She’s worked with heavy hitters including Kendrick Lamar, ASAP Rocky and Flume — but now the Australian producer is doing for herself

This story was originally published in The Guardian.

Sunlight pours through the window of Laura Jane Lowther’s bedroom in Los Angeles, catching a gold record that hangs unassumingly in the corner. Recognising her input on 2015 hit Walk With Me from Australian duo Cosmo’s Midnight, the plaque seems like a lifetime ago for the Australian songwriter, producer and vocalist also known as Kučka (a moniker lifted from the Serbian slang for “bitch”).

In the time since that record came out, Lowther has become known as a prized collaborator who has featured on, written toplines for or been sampled by heavy hitters including Kendrick Lamar, Vince Staples, ASAP Rocky and the late electronic trailblazer Sophie — but it’s perhaps with fellow antipodean, Flume, that’s she’s achieved the most local success, performing and co-writing on multiple records including the Grammy-winning Skin.

Yet Kučka remains something of an underground phenomenon as a solo artist, especially in Australia where the overwhelming majority of top-tier electronic producers are men. But on the cusp of releasing her debut album, Wrestling, Lowther — responsible for helping so many others strike gold — is finally ready to bask in her own light.

Lowther grew up in Liverpool before a dramatic sea change in her teenage years catapulted her to Perth. She started out writing angsty, alternative indie music inspired by PJ Harvey before discovering GarageBand, and building her own MIDI controller for a uni assignment. Since then, she’s become a regular face in recording studios around the world.

“It’s usually a dudefest,” she laughs, of the typical recording session she attends in LA, where she moved a few years ago. “I’ve gone into a few sessions where it’s been one guy in the room and he immediately jumps on to the computer to produce, even though there’s a few other people who can do it. We’re like, ‘Oh, can we also get in on that?’ And he says, ‘Oh, sorry.’ It’s not even malicious. It’s more of an assumption.”

Despite often having to elbow her way to the front, Lowther remains in high demand as a producer — and had to carve out time away from collaborating to write an LP for herself. “I had to say ‘Absolutely no vocal features’ while I was finishing the record, no matter how good the opportunity was,” she says. One of those missed chances include a personal request from K-pop juggernauts BTS. “They asked ‘Can you write something for this?’” Lowther says, laughing. “And I was like, ‘I need to finish this random, ambient track that hardly anyone will care about … ’”

Lowther — who has won the best experimental category at the Western Australian music awards — is accustomed to the fringes, anyway. Her ear for the ethereal and unusual is present on lead singles Ascension and Drowning, where densely packed productions boldly claw at the edges of how electronic music should sound. It’s this obsession with new textures and an ability to conjure a cornucopia of sound that has made her name in producer circles; it also piqued the curiosity of LuckyMe, the Scottish tastemaker label home to super-producers including Hudson Mohawke and Baauer, which signed her in 2019.

“I think the mood of the production is equally as important as the lyrics,” she says. “Sometimes I’ll have a track that technically sounds fine. But like, there’s something missing … I’ll be like, ‘It needs a rhythm. What if I get this random sample from my electric car window?’

“That’s kind of why I love music as a medium, because it’s abstract. And you can make someone feel something that’s way more complex than if you just spoke to [them]. When I’m making something I always ask, ‘Why is it a song?’ You know, why is not a poem?”

Wrestling is also more personal for Lowther, with lyrics that detail seismic changes in her life, including coming out to her family, moving to the US, and marrying her wife, Dillon, who serves as her creative director. “For this [album], if it felt like I was writing it in a diary, then that was it,” she says. The title track, for instance, details a difficult conversation she had about her sexuality with her grandmother, whose struggle to parse the news is reflected in the song’s climax: “You’re wrestling / You say you believe it / Fighting for it / Shamed into believing.”

“I have such a good relationship with her that I was not expecting her to be shocked about me telling her that I was with a woman,” Lowther says now. “That moment was sort of like a catalyst for me to realise how much stuff we are conditioned to, that we react to without even thinking. It was almost like observing myself.”

The electronic music landscape has shifted dramatically since Kučka started noodling around in her Perth bedroom, with more female writer-producers celebrated as pop pioneers, from Christine and the Queens to Charli XCX. “A lot of more experimental production has become mainstream, which is so cool,” Lowther says. “Previously a lot of people got their music from the radio, and they want a singular mood per station. Now I think it’s more common to get music from streaming playlists, and YouTube, all of the above at the same time.”

It presents a particular opportunity for Lowther, whose best compositions often present like a diverse playlist crammed into three minutes. Wrestling sounds like nothing else out of Australia this year, which shouldn’t be surprising given that its author is a conduit for the most cutting-edge sounds in the world. Perhaps she should clear some more space on her wall.

Kučka Is Writing For Herself was originally published in Jonno Writes on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Talking soul, faith and Billie Eilish with London’s multi-hyphenate music maverick

A condensed version of this interview was originally published in Brick №9

A bona fide son of a preacher man, North London drummer Femi Koleoso talks with such passion and poise that it often seems like he’s sermonising at his father’s Jubilee Church. If you’ve ever seen him onstage, you’ll know that’s not far from the truth; despite being the rhythmic spine of Ezra Collective, a quintet that piles jazz, hip-hop, afrobeat and Shanks & Bigfoot covers into a Nutribullet, the 25 year-old Koleoso devotes significant time to spreading gospel from behind his toms. His relentless positivity is the fuel behind his group’s critically acclaimed debut, You Can’t Steal My Joy, as well as a staggering amount of concurrent projects, including two radio shows, DJing, modelling, volunteering with his Church’s youth outreach program and being a core member of longtime friend Jorja Smith’s live outfit.

Joy and gratitude are fundamental to Femi’s sense of self. They’re what allows him to tour internationally for up to 40 dates at a time, often with his and Smith’s bands concurrently. They inform the way he thinks and speaks, both internally and to large audiences. The majority of Britain was first introduced to Femi, who lays down blistering grooves alongside his bass-playing brother, TJ, during last year’s live telecast of Glastonbury. Ezra played a prime slot on the West Holts stage, alongside contemporaries Steam Down, Comet Is Coming, Kokoroko and Sons of Kemet, in what has since become regarded as a breakthrough moment for modern UK jazz. For Koleoso, it signals the dismantling of the preconceptions around genre that has spent decades shut away in expensive nightclubs and elite university courses. And there’s nobody better to preach the benefits of switching shit up than a man who spends as much time working his chat as his hi-hat.

From the drum stool to the pub, the Church to the club, Femi is an electrifying, infectious figure whose kinetic energy reaches every person he — or his music — encounters. He also spearheads a movement of drummers morphing into frontmen, with 2020 seeing high profile releases from other stick-wielders like Yussef Dayes and Moses Boyd.

It’s not often you encounter a musician this eloquent. So in the spirit of one of Femi’s heroes, Clyde Stubbelfied, let’s give the drummer some. Here, Koleoso tells us what he’s learned about keeping the faith, strategic vomiting, worshipping Arsenal, rigorous touring, attaining perspective, building communities and not letting anyone tell you you’re not allowed to like Billie Eilish.

On how to attain — and retain — gratitude.

I remember a big moment for me was realising that most of my friends didn’t live with their Dad — and I did. Part of that could be a real negative thing: ‘What’s wrong with our community that none of the Dads are sticking around?’ But on the other side of the coin I thought ‘This is amazing. I’ve got the best role model in the world and he’s in the living room right now, chilling.’

Quite often joy is a case of looking in the right direction. If you look at everything that is negative in your life, you will not experience that joy. If you look at the negativity, but shine a light on all the great things that have happened and use that to help yourself, that’s how you get the joy. You play a sold-out venue, you’re joyful it’s sold out; you play an empty venue and you’re joyful that someone’s there [at all.] You have to train yourself into being like that. It’s not natural.

The way you train yourself is by making sure you’re surrounded by the real world at all times. You’re surrounded by people you’re trying to help, people that help you. Surrounded by scenarios better than you own; that’s where you get inspiration from. Surrounded by scenarios far worse than your own, that’s where you get gratefulness from. Keep a variety of things around you and you’ll learn to focus well.

On why more drummers need to jump on the mic.

A lot of people look at the drum kit as a restriction. They [just] see ‘hold the groove at the back of the band.’ But when I watch a gig, all I do is look at the drumer. My dream is the drummer stopping halfway and talking about what they’re playing or explaining what they’re doing. So why don’t I provide that?

I just felt like I had something to say, and I didn’t see the drums as a restriction to that. I remember just thinking ‘all I have to do is shout a bit louder.’ I feel like I took that energy and attitude throughout my life.

I’m into it, man. I think drummers make great frontmen. Remember Phil Collins? [laughs]. Clyde Stubbelfield actually had his own projects for a bit. Same with Art Blakely and the Jazz Messengers. Of course, you have the great Buddy Rich. He was a showman.

On what community really means.

Communities don’t look like something. In the same way that a yoga class is a community, Mums at the school gates are a community, a mosque is a community, a football team is a community. The whole of Arsenal stadium is a community when we cheer for the same people, you know what I’m saying?

People often talk about ‘the jazz community’. That’s a community of people who have jazz in common with one another, so we have something to build on together. But if you actually looked at it, what do I actually have in common with Shabaka [Hutchings of Sons of Kemet, The Comet is Coming]? Shabaka wasn’t born in North London. Shabaka’s Carribean, I’m African. Shabaka’s about ten years older than me. There’s so many ways I could look at that guy and say ‘he’s completely different from me.’ But there’s also a lot of ways to think that we’re exactly the same.

