Month: June 2025

I have to ask: is everyone else getting as many spam texts as I am pretending to be recruiters that want to talk about getting you a new job? For the past few weeks, I’m getting three or four of them a day, and they’re all pretty much the same: variations on “Hi, I’m [made-up name here], a recruiter for [made-up company here]. I’m really sorry to just text, but we have an opening that I think you’d be perfect for,” and then a description of a job that I am almost certainly not only not a good fit for, but in most cases, not even vaguely in the same line of work as. Day after day after day, they come in, and that’s been the case for awhile now.

There’s probably some kind of study to be done in the format and subject of spam messages and phishing hoxes. What does it say about where we all are now that trying to get you work is the topic that the spammers have decided is most likely to lure people in and get them to reveal information about themselves? (Nothing good, I’m sure; people are so desperate for gigs that they’d fall for this kind of thing?) What made the Nigerian Prince who wanted to share his wealth fall out of favor? It can’t just be that everyone collectively wised up and started making jokes about it — we were doing that when those messages were still coming in.

There was a point where the spam texts used to be far more vague that I was fascinated by. They’d come into your inbox with these entirely meaningless messages like, “Hey, are you still up for that thing Saturday?” and I’d immediately think, I don’t recognize this number and I am never up for anything on Saturday, who could even fall for this? before realizing that the answer was “people with active social lives, not like you, you loser.” But I loved how empty and low-effort those messages were. “Wanna get coffee?” Nope, never. If you know me, you’d know that. “I’m going hiking this weekend, can you recommend some trails?” was one of my favorites.

Now, though, it’s job offers. On the one hand, I appreciate the flattery aspect of the whole thing: Oh, this is a job you think I’d be perfect for? That’s so nice! Thank you! I also just end up worrying about the recruiting industry if these kinds of texts are in anyway representative of what it’s actually like out there, and all the recruiters are actually very apologetic people chosing entirely the wrong people for these positions and then telling them via text. Whatever happened to email? Am I just too old now?

Of course, there’s also the horrifying possibility that I’m the only person receiving these kinds of messages and they’re not spam. What if I really am ideal for all these jobs, and I’m just deleting each and every text thinking it’s fake? What kind of life am I passing up by not agreeing to be the head of an advertising and branding agency that specializes in pet food?!?

I’m (more slowly than I’d want) working my way through Bob Stanley’s Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! The Story of Pop Music from Bill Haley to Beyoncé, with my progress slowed down by a tendency to add songs mentioned to playlists and really try to sit with some of the threads and sounds he’s writing about. (I have a newfound appreciation of Wanda Jackson as a result, if nothing else.)

I’m still stuck on a line from the very start of the book, however, when Stanley makes a stab at defining what makes a pop song — or pop anything, for that matter: “Pop needs an audience that doesn’t know the artist personally,” he argues. “It needs to be transferable.” I read that, and I thought, that’s it.

I love pop, as a concept; I don’t know if that’s something that comes from being British — I always think of “pop” as a concept that’s far more popular for British people than Americans, for some reason — or because I grew up in the 1990s with Britpop and Trip-Hop being all the rage, or even because I went to art school and had that background to deal with. Whatever the reason, I’ve always enjoyed the idea of art created for the masses and the potential it has to shape people’s opinions and change people’s minds; I’ve always been curious about things that shouldn’t have gone mainstream but did, and also things that were purpose-built to sell out and utterly failed as a result. One of the finest joys of pop culture as a whole is the surprise of it all: when the audience en masse doesn’t do what’s expected and what happens afterwards.

Throughout all of this, though, I’ve found myself caught up in how to define “pop” to people who ask for a definition of what, to me, has traditionally been indefinable; “pop” has been something I’ve felt or instinctively understood on a level I struggled to explain. Stanley’s definition comes the closest to something that works for me, even if I think he’s more broad in his thinking than I might be. (I’m a snob in certain ways, I admit.)

It nonetheless touches on the idea that many things can be pop that aren’t immediately obvious; visual artwork or graphic design, for one. Graffiti, for another. Anything that’s a message in a bottle to a world where someone wants to reach a stranger and see what happens.

We’re all pop, deep down, perhaps.

Perhaps it’s my job, or perhaps it’s simply who I am, but I think about ways to communicate a lot. I read more than my fair share of newsletters these days, for example, and spend my day — for my job, I promise! — online scrolling through the internet for information. In years past, I practically lived on social media or listening to podcasts, although my fervor for both has dimmed significantly as both spaces became overwhelmed by right wing voices that were more interested in demonizing everyone that wasn’t like them, and profiting from it. (I know a bunch of people who’d disagree with me about that characterization; they’re wrong.)

I think about the voices we put on for our different spaces, and the ways in which people write for newsletters or personal blogs are different from other spaces. The me I am “here” is more digressive, and less definitive than the one I am while working, for example, and less likely to make a cheap joke to close things out. (Well, I hope so at least; bad jokes are ingrained in who I am no matter where, however.) This is the space where the Elliott Smith line about being “not uncomfortable feeling weird” lives, which is fully not something I can embrace in professional spaces.

Different people flourish in these different spaces, to my eye, finding voice in a way they can’t otherwise. I’m fascinated by that — by the empowerment that different formats and outlets provides to different people, and seeing who finds themselves in each new incarnation. I think back to what it felt like doing Wait, What? with Jeff for more than a decade, and how that felt like a different thing to every other way I presented myself online, and how freeing it was; to this day, I recommend podcasting to people whose minds work certain ways because of the opportunities it presents that writing literally can’t.

I read something recently that suggested that the written word was authoritative, whereas the spoken word was conversational, and that the difference is something that needs to be considered more seriously as we move into a post-literate society; it’s an idea that’s been lodged in my mind ever since, as I play with it and try to work out what to do with it.

I don’t believe it fully, of course — social media is written, and inherently conversational and non-definitive, surely — but there’s definitely something to it that I’m trying to unpack. Am I trying to find a way to make my preference (Writing) do something that is better handled in spoken word form? Am I a square peg, trying to find a way to fit into a round hole? And how am I supposed to deal with the very idea of a post-literate society, anyway…?

The local bar just down the street has started to have bands playing every Friday and Saturday night during the summer. No matter how cold it might be — Portland Spring means that the weather can go anywhere from that’s really nice, actually to why do we need heavy coats again, it’s fucking June at a moment’s notice — around 7 o’clock each of those nights each week, we get the soundcheck starting up, and then somewhere close to 8, the bands start up.

It’s a weirdly nostalgic, pleasant experience hearing it all from inside the house each time. We’re close enough, and the bands are loud enough, that we get more or less the entire show no matter what — I had the weird experience of having to turn up a horror movie one night because I couldn’t hear the blood-curdling screams, the music was so loud — but it’s that kind of distorted version where everything’s kind of bass-heavy, and the vocals are echoing and indistinct. Given the types of bands (and especially vocalists) that are invited, the odds that the night will be soundtracked that resembles nothing so much as a Pearl Jam dub remix are high.

The nostalgic part of it all is very specific; for reasons I can’t completely decipher, every time it happens, I’m reminded of living in Aberdeen when I was a student and walking home after seeing friends, past pubs where bands would be playing and you wouldn’t hear anything properly, just this muddy hum of almost-music and occasional applause that I’d walk past as my teeth were chattering.

The music is nothing alike — there aren’t so many Britpop wannabes in Portland in 2025, unsurprisingly. Although, it’s been 30 years; someone is probably planning on reviving it again momentarily. But the feeling is the same, somehow; the sense of… almost the opposite of FOMO, if that makes sense: taking pleasure in other people’s pleasure of being in that musical moment, even if it’s very much not my particular thing. Knowing that the dull thud of the drums and the meandering bassline is thrilling the audience in question, and smiling everytime the song ends and there’s a breath before an inevitable cheer.