I can see where I caused you strife
But I know, oh yes, I know
I’d never make that same mistake again
Started listening to Brook Benton today thinking about last year’s Gregory Porter duet with Ledisi when the pair channelled Benton’s duo with Dinah Washington, That (You’ve Got What It Takes) was superb. There’s been nothing of that calibre this year so far. Looking back eh. I love Carla Thomas’ version of that great song. It’s above. What a joy. Carla Thomas (born 1942) is an American singer known as the Queen of Memphis Soul. As the daughter of blues pioneer Rufus Thomas, she became a foundational artist for the legendary Stax Records label during the 1960s, helping to establish its signature rhythm and blues sound. Beyond her celebrated solo hits like ‘B-A-B-Y’ and her famous duets with Otis Redding, her sophisticated vocal style, captured on landmark albums like her 1966 release Carla of which ‘Looking Back’ is the last track, solidified her legacy as one of the most influential female voices in soul music history.
“I see love turn to hate”
So just a few thoughts inspired by listening to old records and Carla on the soul side again. I don’t know much about soul but do love it turned on to the genre by the Alan Parker film The Commitmentws I saw in a cinema for the first time in Berlin somewhere near the Ku’damm, I was visiting from Warsaw where I was living at the time and took a midnight train over to Berlin and did a bit of sight seeing. My German is pretty crap but it didn’t matter that the film was dubbed. Hearing Irish accents would have just made me homesick anyway. In fact being distracted by not hearing the album in English didn’t matter at all. It was the imagery and the music. I’m Jimmy Rabbitte in my dreams. I only heard the film undubbed in English like a decade later. Roddy Doyle – what a genius eh. Even his newspaper columns sing off the page. To this day I still only listen to audio when I put on YouTube. The videos mean nothing much.
Anyway it might be useful to you if you also blog about jazz, read the site whether a musician, general reader, publicist or not. I have no agenda in doing this. It’s not score settling or anything crass like that. They say, and it is a joke but true at the same time, that the top thing an Irish person can aspire to and possibly only dare to hope to find one day is to chance upon a state of grace where you are comfortable to land in a place beyond all begrudgery. More then what follows ramblingly is to express a certain incredulity at the way things operate now online.
My starting point is simple. Everything on this site could be written by AI. It might probably be even better. All the typos and grammatical faux pas would be erased! I could sleep at night without worrying about misspelling the word “and” yet again and worrying about the difference between an em dash and an en dash. Happy days. It could certainly and would certainly be better from an SEO point of view if everything was automated strictly from an AI point of view. That might make traffic grow although still there wouldn’t be much coming in and I don’t even care about that at all. But would it be interesting?
No. But I love the new technology. However it is a bit like a turkey voting for Christmas to say this.
I could give up entirely or just fire off AI written reviews every day. Would you care?
Shaggy dog story
I’m sure you wouldn’t give a flying fuck as long as you knew what the new releases were and there were a few handy links to help save you a bit of time finding it out for yourself. Readers hoovering up free content on the Internet shamelessly and I count myself as an amateur reader (still mouthing the words as I read half the time) are like that unruly Jack Russell we all want to own but know it is unbiddable. The little dog comes fully loaded completely without a conscience when it comes to chasing, preferably killing, squirrels running amok given half a chance and eating like Henry VIII when back at its bowl, completely pleased with itself and ready for a well earned kip. Ah, but first there’s the small task of savaging the sofa to be getting on with.
So blogging then. When the blog started in 2013 I wanted to make it work like a small business. I got a few ads, got some design, published every day, built things up.
Income was meagre but I was convinced it could grow and I was willing to give it a go. I also at that time was writing for a few other outlets and doing a bit of radio. It helped my profile, kept me out of the pub, and maintained my knowledge
Then along came Covid. I had no means of covering gigs obviously as they all stopped. I continued to review records. My radio spots stopped. I had begun to put on a few gigs myself locally near where I live with a view to furthering the brand and maybe figure out a way of making a small income from this. That all stopped after the initial effort.
So 2020 after some 7 years of the blog was a wake up call. The site gradually returned to normal but things were different. The tech landscape even before AI had changed. I noticed people weren’t clicking on stories as much. My design company were not that equipped to help SEO the site. Bills started to go up. And the site wasn’t really improving.