You have to really work at finding similarities with people. If you’re good at doing that, you start to believe in yourself a lot. I don’t look at what Dave Grohl’s achieved with Foo Fighters and think ‘Well he’s American, he’s white so he probably didn’t have to deal with some of the racism I had to deal with, he’s older than me so he’s from a time when people actually liked buying records…’ Nah, man. I’m looking at him and saying ‘He plays drums, I play drums, same thing. Let’s go.’

On how faith influences performance.

I’m a son of a preacher man, you know what I’m saying? I think what you get when you go to Church — especially one like mine which is quite multicultural — is you learn the skills of making people feel included and valued, even though they’re totally different.

There’s not many scenarios where that happens. That’s why there’s different channels on TV. But in Church, you can’t just change the preacher when you’ve had enough, so the preacher has to engage everyone.

I’d like to think that regardless of your thoughts on Christianity, once speaking to me and TJ, my prayer and hope is that you leave thinking ‘Well, they’re not all that bad.’[laughs] I enjoy being challenged on my faith because it forces me to confront those stereotypes and help smash them. You start to question ‘Why did I think that person wasn’t going to be cool? What do I need to address in myself so it doesn’t happen again?’

On why jazz needs to tear it all down and start again.

The most important thing for me would be to strip the elitism away from jazz. That’s not it’s foundation and not what it was written for. For instance, I love Ronnie Scott’s. I love going there, I love playing there, but that serves one purpose. It’s very much an upper class view on jazz. At the same time, you need the pub in South-East London, where entry is free, beers are cheap and there’s a real vibe in there. You need that diversity. Diversity kills elitism.

Jazz was heavily institutionalised in a way other genres weren’t. You can’t go and get a degree in soul music even though it’s as academic as any other kind of music. The snobbery brought in around jazz music has been a really big factor in why people view jazz in the way they do. There’s a sophistication to jazz music that intimidates people.

I often hear ‘I don’t know if I’m qualified to say this, but I think..’ I don’t need a qualification, man! A perfect example is football fans. None of them can play football, but every single fan has the best opinion of how the manager should set up a team. I’ve never heard a fan say ‘I’m not qualified to say this.’ They all say ‘this is what [Mikael] Arteta should be doing with Arsenal.’ That’s how I think you should talk about jazz music! Say what’s on your mind. It’s all good.

On dissolving genres….

Right now I have the most unashamed freedom in what I like. I don’t care. I’m a Billie Eilish superfan and proud of it. I remember someone tried to tell me she was whack and I was like ‘bro, I don’t care what you think. I’m going to listen to her every day this year — and next year!’

I mean, I was on television. That’s unheard of in jazz! At Glastonbury, we were dealing with crowds and competing with rock bands. It really changed things positively. People respected the form when they saw how captivating it could be, even though we don’t have a singer or rapper.

I feel like I was born too late. I missed the generation of walking down the street and people were playing music out of boom boxes, or listening to the radio together. Sound systems, stuff like that. Communal listening creates such a beautiful energy.

…and fighting homogenised taste

I’m here to hear something I’ve never heard in my life, you know what I’m saying? I don’t want to rap all the lyrics along; sometimes it’s fun, I mean that’s what Wu-Tang’s for, but sometimes you want to be blown away by something, like ‘Yo, what the hell is this?’

We’ve lost the ability to discover. When I go to a rave in London these days, what I find sad is people dancing to songs they’ve already heard. Nobody is trying to vibe to new stuff. Where’s the fun in that?

Maybe in the future we might do more narrowed projects. You know, like Ezra Collective Play Britney Spears. You have to pay homage to the legends. There’s no Britney, there’s no Billie [Eilish], you know what I’m saying! Part of who we are is that we’re always flexing and switching around genres. I don’t see that changing.

On being a role model for black youth

I wouldn’t say I’ve ever been particularly inspired by Kanye West. I found it quite tough to relate to him, mainly because by the time I got into him, he was already a multi-millionaire and definitely living that way. The more relatable I found someone, the more possible I saw what they achieved was.

People like Robert Glasper inspire me the most. I saw that journey. Even though I was really young when he started putting music out, I got onto it really quickly. I was sneaking into jazz clubs at age 16 to watch him. He really made me believe my dreams were possible. He just put out a film soundtrack the other day and I was just like ‘well, I better start learning piano again because I’m going to do a film score, too.’ Glasper did it, why can’t I?

I want [young people] to see a dream that is achievable. I want people to look at me, whether they’re black, white, male, female, whatever it is, I want them to look at me and think ‘This pipe dream that I have in my mind is achievable, because Femi did it.’

The Gospel According To Femi was originally published in Jonno Writes on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

An conversation about psychedelics, politics and policy

This piece was originally published in Buffalo №11 .

It seems psychedelic drugs are having a moment. Historically the stuff of successive subcultures, psychedelics have typically figured in the popular imagination through a surreal smorgasbord of signifiers; bell-bottoms, flower power, Day-Glo, field raves, hippies, tie-dyed trippers, Bez, nudists, Martin Sharp album covers, free love, Hendrix humping his white Stratocaster through the world’s longest national anthem.

The drugs’ long history of association with creatives living on the edge is hard to shake. Hunter S. Thompson’s mescaline-fuelled madness looms large over counter-culture, as does existential philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre’s much-chronicled, crab-infested bad trip. To indulge in psychedelics could mean opening the doors to blissful hallucination, wondrous disembodiment and potential insanity. They weren’t legal or easy to obtain — and they definitely weren’t for everyone.

That perception is changing — and quickly. Currently in vogue but perennially in-season, psychedelics have become increasingly accessible and acceptable. Right now, it’s possible to source LSD or 2CB on the dark web, sign up for psilocybin tours in The Netherlands, join the waitlist for high-end ayahuasca retreats or even volunteer for a clinical trials on the undiscovered benefits of MDMA. You could say these mind-bending substances have graduated from direct message to a group chat. Every day, someone new is joining the conversation.

It would be prudent to imagine popular culture as responsible for this renaissance. After all, psychedelia, the artistic younger cousin of those steeped in the psychedelic scene, is popping up everywhere from the music of Tame Impala to the Gucci suits of Harry Styles. Combine this with a booming bourgeois wellness scene that’s currently obsessed with micro-dosing and it seems to line up.

But the real boon for reality-shifting tabs, pills, powders and mushrooms comes from somewhere decidedly more academic. Somewhat ironically for a set of scheduled substances still outlawed in many Western democracies, it’s government-sanctioned science that’s redefining the role of psychedelics for the post-Brexit generation.

Last year saw the world’s first Psychedelic Research Centre open at The Imperial College of London, already famous for a clinical trial that investigated the use of psilocybin — aka magic mushrooms — to treat depression. Across the pond, the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), has completed highly publicised and totally shareable studies on the therapeutic uses of MDMA for PTSD and LSD for anxiety. Throw journalist-evangelists like Michael Pollan and Tim Ferriss into the mix and you’ve got one serious cocktail.

So what’s the future of psychedelics? Are they a fashionable phase or here to stay? To find out, JONATHAN SEIDLER talked to two expert voyagers that have taken more trips than most.

MIKE JAY is widely considered to be one of the UK’s leading researchers and authors on psychedelics. Having experimented with acid and mushrooms in the decidedly un-hippie post-punk era, Jay became intrigued with the universes surrounding these drugs and has made them the focus of multiple articles, essays and books, including a recent history of mescaline. He’s also curated exhibitions on psychedelics for The Wellcome Collection and Bethlem Museum.

STEPHEN REID, a multidisciplinary scientist and thinker, co-founded the Psychedelic Society in Hoxton. After his first MDMA experience at Glastonbury in 2011, he’s been involved in spreading the gospel of these substances through environmental and political activism. Reid also runs monthly experience retreats, where curious newcomers try psilocybin-containing truffle in the Netherlands.

JS: Let’s start with the good stuff. How did you get into this? Was it through a drug experience?

SR: I think it only really takes one strong positive and positive drug experience to start questioning the possibility that everyone everything one has been taught about psychoactive substances and plants at school and through mainstream society and culture is nonsense.

I had what was my first mystical spiritual type experience, I suppose. Feeling this like a sense of unity and interconnectedness, a sense of cosmic connection with the stars, clear and Starry Night. It just totally blew me away and from that moment I became especially fascinated with with psychedelic substances. I got to reading a lot more, but I wasn’t very technologically literate. I quickly became aware I could get hold of basically anything I wanted through dark net.

MJ: My first experience was sort of acid and mushrooms, in what was with hindsight, you know, not a very psychedelic period. It was that sort of post-punk period, after all that sort of 60s hippie shit had kind of got really boring, what kind of before rave culture started .

I was like an early adopter on the internet. I was on early newsgroups and stuff in the early ’90s. And I started writing bits of stuff about drugs and internet culture before everyone else was. It’s kind of hard to remember now that there was a sort of public news blackout about drugs. There wasn’t anything that wasn’t anti drug propaganda.

What interests me about what you both said is that people often associate psychedelics with a certain culture, but they probably don’t think about the Internet as one of them.

SR: I think in recent times has been a very significant shift. Formerly it was people that either had the expertise in growing food, (thinking about mushrooms in particular) or chemistry, or linking to people with those skills that have access to psychedelic plants and substances.

Whereas more recently with the advent of the dark net, and I’m sure there were like, ways of obtaining these substances through the internet.

I didn’t know how to grow mushrooms. I didn’t know LSD chemistry, I wasn’t doing that side of things myself, nor did I know anyone directly that had those skills. But because I was very comfortable with, cryptography and Tor and this kind of stuff, then I was then able to obtain substances on it.

MJ: Yeah, I think psychedelic culture was kind of like an internet before the internet, you know, back in the ’90s. There was a huge kind of zine culture, building on the whole free festival culture before that. And I think that’s why as soon as the message boards and newsgroups got going, drugs was one of the first subjects to be colonized. There was a ready made subculture who developed their own kind of analog ways of corresponding who jumped onto the digital world.

