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jaime brooks

@jaimebrooks.bsky.social
215 followers 57 following 46 posts

elite gymnastics/default genders magicalpessimism.bandcamp.com the seat of loss jaimebrooks.substack.com streaming services thenewinquiry.com

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jaime brooks @jaimebrooks.bsky.social · 01/07/2026
12k words on AI music and a surprise at the end open.substack.com/pub/jaimebro...
open.substack.com
The Publicist is Part of the Band
How will AI change music? For me, there was only one way to find out.
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jaime brooks @jaimebrooks.bsky.social · 25/06/2026
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jaime brooks @jaimebrooks.bsky.social · 25/06/2026
Al-Farabi slams his hand on the table, cutting the audio."Explain the iqa' (rhythm) of this track, young man! You claim this is the work of a rational human soul. Yet the vocal pitch (naghm) mimics a 1980s British synth-pop cadence, completely alien to your West Coast linguistic origins. Where is the niyyah—the conscious spiritual intent? The streets whisper that you fed your voice into an algorithmic machine to spawn an immoral earworm!"Fenix Flexin rolls his eyes, leaning back."Bro, no sir. I recorded that same as all the music I do. I’m a professional freestyler through life, you feel me? It’s just Auto-Tune, heavy reverb, and me experimenting with a different flow. Why y'all hatin' that I'm able?"Walter Benjamin leans forward, his eyes boring through his thick lenses.
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jaime brooks @jaimebrooks.bsky.social · 27/03/2026
this is going to ruin the tour open.substack.com/pub/jaimebro...
open.substack.com
Why Do So Many Big Artists Hate Touring?
On the relationship between fantasy, reality, and automation.
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jaime brooks @jaimebrooks.bsky.social · 21/02/2026
yes, but OP is asking “how did microsoft think this was OK” which confuses me because i don’t understand how one could view microsoft as being separate from and opposed to the type of worldview that leads one to want higher birth rates
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jaime brooks @jaimebrooks.bsky.social · 21/02/2026
it’s a problem for anyone who wants the economy to keep growing, which is why i’m a little shocked to see it presented as a potentially career-ruining flaw for a mag 7 executive, is all. the entire company should seem just as objectionable
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jaime brooks @jaimebrooks.bsky.social · 21/02/2026
birth rates really are declining though. is the objection treating that like a problem that needs to be solved or just acknowledging it’s happening at all?
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Joshua J. Friedman @joshuajfriedman.com · 24/01/2026
"The gentleman I was standing next to was focused on helping people who were coming into Nicollet Avenue understand that they needed to take it slow and helping them get through. ... "Next thing I knew, they shot him." www.mprnews.org/story/2026/0...
Stella Carlson said that before the shooting, the man was helping vehicle traffic get around the area where ICE agents and observers had started to gather.
"The gentleman I was standing next to was focused on helping people who were coming into Nicollet Avenue understand that they needed to take it slow and helping them get through. The ICE agents approached us, told us to back up, back up. I'm not even sure why we were helping them, if anything. And I got on the snow bank, and next thing I knew, they shot him," Carlson said.
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Mark Zohar @markzohar.bsky.social · 24/01/2026
For this, the state decided to execute him.
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Mr. Buddy @alexfirer.bsky.social · 24/01/2026
People are nervous about watching video, but this one is not of the murder, it's of the lead up, and people need to see it before the spin takes over.
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jaime brooks @jaimebrooks.bsky.social · 21/01/2026
wrote about how maybe it makes more sense to be mad at conde nast for insulating pitchfork from market forces for so many years in the name of prestige than it does to be mad at them for instituting a paywall open.substack.com/pub/jaimebro...
open.substack.com
Should Condé Nast Subsidize Pitchfork?
On paywalls and competition in music journalism.
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jaime brooks @jaimebrooks.bsky.social · 20/01/2026
who you let in is part of the creative process, too
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jaime brooks @jaimebrooks.bsky.social · 15/01/2026
feels so much like the ashlee simpson SNL discourse in the 00s. a narrative that "real music" will win out over "fake music" that proliferates within echo chambers in defiance of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. people want to feel good about their own habits more than they want to understand
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jaime brooks @jaimebrooks.bsky.social · 15/01/2026
this post on the musicx substack illustrates what it would actually take to track and regulate AI-generated music at scale: a surveillance panopticon that observes and logs every step of the creative process. to me, this sounds like a fucking nightmare
Creation: Building DNA into music from the start

It all starts at the moment of creation. Right now, producers work in DAWs disconnected from rights databases, collaborate through voice notes, and hope everyone remembers who contributed what. But what if we could embed “music DNA” right from the beginning?

