There’s never been a better time to be curious about music.
An hour or so ago I innocently followed a Pitchfork Twitter link to Robyn’s cover of Bjork’s ‘Hyperballad’.
It was so good, I had to go and watch the original in all its Gondry glory.
Listening again, I was struck by just how good the production on this track is. So I went looking for its producer and found Nellee Hooper.
It turns out that after starting life as a DJ for Wild Bunch (more on that later), Hooper went on to produce a slew of big records (Madonna, U2, Bjork, Smashing Pumpkins, Gwen Stefani), including one of my favourites, Massive Attack’s ‘Blue Lines’ and the score and soundtrack for Baz Luhrmann’s ‘Romeo anf Juliet’.
One of Hooper’s most successful productions was ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’.
I only realised today that ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’ was originally a Prince song.
Anyway, I’m fascinated by clusters of musical talent (like Madchester or CBGB’s in the 70s) and one of the things that made Bristol so unique was that a wave immigration in the 50s made it one of the most racially, culturally and therefore musically diverse cities in Britain.
Out of this mix came Wild Bunch, a sound system comprised of Hooper and other local DJs and producers. One of the Wild Bunch was Robert Del Naja who would go on to start Massive Attack. He described the music like this:
“It was more hip-hop in its center, but it went dub, it went soul, it went a bit New Wave, it went a bit retro film soundtrack-y—it was always a bit kind of strange, and I guess that’s how the reputation spread because we were doing something nobody else was doing at the time.”
Two songs that typify this period are The Wild Bunch’s ‘Look of Love’ and Smith & Mighty’s ‘Anyone’.
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They both sound so raw today but when Wild Bunch disbanded, Massive Attack formed, and trip-hop was born, serving up a more polished version of the Wild Bunch melange. There’s a good description of the time in Salon:
“Trip-hop came together in the bohemian, multi-ethnic city of Bristol, where restlessly inventive DJs had spent years assembling samples of various sounds that were floating around: groove-heavy acid jazz, dub reggae, neo-psychodelia, techno disco music, and the brainy art rap.”
Massive Attack spawned or inspired a wave of other trip-hop artists like Tricky, Portishead and Roni Size (whose ‘Brown Paper Bag’ has one of the best samples of all time).
I was too young to be aware of trip-hop and I listen to it infrequently now but there remain some incredible musical artifacts from the Bristol scene. The enduring one for me is ‘Unfinished Sympathy’.
So, back to Hooper (who was the whole reason I got sucked into this musical vortex). Before trip-hop blew up and he became U2 and Kylie’s producer, Hooper had a UK #1 with Soul II Soul’s – ‘Back To Life (However Do You Want Me)’.
When my ears hit ‘Back To Life’ I figured the rabbit hole had ended.
But the more I listened, the more it sounded strangely familiar. If I’d never heard it before today – why did it feel like an old favourite? Turns out, Big Boi pulls a chunky sample from it for ‘Shutterbugg’, a song I’ve had on loop lately.
So the Bristol underground gets reborn and repurposed on one of 2010’s best hip-hop records and I come kind of full circle from Robyn to Big Boi via Bristol.
When you’re in the web’s musical rabbit hole, everything’s connected and everybody’s happy.
Being asked often by friends and family back home – How’s New York? What’s it like? – I’ve had a lot of opportunity to consider my response.
Why is New York so good? Why is it my favourite city?
To these questions, I have two answers.
1 – You can make New York any city you want it to be.
This is a choose-your-own adventure city. If you want Paris, the monuments, the restaurants, the biking through leafy streets, you can find all these things here in New York. If you want great Korean food and karaoke, you can find it. If you want to eat vegetables, brown rice and exercise all the time, New York can provide that too. If you want clubs and cocktails and and the high-life, it’s never more than 10 minutes away. And if you just want a quiet life, reading books, drinking coffee and writing, there’s no better place.
Any life you want, any experience you need, it’s usually just a $10 taxi ride away.
That’s the first reason I love New York. You get to make it what you want.
2 – In New York, you can be who you want to be.
In New York, you’re invisible no matter what you do. No matter how grand your ambition, how outlandish your attire, how poorly you want to sing on crowded streets, in New York there’s always someone with loftier ambitions, crazier clothes or a worse voice.
You can’t do much to shock this city. And that means that you get to choose every day who you want to be without needing to worry about what other people think.
I love the freedom that invisibility brings. Here, you set your own boundaries. You create your own definitions.
That’s the second reason I love New York. You get to be who you want.
If you want to know what it feels like to be invisible in New York, watch this video my friend Mark Lobo shot recently on a stroll through the city. I love it.