So I think it’s been part of that from the beginning, but I totally agree with Stephen and I think the dark web has been a real game changer. Until then, psychedelics were a bit random and the choice was limited. I think it was always a bit of a fantasy, like the coffee shop, having everything that you could possibly want available to order. And that has now happened! So I think drug culture responds to changes in supply, as well as changes in demand. The dark web is a whole new world and takes it to a whole new level.

SR: I can see how psychedelics were available to certain types of people within a certain subculture. In my case I can I was well outside of that subculture, but because I had those technological skills I was able to plug into it, as thousands of others have done across the world.

Have drugs become more democratic, then?

MJ: It’s an interesting lens. Looking at the festival, for example, that’s a place where a huge number of people who are no longer part of that subculture can become part of it for one or two long weekends over the summer. The culture has mostly moved online, but it also still has physical nexuses.

Unless society does undergo a profound shift, particularly in regards to our relationship to the natural world over the next decade (or even sooner) civilization as we know it is not going to be able to continue — Stephen Reid

Mike, you mentioned once that psychedelics are always sexy, but it seems like there’s more articles and scientific studies around them than ever.

MJ: There’s been a huge shift in mainstream culture. For a very long time, psychedelics were only ever talked about as a problem. The associations were with nervous breakdowns and psychosis and mental illness. We’ve now changed, for many different reasons to a mainstream culture in which they’re not in that box anymore. They’re in the box that’s all about wellness and self actualization, and all these other things that we’re talking about.

This has definitely set up a kind of virtuous circle, if you like. Lots of people who were only hearing negative news about psychedelics are now hearing lots of positive news. And that’s encouraging them to take psychedelics, which because of the dark web are much easier to get hold of. Those people have positive experiences and they tell other people about them and so it spread. And I think that’s been the story of the last decade.

SR: I think what was leading it is science, the modern wave of psychedelic science. You’ve got MAPS putting MDMA through three clinical trials in the United States. Science, whether we like it or not, still has enormous credibility in our modern Western culture. So really I think that’s the root of it. And from there, of course this kind of wellness industry has grown, which is clearly not all good.

Right, like Gwenyth Paltrow et al. What are the negative aspects associated with everybody jumping on board at the same time and psychedelics becoming ‘on-trend?’

SR: There’s just a danger of it being a huge missed opportunity. For me, these two things — personal wellness and societal wellness — are not separable, but they are in some way distinct. That’s the ability for psychedelics to affect change, not simply the level of the individual, but the level of society or culture. And it seems to me that unless society does undergo a profound shift, particularly in regards to our relationship to the natural world over the next decade (or even sooner) civilization as we know it is not going to be able to continue.

And that is really the promise of psychedelics to me; that they can act as catalysts for an extremely deep shift in culture.

Does it matter how people are engaging with psychedelics? Whether on a superficial, wellness level or a deeper scientific or spiritual one?

SR: I mean, it’s not rocket science. It’s important to be in a good state of mind, at a safe place, have a trip sitter if you’re going to have a high dose. But there’s a risk of psychedelics becoming slightly overdone at this point. People are being told it’s necessary that you pay thousands of pounds to go on a facilitative retreat. Well actually, it’s been my experience, as has been for plenty of others across the ages that if you simply get hold of something you know is good quality and you take it somewhere that you feel comfortable, then there’s every possibility that you will have a positive experience.

MJ: I think I’m also surprised there. I mean, it seems to me that there are not as many people picking mushrooms as they used to. Let’s not forget that mushrooms are available freely everywhere.

SR: I would love to be part of stimulating a kind of renaissance in homegrown mushrooms, such that people see they don’t need to buy packaged products or go on expensive retreats. A huge part of the magic of that is the process of actually seeing them grow and develop over a period of weeks. I think all of that actually helps to significantly improve the experience.

I was going to ask about regulation. Is there going to be a point where Europe or the UK regulate psychedelics and would this be useful or damaging?

MJ: I think the point about mushrooms is when you’ve got quote unquote Big Psychedelic, or pharmaceutical companies trying to lock down the market on kind of clinically approved psilocybin. You know, medications that are kind of predicated on the fact that nobody can get hold of these mushrooms in any other way. So I think this is a crucial question about regulation. The way it’s being led by medical science is that the people who are driving this often, for understandable kind of PR reasons, are very, very keen to say the use of psychedelics by medical professionals is totally different from recreational use. [It becomes] a very special kind of technical, medical and professional application. And my view is that it would be great if psychedelics were legally regulated, and people could use them in all kinds of contexts, [whether that’s] their own unstructured contexts or medications or therapy of different kinds.

By relative historical standards, most of us live pretty safe and comfortable lives. We have our screens, we have our devices and we’re constantly being fed stuff. But that brings [with it] a feeling of ‘hang on, this is not really me reaching my full potential. There’s more to life than this.’ I think that is a broader cultural feeling to do with how mediated our culture has become. People respond to that in lots of different ways. But I definitely think one of the ways in which people do that is by wanting to take psychedelics, to have a really powerful, intense, unmediated experience where you find out things about yourself that you wouldn’t have found out in any other way — Mike Jay

SR: I haven’t followed cannabis regulation in the US that closely, but I sense that in some states at least, regulation has been introduced which favours big business over small local organic production. And that’s a real shame and a missed opportunity. So I think the jury is out. It’s an important time for us to be kind of engaged with these debates to try and bend it in the right direction. There are some people linked to MAPS just starting a new initiative with a kind of Code of Conduct for psychedelic businesses, which I think is a really valuable contribution. But the thing that means I’m not losing sleep over this is the fact that whatever the laws, it will always be possible for people to grow small amounts of mushrooms in their own home.

It strikes me as similar to the CBD revolution we’re experiencing at the moment, that’s actually being driven by the idea of ‘productivity’, which is a really weird way of thinking about drugs in general.

MJ: I think this is true of wellness generally. It relates to a bigger thing in our culture, which is that by relative historical standards, most of us live pretty safe and comfortable lives. We have our screens, we have our devices and we’re constantly being fed stuff. But that brings [with it] a feeling of ‘hang on, this is not really me reaching my full potential. There’s more to life than this.’ I think that is a broader cultural feeling to do with how mediated our culture has become. People respond to that in lots of different ways. But I definitely think one of the ways in which people do that is by wanting to take psychedelics, to have a really powerful, intense, unmediated experience where you find out things about yourself that you wouldn’t have found out in any other way.

From a cultural perspective, we are definitely seeing a confluence of the tropes ‘hippieism’ across fashion and art in a big way. I’m wondering if you think psychedelics play a part in that, or whether it’s just coincidental?

MJ: No, I think there’s an appetite for an experience that is somehow bigger, more powerful, more intense and more real than we get in our daily lives. Putting it in the wider context of the experience economy that’s becoming a larger a sector of consumerism, that’s what a lot of people want. And I think psychedelics are a kind of an emblem or a symbol of something to share. They’re the idea of summit experience, [which is] why they become very good memes or tropes for other parts of the culture that are trying to capture those ideas.

High Definition was originally published in Jonno Writes on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Finding home with Africa’s ARIA-winning first lady of hip-hop

The vast multitudes of Sampa The Great sit cross-legged in a meeting room at Ninja Tune’s South London office, sipping lemon tea to preserve her voice. Formerly known as Sampa Tembo, this swarm of spirits has become many things to many people since leaving her native Botswana. Her identity, history and soul have been pinned down and scrubbed over so many times that it’s sometimes hard to know who wrote which words first.

It is these many Sampas that make Sampa The Great, a title she conferred upon them at the grand age of seven in her childhood Zambia. “I wanted to put a name beside myself that I could aspire to be,” she says, her expansive voice sonorous even at breaking point. “It’s a challenge to myself, and also a goal; one day I’m going to get to a place where I’m the greatest version of myself.”

But to play host so many iterations — often at odds with one another — in the same liminal space can be testing. African spirituality, Sampa tells me, is based on the belief that there is no start or end to any of us. “We’ve been here before. What are the lessons we can learn?” she asks. “For me, what comes with that is you’ve already been connected. The disconnect happened, but there was a connection before. So, how do we journey back to that?”

It’s no accident that Sampa’s debut album is called The Return. It arrives after five years of relentless independent output; two mixtapes, one EP, multiple needle-shifting singles. One spin through its dazzling merry-go-round of rawness and regality, influences and influence and we all become hitchhikers on Sampa’s criss-crossing journeys. One month after playing her first Glastonbury, she is reaching the end of a particularly testing quest to reconcile these facsimiles of spirit to herself.

You should see Sampa in the flesh, but it’s just as easy to witness her transfiguration on record. Blessed with a multiplicity of voices, infused with the strength of her ancestors and the invisible links of a growing global community, Sampa shifts shapes seamlessly. She is an artist of exquisitely refined talent; dexterous wordplay and bold themes now come standard. She is also, quite undeniably, African.

“I think hip-hop is often so specific to an African-American culture, so with that comes their way of speaking, their slang, their references,” she muses. “Africa has its own culture and a rich one as well. I find [it] has to do with us as Africans being able to translate our sound to our people. I don’t want to sound American, I’m not American.”

—

Before Sampa can find herself, she’s had to find her home. For the past five or so years, that’s been in Australia, where she arrived to study audio engineering, fell in with a group of jazz and R&B heads and somehow ended up becoming the flag-bearer for a ‘new wave’ of conscious hip-hop in the country.

“I think it’s a testament to how when something great comes out that people recognise, they want to claim it,” Sampa chuckles. “People [would] test me on stuff in Australia and I’m like ‘I’m new! I have no idea about Vegemite.’”

