I have avidly watched the Triggernometry YouTube channel for years now. I deeply enjoy the honest conversations that
and Francis Foster have had with a plethora of guests who have a range of opinions and are from diverse walks of life and disciplines. They were especially helpful to me in those early months after I started noticing the ideological capture of our public institutions by a small minority of the most extreme fringes of the political Left. The fringe subset that is colloquially known as ‘Woke’.Now I understand that these guys have their detractors and critics and that is fine, anyone can dislike whoever they want. But for a political centrist like me, who regularly get called ‘Far Right’ by the radical leftists and ‘Woke’ by the staunchest conservatives, it was refreshing to see anyone at all discussing the contentious issues we are bombarded with constantly in the media from a middle of the spectrum perspective.
Through their podcast, I have discovered new thinkers and ideas that I have come to admire greatly and have had great influence on my own philosophical reasoning. Academics like
, , , , etc. They also occasionally featured guests whose work I was already familiar with from my avid following of the New Atheist movement; , , & .But one subject they rarely touched on was the one closest to my heart: Music. They did once have the former member of Mumford & Sons,
on as a guest where he talked about his experience of being cancelled from the music industry for recommending a book that questioned the progressive narrative.When I learned about Winston’s experience, it became the start of a nexus point for me. I had already noticed how much of the woke stuff was ingrained in academia and the arts, but I hadn’t learned to what extent yet when I started studying my degree. I believed then that I could ‘toe the line’, to quietly go along with the crazy level of what I would have called ‘political correctness at the time without actually believing in it. To pay lip service to it enough so I could go about my business undeterred and unfettered. I was wrong.
I learned through my own experiences, and my deeper dive into the heterodox parts of the internet, that such an idea was impossible. You have to affirm the dogma of this quasi-religion or you're not invited to the arts industry party at all. Winston Marshall’s story was part of that realisation, as was the account of dance choreographer
.But the straw that broke the camel’s back was Singer/Songwriter Louise Distras account on Andrew Gold’s Heretic’s podcast. She had everything taken from her. Her tour was cancelled, her music was removed from streaming platforms, her former friends turned their backs on her, her representatives dropped her as an artist. All because she exercised her right to express her legally protected opinion about biological sex categories. She was ruined professionally because she wouldn’t submit to industry groupthink.
So I quit trying to enter an industry that would never allow me to be an individual and speak my mind, and turned to SubStack.
This problem with ‘Woke’ ideological capture in the arts is a part of this discussion that I feel is underrepresented in heterodox discourse. There are some trying to raise these issues of course. Rosie Kay has set up THE FREEDOM IN THE ARTS organisation that fights to retain freedom of speech and expression for artists and creatives in Britain. (You can sign their open letter here).
regularly raises awareness about these issues as they pertain to his creative field, in the theatrical arts and literature. And Louise, Winston and others continue to push back against this nonsense in the music industry.And recently, Triggernometry had on as a guest the Canadian Composer Samuel Andreyev in an episode entitled ‘Making Music in a Woke World’. Finally, I said, when I saw the thumbnail.
In it, Andreyev hits on many points that concern me and that I have already touched on in previous posts. Not least ‘Wokery’, of course, but also not exclusively. It was quite a validating experience to hear such an accomplished musician raise concerns about the same issues I have been obsessing over for the last two years or so. I felt like I had been screaming into the void about them for ages, so its nice to know I’m not alone in my concerns.
When one graduates with a Bachelor of the Arts degree in the UK, you have the option of applying for a monetary grant from THE ARTS COUNCIL. I have been hoping to build some kind of community project around live music in my hometown and have been drawing up plans for a proposal. But naturally the Arts Council is just as ideologically captured by the woke nonsense as the rest of our institutions are and any grant that I had approved would come with expectations that I would swear fealty to the tenets of the faith. DEI initiatives, activism, affirmation of their craziness, etc. So I have not even bothered sending in an application.