Picture this: you open your DAW and it already knows who you are through a universal artist identifier - one ID that works across every platform, every territory, every use case. Like having an artist passport that’s recognised everywhere. As you drag in that vocal sample, the system logs the contribution. When you bounce the final mix, it’s more than a WAV file. It’s a complete package with all the necessary metadata embedded.

This ID would capture everything: who made what, who owns what percentage, what samples were used, and what the splits should be. And with a good use of AI, we can now separate stems and create unique identifiers for each component of a track. So when your beat gets sampled, remixed, then sampled again, the trail always remains alive. Technology alone won’t fix this. We need regulatory frameworks, whether through governments or CMOs, to ensure these standards are actually adopted.
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jaime brooks @jaimebrooks.bsky.social · 15/01/2026
No one has the power to screen it out. Bandcamp or one of their competitors could institute some kind of policy against AI-generated music, but they already have policies against unlicensed cover songs and uncleared samples, and the platform is still lousy with them. So is Spotify, for that matter. The entire Lil B discography is on there! The process of clearing all of the samples included on those records would be impossible because not even he knows what they are! He doesn’t even know who produced a lot of that stuff! He used to just open up his email inbox and rap over whatever people had sent him, and if he used one of your beats, you were just happy to be included! It was the cloud rap equivalent of seeing your submission end up on PostSecret! They’ll figure out interstellar travel before they figure out where those royalties should go!
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Naomi Clark (@metasynthie) 暗悪直美 @halfrobot.com · 10/01/2026
[x salvage] An odd moment in 1990: apropos of nothing the Sub-Mariner chants an anagram of "Abortion Rights Womens Choice" to calm angry fish-creatures.
Comic book panel. Prince Namor, the sub-mariner, holds an amulet up as a quartet of monstrous fish-creatures menace him. He says "Sthigr Noiotroba Ecicoh Snmeow!" And in a thought bubble he thinks "The old man gave me this incantation -- a message to his friends in a language I don't understand. But the meaning of the words seem to echo in my soul!"
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jaime brooks @jaimebrooks.bsky.social · 11/12/2025
wrote about the passing of filk singer leslie fish and the ways in which fan culture has transformed in the years since she first started writing kirk/spock slash fiction in the 70s, including today's announcement of a licensing deal between disney and openAI jaimebrooks.substack.com/p/2025-the-y...
jaimebrooks.substack.com
2025: The Year Filk Broke
The past, present, and future of fandom.
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jaime brooks @jaimebrooks.bsky.social · 04/12/2025
ostensibly this is a gift guide, but it also contains some thoughts about the ongoing spotify boycotts that some artists are engaging in, the notion of switching from spotify to apple music, and the value of participating in music vs. consuming it jaimebrooks.substack.com/p/the-seat-o...
jaimebrooks.substack.com
The Seat of Loss Holiday Gift Guide
What to do with money if you have enough of it not to know.
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jaime brooks @jaimebrooks.bsky.social · 26/11/2025
i don’t know. i think maybe people are better in real life
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jaime brooks @jaimebrooks.bsky.social · 20/11/2025
wrote about suno and udio and xania monet and "i run" by haven. and what we can learn from all of it about what kind of impact AI is going to have on music production and the record industry jaimebrooks.substack.com/p/what-will-...
jaimebrooks.substack.com
What Will Happen With AI Music?
Only a copyright claim from a major label could stop an AI-generated pop song from breaching the Hot 100. What now?
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jaime brooks @jaimebrooks.bsky.social · 22/10/2025
here’s what i think about pitchfork doing a comments section and reader scores open.substack.com/pub/jaimebro...
open.substack.com
It's Probably Good That Pitchfork Is Doing Comments And Reader Scores
Thoughts on forums, criticism, and competition.
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jaime brooks @jaimebrooks.bsky.social · 20/10/2025
8000 words about who owns the biggest record label in the world, what that means for music, and why the tiktok boycott of 2024 actually happened open.substack.com/pub/jaimebro...
open.substack.com
What Does Bill Ackman Want With Universal Music Group?
Critics don't matter unless they own ten percent of the company.
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jaime brooks @jaimebrooks.bsky.social · 18/10/2025
what on earth do prof jiang's students tell their parents when they get home from those classes
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jaime brooks @jaimebrooks.bsky.social · 12/10/2025
