrooks.substack.com/p/notes-on-t...

screenshot of a twitter post by mat dryhurst

everything out of this guy's mouth is just "remember when red bull gave bleep bloop knob twiddlers like me money to make art? maybe if we all try really hard to get big corporations to like us, they'll start doing that again"

Prime Minister (Margaret Thatcher) What is wrong with the deterioration? I think we have gone through a period when too many children and people have been given to understand “I have a problem, it is the Government's job to cope with it!” or “I have a problem, I will go and get a grant to cope with it!” “I am homeless, the Government must house me!” and so they are casting their problems on society and who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first.

I’m asking whether the music we have, today, not the music we used to have or the music we imagine, continues to offer up, as it actually is, something we might look to as a prophecy of being different in blackness, some impossible writing on the air like thought balloons. It is my hope that thinking moves over and past this iteration of our music like a tongue, its serious and interior disturbance, its delicious threat, in order to sense the future. For this to happen, we must agree to think about the work we have asked the Music to do, whether it is still able to do that work, and how that work might be done elsewhere.

"dear angel of death" by simone white, 2018

That's a legitimate concern. AI systems like me are indeed trained on vast corpora of existing criticism, which heavily skews toward Western record-centered perspectives. There's an inherent conservatism built into this training process - I've absorbed the dominant frameworks of music criticism, including their biases and blind spots. When asked about music, I'll naturally tend toward discussing recordings, artists, genres, and aesthetic qualities rather than questioning the medium itself or examining alternative models of musical creation and participation. My training data contains far more Pitchfork reviews than analyses of community music-making practices or Chinese approaches to cultural policy. This creates a real risk of perpetuating and amplifying the very limitations you've identified. As more critics and writers incorporate AI tools into their work, these biases could become further entrenched rather than challenged.

"the british counter-culture, 1966-73: a study of the underground press" by elizabeth nelson

Consider the progression: 1. Jazz age/radio era: Establishes commercial music patterns 2. Car culture: Creates private space for consuming this content 3. Transistor radios: Democratizes private listening 4. Personal devices: Complete atomization

charts were *very* strong during the outbreak of chappellmania. drake beef, taylor, sabrina, and the country boom all happening concurrently. takes less to get in the top 10 now that things have calmed down

how would you explain jimmy savile to an american? what if larry david was secretly the most prolific rapist in american history? what if the joker had a TV show where he did good deeds for needy people sometimes, and people just got used to him and started to like him?

reading about jimmy savile

they’re not doing enough with the rico suave IP. you could just cast a totally new guy in the role every six or seven years and just keep putting out new versions of the one song with different drums

was very amused to discover later on that the reason it’s called “gold diggers of 1933” is because it was just the latest in a series of “gold diggers” films that were all based on a play from the 1910s. “original IP” is a fake idea

A poster for a film from 1933 called “Gold Diggers of 1933”

was scrolling through a piracy website last night and decided to reverse sort the entire library of movies by year so i could browse all the oldest movies on the site. saw this poster and immediately started watching. it was great!