I’ve only met Kirk Docker briefly a couple of times and we’ve spoken on the phone. Most of what I know about him, I derive from his work as the founder of Vive Cool City and as a Hungry Beast.
I think his work says more than I could. But I think his ability to tell stories without judgment, to ask questions without implication and to get people to be open about the most difficult and painful things is extraordinary.
I think he could become one of the defining Australian storytellers over the next few decades.
Watch Kirk talk to a couple shooting smack here. This is not for the faint-hearted, but it is one of the most honest, painful portrayals of addiction I have seen.
Kirk did a piece for the ABC on the ‘Gang of 49′. I was in Adelaide when the Gang of 49 stuff was going down and it was a bit disconcerting. Watching Kirk dissect the whole thing is incredible.
The other example of his capability is his extended piece on the treatment of paedophilia. I can’t think of more difficult or sensitive subject matter to try and present. But somehow Kirk manages. How many journalists anywhere could have done this?
Person 2: Nick.
A concept and a context.
Nick is Nick Boshier, who is in New York right now starring in the NY Fringe Festival play One Thumb Out.
Nick managed Lior for many years and now is a self-described ’slashie’, as in, actor slash writer slash producer slash entrepreneur.
Nick, alongside mates Macca and Jarod, was behind the cult-viral-culturally iconic Trent From Punchy and Beached Whale. Watch them below if you aren’t familiar.
Beached az.
Trent, Trent, Trent.
Off the back of these videos, Nick and his crew have made real money, creating a business model in the process for turning viral success into something sustainable.
Based in LA, Nick is insanely charismatic, driven and determined. And from no real, formal acting background, I think he might become a superstar.
Watch whatever he does next.
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Theory 1: The Basquiat Hair Theory.
Your best haircuts always coincide with your greatest moments of self-realisation.
You cannot be at the top of your game and have a bad haircut. Sometimes, you might be near the top of your game but you need a great haircut to push you over the edge.
I came up with this theory whilst watching Radiant Child (trailer below) and lamenting the fact I haven’t had a Basquiat Hair moment since 2003.
Theory 2: The Facebook Photos As A Narrative Theory.
I tagged a friend in a photo on Facebook recently. When I went back to the photo, I noticed he was no longer tagged. I tried retagging him but Facebook informed me I couldn’t tag him because he’d detagged himself.
How vain, right?
I was confused because he was tagged in much less flattering photos than the one I tagged. What was the deal? What was it about my photo of him that was so wrong?
My friend’s explanation was that he chose only to be tagged in photos that represented or added to the narrative of his life in an accurate or interesting way. I tagged him at an event where he had already been tagged by someone else. He was therefore covered in his photos for this part of his life.
Your Facebook photos represent a a story of your life. In many cases, they are one of the most public stories you have. For old or distant friends, they are sometimes the only available representations.
Having 37 photos of the big night you had at TGI Friday’s obscures people’s ability to get to the interesting photo of you in Morocco 4 years ago.
Facebook photos of you are a narrative you should control. If this theory holds, you should be tagged in 40-50 photos, which viewed from start to finish, give people your story in recent years.
Time to hit ‘remove tag’.
Theory 3: The Love Music You Love Theory.
In 2007, I interviewed Hank Shocklee from Public Enemy. I asked a question about music taste and finding great new music, referencing Pitchfork and its famously divisive reviews. He looked at me annoyed.
- Man, f%&k that. Listen to your own s$%t. The only judge of great music is you. If you love a song, if you love it, that’s enough. And it doesn’t matter when or where you find it, so long as you love it, that’s great music.
I took the wheel of my musical journey around 1996. I had been given ‘Dookie’, ‘Nevermind’ and Offspring’s ‘Smash’ on tape by friends.
I loved those tapes to their wobbly death.
Then I got my first CD, ‘August and Everything After’ by Counting Crows (to this day one of my favourite records) and started reading back-copies of Rolling Stone from the Council Library. I used to read every article and every review, using the subtle references or landmarks as launching points for discovery.
Why did all these articles mention My Bloody Valentine, The Pixies, The Smiths, Little Richard, Velvet Underground?
I started reading liner notes and branching into new places.
Then I started listening to albums that didn’t make sense at first – Chemical Brothers ‘Surrender’ and Tool ‘Aenima’ – but then slowly unfolded into something I loved. These were my personal Rites of Spring.
Somewhere along the way though, listening to what I loved gave way to knowing first and knowing most.
After I was introduced to Pitchfork, I spent years of my life devoting hours daily to trying to become and stay a forerunner in ‘music taste’.
