Assistant Blog

I’d lost track a bit of Mike Skinner over the course of his last couple of LPs – but this is really brilliant. This song brings together a bunch of things I’m really interested in at the moment – video, music, social media, blogging.

What’s happening is that Mike – who’s been inactive on Twitter for a year, until recently – seems to have had a bit of a creative second wind, and he’s incorporating his online, social media interactions directly into his music – particularly twitter conversations. A bunch of his new tunes, which he’s posting regularly on his blog, are direct interactions with his fans and followers – songs inspired by, and in some cases co-created by, twitter. As usual, of course, Skinner’s lyrics are always worth listening to – here he’s kind of fascinating rapping about cinema:

“Films from the trailers these days look waste
like a gun in the hand of a desperate character.
Fun in the land of disparate savages
like all your natural movements however habitual
become separate acts of action;
teary sarges and burned-up seers”.

In other ways, though, this new one is like nothing I’ve heard before – not that it’s amazingly groundbreaking musically, but what’s interesting is that the nature of online media is changing the way Skinner thinks about content. Rather than being complete, thematically consistent chunks, his songs are becoming multi-threaded, conversational, collaborative. He’s opening up the songwriting process so that it’s a dialogue, informed by and responsive to, multiple actors. Here he addresses three questions, on the fly, thoughtfully, and in a really charming way (side note – when did he get so handsome?). I’m really glad someone is doing this – this is the kind of innovation music needs. The video is great, too – particularly the bit where his mate shoulder-barges him.

Apologies to Sam and Dan, who have already heard all this in a flurry of excited emails this afternoon.