In the interview, Andreyev seems to agree with me when he says that when art is funded by the state, (as is the case in most Western European sovereign states and the USA), the artist is susceptible to pressures from that state. It can become corrupted and led by the ideological whims of those who oversee the grant approval process and the project's progress. Just like investors who interfere with the production of a movie to protect their investment and force the creatives to compromise their visions by adding elements that have been successful in the past. In movies, this manifests in films that reuse the same tropes and cliches that worked in the past until long after they have become stale. Or cramming so many unaffiliated, test-screened, crowd pleasing elements in that they compromise the story that the director was trying to tell.
To avoid becoming a mouthpiece of an agenda, Andreyev says artists need to ‘diversify’ their sources of income to avoid an ‘over-reliance on state funding’ and thus putting themselves in a position where they need to bend to these ideological pressures to pay the bills. This is exactly why I started releasing all my stuff on SubStack. The freedom of speech and expression that this platform promises (and I hope they stand by) which protects an artist from the kinds of cancellations suffered by Winston Marshall and Louise Distras was my main motivation for signing up.
He says that people in the industry are too afraid to speak out against the woke stuff for fear of being ostracised or losing their livelihoods. Instead they just repeat the ‘party lines’ and keep their mouths shut. This is reminiscent of Alexandr Solzhenitsyn’s essay ‘Live Not By Lies’ that warned the people of Russia that their silence in the face of wrongdoing is manufactured by bad actors to specifically pave the way for that wrongness to thrive. Silence in the face of evil one could argue, is therefore tantamount to compliance with evil.
‘There was a time where we dare not rustle a whisper’.
Alexandr Solzhenitsyn - ‘Live not by lies’ (1974)
Winston Marshall theorises that a massive proportion of people in the music industry do this very thing. They disagree with the Woke stuff but bite their tongue so as to not rock the boat. Hiding in the safety of the tribe. I think this is both true and dangerous, as I describe at length in my Solzhenitsyn essay series and I will touch on further in my upcoming article ‘The Path Of Least Social Resistance’.
Andreyev then mentions that there is always a debate over the value of the artistic and creative output of a country to its economy. Again his arguments against this echo those I have made on several occasions.
‘What’s Shakespeare been worth to the United Kingdom? How about the Beatles, what’s that been worth to the city of Liverpool?’
Samuel Andreyev (2024)
This is a great argument. I have always been annoyed at the government for talking about defunding the arts. Remember the poster of the ballerina that had a caption inferring that she could retrain in a a more practically useful field? Utter nonsense!
How much money has the arts generated for this nation in the last few centuries? How much has our reach been extended by the creative voices that have captured their generations' imaginations so concisely. There’s The Beatles, as mentioned before. How about Ed Sheeran? How much money has he generated for the UK economy over the years? Or the Rolling Stones? Or Oasis? Or Led Zeppelin? Black Sabbath? Muse? Queen? What about literature? Andreyev mentions Shakespeare. But what about Byron? Jane Austen? Charles Dickens? Or about 400 other history defining writers?
Defund the Arts? Poppycock!
Andreyev then mentioned the decline in the viability of the old fashioned standard business model for young artists: Sign to a label, record an album, tour album and sell lots of records. He says this started happening in the 90s with the emergence of Napster and has been steadily declining ever since in the wake of streaming services. ‘Spotify kill the Record Band star’. I have spoken about this matter at great length in several (slightly idealistic) articles on streaming services and the music industry that you can read here, here and here.
Francis then asks him whether we will ever see another Micheal Jackson in our fractured, micro-niched society? Can there be an artist that everyone has heard of and can recall their songs in such a world? A cultural touchstone, as it were.
Andreyev mentioned that there are artists with millions of listens on the platform that almost no-one has ever heard of. They have their audiences but the layman wouldn’t recognise them or their creative work at all. This is true of the artist LP. She has BILLIONS of views on one song Lost On You, (not to mention she worked as a ghostwriter for Rihanna, Rita Ora, Celine Dion, etc for years), but no-one has ever heard of her. I hadn’t until my sister played her for me. Listen to this song, please! It’s wonderful. But you don’t have to just take my word for it as it has been streamed on all platforms over 2 billion times.
Around the 35 minute mark of the interview, Andreyev beautifully explains why musicians are drawn to make music after being asked why some people are inherently drawn to listen to and create music. I’ll quote him directly because I cannot put it any better then he did.
‘If you're going to be crazy enough to pursue [a career in music] then it's not something that you've decided to do, it's something that's happened to you. It’s a form of affliction. You don't decide to do it. If you have any sense you would do something else because it's too difficult. It manifests itself as an irresistible compulsion and the call is so strong that you would move mountains to respond to it. I don't know why that happens.’
Samuel Andreyev (2024)
I resonate with this. I know I would be better off financially if I used my intellect to do anything else. I could have learned a trade or anything more practically useful to the economy than music. If I had, I may have some stability in my life by now: some savings, maybe even own a home. But I can’t do anything else. I am compelled, as if by a supernatural force, to create things. Music, poems, essays, stories, jokes, etc. I can’t help it.
He goes on to describe his own experience of first hearing the call to create music, which again resonates with my own. He also touches on his theory of why some people have this innate compulsion.
‘When I was five or six years old I had an intense and immediate reaction to the phenomenon of music that was undeniable. There was never any question in my mind that I would ever do anything else. So it's a psychological thing, I think, fundamentally. There are people of the population that are off the charts when it comes to trait openness, and I I think that's a huge part of it. You know, people who tend to be interested in the arts tend, or to be interested in music, tend to have that predisposition towards openness; and that's not a trait that you can acquire as far as I understand it.’
Samuel Andreyev (2024)
That's right. We are born with it. I became obsessed with the idea that some people are born with an innately high level of the personality trait ‘Openness’ when I heard Jordan Peterson also partly credit it with the emergence of creativity in people. I took the Big Five personality test to check how I scored, and I was not surprised to find I scored extremely high. Not ‘off the charts’, as Andreyev claims, but definitely high. I wrote an entire 5 part series unpacking my results after taking this test. (Part III is Openness to Experience)
There were many more points that Samuel Andreyev made in this interview that I could comment on, but I feel this essay is long enough already. If you’re a musician, or interested at all in the subjects that he discussed, I highly recommend the interview [linked at the top of this essay].
Thank you KK, FF and everyone else at Triggernometry. You guys got me through my time studying in the Church of the Woke religion, and I am eternally grateful.
Thanks for reading,
The Common Centrist
I agree with all that. Curiously, classical music doesn't seem to be nearly as captured. But the literary world is now policed by a very authoritarian politburo. Up-and-coming writers have no chance unless they submit. We have to establish a parallel culture--a free one.
"Can there be an artist that everyone has heard of and can recall their songs in such a world? A cultural touchstone, as it were."
I have been thinking about this a lot lately, wondering if Taylor Swift is the common denominator for young people today. I just don't know about these things. I guess I'm old and out of touch. I mean, I know if I talk to anyone my age, that person will likely be familiar with Nirvana, Green Day, Pearl Jam, Tori Amos, the Counting Crows, and the list goes on. What do young people today have in common? What will they sing for karaoke night when they get a little older?
I fear I may have contributed to the decline. I was in college when Napster came on the scene and I confess, I downloaded music like a maniac. The streaming services today are a complete joke compared to the sheer enormity of Napster. It was truly nuts what you could find. I could listen to a local band at the bar down the street and come back to my dorm and download a recording someone had done of that live concert. The sound quality was often retched, but the songs were there. And for college kids like me, that access was irresistible. I'll never forget the reaction when we heard the news all that free music might no longer be available. I hadn't heard from my friend in a long time so I decided to pay her a visit. I knock on the door. I hear a weak voice say, "Come in." There she is sitting in the dark in front of her computer and a huge pile of CDs. She had taken enough speed to stay up for 5 days straight, all so she could download as much music as possible before the end of Napster.