Björk in concert

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Cinema

Poetry I cry in the cinema Or not cry So hard that my head aches with the holding back Not in the film When those beside me weep Manipulated by...

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Non-fictionYoung and Kucyk are as good at tracking down hard-to-find people as they are at tracking down hard-to-find music, although sometimes they do reach dead ends. Their methods aren’t particularly advanced and are often helped by luck. Sometimes they’ll raid the White Pages. Sometimes they’ll search for relatives of musicians online. Sometimes – as in the case of another song on Someone Like Me – they’ll scour through five years’ worth of archived weekly newsletters from a Seventh Day Adventist Church in the UK and Ireland and spot a tiny article that contains the full name of a mysterious musician they’re trying to find.

Creative industry

Non-fictionThe hacker ethos helped solidify the idea that computers weren’t just utilitarian devices that performed tasks – they had expressive potential and could be used to facilitate new forms of art and activism in the right hands and under the right conditions. But this perpetuated a myth that anyone with access to computers could try their hand at being creative and participate in a new, digital culture. While the ethos achieved a great deal in the acculturation of utopian and countercultural values, a neoliberal core soon began to emerge – especially as early tech pioneers got rich.

The marketing is still crap

Non-fictionThis neoliberal reframing of the arts into ‘creative industries’ first took hold in the UK with Tony Blair and his attempt to make the country’s image less frumpy and more innovative: New Labour lumped disparate industries together under the guise of creating a so-called ‘enterprise economy’. This ethos has continued with gusto in the twenty-first century, with artistic development corralled into corporate spaces while creative professionals are expected to perform their roles with sharpened governance, purpose and glad-handing to prove more is achieved by following a new regime of accountability.