she was cuffed to the truth

Posted by The Editors

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Today: Activist, musician, and writer jj skolnik.

Issue No. 556

Angine de la Scene
jj skolnik

Angine de la Scene

by jj skolnik

If you aren’t familiar with the Quebec band Angine de Poitrine (“angine de poitrine” = “angina pectoris,” chest pain caused by lack of blood flow to the heart), they’re a duo who wear oversized costumes with long-nosed papier-mâché (??) heads onstage. They’re covered in polka dots, right down to their bare polka-dot-painted feet, in the case of guitarist Khn de Poitrine. They make proggy math-rock, and have described themselves as a “mantra-rock dada Pythagorean-cubist orchestra.”

To me they’re reminiscent of the Rhode Island School of Design-centric scene of the aughts that produced Lightning Bolt, mixed with Primus and Frank Zappa. There’s also something that feels French-Canadian there that I can’t put my finger on because I’m American and have spent a grand total of maybe a week in Montreal total over my lifetime. Erin McLeod at touchofallright has more to say about the Quebecois context, placing their sound into the context of what she calls “cirque rock.”

I first noticed my online cohort discussing AdP a few months ago, when their KEXP session went viral just before the release of their second LP. At that point I filed Angine de Poitrine into the “not for me” category and went on my merry way. 

People really do love this band. On the popular podcast Justin Hawkins Rides Again, The Darkness frontman opined: “J’ADORE.” DJ Food enthused over the KEXP session as well: “It’s rare that something comes along at my age that knocks my socks off like this does, glad to know there are people out here this crazy.” Dave Grohl told 14-year-old Irish podcaster Logan Kelly that AdP’s music “absolutely blew my fucking mind.” There are endless references for fans to discuss: Adrian Belew-era King Crimson and Devo, Zs and Mick Barr.

The fanfare itself is at the core of the story among the lifetime niche heads I hang out with; a lot of the heads are irritated by the phenomenon itself, that is, rather than the band: why this band, where’s the dues for their predecessors, and why does the hype feel so inescapable? In part, I think the commercial landscape of modern music online is to blame.

While we have access to more music at our fingertips than ever before, at least online, it’s all controlled by platforms: streaming behemoths as well as the marketplaces for independent sellers, all obeying their own profit motives. Virality plays into the profit calculations of every platform; social media integrates with both streaming and selling platforms to drive discovery, and create as frictionless an experience as possible between sharing, listening, and purchasing. And then, arts criticism is often the first to go when media layoffs happen. In an age where social media is ubiquitous and AI is everywhere, being pushed down our collective throats, who needs people who know what they’re talking about and who know how to put a sentence together? Music journalists cost too much, and sometimes we do rude things to the bosses like try to organize. 

Interesting, intelligent, useful music journalism had been harder and harder to come by even when digital media felt like it still had some cash left in its pockets; a lot of publications preferred to push out argument-worthy best/worst lists to generate clicks and shares, or bite-sized, quotable commentary, rather than invest in the kind of deep dives that can illuminate the histories, the literature, the aesthetics, and the emotional connections we have with the music we love—or take a chance on a fine new band that maybe 30 people care about, so far.  

Sometimes, social media virality is organic. But as ever, marketers’ hands have been in the mix, manipulating “popularity” for the benefit of their paymasters. The recent Wired piece on the band Geese—another band that has generated critical discourse similar to that surrounding Angine de Poitrine—expanded on Eliza McLamb’s independent reporting on the digital marketing agency Chaotic Good, which creates networks of fake fan pages to boost virality. They were not particularly secretive about their tactics, bragging last March, in Billboard, about how they create their viral campaigns; in response to McLamb’s reporting, the firm removed their client list of artists from their website. As the Wired piece notes, juicing the stats via bots and streaming farms is well-established digital territory and exists firmly in the long lineage of payola and market manipulation. But the illumination of Chaotic Good’s tactics settled the feeling attentive music fans had been having that Something Was Algorithmically Up. 

One of the major features of this environment we’re in, then, is the erosion of trust. I have no idea whether Angine de Poitrine’s sudden fame is more on the organic side with a touch of regular marketing (e.g., placement on the KEXP show), or whether there’s more manipulation than meets the eye. Does it matter, though, when the platforms we depend on have so much say in how music gets to us in the first place? When they have control over whose speech is suppressed and whose boosted, whose catalogs disappear, and whether there are fraudulent AI releases appearing under artists’ names, sucking away their revenues? 

There’s been good reporting around these issues, some of which I’ve linked to here, but most of us understand by now that the journalists doing the most valuable reporting are not having an easy time keeping themselves afloat. Will there be a day when they lose their jobs and their freelance checks, or get booted off of platforms like Substack? 

All of this, then, is an argument for supporting the offline communities that remain, and for building a robust independent media infrastructure. Trust is still difficult to earn, but harder to fake or manipulate, in independent spaces. It feels fragile and atomized at the moment; finding the time, and the money to pay the writers and print the magazines, feels both Sisyphean, and necessary.

MAY DAY MAY DAY

On this International Workers’ Day and/or European festival of ancient origins marking the beginning of summer, we direct your attention to a fiery roundup of last year’s observance of WICKER MAN WEEK at Flaming Hydra.

Here is our creepily insightful and critical collection, with works from Tal Lavin, Annalee Newitz, (plus bonus Yak!), Maria Bustillos, Miles Klee, and Kim Kelly.

Groweþ sed and bloweþ med
And springþ þe wde nu,
Sing cuccu!

AND FURTHERMORE

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