So I took the hard decision to DIY it myself. It was very hard at first. I am a writer not a designer and certainly not a computer wiz. I made some mistakes transferring over the site and lost a lot of the archive (a lot of it I now have access to) which was almost fatal. I thought of giving up. I call this new phase the Chumbawamba years. I get knocked down but I get up again and all that.
But I began again, the site was now looking better. I could do more with it hosting via WordPress and taking control. I learnt new tricks and think the site has more to it now than it did in its heyday.
But all income dried up. Even donations. I occasionally got donations. For the last year or two all my work and it is work even if you don’t agree has earned nothing. But at least operating costs are down.
For a while a couple of years ago I got a placement with a digital SEO firm which was helpful in learning new things. AI isn’t new but it was to me two years ago. I learnt a few things. The sobering truth was people wouldn’t and clearly by now don’t click on stories so much. So my traffic has gone down loads. I do wonder if there is any visibility at all. Some other people certainly realised that and threw in their lot by doing a Substack instead. It’s a great website. But I thought well I don’t want to give my content to a big company like I once did with Medium. It’s better to have my own domain.
Pity. Really. But I persevere. I restrict the time I spend here. It’s a lot less. I do it still because I am stubborn and really believe marlbank fills a gap even when there is no date to prove this and I revert to magical thinking. It’s unique. But to finish off this post I think a few briefer, broader comments are worth sharing.
‘Existence is of little interest save on days when the dust of realities is mingled with magic sand.’
Marcel Proust
The world owes nobody a living. But people who read journalism want it for free ideally. The writer (ie jazz journalist) has zero status which is a pity because reviews are actually useful. They more to the point can’t really earn a living unless they subsidise it via other activity.
A trained observer of music journalism will also realise what is ad led and what isn’t. Publications that do exist, like small magazines still surviving, don’t have the funds to buy tickets or send them off to cover events paid for by the title. That’s not new. They make compromises. If everybody writing about the subject bought their own records, bought their own gig tickets etc, paid for everything or their company pays the results would be far better. That’s why top restaurant critics like Jay Rayner and Camilla Long and Giles Coren can write exactly what they want because they are free to write their opinions and don’t have publicists acting as paymaster, arbiter, gate keeper and so on. They review restaurants under pseudonyms because they have to. So the results in our music journalism neck of the wood for readers are unsatisfactory. Full disclosure I occasionally get free tickets. But usually I pay to buy records and I pay to go to gigs. I prefer it this way now. My writing is better. I feel freer. I hope the reviews read better. For readers you have to believe the genuine motivation about what the guy writing all this stuff brings to you. Otherwise it’s pointless. If you have been treated to free flights, accommodation and tickets to gigs it’s only the genuine sociopath who will speak completely freely about what they have been sent to write about if they hate what they have heard and dump their thoughts like an edgelord ta-dah on the page. I now rarely read gig reviews that I know have been created via attendence on a junket.
With AI it’s even worse. You can generate AI reviews which usually are coated in golden words. That’s one good thing about AI for now anyway: it is usually positive. Of course you can change all this with a prompt. Hey Chat GPT: write a negative review of The Vindaloo Stompers Plays Albert Ayler In A Bus Shelter With The Help of a Shruti Box for example. Of course that is a made up title. It DOESN’T EXIST But these words do. This is what Perplexity wrote when asked: “I’d give it a mixed-to-positive review based on the title and context alone: it sounds like a sly, irreverent free-jazz document that nods to Albert Ayler’s raw intensity while adding a busking, DIY, and slightly absurdist frame. The strengths are the image-rich concept and the promise of odd instrumentation — a shruti box is a good fit for sustained drones and can sit naturally under Ayler-style abrasion. In one line: it sounds adventurous, memorable, and very likely to appeal to free-jazz listeners, but it may feel knowingly niche or mannered to anyone outside that circle.”
That’s what we are all faced with now whenever we consume text. Find the truth, that’s the next big task. Soon we won’t be able to know what is fake or not given how incredibly clever and convenient the technology is to increase our knowledge of things but also to subvert even our best intentions. Anyway gotta be optimistic somehow. James Hunter does the trick for that, above. As ever we all need to escape into the best stuff we can find.
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