First and foremost we write, photograph and make stuff about music.
In the same way that on the day the European Referendum result was announced we didn’t post anything on the site, today it all feels inconsequential. Anything we’d planned on June 24th was dwarfed, and today it feels a bit weird talking about anything else.
We’d probably just do that again, except, we probably regret that a bit. Instinctively, inactivity feels wrong and useless.
So, today, like yesterday, we’re going to continue to post about music we love.
And while America has made a choice we fiercely oppose, day in day out we write about Americans making challenging, enlightening, interesting art that resonates with us.
Today, we’ll all read a lot of negativity about America and its people – big sweeping, generalised statements about the country’s naivety, idiocy, bigotry, stupidity. The same things were presumed about the whole of the UK the day after the referendum.
We don’t pretend to be authorities on politics but we are engaged. So when we thought this morning about how should we handle this unexpected day we quickly ruled out our referendum approach of shutting down, not least because if there’s one person we don’t want to make us feel insensitive and inconsequential it’s Donald Trump.
So if all we do today is point some people in the direction of these great, creative Americans we’ve met this year, at least that’s something.
As you can see, they’re of all genders, races, backgrounds, ages and communities.
Maybe we’ll write this post again in four years time and it’ll be very different, maybe it won’t, and maybe you’ll spend the next 24 hours listening to the music of Sassy Black or Anohni or Mitski or Allan Kingdom. We’re celebrating those Americans today, because it’s so easy to tar a whole nation and one decision with the same brush – something that America’s new president knows too well.