Hank’s ‘love what you love’ spiel came around the time I started to tire of the fashionable music grind.
In the last few years I’ve learnt to love what I love and let that be my guide. I’ve given up trying to be into the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, I’ve conceded that I’ll never get LCD Soundsystem and I’m comfortable that I’ll never be able to tolerate Lightning Bolt records or Bambabounce DJ Sets.
I’m into lots of stuff that makes me lame: Phil Collins/Genesis, songs featuring T-Pain/Jeezy, auto-tune, Lady Antebellum, the Isley Brothers, Usher’s ‘Confessions’, Chaka Khan…
Pitchfork would give my taste a 4.4 but so long as I’m finding songs to love, I’m OK with that.
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Web Thing I’d Fix 1: Tumblr Save
Read within the images below.
And while Wordpress has it most of the way there, hitting save draft takes you back to the top of the post, rather than back to where you were typing.
750words.com is still the best save as you go writing interface I use (GoogDocz is also amazing).
Web Thing I’d Fix 2: Twitter Sign-In
I click on sign-in, where my details are remembered and the uname/pword fields usually drop down.
But if the page is slow to load, I end up here, where I don’t have my details saved. This happens 5 times a week.
Just want the Twitter front page to be simple like Googzmail.
Web Thing I’d Fix 3: My Facebook Feed
I want to be able to select the friends whose updates I want in my feed.
I don’t want to have to hear updates from bros I knew but didn’t like in Grade 9.
The SMH is still the place I go for Australian news. But it’s a terrible, horrible, no-good, auto-load video, spamalam, textathon, width-be-damned nightmare. And until something better comes along, I’ll have to keep putting up with it.
Consumption is easy and fun. You can spend hours watching movies, reading books and articles or exploring your feeds on Twitter and Tumblr.
Creation is not so easy. But it is more rewarding. And creators build value.
I spend too much time thinking about writing and not enough time actually doing it and I’ve been thinking about why this is.
The notion of wanting to create but not being able to holds a lot of people back. Here are some reasons why people, myself included, don’t ever make it to creating.
Waiting For The Perfect Time
Lots of people wait for a perfect time. They wait until the next project is done or they have a little more breathing room. Tomorrow, three months, a year won’t be any different. The perfect time to launch was yesterday. Because in a year’s time, you’ll have learned a year’s worth of things about what it takes to be a creator.
Waiting For The Perfect Idea
Waiting for the perfect idea is the quickest way to kill creativity.
I believe what Sivers said: Ideas are just a multiplier of execution. Ideas themselves aren’t rare, it’s the ability to stick with them long enough to turn them into something worthwhile that matters.
Launch with the best idea you have, the one you like the most or the one you are most curious about exploring. Whether it succeeds or not is immaterial so long as you’re learning. Reid Hoffman says – If you aren’t embarrassed by what you launch with, you waited too long to launch.
Fear
The fear of judgment and criticism can be paralysing.
What if people don’t like what I make? What if they disagree with my point of view or critique my style?
These anxieties hold a lot of people back. But feedback, criticism and sunlight are all necessary for great ideas to evolve. A single human brain sometimes isn’t the best place to see an idea to fruition. You need the sharpening that comes with the friction of alternative points of view and the expansion that comes with other people’s perspective.
Unrealistic Reference Points
I look at the way Atul Gawande, Paul Graham and Ben Horowitz write. I want to write like that. When I try and fail, I get disheartened and stop.
That’s the mistake. The right reference point isn’t external, it’s internal. Did I create something that I like, that I believe in, that feels true to me?
Just because you’re not Thom Yorke doesn’t mean you shouldn’t write songs.
Polishing
It’s easy to do the wireframe, the mock-up, the one-page summary. What’s hard is the polishing, the refining, the perfecting, the amending and re-amending.
Pareto’s Principle, that it takes 20% of time to do 80% of the job, is true in the reverse. It takes 80% of time to finish the last 20%. So many creations sit unfinished because to finish takes discipline and commitment and some grind-it-out boredom.
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This article’s first draft took 20 minutes. It looked nothing like what I finished with. Getting it right enough took a few hours.
It’s not the best thing I’ve written. It might not even be very good.
But the point is, I stopped consuming and started creating. I created something. And so should you.
I am fascinated by how a person brings about change in themselves.
I have been slowly improving my own ability to change certain behaviours over the last few years.
It started with some advice from my dentist – “Nick, remember: floss the teeth you want to keep”.
I did floss, sometimes, but I realised at that point that a couple of times a week wasn’t going to cut it. And so I set about making it a habit.