Thrust onto large stages and newspaper covers while still trying to figure out who she was, Sampa was feted by the media as a cultural salve to Australia’s particularly thorny relationship with its indigenous population and the music industry’s female quota issue. It would be the first of many Sampa schisms, as she found her spirit splintering at the seams.

“For a minute there I was like two different people. I’d tell Australians I was Zambian and they’d be like ‘OK’, and Zambians be like ‘huh?’” she laughs deeply. ““I didn’t do anything professionally there. So I had Zambians not knowing I was an artist and Australians refusing to accept I was Zambian.”

The ‘new wave’ of Australian hip-hop isn’t really that new; many of Sampa’s contemporaries, like B Wise and REMI have been going for close to a decade. What’s changed is the attitude, particularly a local willingness to adopt first and second-generation immigrants as our own. Australian rap now sounds Nigerian, Botswanan, Zimbabwean, South African, Sri Lankan. But while the influx of people of colour may have upended the rules, it hasn’t entirely removed the gatekeepers. It’s not that difficult to figure out where these artists are from. Many of them reference it in their lyrics, but it’s rarely covered in the media.

It’s a struggle Sampa knows well, having used her Australian Music Prize-winning mixtape Birds and the Bee9 to take aim at those that co-opted her flow but left her character for dead. “You don’t nurture this artist, you don’t know how to even promote this artist,” she reminisces. “You don’t even understand enough about their culture to say ‘OK, you’re an immigrant, what does that actually mean?’ To delve into the story. It takes a lot of teaching, that I found as a huge weight on me.”

Split in half, Sampa was drowning. To compound the issue, the more her star rose, seemingly, so did her experiences of racism. “There was a moment where I was just going to leave [Australia] and nothing more was going to happen,” she admits. “I had my first Kendrick [Lamar] support and then got spat on by this white dude on the train — in the same week.”

With her increased profile, Sampa found herself being subdivided in other ways, including the pressure to be a role model. When she talks about it, she chokes up. Tears brim in her eyes.

“I’d have little children of colour come up to me and say ‘I’ve never seen anything like you.’ It was so heavy. I couldn’t carry it. I didn’t even know who I was as an artist yet and then I had to carry everybody else. That’s what artists of colour feel. Every. Time. I didn’t constantly want to feel like I was an ambassador for everyone.”

—

When Sampa was still a singular child and had not yet decided to be Great, she was a blossoming musical arranger. Whipping around her neighbourhood in Luanshya, she would round up the local kids to join her choir, where they’d recreate the soundtrack of The Lion King. A born leader, Sampa would delegate all of the harmonies, but you’d never hear her do it herself.

“I’d write songs for everyone but when it came to actually singing, I’d think it was too vulnerable for me,” Sampa admits. “You can actually see my soul when I sing. So I’d give it to someone else. Which is crazy because I can do it with ease when I rap.”

Vulnerability is a crucial aspect of The Return and Sampa’s reconciliation of her selves. Its star-studded guest list, which includes Stones’ Throw’s Jonwayne on the boards and appearances from Steam Down, Blue Lab Beats, Mandarin Dreams, Silentjay, MsM, Whosane, The Sunburnt Soul Choir and Sampa’s parents, is intercontinental in flavour and personal by design. It’s a huge coup for an artist only just starting to bubble in the Northern Hemisphere, but Sampa puts this down to levelling with everyone.

“I can honestly say that music is a language, regardless of where you’re from. It’s something I’ve known since I was a child. I think that resonates. The story resonates,” she says. “These are not people that I wanted as a feature for credibility. We see them all the time and have a human connection. I guess me wanting to know who they are as human beings could be the thing.”

In the spirit of honesty, Sampa refuses to put down a note in the studio with anyone before they talk about what’s eating them. “So off the bat, I was like ‘Yo, it’s my first album. Scared as shit,” she laughs. “‘This is meant to be the thing that defines me for the rest of my life, but actually, I’m terrified.”’ Facing this also meant facing up to her singing, something she only started doing in earnest on her last release.

“I do hear verses in different voices,” she says. “It helps carry the emotion of what’s behind them. I always told myself not to limit my expression because I am a whole person, so if the emotion is this, then I’ll be that. I’ll express it in the way that I see fit; singing, rapping, scatting. But I’m not a monolith. Different songs bring different feelings, emotions, pitches, personalities.”

—

The many Sampas that comprise Sampa The Great have travelled to many continents to record, absorb, perform. But the key has been, and will always be, Africa. “When we talk about the diaspora that’s been displaced, people who don’t know where home is or where they are,” Sampa says. “From moving around I came to the conclusion that to keep myself sane and grow my career, I had to take elements of home and keep them with me.”

Part of the mission behind The Return is to, in Sampa’s words ‘flex the culture’ of the place that encouraged her aspirations of greatness. For the first two singles off the album, she returned to South Africa, shooting videos with her longterm collaborators that are soaked in local flavour. There are kids busting moves in traditional dress, scenes inside her parents’ home in Gaborone, street drifters and confronting, masked Nyau dancers. It is riotous celebration of colour and sound, but also reclamation, after years of co-opting, of pleading and being ignored, to take her home and infuse it into herself.

The music is no different. Sampa arrives fully formed; singing, slinging rhymes, scatting and speaking in her native tongue. It’s a hip-hop record unlike many others you’ll here, one which, despite its varied collaborators, sounds definitively African. For Sampa, it’s part of a turn inward that has been embraced by the likes of Skepta, whose wildly successful Homecoming festival in Nigeria has become a blueprint for how to market an African artist’s background as the foreground.

“It also comes with an assurance that what you’re doing is cool enough,” Sampa says. “That it’s accepted. It’s like ‘Ok, Beyonce’s wearing Ankara [African wax printed dress] so shit must be cool.’ But ten years ago, it just wasn’t. I think Africans have realised that they’re really dope as well. That’s when you can actually come into your being and do local hip-hop well.”

To that end, Sampa has realigned the spiritual with the physical, recently playing her first ever shows on African soil after half a decade in the game. It’s a move she’s clearly jazzed about. “It’s different hearing your song on the radio on a country you’re not from and a station you never grew up listening to,” she explains. “Until I heard my song on radio at home, I didn’t really believe how big it was.”

After years of displacement and renegotiating her identity, Sampa The Great is finally starting to feel like herself. She is someone and she is from somewhere. But as she rebuilds her city of hip-hop, traversing cultures and borders with love, respect and vulnerability, it’s also becoming clear that she is from everywhere.

As she puts it so eloquently, holding an empty mug in a small office on the other side of the world from where she was born: “If your ancestors live through you, then you’re already home. They are within you. You don’t have to prove you’re African, because you already are.”

As originally published in BRICK, Edition 08.

Sampa The Great was originally published in Jonno Writes on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The running joke in our family is that having had and recovered from Covid-19 has given us a superpower — now we would like to use it

This piece was originally published on Guardian Australia.

We were supposed to be getting married today. We came back to Australia from the UK for our big moment. Right now, we’re finding other things more exciting. Unable to walk down the aisle or even leave the house, driving ourselves to St Vincent’s hospital for our coronavirus PCR tests is as wild as it gets around here.

For those fortunate enough not to have had one of these yet, imagine a cotton bud being rammed up your nose, somewhere close to the region of your brain. Now multiply that by your other nostril. It’s definitely up there with the most romantic things you can do with your fiancee in her first week in Sydney, second only to testing positive for the most topical virus since Y2K.

Here’s the deal with coronavirus, from someone who lives in the country’s biggest hot spot (Sydney’s eastern suburbs) and is young, fit and healthy. It is as bad as you’ve heard. I shouldn’t need to end up in ICU to make you believe that. Between us, my fiancee and I have run the full gamut of symptoms, from blinding headaches to intense muscular pain, panic attack-tight chests, loss of smell and taste. And we are considered mild cases.

I say this as someone who’s had to kill off a wedding to the woman I love for the foreseeable future, at great personal and financial expense. For once, the memes and celebrities are correct: stay put. Buy a puzzle. Whatever it takes to keep you away from others. What we had will flatten anyone less healthy. It’s just not worth it.

We’re aware of the bitter irony of our survival; had we succumbed to our illness, we would have been allowed five more guests at our funerals than at our scuppered nuptials.

On 30 March, having spoken to doctors up and down the chain, we finally got an email from St Vincent’s Hospital declaring us fully recovered. We have proof.

Though the stricter sanctions on our movement will cease, it’s unclear what kind of world we’ll be re-entering.

We don’t know is how the community at large will treat us ranking members of the highly unenviable First 1,000 Cases club. Paradoxically, everyone is talking and not talking about coronavirus at the same time. Around me, all anyone is concerned with is not getting it, or more vitally, not having their own lives put on hold.

In the rush to contain the virus in its early stages, there’s also not a clear path for the sizeable number of people coming out the other side. That’s fair enough; we’re primarily concerned with stopping people from dying.

The prevailing wisdom is that people like my fiancee and me, who initially tested positive and have subsequently been cleared after two consecutive negative PCR tests, are theoretically immune to coronavirus while it is in its current incarnation. We are not the only ones in this position. Soon, there will be a lot of us.

We could be incredibly beneficial to the community; able to move about, buy supplies and help those in need without fear of contracting or spreading the virus.

That relies on a few things to happen in tandem. The first is honesty. The spectre of the virus has created a culture of fear so pernicious that many would rather lie about being tested positive than deal with the stigma.

Thanks to a continual flouting of the rules of social distancing, we’ve also turned our hands to citizen policing. Particularly around my area of Bondi, dobbing in your neighbours has become Sydney’s new favourite pastime — especially now the toilet paper panic has passed.

