Housekeeping: I’ve had complaints about the sound levels on the podcast, voices being too quiet etc. Bear with me, I’m working it out as I go, but it will be fixed. In the meantime, don’t forget to listen to Daisy Christodoulou on whether technology is harming our intelligence, and James Kanagasooriam on why Britain is depressed.
I also want to tell you about something that delighted me. Irish actor/Hollywood star Paul Mescal is set to play Paul McCartney in Sam Mendes’s upcoming Beatles biopic. Mescal just did an interview with Rolling Stone, and guess what…:
’Recently, Mescal tells me, he’s been reading Ian Leslie’s John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs. “He reframes this whole relationship for me,” Mescal says. “We understand it as something that became incredibly antagonistic, which it was for a period, but also it was, to my mind, the greatest creative collaboration that we’ve maybe ever had as human beings — definitely in modern times. He roots it in a kind of love. It’s so moving, so moving. I was crying so much.”’
Right, on with the show. I’ve been travelling this week, making appearances at two book festivals in beautiful Devon: Budleigh Salterton and Appledore. So I didn’t have time to research and write a longer piece. Instead I’ve gathered together five different thoughts I’ve had about current events, each of which tells us something significant about how the culture is changing. The first two are related to the Charlie Kirk assassination, the third is about how young people discover new music, the fourth is about British politics, and the fifth is about Nike’s remarkable new ad campaign.
THE OVERREACTION TO KIRK
Last week I said I wouldn’t write about Charlie Kirk because I didn’t have a clue who he was, before he was assassinated. I’m going to keep to that, sort of, but I do want to say a few things about the reaction to this terrible event.
I speak as an outsider to American politics, or an ignoramus, whichever you prefer, but to me the media response has seemed somewhat overheated. This was one guy with a gun. I know there have been several politically motivated shootings in recent times, and yes, that is a very concerning trend, if that is indeed what it is.
But the jump to predictions of civil war and the collapse of American democracy seems premature. I’ll be seriously worried about such things as and when incidents of political violence happen every week across the country, or if we see the emergence of warring militias. In the meantime, as Ezra Klein says, Americans are just going to have to live with one another peacefully, something which, for the most part, they already do.
At first I thought the assassin’s politics would prove indecipherable since he was immersed in the dense, ironic, nihilistic online networks for whom his bullet engravings made instant sense, and which obstinately defy ideological categorisation. But that now seems only half-true. If the transcript of his text exchange with his partner is reliable, then Tyler Robinson’s motive was grounded in leftist ideology, specifically trans rights.
Again, I’m wary of the conclusions some are drawing from this. Even though progressives are more likely see the physical disruption and blocking of speech as acceptable - which is obviously very bad - I don’t see enough evidence to conclude that they are more liable than conservatives to commit murderous acts of violence (not least because gun ownership and skills are more prevalent among the latter group). It’s not yet clear, by the way, that Robinson was part of a radicalised group of any kind. This sampling of his friends’ chat on Discord makes them seem pretty normal.
I’m not even sure if this is about left and right and polarisation at all. Perhaps this shooting is more as an example of a meta-trend towards more weirdness in the world. Over a period of years the aviation industry fixed nearly all the obvious problems that led to aircraft disasters, which means that a high proportion of the remaining ones are just really bizarre, like the Malaysia Airlines flight which inexplicably went off course over the Indian Ocean and disappeared, or the Germanwings pilot who seems to have deliberately crashed into a mountain. As we fix more of the obvious problems and bad rules in the world, weird incidents become relatively more common, and more high-profile.
Politically speaking, Western societies have found solutions to a lot of historic problems, including a legal framework for equal rights. There are fewer reasons for political violence. With obvious exceptions, wars between and within developed societies are rarer than ever. Extreme and violent impulses remain, but they are getting channelled into ever more narrow and idiosyncratic causes, and acted on by oddball individuals rather than organised groups.
COATES VS KLEIN
In his first column in response to Kirk’s murder, Ezra Klein paid tribute to Kirk for “practicing politics in the right way”: for arguing with people who disagreed with him and trying to win them over. He said that while he was on a different side to Kirk, he had wanted him to be safe because he was a collaborator in the larger project of American democracy, in which people use words, not bullets, to settle differences.
This heartfelt, perhaps somewhat anodyne, column provoked a full-on broadside from Ta Nehisi Coates. In a piece for Vanity Fair, Coates laid into Klein for not being honest about how abhorrent Charlie Kirk’s views were. It’s a rhetorically effective polemic; it’s also a terrible piece. To my mind, Coates is a wonderful prose stylist but a disappointingly shallow thinker, and the former covers up for the latter. Such is the case here. His piece is worth spending a bit of time on because it says about the state of American political discourse, even among intellectuals and their readers.
Coates goes through a list of what do seem like nasty quotes from Kirk, although he overdoes it by throwing in material that isn’t so damning, like the use of the word ‘tranny’ and some tenuous guilt-by-association stuff. In the final section he starts going on about slavery and Jim Crow. Why? I’m not sure, other than it’s his specialist subject and had another 300 words to fill. He ends with a portentous rhetorical flourish: “If you would look away from the words of Charlie Kirk, from what else would you look away?”.
Well, I don’t know, TNC, you tell us. What else is Klein meant to be looking away from? We might guess at Gaza, but Coates doesn’t say so, perhaps because then he’d have to articulate a substantive difference in position. (Klein has unequivocally condemned Israel’s actions). But I suspect the truth is that there’s no ‘there’ there; it’s just a device with which to end the article.
However, none of this is my main objection, which is to the topic itself. Coates does acknowledge, albeit further down the piece then I’d like, that this was a heinous act of violence, and a tragedy for Kirk’s wife and two young children. That’s more than some other commentators on the left have managed. Even so, I don’t understand why, in the days following this awful, juddering, act of politically motivated violence, a high-minded left-wing intellectual would take to the page to write a stinging rebuke to another left-wing intellectual. What an absurdly parochial, trivial thing to do.
And what an odd target. Klein, whatever one’s disagreements or frustrations with him might be, is a patently decent, painstakingly fair-minded journalist. He also agrees with Coates on nearly everything, narcissism of small differences aside. You might believe that political ‘moderation’ itself is problematic, but surely we can agree that this murder was not caused by excess of it. In short, there are much bigger, much more urgent questions at stake than Ezra Klein’s ideological hygiene. But Coates saw an opportunity to dunk on another left-wing writer, and he could not resist it.
Nor could his fans: the article elicited something close to sexual ecstasy among progressives. This was a typical response:
So much for the gravity of the moment, or for condemning violence. So much for finding common ground with opponents, for shared projects, and all that boring jazz.
There’s this strange line in Coates’s piece: “And what of the writers, the thinkers, and the pundits who cannot separate the great crime of Kirk’s death from the malignancy of his public life?” This is directed at Klein and his supposed peers. Except, it doesn’t make sense, does it? The whole point of Klein’s piece is that even if you strongly disagree with Kirk you ought to be horrified by his murder. (That’s why the fact that Klein didn’t quote Kirk is not, in fact, as “telling”, as Coates suggests.) With this line, Coates inadvertently dunks on himself. It is he who cannot separate the murder from the opinions of its victim.
By focusing on Kirk’s rhetoric and Klein’s failure to sufficiently condemn it, Coates has simply saved himself the bother of engaging with the deeper questions raised in Klein’s piece and by Kirk’s murder. He has allowed himself not to ask how to heal America’s rancid political culture, something he and his fans seem very uninterested in. I don’t know what the answer to that profoundly difficult problem is either. But I can’t believe it is to relentlessly prosecute the smallest of political differences in moments of democratic crisis.
THE CRISIS IN MUSIC MARKETING
A company called MIDiA (terrible name) has published a report on the state of music consumption, based on a survey of consumers around the world. Its findings are fascinating, even if they are slightly bleak news for the music industry. I think they tell us something significant about how culture is being consumed more generally, and why marketing is getting harder.
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