Dada Drummer Almanach

Fantastic Tavern Flinging myself down in the trench, my mouth filled with paper. The smell of ink, so pervasive I had long stopped sensing it, was new again. Or was it blood? I was in the Georgian section, there were pages by Iliazd, handbills from the Fantastic Tavern, reams of gorgeous script that I could not read. I imagined after countless days and nights in this trench I would crack the code, cut through Georgian script easy as my own. But no amount of time mattered.

Zuccotti Park, NYC, September 2011 As watershed radical events go, maybe Occupy Wall Street wasn’t May 68, much less Tiananmen or Tahrir or Gezi Park or Puerta del Sol or Syntagma Square. But then again, it was all of those in my direct experience. I was changed by it. And I believe it changed everything, as watershed radical events necessarily do. In their immediate wake, we are told watershed radical events don’t change anything, however. We get this from the opposition, of course.

The New York Times ran one of those squishy soft interview pieces boosting the rich, in this case Jimmy Iovine and Dr. Dre. Here’s what they had to say about AI and music creation: How does one prove to capitalists that labor matters? Strike is a traditional solution. But how can labor strike if it already doesn’t matter to the bosses? Which would seem to be the case for Iovine and Dre and the capitalized music industry they represent.

Phoebe Bridgers is just the latest prominent artist to ban smartphones at shows - although Bridgers has gone even further, banning pens, pencils and paper for journalists. I wish that were a joke. I also wish this article I wrote for Frieze in 2014 was out of date for more than the artists I mention. Originally published by Frieze (May 2014) I know first hand how distracting it is from the stage to see the blue glow of a phone screen light up an audience member’s face.

L’Rain is a great live band, I can attest.

AI is burning like a wildfire through what many of us have spent our lives constructing: for me, that’s a world of writing and music. I am far from alone in believing a machine cannot do what people do with words or sounds. But that will not stop the onslaught of machine-made versions replacing human ones in myriad ways. What would seem to lie ahead is a loss of continuity in certain skills, as AI pulls people away from their practice.

I’m out of my depth writing on pop music, but Charli XCX’s new album Music, Fashion, Film dares us to think about lines drawn around rock. “We were doing our version of analogue,” she told Laura Snapes, quickly qualifying to undercut any portentiousness. “But putting it through our lens, and making sure that nothing felt too macho, was important.” “We” and “our” may be the true key words in those pop-wise statements, however. Charli XCX is a band on the latest album: a trio of Charli, A. G.

Last week, streaming platform Deezer announced that more than 50% of all new tracks released in June 2026 are generative AI music. “It’s evident that the primary purpose of uploading these tracks to streaming platforms is fraudulent,” the announcement continued.

A lavish book of over 300 photographs of The Velvet Underground at the Boston Tea Party in 1968 and 1969 was recently published in a limited edition by Phil Milstein, founder of the Velvet Underground Appreciation Society. The photos are credited only to a mysterious “Modern Printer.” I am lucky to have a copy of this rarity, but it brings to mind a more widely available account of the Velvets’ relationship to Boston, Ryan H. Walsh’s Astral Weeks.

With fanfare last week (or was it sad trombones), the “IFPI, RIAA, A2IM, WIN, IMPALA, The Grammys, SAG-AFTRA & Human Artistry Campaign, representing a broad spectrum of recorded music creators and companies around the world,” introduced labels for AI music. The announcement was amplified by headlines throughout the US media, from People magazine to the Wall Street Journal. Is this really all we get, a sticker?