This newly enshrined citizen spy network is matched only by our opaque approach to self-reporting. My WhatsApp groups are alive with stories of friends of friends boldly announcing negative results while also exhibiting symptoms identical to the ones we’ve had, the type that do not spontaneously occur in young people. A 27-year-old doesn’t just wake up one morning with deep body pains akin to the shingles. Nobody is fooling anybody.

I understand the predicament. My family has the same issue. If we announce that we have — or more accurately had — coronavirus, even when medically cleared of the illness, who is going to believe us? More importantly, in this strange context in which people are too scared to talk about it, how will we be judged?

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There is a world of difference between not having had an illness and having recovered from one, both from a personal and social utility perspective. After two weeks cooped up in our place, the only thing we want to do now is help out others.

Whether that’s dropping food off to families that can’t get much-needed online delivery, having distanced chats with the elderly or even volunteering for administrative tasks in the hospital. We hope these roles are open to us.

For every Australian succumbing to this illness, many will recover. That’s especially true of younger people, who often experience mild (or no) symptoms and are now sitting around idle.

In our house, there’s the running joke that having recovered from Covid-19, my partner and I have been granted some form of superpower. This pandemic has already taken so much away from us. Hopefully, at the very least, being candid about our experience will give us the opportunity to make good use of these “powers” while we have them.

The wedding can wait.

Coronavirus cancelled my wedding and made me sick. What now? was originally published in Jonno Writes on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Freelancing is the new normal. Does that mean loneliness is, too?

Diary Of A Freelance Journalist has long been lost to the travails of Tumblr and vestiges of my youth. I wrote it about a decade ago, when trying to be funny was something that took up vast swathes of my time. It featured entries about befriending every barista in the neighbourhood, annoying a variety of editors at exactly 3:15pm each day, watching pornography out of a sheer lack of anything else to do and listening religiously to Australian youth radio so as to have enough currency to feel part of -if nothing else- a burgeoning Twitter community.

What the naive, 21-year-old me was trying to get at is easy to see with the benefit of hindsight; being a freelancer is fabulous if you want to work in your pyjamas, catch public transport only when there’s nobody else around and not have to sit in endless meetings with puffed-up creative directors for whom you share a healthily mutual disrespect. But it’s absolutely shocking for your mental health.

There are many flexible definitions of freelancing in the post-gig-economy world. But if we’re going off the traditional one, where your home is the office and a cafe is your meeting room, it’s essentially condemning yourself to a specific form of loneliness for around 40+ hours a week.

Some of us are downing watery Americanos while furiously writing the next Fleabag or Conversations With Friends. But the majority are staring at our phones, wishing for someone to give us something to do, or craftily avoiding the work we do have because we need to stretch it out for the next few days like leftovers in a neglected family fridge. We start personal projects before realising that we might need somebody else’s help to bring them to fruition. Taking all day to read the newspaper. That sort of thing.

Being a freelancer in your thirties is different to your early twenties, when everyone is essentially a freelancer unless they’re a medical student. It means having a rolodex of all your friends on sabbaticals, between jobs, with children or on maternity leave. It means knowing the gym schedule so well that you can be there when there is only you and the guy who spends 5 hours a day on his right bicep.

It means avoiding brushing your teeth and getting dressed for as long as humanly possible, because once that happens you need to admit that you’re all dressed up with nowhere to go. We jump at the opportunity to get pulled into offices for two-day stints where nobody knows our name, lie about our careers at group dinners and spend way too much time on LinkedIn, which is as fruitless and heartbreaking as early-era Tinder.

At 32, I’ve now been a freelancer in some professional capacity for over half my working life. As I frequently tell people, it’s the kind of thing that’s great until it isn’t. And it’s at this point, which comes for everyone in my position no matter how many decent headhunters they know, that things can take a turn quite quickly. A deluge becomes a drought, and you are cut adrift for days, weeks, wandering around the city and wondering about the status of about 16 roles you applied for out of sheer desperation.

Outside of specific areas like journalism, freelancing used to be considered an unusual decision to make when you weren’t a mother of two young children trying have more control over your hours. It was seen as a stopgap between Actual Employment and a Proper Adult Role. That’s just not true anymore. In the UK alone, freelancing has jumped 43% since 2008 to encompass some 2 million people. That’s a lot of bereft souls asking for the WiFi password at once.

What this growth in individualised workers will inevitably lead to is an epidemic of solitude and disconnection that’s previously been the terrain of our elderly population. Whether you’re on a job, between them or chasing the next one, freelancing necessitates large amounts of time spent alone. WeWork set-ups, co-sharing spaces and trendy cafes where everyone ‘mingles’ by staring at their Macbooks wearing noise-cancelling headphones doesn’t exactly solve the problem.

Everyone knows that freelancers gain autonomy when they give up sick leave, superannuation and a boss. But what they lose is a community, practically the only reason offices need to exist in 2019. In reality, short of important client meetings (which can be done on Zoom anyway), nobody needs to go into work anymore. It’s the argument that’s most recently been levelled at City Airport’s expansion by Extinction Rebellion, but it rings true across the board; thanks to today’s transformational technological tools, we could arguably do it all from home.

The reason we don’t is so we can talk shit with our co-workers, who replace our uni mates that replaced our school friends. We eat lunch with them, banter before big presentations, blow off steam at Friday drinks. These people end up at our weddings, become godparents to our kids. We don’t realise it while it’s happening, but they are exceptionally important to us.

Freelancing professionally removes you almost entirely from this equation. Perhaps some people prefer it that way, especially those with other dependents in the home. Maybe they’ve been in the workforce 30 years and had enough. For everyone else freelancing, there are no duvet days, office mental health programs, duties of care. If someone looks like they’re going through the wars at the office, you do something about it. It’s almost impossible to deduce the same through emailing someone slumped on their couch.

It’s possible we over-invested in the positives of living life by a day rate to the point where the drawbacks are now considered fundamentally normal. And to be fair, I enjoy occasionally going into different offices and working on different clients. But that’s rare; most freelancers I know are treated like commodities. You do the job, you fuck off, you do the next one. I’ve completed ‘jobs’ for 17 clients and 4 agencies this year and in addition to chasing nearly all of them for money (let’s not get into it), I’ve also had to repeatedly request feedback. Your Uber driver currently gets more interaction.

I feel like not enough freelancers are talking about loneliness because they don’t want to be accused of having their cake and eating it, too. But the perception we have of this industry — and it is an industry unto itself — is stuck in the early 2000s. For creatives like me, it’s not a lifestyle choice but often the only choice. I work in branding and any workplace I’ve set foot in this year has at least been half ‘staffed’ by freelancers. In a period of dramatic economic uncertainty, many companies don’t want to commit to full-time hiring. This in turns cements a new normal of resources available on tap that can be easily dispensed with depending on cashflow. It’s a vicious cycle.

Freelancing might be a healthy life choice, but solitude isn’t. It affects everything from the state of your mind to your diet, and in severe cases, it can kill you. And sure, we’re not 90 years old, but Instagram DMs and Facebook banter don’t do a great job of replacing human interaction, either. I’m ten years and half the world away from that piece I wrote as a joke and I still know every local barista’s name and backstory. Without realising it, I’ve been actively trying and form relationships with people that most of us typically see as a service, or a means to end.

Perhaps it’s because I know the feeling.

The Day Rate Blues was originally published in Jonno Writes on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

This piece was originally published on Junkee.

It’s awfully serendipitous that in a week that saw one of the worst encroachments on the electronic music scene by a brand in recent memory, it’s most consistent commercial champion quietly called it a day.

Red Bull Music Academy, which ran programs, lectures, radio stations and curated festival stages across the world for over two decades, has just announced this year would be its last.

Ordinarily, a corporate entity getting out of the way of the people creating and performing music would be heralded as a huge success. Lord knows we’d all love it if KFC got back to chicken and left the drops to the experts. But with Red Bull, it’s different.

If you’ve had anything to do with the dance music underground in the past 21 years, or left-of-centre music in general, the sudden demise of RBMA will come as somewhat of a shock. So enmeshed into the fabric of the alternative/electronic world since its late ’90s inception, RBMA for many musicians has come to be seen as one reliable place for them to express and flex their weird and wonderful ideas without bending to anyone’s rules.

Dreamed up in collaboration with Berlin-based consultancy Yardstar, whose burly, bald director, Torsten Schmidt seems to be simultaneously present at every RBMA event across the world, it’s the sort of project that no one will ever be able to convince a brand to do again, especially for such a consistent stretch of time.

Just some of the sounds covered by Red Bull Radio.

If RBMA is the sort of thing you only registered when you saw the brand’s logo at a festival, you should consider the huge range of artists it gave a leg up when nobody would take a chance on them — offering them studio and on-air time, lectures and headline slots with essentially zero expectation of repayment. Their Academies, which took place at a different city each year and flew in up to 60 producers and musicians from all over the world to co-create, learn, write and gain confidence have been a launchpad for a huge range of genre-nonspecific artists.

Notable alumni of the program include Hudson Mohawke, Sinjin Hawke, Tokimonsta, Katy B, Nina Kraviz, Flying Lotus and Aloe Blacc. Australian beneficiaries include Ta-Ku (Barcelona, 2008), BRUX (Berlin, 2018), Kučka (Montreal, 2016), DXHeaven (Paris 2015), Andras Fox (London, 2010) and Lorna Clarkson (Rome, 2004).

MUSICIANS ARE OFTEN SEEN AS A CHEAP EASY WAY TO BYPASS THE GATEKEEPERS OF CULTURE AND LEVERAGE SOME AUTHENTICITY FOR NEXT TO NOTHING.