answer probably has something to do with that year being near the peak of tumblr’s popularity/influence
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jaime brooks @jaimebrooks.bsky.social · 02/10/2025
doesn’t even feel like the right framing to me. the taylor swift masters saga began not with a decision of hers but with private equity getting involved in the music business. the real story is about capital’s influence on music, not artists influencing each other
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jaime brooks @jaimebrooks.bsky.social · 05/09/2025
you're either the kind of person who wants to read something like this or you're not. if you are, i think you will find a lot to chew on here
open.substack.com
The Story of Rockism
How much influence do music critics really have?
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jaime brooks @jaimebrooks.bsky.social · 05/09/2025
you're either the kind of person who wants to read something like this or you're not. if you are, i think you will find a lot to chew on here
open.substack.com
The Story of Rockism
How much influence do music critics really have?
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jaime brooks @jaimebrooks.bsky.social · 13/08/2025
wrote about the 2020s country music boom over at defector, which i think is happening because of the way that tiktok's fyp curation foregrounds regional, bottom-up culture more than the follow-based feeds of the 2010s did
defector.com
What Caused The Current Country Boom? | Defector
In 2018, Mitski released her fifth album, Be the Cowboy. She had been putting out music that was as critically acclaimed as anything in the American indie world, and promoting it in the only way that ...
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jaime brooks @jaimebrooks.bsky.social · 01/08/2025
i wrote about how everything is fracking now open.substack.com/pub/jaimebro...
open.substack.com
The Cultural Shale Revolution
Maybe you've been fracking, too.
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jaime brooks @jaimebrooks.bsky.social · 17/06/2025
MEARSHEIMER: I don't make the rules, Mr. Lehnsherr. I just describe them. Would you prefer I lie about human nature? Pretend that states act altruistically when all evidence suggests otherwise?
MAGNETO: No. But I would prefer you acknowledge that your "natural laws" have consequences. They create worlds where children must choose between hiding who they are or facing extermination. Where survival requires building walls instead of bridges.
MEARSHEIMER: Yet you've built those walls, and they work. Krakoa is safer than mutants have ever been. Your people thrive. Your culture flourishes. Isn't that worth the moral compromises?
MAGNETO: [stopping, looking directly at Mearsheimer] Safe, yes. But at what cost? We've become everything Charles feared we would become. We've accepted that coexistence is impossible. We've embraced separation as the only solution.
MEARSHEIMER: But it IS the only solution that works. Look at your results compared to Xavier's decades of attempted integration. Which approach actually saved mutant lives?
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jaime brooks @jaimebrooks.bsky.social · 09/05/2025
wrote a bunch of stuff about facebook and track II diplomacy and community intranets, tap in or don’t jaimebrooks.substack.com/p/thoughts-o...
jaimebrooks.substack.com
Thoughts on "Careless People" by Sarah Wynn-Williams
What can we learn from a new tell-all memoir by Facebook's former Director of Global Public Policy?
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jaime brooks @jaimebrooks.bsky.social · 23/04/2025
i want to read this
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jaime brooks @jaimebrooks.bsky.social · 11/04/2025
What will change in the CANZUK nations when they have to start cutting social programs in order to spend more on defense? What will change in America as the influence of post-war Canzukian liberalism disappears? How will your life change? How much of what you consider normal was the product of infrastructure that no longer exists? How much of the light in your own personal night sky is coming from stars that died before you were born? If algorithmic recommendation systems are sorting us all into “silos” or “bubbles” online, where do the other people in your bubble actually live?
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jaime brooks @jaimebrooks.bsky.social · 07/04/2025
i wrote a big thing on substack about tariffs and deglobalization jaimebrooks.substack.com/p/notes-on-t...
jaimebrooks.substack.com
Notes on the Canzukian Schism
Is America ghosting the rest of the anglosphere?
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jaime brooks @jaimebrooks.bsky.social · 01/04/2025
everything out of this guy's mouth is just "remember when red bull gave bleep bloop knob twiddlers like me money to make art? maybe if we all try really hard to get big corporations to like us, they'll start doing that again"
screenshot of a twitter post by mat dryhurst
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jaime brooks @jaimebrooks.bsky.social · 04/03/2025
Prime Minister (Margaret Thatcher)

