SKILL ISSUE #16
April '25 - Robocopaganda
Welcome to SKILL ISSUE, a newsletter for the gamers, ravers and the haters. The adaptability of the human spirit sure is a wondrous thing. Just last month, I was sat on my sofa, a warm tin of gin and tonic in hand, eagerly awaiting the start of the finale of Severance, when I decided to open up Bluesky and scroll for reasons I still don’t truly understand. I immediately saw a video of Donald Trump espousing how good his presidency was going to be for women. His reasoning? An increased push for fertility. Not the rights of parents of course, or increased maternity pay, or healthcare, or any of the really valid things that could be done for women with children across the US. Increased fertility. I thought it was one of the worst things I’d seen in open political discourse for a while
The next day I woke up to a screenshot from the official account of ICE. They had fed an image of an immigrant they had arrested into an AI to jump on the hot new social media trend: Ghiblification. A woman crying, that they were almost certainly planning to send to the notorious CECOT detention centre in El Salvador. In that moment I felt a shift in the standards that my brain could really even compute. Ghiblification felt like a particularly targeted attack in some ways. In our last issue we quoted Miyazaki’s thoughts on AI from over a decade ago, “an insult to life itself”. The choice of emulated artist is no accident. A couple of days later, the IDF were jumping on the same trend. As I’m writing this intro, I’ve read that unaccompanied migrant children in the US are being forced to attend deportation hearings alone, with no attorney. And the shift in standards continues, ever adjusting to the new reality we find ourselves in.
This is, of course, how it’s always worked. We adapt, we live, we persevere. This is how sleepwalking into facism happened before, and it’s how we will sleepwalk into whatever new political designation we eventually give our current nosedive into far-right politics. A hate group funded by a bad children’s fantasy writer might be able to change the definition of women in the supreme court, but that doesn't change the reality of the existence of trans people. It changes the boundaries of political discussion, but trans women, trans men, and non-binary people will persevere, adapting to the new horrors of the world as we all do.
This month I received some upsetting family news - no small part of why this issue comes to you later than we would have liked. Upon hanging up the phone, as I felt my world lurch once more in an all too familiar way, I broke down onto the kitchen floor. In that moment I could not conceive of a way in which I would finish the course I am due to complete this year, or write about bloody video games for a small group of readers, or really even make it out to the pub. But I will. In some ways I have more drive to than I even had before. Certainly for the pub at least. I adapted.
Many economists agree that the UK is if anything long overdue a total economic collapse, on par with the worst we saw in the 20th century. When this happens, it won’t be easy to adapt. But we will. Many will die of course. But many more will persevere. And even in those times we will manage to find joy. Just like we do in our current reality. Joy in friends, in music, in games and in films. And the immense joy we all feel when Elon Musk gets bullied off of his own livestream. Now there’s a man unable to adapt.
SKILL ISSUE is written by Christopher Watson and Hue. You can get in touch if you’d like to contribute, if you’ve got anything you think we’d be interested in, should be covered, or if you're just looking for an Overcooked squad - hit us up at skillissuecrew@gmail.com.
///THAT’S NOT RAVE, IT’S SPARKLING CLUBBING
It’s rare that we talk about good news in SKILL ISSUE, and to be fair, we aren’t changing anything with this piece. But this article did actually start life as a rare win - the news from Mixmag that London’s most financially viable superclub Ministry of Sound had been broken into for what appeared to be a legitimate rave. It was an all caps OI OI all round. A statement against the commercialisation of our culture. A last stand at a time when it was sorely needed.
The term rave is increasingly convoluted, and whilst I have my own personal feelings about what constitutes a rave and what doesn’t, I can’t claim to have been part of what most would consider the classic rave scene. Still, squat raves were a major part of my life growing up in London. And despite the many club nights purporting to be raves across the clubs of the UK every weekend, raves, to me at least, do not have a license. When you are going to a rave, you are likely clueless to lineup, and certainly to the set times.
Security may or may not exist at a rave, but if they do, they are mostly there to take rolled up tenners from punters on entry. Raves are about dancing, sure. They’re about seeing friends you only ever see at raves, and the community that grows around them. They’re about the heady space between the time stretch of the jungle vocal and the stink of spray paint fumes. But crucially, they are a middle finger up to the commodification of dance music culture.