I spent ten years working pretty much full-time as a music journalist and another six trying to sell music to brands in agency land, which gave me the somewhat dubious fortune of seeing firsthand just how little the vast majority of advertisers respect musicians and what they do.

Whether it’s a denim company, a shoe brand or someone that just made an expensive new phone, musicians are often seen as a cheap easy way to bypass the gatekeepers of culture and leverage some authenticity for next to nothing.

I don’t have to give you examples, just go to literally any festival or major event in this country, open Instagram, or wait for a ‘content piece’ from any publication you read regularly. Or just cringe through this:

Giving You Wings, But Not Selling You Out

The creators of RBMA had a number of things working in their favour that today’s branded partnership alchemists do not. Most vital was a product that, by the late ’90s, had already made so much money it’s founders were well on the way to becoming multi-millionaires.

Discovered by adventuring Austrians in Thailand, Red Bull sold bucketloads (sometimes in actual buckets) and created an entirely new segment in the market. But where it really got legs is when some bright spark realised you could mix it with vodka and party all night, instantly transforming it into the club drink of choice. By the time Y2K rolled around, they were selling close to a billion cans globally.

This cash train provided freedom. While Red Bull still wanted people to know about their product, they had license to be more radical about creating deeper relationships with consumers. The sort of deliverables anyone that works in marketing is used to seeing from a client — you know, like sales spikes or return on investment — weren’t as much of an issue.

Aligning themselves to dance music, which at this point in history was still very much a subversive medium, meant that overt product placement wasn’t going to work. Pepsi and Britney Spears this wasn’t.

In 1998, the idea of selling out was a very real concern. It remained so for many years, especially as electronic music grew in stature. That Schmidt and Red Bull got buy-in from the get-go and enjoyed a relatively unsullied reputation among the community for this long says a lot about the time and effort that went into getting it right.

There were lots of brands attempting to get into the music space, but the dominant model (if you weren’t a rapper starting your own clothing line) was still buying someone famous and sticking them in an ad. And that made sense. Even in the early noughties, major artists were selling a million CDs in a week. They didn’t need that Mattel money.

In this respect at least, Red Bull was prescient. The idea of investing back into the culture and collaborating with, rather than prostituting artists, seems like a good idea now that pretty much nobody outside of Adele is selling records anymore.

Certainly it was a better move than showing up somewhere you weren’t invited — the cardinal sin of advertising committed by The Colonel last week. Modern music campaigns and collaborations from the likes of Nike (Jorja Smith) and Adidas (Kanye West, Pharrell, Stormzy et al) have built on this legacy.

Levi’s Music Project, which this year focuses on rising UK rapper Loyle Carner, perhaps comes the closest to the Red Bull model.

However, what made RBMA unique is that their expectations for Academy were never grounded in sales. A huge awareness play, sure, which makes sense given how much money they sank into it. Custom-built studios, venue hire, all-star lecturers and international airfares don’t come cheap.

I was lucky enough to be a fly on the wall for the Paris 2015 edition, where the studio producer in residence was Just Blaze, guest lecturers included Kindness and Hudson Mohawke, interviewed by experts from NTS, Boiler Room and BBC. That’s a ridiculous level of talent.

WHAT MADE RBMA UNIQUE IS THAT THEIR EXPECTATIONS FOR ACADEMY WERE NEVER GROUNDED IN SALES.

If you were the marketing manager of any brand, you’d want to milk as much content as you could out of an event like that. Film every single person on the ground saying how great Red Bull were, how it’s really changed their lives. You know, the sort of crap we hear bands having to say about beer companies today.

Red Bull left their artists alone. I can’t stress emphatically enough how rare that is. What struck me from the get-go was how much deference was given to the musicians from a brand that had no reason to.

Yes, there was always a mysterious fridge with shiny cans positioned slightly to the left, but nobody was forcing anyone to drink it. Photo opps were non-existent. Media were often restricted to short periods and small numbers to give the musicians space to create without interference. I flew all the way to France and was booted out after two and a half days, told to come back the following week.

A Big, Energetic Loss

What Red Bull (or more likely, Torsten) understood was that there was a long game here. That long game was PR; look at any bio of any DJ, producer or musician worth their salt in the last decade and Red Bull is woven into it.

By being involved in their talent incubation and encouraging them to make music without imperative, Red Bull ensured a historical legacy that money can’t buy. Which other brand can lay claim to unearthing a young Nina Kraviz or Hudson Mohawke, now a favourite producer of Kanye West, and giving them a global platform?

During my three years covering Red Bull Music Academy, I also spent time with Mark Pritchard in Tasmania, who used his long-standing connection to the Academy as a studio head to wrangle a ridiculous sum out of them for a bonkers Dark Mofo show featuring floor-to-ceiling custom projections from frequent Flume collaborator Jonathan Zawada.

I also attended Ta-Ku’s EP launch in Perth, where he retro-fitted his barbershop with full-scale visuals for a livestream. In these (and many other) instances, the initial costs far outweighed the benefit. Particularly given that these audiences were always small clusters of devotees, not festival-sized crowds.

That’s perhaps the most unfortunate thing about losing RBMA; it removes a patron that has long sought to understood and foster niches in music rather than exploit them. A constant couch where D’Angelo and Questlove can feel as at home as Actress or Peggy Gou.

More than ever, musicians of all stripes need financial support that doesn’t rely on relentless touring. That’s even more true of those that operate on the fringes of what’s popular. Let’s hope some bright spark with a blank chequebook takes up the mantle of Red Bull Music Academy.

Trust me, you’ll miss it when it’s gone.

Red Bull Music Academy Is Gone, So What’s Next For Brands In Music? was originally published in Jonno Writes on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I’m that guy that really like understanding people. I like to know why someone wears adidas instead of Nike, why they eat poke over acai bowls, whether they drink whiskey at night or run laps at dawn, when and how they spend their money.

I’m also a curious person. I always want to know why things are popular, or niche, or blowing up right at a particular moment. I ask questions all the time. When we go to the pub, my friends always feel like they’re being interviewed. This helps because among other things, I’ve been a music journalist since I was 18.

I still remember my very first question in my very first interview, with You Am I. Here’s what I asked Tim Rogers: ‘With the rise of retro bands like Jet and Wolfmother, do you feel like there’s a trend back toward long sideburns?’

He ripped up my questions. And stuck them to my sideburns. I think it went well.

In my quest to know more about people, especially young people, because I am a 30 year old who dresses like a 15 year old, I’ve managed to hold down a lot of different careers at the same time. Right now I work as a copywriter at an ad agency, a journalist, a producer and a consultant. I’m a weird one to hire because nobody quite knows what to call me or do with me.

It’s fitting then, that we’re here to talk about trends with millennials, another group of people that literally nobody knows anything about. No, I’m serious. Not even millennials know anything about millennials. It’s all happening too fast.

Today’s theme is ‘Stop Making Sense.’ I think it’s apt.

The only way to get on board with young people, to try and understand even a sliver of what they’re about, is to stop trying to make sense. Because let’s face it, we live in a world that increasingly makes no sense, and we’re charging these irony-free, Instagram bards with the future of it.

May God help us all.

Understanding that you’ll never really properly understand youth culture is super liberating. It allows you to focus on what matters, to hone in and target an insight based on an actual truth, rather than what some kid told you because you gave him and his mates pizza on a Monday to answer 100 questions.

Before I get into some of the trends I’ve picked up on that will definitely be irrelevant by the time you leave this place, I think it’s important we have a chat about the word millennials. I hate it. It’s the worst. You know who else hates it? Millennials. You’ll never hear them call themselves that, not like your bosses like to boast about how they’re Gen Xers.

Young people. That’s who we’re talking about. And if you’re like me, you’re probably starting to feel like our generation has split in half. Technically, if you’re born after 1985, you’re the same generation as my sister, who’s 20. I have a theory that there’s a fault line between our generations, and it sits around the 1997. You can call it pre or post-Spice Girls. Or pre or post-MSN Messenger. My sister doesn’t remember life without an iPod, a mobile phone or super fast Internet. We have completely different lived experiences but we’re supposedly the same generation. It’s crazy.

So personally, when I talk about millennials, or young people, I usually talk about the group on the other side of that fault line. Sure, we still have things in common, but our differences grow every day. I’m starting to feel like I have more in touch with my parents than I do with the bottom half of my own demographic, and I’m not even that old.

The other day, we had a work experience girl come into our office and I was charged with giving her something to do. I thought it would be fun to get a teenager born in 2001 to read through a bunch of presentations written about her own demographic by publications like Lifelounge, VICE, Junkee and Pedestrian. Millenial reads millennial decks. Could be a good content series.

These were companies trying to package up and sell young people to brands like you. I’d know all about that, I’ve worked for all of them. It was imperative to them to at least pretend to know what young people wanted. Which is understandable, given that I’m sure you all know that as we come of age, our generation will spend more, make more and eventually swallow the Boomers whole.

Stop Making Sense.

Because I’m a music geek, I got a discount pass into youth culture. More than at any other time in history, it pays to stay young in the music industry. We have multi-platinum teenage stars emerging from their bedrooms faster than their parents can make them. I’m going to use quite a few music examples today, because I really believe it’s the nexus of many aspects of what kids love and hate. It’s worked for me for the last decade, so hey, why stop now?

Stop Making Sense doesn’t just apply to us. It applies to the kids we’re talking to, too. They’re coming of age in a world that has not been this totally messed up since World War II. Every day is a complete mystery; who is going to tweet what, nuke whom, invoke ISIS where, out that Hollywood exec for exposing himself to how many women. Things as we knew it are disintegrating, but for the new millennials, it’s all they’ve ever known.

I think we can trace our big themes back to this concept of non-sense. Today we’re going to talk about the resurgence of Australiana. New substitutes for religion. The breakdown of genres. Radical transparency and the rise of activism. Ways of making sense of a country, and a planet, that doesn’t really have much left. Let’s dig a bit deeper.

Let’s talk about Australiana.

I grew up in the ’90s. In the ’90s, being Australian was not cool. We all wanted to be American, or British. We wanted to skate like Tony Hawk, play in bands like Red Hot Chili Peppers, rock cargo pants and crop tops like All Saints and S Club 7.

We had the odd local hit here and there; Powderfinger, Heartbreak High, Looking for Alibrandi. But the majority of our stars and personalities sounded or tried to become foreigners. Silverchair, the Nirvana from Newcastle. That sort of thing. We wanted to be cool, not daggy. Australia was the end of the Earth, and all most of us with a Napster account were dreaming of was escape.

Fast-forward to today. It has never been cooler to be Australian. And not just Australian, but daggy, 1980s, unsightly colours and harsh-accented Australian. I’m sure you’ve noticed this. R.M. Williams boots are everywhere. Client Liaison, who spruik Fosters and shot a film clip on an Ansett plane, are festival headliners. Courtney Barnett, literally the most ocker sounding girl on Earth, has broken America. Paul Kelly won two ARIAs. The ibis is water cooler conversation again. Everyone really wants Warney back.

An entire subculture has popped up around this phenomenon, and it’s become currency for young people more than the rest of us. We chuckle about it ironically, they drink VB out of shoes. They go out dressed like our Dads did when they used to pick us up from soccer practice on a Sunday. It’s this sort of mish-mash between reverse bogan and ironic playfulness that seems to have come from nowhere. Genuinely, it doesn’t make much sense.

That drills down right to a local level. When I was at uni, kids from the country or regional areas used to lie about where they were from, and try and disguise the thickness of their accent. Not anymore. Now we’ve got Nina Las Vegas repping Wagga, the Betoota Advocate from Far North Queensland, Vera Blue from Forbes. By the numbers, Groovin’ The Moo is the biggest festival in the country. It’s never been cooler to be a salt-of-the-Earth Australian.

What’s making us embrace our Australian-ness again? What happened to cultural cringe? One theory might be that the countries we used to look up to aren’t really providing great role models at the moment. America’s about to start a proper nuclear war thanks to a President none of us can believe is actually still in office. The UK is splintering the EU to bits and Oasis still haven’t gotten back together. There’s a refugee crisis, climate change, bloody Bitcoin. It’s scary out there.

In light of all this and even given many of our own grave issues, suddenly Australia seems a whole lot more attractive. So we amp up the qualities we’ve always had. We have a laugh. We embrace our backwards country brethren, our crocodiles and kangaroos. We still have a healthy dose of sarcasm. Tall poppy syndrome is stronger than ever. We fall back in love with ironically hating ourselves but actually, deep down, really loving our country.

Injecting yourself with strong ocker culture, even if you grew up in Mosman, is important given how much this generation travel. It’s literally what they spend about half of their money on, and it gives them a bond with other self-reflexive dags wearing Sydney Olympics 2000 sweaters in Berlin or at Coachella. But it also gives them a sense of identity, even though it’s a strange rehash of one that we all tried to avoid 25 years ago.

Identity is important to kids.

When you think about today’s teenagers think about how different their identity politics are to yours. Many of you probably went to a denominational school. Perhaps your parents were religious. Your grandparents belonged to a Church, a local mosque, or a synagogue. According to the last census, more Australians identify as ‘no religion’ than ever. Now, we all know it wasn’t the best census on record, but it’s interesting nonetheless. If today’s kids are growing up in houses where religion is less prominent, or perhaps are making that decision for themselves earlier, that has a big impact on how they try to make sense of the world.

It’s somewhat true that today’s youth are increasingly fragmented. What’s interesting, and it’s something Alain de Botton, one of my favourite writers touched on in his book Religion for Atheists, is that an absence of religion leads people to form new tribes. We still need to be connected, even if it isn’t a big guy up in the clouds or Sundays at the Greek Orthodox service keeping us together.

But living vicariously through the endless scroll rather of your phone rather than a Torah scroll can have very real impacts on your levels of alienation and belonging. So millennials have taken it upon themselves to create new tribes, new religions, and in some cases, stand-ins for God.

This year, nutrition is a religion. F45 is a religion. Mental health is a religion. We are forming associations based on things we used keep to ourselves; issues with our guts, our flab, our minds.

I will wager that almost everyone in this room is a follower of one of these new faiths. Maybe you worship some toned nutritionist on Instagram. Perhaps you’re a member of a new fraternity of crossfit fanatics. I’ve been observing in quite a few of these new religions lately, and the funny thing is that they kind of function like traditional ones, except they started yesterday and not thousands of years ago.

Young kids are finding new colonies of meaning. The most surprising of these has been around mental health.

A few years ago, I wandered down to check out a new group I’d heard about, on Instagram of all places. It was called One Wave Is All It Takes. Its founder, Grant, stood up in the first session I went to, which was kind of like Church mixed with AA, and told everyone about his own struggles with bipolar. He encouraged everyone to open up about their mental health, and use fluoro colours and surfing as a way of managing it. It was wild. I’ve been a card-carrying member ever since.

One Wave has now spread across Australia and the world. It’s essentially the Crusades of feel good. There’s a new Jesus, fluoro-coloured minions, weekly Confession, a set of psalms like ‘Free The Funk’. From seemingly nowhere, an entire global community has come together, and almost all of them are super young.

Grant’s got a mate called Stefan. You might have heard of him too, he’s another surfer with too many ideas that makes people like me look bad. Last year, Stefan ran a festival called We’re All Going To Die. It was sold out. That’s 2000 kids who came out on a Friday night to rally around their anxieties and to discuss how death can inspire us to live. Some psychologists ran a session called Death Meditation. The line to get in was longer than a when Kanye West launched his clothing range in Sydney.

If religion has stopped making sense to this generation, it should come as little surprise that they’ve started to create their own. All influencers are, really, are the self-appointed priests of their new brand of religion. We’ve recalibrated our faith around common, previously taboo interests, and they feel more real to us than any stuffy old Priest.

Were you a rock and roll kid growing up ? I was. They don’t exist anymore.

You know what really doesn’t make sense? Today’s pop charts. Music is all over the place. Hip-hop is stealing cues from rock music, R&B and electronic are the same thing, folk singers are writing for Beyonce, rappers are coming out as bisexual. It’s a total mess. Add the complete breakdown of the album and singles sales model and throw in play listing and suddenly you’ve got an entire generation that refuses to identify with what has essentially been the strongest indicator of youth culture for over 50 years.

In the grand hierarchy of what kids like, music has firmly pushed film off the map. Right now, there’s some disaffected kid that looks like Bilie Eilish with a laptop who is simultaneously launching a fashion line, a hashtag and a web series and she has assembled an army of Internet followers around him.

Maybe he or she is like Lil Peep, who looks like a punk, wrote a new brand of emo and rap and died a few months ago like a pop icon, allegedly overdosing on the same drug as Prince. You probably never heard of Lil Peep. I know I hadn’t until he passed away. He was nowhere near radio, got zero mainstream media coverage. But playlisting and Soundcloud made him a huge star who sold out shows weeks in advance. He was part of a new guard of kids that speak to their fans directly.

The a la carte, anything-goes way kids are consuming music now is an incredibly important for brands. They trust their own feelings, and they’re not waiting for a record label or a radio station to give them a lesson in authenticity. They take what they like, and most of them follow playlists rather than artists themselves. Loyalty is not a given.

Think about the last piece of communication your agency created for you using talent. Perhaps it was a TV star, or a musician, or an influencer. You decided to go with them because of their stock, their track record. But here’s the thing. You can’t assume things will make sense. Past performance is no longer the indicator it once was of future success. My de facto intern summed it up best; ‘I don’t care who it is,’ she said as I asked her about different artists. ‘I just care that it’s got a good beat.’

No genre, no tribes. And no fixed rules, either. A$AP Rocky somehow models for Dior, sells Mercedes Benz A Class while simultaneously being a rapper who loves narcotics. Tyler, The Creator has three capsule collaborations with Converse, his own sold-out fashion label, a TV show on VICE and is banned from the UK and New Zealand for being homophobic while having just received a Grammy nomination for a record in which he announced he was gay.

It is foolish to try and keep up with the pace of this new guard. But as marketers, we can learn from their anarchic approach to creativity. Think about what’s good, not about what’s hot. Because by the time any of us get there, we’ll be lucky if it’s even lukewarm.

For the first time since Jesus walked on water, it’s not a great year to be a powerful white male.

If you want to get what young kids are about, you should probably know that the slow breakdown of power structures that we’re currently seeing everywhere from Kevin Spacey to the Paradise Papers is already happening in their culture at about 50 times that speed.

Make no mistake, this is not going away. If anything, 2018 will see this radical transparency move from entertainment and into the commercial sector; marketing, advertising, finance.

Kids have always called bullshit on brands and institutions, but it used to be based on gut feel. Now they have access to information, private conversation, leaks, the President’s twitter account. It’s open season. The age of accountability is truly upon us, and while it seems like the world has gone mad, it makes a lot of sense to millennials, who have been raised to know that nothing sacred and nothing is permanent.

Just look at how many times Bieber has restarted his career.

What has changed is the expectation. Now that the rest of us have caught up to this brave new world, there is literally no situation in which you as a company are allowed to lie to them. If you try and dupe them, even if you succeed, you’ll ultimately fail. The kids will get you, and it will be swift and merciless.

It’s the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help you God.

This is probably the one trend that is only going to magnify over the next decade. It’s pretty much the only sure bet when it comes to marketing to young kids; be real with them. The only word as overused as ‘millennial’ is ‘authentic’ but it’s valid. Don’t worry about telling authentic brand stories, worry about being authentic.

Some brands, like yours, actually have a very strong track record when it comes to standing for what it believes in, whether it’s small business, the Statue of Liberty or the environment. But the general marketplace isn’t so blessed. Disingenuous, cause based advertising is an easy trap to fall into, especially when what you’re selling isn’t sexy and comes with heaps of terms and conditions.

You know, like a credit card.

Let’s take Marriage Equality as an example. It would be hard to find a brand that didn’t come bursting out of the gates demanding equal rights for gay couples last year. But many of them were just using it as an excuse to be part of the conversation. They invested zero money in initiatives and essentially sought to better their standing by latching onto something trendy. It didn’t take the kids long to realise who was really walking the walk.

I like to say that rainbows are trendy for marketers in 2017, like women’s issues were in 2016 and diversity was in 2015. Piggybacking a cause has never been more dangerous than it is right now.

[Post-script: Toxic Masculinity will definitely be this for 2019]

I have a friend who is a pretty Indian girl who runs a hip-hop class. She was getting approached so many times by brands to tick their diversity box, that she got all her brown, queer and ethnic friends and started a talent agency. She probably makes more money a year than I do. That’s the climate we’re in.

100 years of history, 50 Oscar nominations, 2 billion dollars. It doesn’t matter anymore. What used to make sense, the rules we abided by are disappearing. But this means you can create new ones, and take your new customers with you. Let’s be real. The old ones are probably pervs anyway.

So what’s the link between a world that makes no sense and powerful people being held to account? Activism.

You probably remember media types going on about ‘slacktivism’ over the past few years. Kids voting with their thumbs, making pointless noise on social media instead of getting out there and pounding the pavement like their folks did.

Slacktivism is a harsh burn for a millennial. It cuts deep. We complain about how things are messed up, but we don’t do anything about it. But here’s something curious, something snapped at the end of last year. We stopped giving thumbs up and starting rising up. Women’s Marches. Manus. Marriage Equality. Proudly Pokies Free. Keep Sydney Open. Taking a knee. Chaining ourselves to trees threatened by the Wesconnex.

A lot of it hasn’t come to pass, but young kids are starting to realise that not trying is no excuse. And there have been more gains made this year, mostly initiated by us, than the last five. Marriage Equality is going to pass. Triple J is changing the date of the Hottest 100. CBA is pulling out of Adani.

Expect more of this. Now that we’re starting to realise Facebook is as responsible for Trump as we are, people are going back to brass tacks. They’re making signs, attending rallies, spray-painting murals of Tony Abbott and Cardinal Pell.

Somewhere along the line, Boomers forgot that every new generation was born to cause trouble. This has been happening since the birth of the teenager. Perhaps they thought we’d get so distracted by our phones that we’d forget about the housing crisis, refugees, crooked politicians and lockout laws. They were wrong.

I’ve done a lot of work with Keep Sydney Open, which is a pretty good example of this idea in principle. KSO started as a Facebook group that nobody believed would go anywhere and ended up with two rallies that brought 20,000 people out to the street. The message made it into both houses of Parliament, the ARIAs and across the entertainment news worldwide. We eventually helped usher the Premier Mike Baird into a new job at NAB and it’s now on the verge of becoming its own party. Laws are slowly starting to change. And that’s largely down to our generation kicking things down and starting again.

Stop Making Sense.

For the next generation, our generation split in two, the world is at once a liberating, confusing and completely lawless place. It explains why they’re starting to cling to a classic idea of what it means to be Australian, to refashion it for themselves. It explains why they’re gravitating back towards new ideas of religion even as they give it up in record numbers. Why they’re opting for the the sound they want, rather than the what we all grew up thinking we needed. Why it’s so much harder to earn their trust and how they hold everyone to account. And finally, why they’re bucking the trend and getting out there and doing something about their political situation.

For young kids, each year changes exponentially from the year before. Trends are subdividing infinitely.

All you can do is ask questions and take the time to listen to the answers.

© Jonno Seidler, 2018. All rights reserved.

Don’t Call Them Millennials. was originally published in Jonno Writes on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Have we been getting male friendships all wrong?

Everyone knows the Paul Rudd movie, so we don’t even need to mention it by name. It forms part of the late Apatow Canon, back when he could take any insight, spin it into a two hour feature and you’d be quoting its inane non-sequiturs to your friends for the next 5 years. The film in question sees an average man, apparently bereft of the ability to make any lasting friends that have a penis, finally succeed by stumbling into a strange, prog-rock fuelled bromance with Jason Segel.

We are made to believe that Paul Rudd, perfectly amiable and innocuous, is some sort of weird social deviant for not having a solid group of male friends. His love interest, Rashida Jones, spends the majority of the film oscillating between overtly pitying him and being exasperated at his seeming inability to connect with other dudes. Perhaps because it’s a bit too existential for an Apatow joint, the film fails to explore the pathology behind this problem. We never find out why Rudd’s character cannot form lasting male relationships. We just accept that it is a thing that he is unable to do, like some people can’t ride a bike, cook soufflé or sing in tune.

On paper, the premise of this film is my life. My female friends have always far outnumbered men and until very recently, I remained convinced that aside from those forced to prop me up while I failed at every known school sport, I would likely not make a single male friend as an adult. It helps that I have two brothers, I’d often joke to my colleagues, because that sorts out the inevitable groomsmen problem pretty easily.

Growing up, my understanding of the male bond was entwined with packs; guys drinking together, playing rugby together, getting wasted at festivals together, marauding through Eastern Europe together, playing FIFA ’98 together.

Through Rudd, Apatow presents a similar view in the film; essentially, if you can’t bro down, you can’t get down. These groups were large and seemingly unstructured from the outside but their memberships were hard-earned and decades in the making. It was not something you could break into even with serious effort and Lord knows between the music industry, two universities and three workplaces before I hit 25, I really tried.

Since moving to London, I’ve found myself in a number of very intense, one-to-one conversations with men. I’ve had long lunches, weekend dinners, walks in parks, visits to galleries, coffees that last three hours and late night pastas that outlast Cinderella. It’s been quite a surreal experience.

Outside of a prostate exam, there’s not a lot of things left in this world that can make grown, white straight men uncomfortable. But sit us across the table from each another, sans alcohol, in broad daylight and see how long it takes for someone to squirm. I remember a recent Marina Abramovic exhibition in Sydney’s Walsh Bay, which forced strangers to stare at one another without distractions for a few minutes. It felt like hours. And having now repeated the same experiment — albeit unwittingly — with new and old friends, I’ve realised that we men don’t really look at each other. At least not in a way that indicates that we’re searching for answers, or understanding what we’re hearing.

Pointedly, none of these recent interactions have occurred in group settings. It’s made me realise that perhaps I haven’t been getting male friendships wrong, it’s that I’ve actually been operating in the wrong format. The concept of two men hanging out alone remains fully loaded, even in 2018. A new acquaintance of mine, excited to find someone else who liked going to the theatre, recently booked us tickets to an upcoming show. He then spent an entire fortnight copping it from his mates for going on a ‘man date’, a shade away from insinuating he was a closeted homosexual. Of course, they weren’t actually being serious. But the implication wasn’t exactly buried, either.

We are in the midst of a Man Revival in popular consciousness. In Western society, we are fighting toxic masculinity on one front, while trying to quell a catastrophic youth male suicide rate on the other. It is not crazy to think these things are related. Men are being told to zip and unzip it, to open up and close out certain feelings. On the attack and under attack. For the most part, they’re simply being urged to talk; about It, whatever the It may be. But this requires a certain level of normalisation. Especially when it comes to talking to other men, honestly, outside of the herd mentality that many of us have been actively building for ourselves since discovering Ninja Turtles at age 4.

I’ve found that men can be good listeners and talkers. That there are levels of engagement that seem preposterously unlikely until you suck all the other noise and oxygen and opinions out of the room. That you can have a heartfelt conversation with a man who either makes dick jokes at least 50% of the time and that you can do it while walking together through a park on a gorgeous Wednesday afternoon, a move he would most certainly class as suspicious were he looking at it externally. Or write long letters to a friend back home, where both of you can talk about feelings of isolation, struggles to really feel successful, reservations around finding true love. I’ve realised that you can actually hug your male friends and tell them that you love them, or that you’ll miss them when they leave. That this is a feeling that need not be saved only for women, whom we often mistakenly render as ‘softer’ in our collective imagination.

I’m not disavowing the conventional male group by any stretch. It’s something I’m very jealous of, to the point where I’ve made a habit of forcing my scarce group of old mates to play a weekly tennis match, just so I can experience that fleeting moment of being in a pack. But I’ve also come to realise that it’s not the only way to interface with men and perhaps there is -for lack of a better metaphor- an entire generation of Paul Rudds out there, desperate to connect but unable to work within the existing configuration.

It shouldn’t take until we’re in the therapist’s chair for us to feel like we can talk honestly or spend time with another man, regardless of sexual preference. The greatest gift of living in another country is to remove oneself from context. And the greatest gift I’ve received this year is the strong, robust friendships of other men that I don’t have to share with anyone else if I don’t want to.

We’ll go to the movies, we’ll drink another coffee, we’ll talk about our partners, bitch about work, marvel over new records, discuss plans for future travel. There will be nothing strange about it. And when we get to the point where we go our different ways, we’ll do that stupid hug men do, where they have to smack each other on the back like someone’s have a coughing fit.

And maybe, just maybe, I’ll say it, because I mean it:

‘I love you, man.’

Talking with men was originally published in Jonno Writes on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.