Constantly Hating With: Jaime Brooks

Jaime Brooks is a Vancouver-based musician and writer most known for her work as Elite Gymnastics and Default Genders. However, for this interview, I’ve decided to interview Jaime Brooks, the writer. Her excellent column in the New Inquiry, Streaming Services, has been spiritually continued on her current substack, The Seat of Loss, in which she’s been doing valuable journalism and cultural criticism in a mode few other contemporary music writers have been so consistent in tackling. I chatted with her on April 2 about the state of music writing, payola, “the algorithm”, music as prestige, black music in relation to AI and what comes next.

Eli Schoop: It’s funny, cause I think a few of my friends, or people that I’m in orbit with, have interviewed you so far. But I feel like now you’re kind of known like, or more leading towards being a writer, or like a cultural critic, whereas, when my colleague H.D. Angel interviewed you for Finals, that was as Default Genders.

Jaime Brooks: Yeah, that was like right after kinda the last album I put out, which was like in late 2022, and since then I haven’t released any music, I’ve been more focused on other things, not just writing, but writing is like the most public facing thing that I’m doing at the moment. After that, things are changing so much with music and the internet and media, and so I had to kind of interrogate what I was getting out of it and what I really wanted to be doing. And, I think, in order to get better as a cultural commentator or critic I couldn’t have the incentive structure of being a recording artist anymore, because I think that I was blocking myself off from seeing certain things, by like, wanting the recording artist career to work out.

I just sort of like let go of that. Once I like, really looked at it–I need to put this aside, I need to you know, just acclimate to the possibility that I’m just not gonna be spending my time doing this very much anymore. Then I started to understand things, that wouldn’t have been possible to understand before that because of the incentives that I had. So it’s—it’s not just that I’m maybe better known as a writer now, I think it’s also that I have a different perspective because I’m not prioritizing wanting to do recording artist stuff as a career right now.

Right, cause I was checking Substack just before this and I saw you reposted Ayesha A. Siddiqi, who is also great. And I know she listed herself as a trend forecaster, which is a very funny turn of phrase. But I feel like that applies well to you too, in terms of music. And you know, obviously critics, writers do whatever. But I feel like we don’t really have much of that in the music media realm at all.

Well, I think that probably part of the reason for that is that the future of the music media realm is kind of dark and I think people probably want to avoid seeing it. I did, I mean that’s what I’m talking about with the incentives of the recording artist career. I kept wanting to see a happy ending, and so I wasn’t doing a very good job of trend forecasting, because I wanted to fulfill my own desire to see an outcome that I as a recording artist would find appealing. But also, like all the other people in the space: writers, other artists, you know, these are the people that early on would have been sharing and getting something out of what I was saying. And I think that there’s been kind of a shift since then, where, maybe some of the people that are involved as artists, or involved on the industry side, or involved as freelance writers, sometimes they are less into what I’m saying these days, because I think the future of this space is dark.

I think the future of recorded music as a medium, is decline. Like, at least in the terms of the way that we’ve always been thinking about it. For me, personally, once I let go of some of that stuff, like, I see the positives. I feel like every black pill is also a white pill if you’re doing it right. And so, I see a lot to be happy about and a lot to feel good about but it’s like, I had to let go my attachment to those institutions, and structures, and career paths in order to get there. And I think that a lot of other people are at various different points on that journey, some people are farther along, some people are not as far along.

And yeah, Ayesha’s the GOAT at this stuff, like, I’m just the humble, student padawan compared to her. She’s the alpha-brain on all of this stuff. I read everything that she feels comfortable sharing with the rest of the world very closely because she’s an incredibly smart, incredibly insightful person, and I’m very lucky to have been able to work with her at the New Inquiry in the past.

I realized two seconds after I asked you that question that, duh, she’s editor and chief of New Inquiry, so it’s like, oh of course, both strains of this kind of discursive thinking about music, where it’s usually kind of processed through the same cultural writing filter that we’ve had for a long time, the like Pitchforkian, Fantano kind of views on music, and there really isn’t as much of the same cultural criticism, even in things like–

It-

Oh, what were you going to say?

Cause it’s a bummer!

[laughs]

Cause the Pitchfork and Fantano stuff is consumer facing, and so ultimately at the end of the day, it’s there to make you feel good about the consumption and so if you want to go outside of that—who’s going to pay for it, and who’s gonna read it and share it enthusiastically if it doesn’t make them feel good? Every once in a while someone comes up with a compelling answer to that question and an idea or a piece will percolate out there and get people thinking. And when I’m at my best, I can maybe get people to do that a little bit. But, as a field, the Pitchfork/Fantano universe of stuff, I don’t even know if it’s really criticism, and I don’t say that as an insult because I like to read a lot of it and I love a lot of the writers that operate in that space, and I’m part of this constellation of artists, and labels, and writers, that make up the kind of, Pitchfork expanded universe, and I like most of the people in that universe.

But the record labels are the ones that initially funded these type of record reviews, this way of looking at things, to fuel their own interest. And when they stopped, that whole type of journalism as a paid career path kind of disintegrated. It’s about consuming records as products, and that’s what rating them is all about, that’s what making lists of them is all about. And you know, it feels good to consume records as products, just like it feels good to smoke a joint or take a shot. It’s not like it’s 100% good or bad. But it’s consumer-facing stuff and that’s who was paying for it and that’s who’s interested in having their preferences validated. And this other stuff that you’re talking about that the New Inquiry does, or that I try to do, it’s just that the audience is not guaranteed. Like you really got to have a sick fastball going right over home plate if you want to get anybody to catch it.

For sure, I think there is like a lack of rigor in, you know, I can’t talk myself because I love a hot take or love just being a shit-stirrer, but at the end of the day, a lot of us don’t really interrogate the system that we’ve been brought up under over the past decade, and stuff like that, and one of the reasons I reached out, is that you’ve actively carved out something that in our heads we’ve just resisted, and like you said it’s a bummer to think about.

[Laughs] Yeah!

It’s like, ehhhh, at a certain point we have to get real. And even with stuff like Los Thuthanaka or Cindy Lee, where it operates out of that sphere, it will still be swept up into the co-optation of that.

Yeah, I mean, Cindy Lee is such an interesting case study, because they seemed, that year at the exact time that critics were all getting into that record, they seemed absolutely miserable. They cancelled the tour for that album like a third of the way through it, or something. And now it seems like after all the accolades they might be a little bit more comfortable in coming back out there and trying to make it work again. But like, that was a farewell tour, I’m pretty sure that the tour for that album was billed as the farewell tour for the Cindy Lee project. And so at this moment where everyone’s celebrating this, and being like “This is the future. You don’t have to be on streaming services, you can just be on Bandcamp, or be physical only and you can still make this kind of impact!” And it’s just like, the person that you’re using as an example of this is done with it, like it’s somebody that’s been in the game for like ten years and they hate it and they want out [laughs] and that’s like, literally this album is someone clearing off their hard drive because they are just trying to get the demons out of their life all at once so they can finally be free. It’s not the beginning of anything. It’s like a Hail Mary at the buzzer from a veteran.

Right, right. Yeah it is interesting, people I talked about are on the older millennial/early gen z side of like, being in the game since early 2010’s and just now kind of like cresting and–

Yeah, I mean, probably like the biggest showing numbers wise that I’ve ever had, like numerically, on critics lists or whatever, is me and Caroline Polachek like last year or the year before that or whatever year it was. And you know, by that point I’m like completely checked out so I’m just like “Mmmm yeah well I’m on the Pitchfork singles list, well that’s—that’s fine.” And it’s just like, I’ve been in the game since like 2010, and Caroline was like a fucking veteran, she was in the game before I was in the game, you know [laughs]? Like I was looking up to her when I was brand new! And it continues to be kind of shocking to me when I look around at how many people that are poppin’ now in some capacity are people that I know, or that I am like one or two steps removed from, you know, from my time in it. It’s still the same people, it’s still the same scenes and stuff.

You know, the other day I was talking with a friend of mine who, I met him because he was playing with this artist called Nicole Dollanganger who was this tumblr era artist, that made really beautiful, kind of gothic, singer/songwriter music. And that scene is the same scene that Ethel Cain came out of, and so this guy that I met cause he was playing with Nicole Dollanganger, now he’s playing with Ethel Cain. It’s like, the same kind of stuff, the things that I was digging into and getting onto like ten years ago, it’s still happening, it’s still percolating outwards. I’m gonna meet people next year that are gonna be like “Are you up on this Ethel Cain shit, I just found out about it.” It’s kind of strange.

Oh for sure, when you said Nicole Dollanganger, that’s so tumblr, the old latex hood album cover, just like extremely 2012/2013 era–

Yeah I mean, I put out that album I was the label for it technically.

Yeah, and she was basically like, in terms of tumblr fandoms, 1-to-1 here with Lana Del Ray, and now Lana’s like a huge mega star and it’s just weird that all that came from that era.

And Lana and Ethel are like dissing each other [laughs].

Right [laughs].

It’s like, there’s like Instagram tabloid drama coming out of that scene, it’s hilarious.

I mean, yeah, I was gonna touch on a similar inside baseball industry thing, which was the revelation that Geese was being astroturfed by the PR agency if you heard about that.