They say habits take 21 consecutive days to form. While I agree with this, it leaves out something very important, and that is that it takes months to get to the point of being able to do something new 21 days in a row.
It hasn’t just been flossing. I’ve been trying to build numerous things into my life – reading fiction before I fall asleep, regular writing, yoga, daily activity reporting, back stretches, Inbox Zero, GTD, daily exercise, more greens, keeping a journal, less coffee, a one in-one out rule for my material possessions – all with varying degrees of success.
Some things I’ve learnt.
Cold turkey is hard. An abrupt about-turn is very hard to sustain. Going from never to always is, in my experience, almost impossible. If you have all the old nudges, the old impulses and the same external inputs (friends, workplaces, housing) then you’re not going to sustain the change you’re trying to make.
The best motivators are negative ones. If you really care about starting a habit, take 10x the money that you would normally spend on a nice dinner and give it to a friend. Tell that friend what you want to do and give them a means of monitoring your progress. Tell them that each time you don’t maintain that habit, they should burn 1/5 of it. Few people will be comfortable with the idea of burning their own money so the incentive is high to stick to the habit. Do this for 90 days with a new habit and chances are it will be ingrained at the end of 90 days.
It’s easier with friends. Sharing the experience with friends makes it a lot easier. Rare is the person with sufficient self-discipline to keep their own promises. But sharing the goal with a friend creates an obligation stronger than obligation to self. I like Jake Lodwick’s Standards, but the thing it misses is weekly feedback from other people with their own standards. Friends are great for accountability.
It’s even better with a coach. Last year I employed a business coach to help me grow my business. (He was the one I gave the $200 to for burning). One of his tasks was to keep me accountable to the goals I set. I gave him the authority to contact me at any time and ask for an update and I asked that he show me no mercy. It’s not for everyone, but the time I spent working with him was the most personally and commercially productive in the last 2 years.
Report back. Regular reporting to an external source is almost essential. Otherwise it will slip out of your mind.
Give yourself nudges. Rather than not eating bad food, just don’t buy it. Don’t go shopping hungry. Put the dental floss on your pillow so you can’t ignore it. Don’t take your laptop to bed with you. Don’t check emails when you get up. Rather than addressing the behaviour, address the inputs that cause it. Little nudges are a big help.
Be patient. Give yourself 3 x more time than you think you need to get the habit started. Its likely you won’t be successful straight up.
Make changes in context. Map out where you want to be in 10 years. Work back and see what that means for where you are in 3. Do the same for 1 year. And then 3 months. Now think about your habits – what habits need to change now to get you where you need to go? Habits outside the context will be hard to maintain.
The habit has to make your life better. The final point is that long-term, if the habit doesn’t make your life better, simpler, easier and at least equally as enjoyable, you won’t keep it.
That’s why diets don’t work. You can’t enjoy life eating only steamed chicken, broccoli and 30g of almonds every 3.75 hours. If you love cookies, then you associate them with your default state and you’ll gravitate towards that state after the initial rush of the habit change wears off.
That’s why the only changes that will stick are sustainable ones. Changes that you’ll not only want to make, but want to keep. And sometimes, that involves looking at your life as a whole – your job, your business, your friends, your family, your home – and deciding which of those you need to change first.
For the record – I am currently trying to: read fiction before I sleep, write a journal at 5pm every day, write 2 short essays a month here and increase the amount of greens in my diet to at least 1/3 (or 1 meal a day).
I’m not drinking alcohol for three months to support Hello Sunday Morning, a program set up by my friend Chris Raine.
Chris decided he wasn’t going to drink for a year, started blogging about it and soon enough, he was a national news story and 1500 people had joined the cause to start a discussion about [...]
I am inspired by Frank Chimero’s idea of Text Playlists.
“I keep a list of the best writing on the web. I take this list and revisit and reread it every 4 to 8 weeks. You could almost consider it a playlist of text: it’s very select (I artificially limit it to 10-15 articles), [...]
I’m excited to announce that New York is going to be my next home and Boxee is going to be my next project.
In Buenos Aires earlier this year, Jules and I decided that if ever there was a time to live the New York dream, it was now. The short version of what happened next [...]
Each new friendship is a chance to present to the world a better version of yourself.
I think a lot of people look back in their lives on the mistakes they made, particularly with respect to relationships, and wish they could erase that part of their history.
But it’s those same mistakes make up who you are. [...]
Culture
This Netflix internal culture document was leaked almost a year ago. It’s an amazing document, enough to make you want to work at Netflix.
I’d love to talk to people at the company and find out if this is a fair reflection of the culture there.
The best bits of it for me are:
