This should be the best week of Erny Belle’s life. Why’s she so down?
New Zealand music is not working like it used to
My first job in journalism was editing a music magazine. It meant I conducted literally hundreds of interviews with artists in the week ahead of an album release. They were sometimes bored (of doing phone interviews, set up in six hour blocks), but more often tingling with excitement. They were never sad.
That changed a couple of weeks back when I sat down with Aimee Renata, aka Erny Belle, a brilliant and thoughtful songwriter who makes a kind of haunted alt country music. Her superb second album came out on Flying Nun earlier this month. Yet she seemed almost broken by the experience of being a musician in this era. She’s far from alone in that feeling. Her story, and its broader implications for New Zealand music, are what I’m digging into for Rec Room this week.
— Duncan Greive, Rec Room editor
In mid-2021, Troy Kingi should have been feeling omnipotent. He was a year on from winning the Taite prize, New Zealand’s most prestigious award for a musician, and had just released a punchy, genre-bending single in te reo. And yet when I spoke to him he seemed glum. He’d come off a long run on Three’s cheap-and-cheerful game show The Masked Singer and wondered if he’d betrayed his mission as a result. “I’ve had a creative block,” he told me. “Maybe I’m feeling shame or something?”
It was a microcosm of the life of a modern musician. As the gravity of tech platforms becomes ever more powerful, it has decayed the institutions which used to tell musician’s stories, and meant New Zealand artists often have to get really uncomfortable. Sometimes, that means putting on a funny outfit in primetime, regardless of what it does to your soul.
I was reminded of that kōrero when I spoke to Aimee Renata recently. It was two sleeps before the release of Not Your Cupid, a second album that fulfilled the promise of her debut and elevated it to someplace new. Yet her mood was not positive, as she entered the promotional cycle. “Even though I've been super busy this week, I've just been feeling really overwhelmed by the whole music industry in general,” she said. “Wondering where it's going and feeling really uncertain. Just feeling strange about being an artist in New Zealand right now.”
What she’s describing is the sense that to be an artist in this era means that you unavoidably have to have a strategy for dealing with the largest technology companies in the world, regardless of whether your interests align. Renata describes Spotify as “evil” and expresses wistful admiration for Neil Young’s ability to consciously uncouple from the platform. Social media to her is just another form of unpaid labour. “It feels really strange to be an artist and to be having to do the Instagram shit. I can do it, and I'm good at it. But it's just work.”
What it boils down to is that as music gets more and more associated with four platforms – Spotify, YouTube, TikTok and Instagram – musicians unavoidably start to resemble generic content creators, swimming in the same soup as Mr Beast and Uce Gang, even if you’re aspiring to make something more enduring than ephemeral. “Switching it all onto social media, you're practically just like an influencer,” she said. “It doesn't feel right.”
We’re talking in the basement underneath Flying Nun Records, a music shop that also houses the venerable label, on Karangahape Rd, long the epicentre of alternative music in Tāmaki. It’s across the road from Whammy Bar and surrounded by the ghosts of pieces of the industry. Apartments stand where the Kings Arms once hosted bands like the White Stripes and Sleater-Kinney, The Mint Chicks played different dive-y venues up and down the street, MTV had a floor nearby while Crawlspace records sold the weird stuff just down the road.
“When I first set out to be a musician, it was just before the era of everyone doing everything through Instagram and Facebook,” Renata told me. “So I didn't expect that a big part of my work would be staring at an iPhone screen and creating posts for Instagram, which is just actually pretty soul destroying. It just pretty much feels like you're building a house with no foundations.”
It was never easy being a musician trying to make singular art. Now, though, it seems almost impossible. As Chris Schulz has detailed in a brilliant series for Boiler Room, much of the infrastructure that introduced us to music is gone or collapsing. The six journalists who made the Herald’s Time Out each week are all gone. 95 bFM has sold its record collection and is fighting for its life. Music reviews have all but vanished from mainstream publications.
As we spoke, I was constantly second-guessing myself. I came up through that era and those institutions. I miss them and feel personally lost when it comes to finding new music, and therefore retreating to the familiar (Renata says she does that too, tellingly). Is that just because I’m getting older and I don’t know what to do? Or are we really losing something with the way the enormous cultural and economic power of a small handful of tech platforms encourages us to do everything on them, at the expense of our own spaces?
Then she said it. The line that dissolved me into a puddle on the floor. “It's just full on, you know? Sharing that space with everything in the world. So I'll go on to do a post about selling T-shirts. And then I see a kid with blown off arms on there. And I start crying.”
There it is. The irresolvable conflict at the heart of music as a cultural force in an era owned by tech platforms. The new system really doesn’t work for many artists, who find its compromises appalling. Yet they feel they have no option but to participate.
To be clear, it really does work for some. Local artists like lilbubblegum, Sxmpra, Salvia Palth and Leisure are thriving through the global distribution offered by Spotify. Six60, LAB and Coterie are all likely bigger than they ever could have been in prior eras. Even Lontalius, an artist who told me he “grew up obsessed with New Zealand music”, has taught himself to love this new borderless world and figured out how to make it work for him.
But Renata is one of an increasingly large cohort of artists who seem to embody what we have loved and valued in this country, yet cannot figure out how they fit into this strange, unstable new environment. Despite a new strategy out this month, no one from NZ on Air on down seems to have a good response to this very complex challenge. Yet if we want a music industry and music made here that we listen to living here, it feels incumbent on us to figure it out.
I’ve written a bigger story leaping off from here and drilling into a broader malaise impacting NZ music, which will run on The Spinoff next week. That sits alongside a companion episode of The Fold, featuring me chatting with Chris Schulz – live Monday at 5am.
If you only click one link today, please make it this
Yesterday, we launched our first PledgeMe campaign since 2016 (!) to do something very new and exciting for us – a new project examining the nature and culture of food in New Zealand. It’s called What’s eating Aotearoa, and the coolest thing about it (aside from the content), is that donations come with a variety of extremely Spinoff rewards. Please check them out – they involve a bunch of our writers and podcasters, and it would just mean a huge amount if you bought some so we can do this fun and very important work next year. Also, this vid is crackup, please watch it:
Quick pop culture hits
Matty McLean is a true breakfast TV original – he’s more human and emotionally engaged than almost anyone else doing it. On the occasion of his leaving Breakfast, Tara Ward recounts his greatest hits.
I missed the premiere of the new Taika, Next Goal Wins – but my colleagues didn’t, and (mostly) offered some quite pointed critiques.
I have to admit that I like a big stupid idea, and Hauraki’s Matt and Jerry pressing a podcast onto vinyl definitely qualifies.
Nathan Fielder is one of the most talented people working in TV anywhere. So why can’t we watch his extremely-hyped new show? Stewart Sowman-Lund found out.
A brand new free streaming service called Brollie appeared this morning, featuring some extremely cool cult movies – Showgirls! – check it out.
Making journalism in online environments is economically really tough (see the top of the newsletter, in a way). Still, despite the headline, Rhys Darby is not really hosting the Emmy Awards.
There was no more Andre 3000 news than his solo debut album being original flute music. And it’s also perfectly on brand that it has turned out to be excellent.
Here’s a link to our daily one question quiz, in partnership with Skinny – please kindly get amongst.
Counterpoint on music: it’s not all bad
Growing up, I remember the moral panic over gangsta rap and the rise of “parental advisory – explicit lyrics” stickers. When despairing over changes in behaviour and technology, the kids have almost always been right, and parents have been wrong. This time really could be different, but I want to be open to the idea that it might not, too. So, as a chaser to the heavy shot above, here are three cool things happening in NZ music to resist that gloomy narrative.
While music journalism has undeniably collapsed, there are very bright spots – Sniffers, 13th Floor, Ambient Light, Under the Radar, and the powerhouse that is Music 101 are all fighting the good fight.
The New Zealand Music Awards, which serve to elevate the nexus of popularity and craft above the UGC masses, this week announced a return next May.
Later today The Beths will continue their incredible 2023 when they play at an 80,000 capacity baseball stadium in Indonesia.
An enduring nightmare of NZ streaming is over
When we ranked all the NZ streaming services earlier this year, ThreeNow came 16th out of 20, despite a great local and international slate, all at the excellent price of: free. Why? The “shockingly bad” service constantly crashed, lost your place in a show and played the same ads over and over. No longer – a long-awaited re-platform has arrived. Tara Ward took it for a spin, and The Spinoff is pleased to report that it is “not munted anymore”.
The sound of Wellington Paranormal
While the show itself is on hiatus, Wellington Paranormal staged a surprise return yesterday as a weekly podcast hosted by the show’s stars, Mike Minogue and Karen O’Leary. The pod is part of a new venture called Frank Podcasts, run by Minogue and entrepreneurial comedian Tim Batt (The Worst Idea of All Time), itself a sub-unit of Minogue’s Frank Talent, which represents a swathe of actors and comics. The trailer is fun and funny, and given the show’s vast global distribution (it’s available in 109 countries), it has a huge leg up in the increasingly saturated podcast market.
Three huge shows return
The end of the strikes is a while away from unleashing the content floodgates, but three very different big budget shows returned this week. Fargo, the at times brilliant noir, is back on Neon – I adored the first episode, it felt like golden age of TV-era craft. That’s not the case for The Crown, which is back on Netflix for a distinctly exhausted final season – Sam Brooks wrote a somewhat withering review for The Spinoff. Meanwhile, the biggest show in the US is Yellowstone, which I have always enjoyed reading about (the off-screen drama is exceptional) more than watching – its fifth season debuted on Sky Open (formerly known as Prime) this week.
I have one much smaller and grittier recommendation: Time, a BBC miniseries set in a women’s prison with a stunning cast headlined by Broadchurch’s Jodie Whittaker. It’s on Neon and a little slow to start, but it really gut-punches as it gets going.
Thanks Duncan, great column and big ups to Chris Schulz for fighting the music journalist fight. Cheers