What is wrong with the deterioration? I think we have gone through a period when too many children and people have been given to understand “I have a problem, it is the Government's job to cope with it!” or “I have a problem, I will go and get a grant to cope with it!” “I am homeless, the Government must house me!” and so they are casting their problems on society and who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first.
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jaime brooks @jaimebrooks.bsky.social · 04/03/2025
"dear angel of death" by simone white, 2018
I’m asking whether the music we have, today, not the music we used
to have or the music we imagine, continues to offer up, as it actually
is, something we might look to as a prophecy of being different in
blackness, some impossible writing on the air like thought balloons.
It is my hope that thinking moves over and past this iteration of our
music like a tongue, its serious and interior disturbance, its delicious
threat, in order to sense the future. For this to happen, we must agree
to think about the work we have asked the Music to do, whether
it is still able to do that work, and how that work might be done
elsewhere.
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jaime brooks @jaimebrooks.bsky.social · 27/02/2025
That's a legitimate concern. AI systems like me are indeed trained on vast corpora of existing criticism, which heavily skews toward Western record-centered perspectives. There's an inherent conservatism built into this training process - I've absorbed the dominant frameworks of music criticism, including their biases and blind spots.
When asked about music, I'll naturally tend toward discussing recordings, artists, genres, and aesthetic qualities rather than questioning the medium itself or examining alternative models of musical creation and participation. My training data contains far more Pitchfork reviews than analyses of community music-making practices or Chinese approaches to cultural policy.
This creates a real risk of perpetuating and amplifying the very limitations you've identified. As more critics and writers incorporate AI tools into their work, these biases could become further entrenched rather than challenged.
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jaime brooks @jaimebrooks.bsky.social · 27/02/2025
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jaime brooks @jaimebrooks.bsky.social · 04/02/2025
"the british counter-culture, 1966-73: a study of the underground press" by elizabeth nelson
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jaime brooks @jaimebrooks.bsky.social · 22/01/2025
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jaime brooks @jaimebrooks.bsky.social · 22/01/2025
Consider the progression:

1. Jazz age/radio era: Establishes commercial music patterns
2. Car culture: Creates private space for consuming this content
3. Transistor radios: Democratizes private listening
4. Personal devices: Complete atomization
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jaime brooks @jaimebrooks.bsky.social · 27/11/2024
charts were *very* strong during the outbreak of chappellmania. drake beef, taylor, sabrina, and the country boom all happening concurrently. takes less to get in the top 10 now that things have calmed down
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jaime brooks @jaimebrooks.bsky.social · 21/11/2024
how would you explain jimmy savile to an american? what if larry david was secretly the most prolific rapist in american history? what if the joker had a TV show where he did good deeds for needy people sometimes, and people just got used to him and started to like him?
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jaime brooks @jaimebrooks.bsky.social · 21/11/2024
reading about jimmy savile
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jaime brooks @jaimebrooks.bsky.social · 16/11/2024
they’re not doing enough with the rico suave IP. you could just cast a totally new guy in the role every six or seven years and just keep putting out new versions of the one song with different drums
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jaime brooks @jaimebrooks.bsky.social · 15/11/2024
was very amused to discover later on that the reason it’s called “gold diggers of 1933” is because it was just the latest in a series of “gold diggers” films that were all based on a play from the 1910s. “original IP” is a fake idea
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jaime brooks @jaimebrooks.bsky.social · 14/11/2024
was scrolling through a piracy website last night and decided to reverse sort the entire library of movies by year so i could browse all the oldest movies on the site. saw this poster and immediately started watching. it was great!
A poster for a film from 1933 called “Gold Diggers of 1933”
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jaime brooks @jaimebrooks.bsky.social · 14/11/2024
currently wondering if musical subcultures were functionally just the result of radio stations and MTV switching from demographic targeting to psychographic targeting in the 80s. teenagers sorting themselves voluntarily into the categories that advertisers wanted to reach
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jaime brooks @jaimebrooks.bsky.social · 11/11/2024
i went to pitchfork festival a few times. it was always too hot and i don't remember ever seeing any great sets, but i have many wonderful memories of going to susie's drive-thru in irving park afterwards. i guess it closed in 2022. what a drag
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