A week later, people were starting to claim that the party was nothing more than a PR stunt. Still, I had my doubts. To what end? Video footage appeared to show a fair amount of genuine property damage. And surely within the parameters of the party, it was hard to see MoS as anything but the bad guy, the target of the plucky ravers who took matters into their own hands. But sure enough last week it was revealed to be the brainchild of Lab54, working on behalf of the club itself.
Lab54, if you are unaware, are a crew of promoters known for putting on wild house parties. Nothing wrong with that of course - house parties, at their best, share more with real raves than fabric ever could. But with their success has come the march of money. Their events are sponsored by brands like Rizla, Velo nicotine pouches and IKEA. Whilst raves tend to reject surveillance culture, Lab54 are notable for their love of an Amazon Ring camera doorbell, often recording the secrets of their willing but inebriated guests and publishing them to Instagram.
All of that’s fine, I guess, if that’s what you’re into. But once you fake a free party at a nightclub in the name of promotion, you are cynically using the legitimacy of the politics of the illegal party scene to further a goal absolutely antithetical to the scene itself. Upon announcing their involvement, they reframed it as an April Fools prank, despite taking place in March and not it being a prank but in fact a brand activation that absolutely took place. This is possibly a sign that they saw how the event had, in fact, resonated with people in a way more substantial than they had perhaps expected it to.
London’s legitimate clubs are, as we all know, not having an easy time right now as it is. So we should celebrate new venues when they open. So on one hand it’s great to see a new spot appear in central London! Unlocked Shoreditch, a new multidisciplinary events space and creative hub, stands in the belly of the beast of the city. On the site of a legendary old squat venue. Something that has been key in their marketing.
Of course, the funds to open a new venue in Shoreditch don’t appear out of thin air. A quick check up on Companies House shows the director of the company has been the director of five other companies, over a range of industries. I am not someone with the inclination or journalistic training for a real deep dive, and if someone with more information and knowledge about his situation could absolutely turn around and tell me that my suspicions were, in this case, unfounded, I would quickly fold. But it’s reason enough to be sceptical of their supposed connection to a world that exists in total opposition to the traditional markers of capitalism.
This appropriation of rave culture Is nothing new. Early on in the life of Boxpark, they advertised events of “Squat Poetry” - a thing that is pretty hard to pull off with any legitimacy in a shipping container next to a Nike store. In a more respectful example, the Barbican have just launched a VR experience of a classic 90s rave, motorway drives and all. The soundbites wax lyrical of the importance of raving, of how its perfect for the soul, and the beauty of the community around it.
The reality of the rave scene is not so nice, and arguably never has been. Raves can, and have, turned violent. There are plenty of sketchy moments that can come from heavy drug use, dealing, and zero security. But they are also becoming impossible to put on at all. The underground scene is very literally being pushed underground, with a number of the most notable raves in London being not thrown in five story office blocks, but in literal sewers and subterranean reservoirs. Raving, for those with money, has never been more relevant. But for the ravers, it is close to totally out of reach.
/// DJ_PROMO_short_intro.h.264.MPEG
Widespread broadband, 4G networks, and the wide adoption of cloud services in the early 2010 enabled every website to start hosting more video content. This seemed like a good idea, now, anyone could create short form videos now and host it easily. People could stream rather than download the video making it a seamless ‘in-app’ experience. The pivot to video would be a total upending of promotion in general. Now that same pivot is finally hitting the alternative electronic music scene and it all feels very 2012.
Fringe media got there first. Journalists of tech specialist magazines and the like, used to counting the number of screws on a games consoles case or differentiating Space Wolves from Imperial Fists in Warhammer, were now told they needed to buy a ring light and second hand RED cameras, an Elgato capture card and those headphones with the kawaii cat ears on.
They had to buy utility shelves from Ikea and fill them with Funko Pops. The background also needed some kind of movement, for ocular retention of course. Lava lamps, galaxy projector, a shrine to former Derby / Man City striker Paulo Wanchope. LED hexagonal tiles arbitrarily placed on the wall for that David Cage / Human Revolution aesthetic. The room should be filled with a trans-purple hue, ideally with another non-binary adjacent colour angled from the other side, anything to hide the pure brilliant white of your rented studio flat. With that shopping cart en route, they were away.
After the larger ORGs saw the success niche publications were having on Youtube and such, we saw the pivot to video accelerate to a momentum only capable when you catch the eye of large-scale financial investment. “All this video is sure gonna need a lot of server space!” Amazon/Microsoft/Google thought, frantically filling Icelandic Fjords with raw video files. Content wasn’t coming out solely from the gaming and nerd sphere, outlets like Vice were sending their reporters on hazing rituals, dipping them in psychoactive honey and creating minor internet celebrities. The papers and news channels eventually cottoned on and thought, if the internet wants talking heads, we’ve got a roster of opinion givers who can happily waffle to. If facebook reposts of our paywall weren’t enough, perhaps it is video that will save print media. Now, popular podcast The Rest is Politics is selling out the Royal Albert Hall as the Observer is being sold to a tech startup.
The whole thing was a terrible idea for papers, whose models are still (mostly) about, y’know, reading. It turns out, once you boost your staff to prominent media positions, they kind of understand that they themselves are the product, and can sell ads solo with way less overheads. The algorithm doesn’t care if you’re legacy media or not, only if the audience is watching.
As such, from the mid to late ‘10s, as print media was finally wrestling with where all the online ad money was (or wasn’t), top reporters - ones who’s audience engaged with them regularly outside the day job – just started leaving and making their own channels, with their own supported streams of revenue. As the women in the Gen Z Boss And A Mini meme might say, “‘Stack and a video poddy, ‘Stack and a video poddy”. Gregg Miller doesn’t need IGN, Glen Greenwald doesn’t need the Guardian, Mehdi Hasan doesn’t need CNN, all they need is to create a subreddit and let yo[u know about the new invigorating way to shave your balls from Goochie™
Covid rolled around and having lived off video content for more than half a decade, the transition was easier for the majority than expected. A large portion of day-to-day media had already become individuals recording themselves talking to camera. Waiting for daily updates from a drunk albino with a busy background or doing jumping jacks in the morning with a Youtuber was par for the course. The whole of print media had been reduced to weekly podcasts, they had stuck cameras in LBC so we could see the grimace of disdain presenters had having to talk to normal people. What was arguably the oldest form of media we have has been assimilated almost completely into the digital realm. Shifting Opinion editorials to video content meant more resources, money and time being spent there, increasing its implied importance and leaving actual news to die in darkness. Opinions, and faces who have opinions, are king - the facts don’t lie (and aren’t important anyway).
This erosion of old media has now taken to the electronic music realm. The problem is the landscape is very different. Just as the bookish Journalist had to stop chinning whiskeys and pub grub to get one good take, so too now do the DJ/Producers. This content though is different to the music’s promotional video, an attempt at creative symbiosis, visuals conjured from the feelings or themes of a song sometimes creating something more than the sum of its elements. As David Lynch said “Cinema is sound and picture both—50/50 really, I don’t know why everyone doesn’t think this way.” They certainly think this less than ever.
The current promotional landscape is totally apart from that lineage. Boiler Room and other platforms rarely let their presenters overshadow the performances, so the great unpaid cottage musicians had to find inspiration for the transition. Most DJs and Producers are shy nerds who would rather fettle with a EQ peak than speak in front of a crowd or for the above-mentioned decade of vox pop infotainment, but now music social media is awash with your favourite producers delivering lines direct to camera with varying results. How did they create that patch? What year was it when they first heard Black Water by Octave One? Can they crab scratch while they spin a plate?
The role of a DJ is an interesting one. The whole idea is to tie other peoples’ art together through patterns in sounds and rhythm, curating ideas and developing a more macro idea of how they fit together. This, in effect, is the musical Opinion Piece, finding threads through new and old thoughts, creating a narrative and finding sources to support it. So it's no surprise that this new Meta reeks of the desperate scattergun of the early ‘10s print pivot. We have the holding up five new records video, the holding up five old records video, the ‘whosampled but in a video’ video, the name drop ‘you won’t believe who I got this record off’ video and the hastily stitched together clean weekend in Kreuzberg video.
And who knew DJs days were so filled with activities? As a DJ myself I was always under the impression that other DJs were also spending their days politely chasing invoices, trying to find a mirror for a broken Mediafire link or for deciding which records would fit in your UDG bug-out bag when the first EMPs hit. Well, no, the modern DJ is a holistic purveyor of local pop-ups. They are a musical Anthony Bourdain, a traveller, a chronicler, and also definitely not feeling a crippling sense of self doubt. They are creative in every sense, they eat ramen from places you’ve never heard of and get new records from record shops that absolutely love it when people film inside. Oh? You didn’t know they were in a running club? How did you miss the Instagram page invite? When the day’s done, they head home to water their money plants, and get ready to do it all. Over. Again. CUT.
Worst of all in the current meta: the ‘put a record on and stand next to it while it plays’ video. It’s hard not to see the cynical post-modern distillation of a DJ sharing music into ‘face + music” as sinister. It only serves to devalue the music played - it cannot be presented on it’s own merit, and the person playing the music reduced to a prop, not for the furtherment of the musical expression but, just like the shelves of Funko-Pops, a set of jingling keys keeping a slack jawed audience from swiping away too soon. What song is getting played? It doesn’t fucking matter, you just really want to ensure the analytics look good so your agency can include your digital stats in pitches
Electronic music, a natively digital genre, is at a distinct disadvantage to traditional instrumentation when it comes to video. You can see this all the way back to the earliest electronic chart entries and their Top of the Pops performances. M-Beat and General Levy’s bongo accompaniment, the original Artful Dodger also on Bongos with added Keytar, acid producers triggering Noddy samples in a Rick Wakeman stylee (although of course there’s exceptions, like the beautifully honest and very fucking cool performance of Chime by Orbital). To attempt to harness and control the complete audio spectrum needs a fair amount of pre-programming, which leaves playback little more than pushing the space bar. Keyboards are just not as cool, no one is air-keyboarding your three-note bassline and nor should they, but they WILL slouch their shoulders and hold their imaginary Fender Jazz as Bela Lugosi’s Dead starts to play.
Speaking of, there does seem to be an uptick in electronic producers receding back into the safe confines of three chord guitar fuzz, returning their pedal boards back to their initial purposes. Now is this down to an eroded electronic underground, the fact the only safe radio station to play in a non-media day job office scenario has become 6music, or that if producers are now also video creators, bands are just a bit more… filmable? Video does work best when some action is happening in the frame, I'll give you that.
What do we film from here? What happens when even the most camera shy are harangued into delivering blow by blow reports of their M&S sandwich on the train to a gig at Patterns nightclub Brighton? A nation of unwilling vox pops, decreed to be necessary by server barons and reinforced via web PR gurus, all vying for the same audience, one that surely by now isn’t interested at all and actually has to get back to creating side hustle content themselves. As the major news channels and late night talk shows crowded Youtube and pushed similar independent channels deeper into the algorithm, the advent of artists such as Dua Lipa creating their own content side hustles should worry any small artist looking to capitalise on another of their passions.
We’re all interested in other people's lives and passions, this is true, but we really do not have enough time to split everyone's daily behind the scene’s updates. Content for contents sake, with no real ideation behind them. The internet is already filled literally to global breaking point with that from yer Youtubers, Twitch streamers etc., do we need music artists to do the same? If we must share output to stay relevant, can it not at least be genuine? Or even just weird?
Influencers are flown to Dubai in fine fashion, we all know it’s bullshit, they know it’s bullshit – and still the money flows. The Russian word Vranyo, when everyone knows they are lying, and they know you know, but we all just go along with it, seems fitting for most online content . Although, if you have the choice of monetising posts about bukkake scat parties or mimosas in the sanctioned beachfront alcohol zone, I’d show the world my non-shitty bits too.
In times gone, artists would play gigs to promote their new records, as that was where the money was. Then that paradigm flipped as records became less reliably bankable, so records were produced to acquire gigs and start tours. Now, artists and DJs create short form video content to promote their gigs and releases. How long before the polarisation flips again and we’re playing the gigs to promote the Patreon?
(Photograph of Aoki with slabbed records by Brad Heaton)
///VINYL BU-CAKEY WITH AOKI AND CHUMS
Since we started SKILL ISSUE there have been several topics that we feel we were uniquely positioned to tackle, but we should’ve known that our spirit animal and guiding light, Steven Hiroyuki Aoki, would be intrinsically linked to an emerging market we were yet to catch wind of. Between apologising for late record postage, Aoki pops up on the Discogs sidebar, and what’s he got in his hands?
It’s an album, but not as we know it. It's a highly sought after blue/purple copy of Hardcore Punk band Gorilla Biscuits – Start Today, worth between £200 and £550, but it’s encased in a see-through hard plastic case and It has been graded an ‘8 EXCELLENT’ out of 10, not by the online menswear brand Pitchfork, but by Audio Media Grading, another sure sign of the vinyl age being completely done, and one Aoki is personally invested in.
For the small price of (at least) $75, you can seal your prized album never to be heard again. An unbreakable slab, suitable for a post-catastrophe archive, as a record of humanities artistic achievements. Is he saving his Gem-mint shiny Charizards and first pressing of The Chronic for future children to marvel over in their lead-lined subterranean school rooms, or to barter with the local Nestle water Baron once the droughts start? In fact, archiving is the name they give the process on the website, a noble endeavour for Steve to pursue as we all collectively sense collapse may be close. Or, of course, they could be used as an asset to be bought and sold and speculated on. Something to covet, not enjoy. To enjoy the idea of the thing more than the function of the thing, I don’t imagine Gorilla Biscuits would think it was very punk.
Bafflingly, AMG isn't the only vinyl grading service, with a handful of grading companies vying to be the industry standard. Michael Harwood from rival Vintage Media Grading was explaining their own process on record collecting podcast ‘The Vinyl Guide’. He explains the difficulty in grading records compared to comics / cards:
“There’s no doubt that one of the barriers of entry to grading or authenticating records is their complexity…with the pressings often times, you’ll see on discogs – you have a sealed album in your collection…but most likely you’re not going to know the pressing, if the album is sealed. “
The problem with records is they can be pressed in different places and with varying quality. Even when record companies had their own pressing plants, the ubiquitousness of records meant that records were queued up wherever they had capacity to print in time for release day. Printing variations from misaligned layouts or reused middle discs, black / colour variants, the list goes on and these are all very hard to find without opening the record fully. Then you get to audio quality and the prisoner’s dilemma of grading for sound. For Vintage Media Grading, the answer to how to grade the audio quality of their discs is they simply don’t do it.
“In too many cases it’s a lot like two different teachers give different grades to somebody, were really trying to create consistency, objectivity and reliability and it’s just very difficult to do with playtesting,” Michael says. “Our grade is more the visual appeal of an album, and the descriptive nature of the providence of an album rather than the sound.” And for the over 50% of record collectors who now only buy records to display as art, who fucking cares if the sealed 8.0 copy of Blonde on the wall has a heat bubble that put a skip in track two. But as any Discogs seller would tell you, visually grading records is a road to an inbox full of nitpicky corrections and probably a few refunds.
There are shared traits for all popular art collectors. They are, by and large, rooted in a sincere and deep love for the mediums involved, as well as the creators who regularly change the course of people’s lives. Most collectors play or read their prized pieces, treating them with the care they deserve whilst still enjoying the art, but throw in light trauma and heavy aversion to therapy and you’ve got a collection. Throw in a global crisis and a fair bit of regression, and you’ve got a speculative bubble brewing.
Nostalgic speculation within comics culture exploded in late 2020/ 2021, a mixture of wall-to-wall Marvel and DC products lined up for the streamers, the US ‘Covid Cheque’, and YOLO meme coin fortunes converted into mint Pokémon cards and superheroes - or more specifically their first appearances, slabbed by grading company CGC and usually given a 9.8 out of 10. Silver and Bronze age key issues exploded in value, with speculation for every Z list character joining a cinematic universe fueling the fire. Blue Chip characters and their appearances became commodities: Incredible Hulk 181 (first full appearance of Wolverine) went from $31k in 2019 to $100k in 2022. But the last sale on Heritage, a large high-value collectibles auctioneers, was $72k, and one sold last year on ebay for $11k. Marvel and DC put out stinker after stinker and the bubble burst. Most issues are down to pre 2020 prices and Diamond, historically the biggest comics distributor, has filed for bankruptcy. It’s gotten so bad Jim Lee is back on interiors for Batman, a true recession indicator.
Records as a category never really go through speculation frenzies, with everything tied to individual experience and continually pressed according to demand, a fan can enjoy the music and love their copy of a 25th pressing as similarly as someone with a test pressing. That’s not to get into the aura farming streaming services. There are ridiculously rare records that should never be played again, acetates, dubs, private press and anthropological recordings – most of which have probably already been archived. But popular music feels worse to slab than comic books, which is at least a visual medium printed on flimsy paper.
It seems to me an incredibly niche service with huge flaws and assumptions in the actual grading process. Hopefully centralised record grading stays niche - the last thing the record industry is an overinflated bubble driven by the least cool Aoki (seriously check his dad out), who, at 47, really should be thinking more about Benihana than how many of his records he wants to display next to his first edition Charizard.
///WHAT WE’VE BEEN PLAYING
Where we will shout out anything that's been resonating lately, regardless of format or release date. Because there's not enough time in the world to keep up with everything.
Lost Records: Bloom and Rage
Don’t Nod, 2025, available on all platforms
I really want to enjoy the Life is Strange games. But as much as I might consider myself an emotionally intelligent modern man, there’s an earnestness to them which I find extremely off-putting. “Surely a softboi like me should find something to like here” I’d think as I snaked my way through dialogue trees and fractured relationships. “Surely I don’t need my games to feature dual wielding and wall-running to have a good time?” But it never clicked. It wasn’t too far into the story that I found myself wiping it from my hard-drive and embracing the visceral comforts of zombie-killing and military strategy games.
So why is it that Lost Records: Bloom and Rage, the new game from the original Life Is Strange developers Don’t Nod, has clicked so much? It’s not the gameplay, which remains minimal, walking, talking, looking around and soaking up the environment. And it’s certainly not the emotional earnestness, which remains, albeit rendered much more aesthetically pleasingly. What I didn’t like about Life is Strange was its portrayal of teenage lives, which never rang true to me.
This is not true of Lost Records. The game takes place over two time periods: in the present day, a group of middle aged women meet up for the first time in decades to discuss the event that led to them distancing themselves from each other. This took place over the summer of 1995. which makes up the vast majority of gameplay hours.
It’s the accuracy of these lengthy flashback sequences that make the game so appealing. The four teenage girls are so teenage it hurts: from acne, awkward early expressions of queerness, and the process of learning to love your body in a world that tells you not to. Whilst I know there are a host of smaller games that tell stories like this, this is certainly the first time a studio with a budget has dipped its toes into this world.
These are all portrayed brilliantly, but it’s the cultural context in which the four girls live that really sells the experience. It’s littered with references, some are hard to spot, like the custom car number plates of The Craft, The X Files and the NIN album Downward Spiral. But some are explicitly part of the story - a major factor pulling these four together is their love of the Riot Grrrl movement, especially Bikini Kill, and we follow their attempts to start a punk band in a small town in Michigan.
I won’t go too far into examples here, not because they’re spoilers as such, but simply because the dopamine released in my brain upon discovering another one always hit brilliantly and I don’t want to rob anyone of that experience. The important thing is they were all believable - this is what these characters would have been watching, reading, listening too. And whilst my teenage years did not take place until nearly a decade after, they reminded me so viscerally of my own experiences and those of the people I knew.
The present day is told in first-person, and flashbacks in third-person, a smart creative decision that really helps to nail that nostalgia. This is not a game I’d recommend to everyone, and in all honesty I spent a good portion of my time playing annoyed at the glacial pace at which events were unfolding and the teasing way the plot's supernatural elements were slowly revealed. But the closing minutes of the first of the game's two episodes landed an emotional gut punch which forced me to recontextualise much of what I had seen previously, and I was all in once again.
That’s it for SKILL ISSUE #16! Do get in touch at skillissuecrew@gmail.com with any thoughts and please, if you’re into it, tell your similarly-minded mates and help get the word out.
Thanks, friends. Always check behind waterfalls, start with a half and remember:
