Alex Brown occupies a unique and wide-reaching place on social media, in music criticism, and among meme culture writ large. A former college radio show host, Brown also wrote lots for Tiny Mix Tapes before its hiatus. He also runs an (I think hilarious, innovative, post-Boomer) Instagram meme account and plays saxophone for the Asheville, NC–based quartet Space Heater.
I think describing memes—and what makes them good, funny, etc.—sounds stupid and trite, so instead I’ve included some of them in this post and linked Brown’s social media below.
Last month, I corresponded with Alex over email to discuss his musical and internet background, COVID, supporting Black artists, and more. Below is the (slightly-edited) transcript of our interview.
Follow Alex Brown on Instagram at @aaaalexbrown or on Twitter at the same handle.
Nicole Collins: How has your quarantine been?
Alex Brown: I just moved from Asheville, North Caroline to Raleigh three-ish weeks ago with my girlfriend, and moving during quarantine has been kinda weird/surreal. But everything is kind of weird/surreal right now, especially since all the protests started. We live downtown and have gone to protests, including the first one, in which the majority of the looting happened. Now there’s a curfew in place so a lot of protests are during the day, but we’re still hearing stun grenades go off late at night. It’s all just very odd and surreal. On that Saturday we went we got hit with the tear gas and during the ensuing scramble I ran into the first person I know around here, and we were both kinda caught in the chaos sort of pouring water on our faces, and it was just a hi-bye sort of thing. Other than that I haven’t really seen anyone I know in person aside from my girlfriend.
Anyway, when I’m home I’m reading a lot, like everyone else I’m online more than ever which is saying something, watching old episodes of MTV’s Challenge (which I highly recommend if you enjoy 2000s trash TV) when I’m trying to briefly get away from all the tragedy. But I’m trying to be active as I can and educate myself, being open to correction when I make mistakes, trying not to get in the way of black organizers leading the way. In any case, I’m excited to be in Raleigh, I like the triangle a lot. It’s just a really chaotic time and hard to think long term right now.
NC: How did you start making memes? What is the origin of your account on Instagram?
AB: I’ve sort of always made memes off and on, just not consistently. Like, back around 2010 or so when those Reddit meme formats were going around—Bad luck brian, college campus freshman, etc. with the block text top and bottom—I remember making those and just posting them on facebook groups and stuff. But everyone did that kind of. I feel like “meme accounts” didn’t really start becoming huge like they are now until maybe 2015 or so, at least not on Instagram. And back then it was just mostly spillover from Twitter (which I like a lot better than Instagram, believe it or not). Anyway, in like 2017 I was working at a day job I absolutely loathed for minimum wage, literally folding boxes for fancy chocolates to be sold to rich people. It was a pretty low point for me actually. And it was such mindless labor, often without talking to anyone, that I would just think all day. So I was feeling really cynical about life, plus having a lot of time to think, and that’s kinda the basic recipe for humor or whatever. I just started having ideas for memes and posting them and getting a lot of likes. And likes feel really good…. It’s a very basic human instinct, I think, to want more likes. If someone says they don’t want a ton of likes on they’re Instagram post they’re either lying or in the small minority haha. It’s kinda narcissistic to admit, but it’s the reality we’re living in, right? We all want self-affirmation constantly, and back then I was so stuck and depressed that it felt good so I kept doing it. I guess giving people a laugh felt good too. And in a way, when I switched to memes instead of lifestyle posts and selfies, it created some distance between my day to day life and Instagram, and took some pressure away from the self-presentation that’s so central to social media. Which feels almost subversive with regard to the way it’s intended to be used. It’s kinda paradoxical, actually, because I just said that I enjoy getting a lot of likes, but at the same time, now I care a lot less when I post memes that barely get any likes whatsoever, because it feels less personal. So anyway, memes just very quickly became a creative outlet for me, a way to express ideas and humor, which I found out I like doing a lot more than making myself look attractive or cool online, and I guess I’m better at it too.
NC: For how long have you been writing music criticism? What made you get into it? Whom have you written for? What are some of your favorite pieces you’ve written?
AB: I was first given the opportunity at WXYC, UNC Chapel Hill’s student radio station. This mainly entailed writing short blurbs on the covers of CDs and records for the sake of description for on-air DJs. I think there were other spaces for reviews (blogs, emails) but that’s what I did most, quite a lot of them. Anyway, a few WXYC alumni have gone on to write for Tiny Mix Tapes (TMT), which has a sort of cult following in experimental circles. They were hiring the year after I graduated, so I applied and didn’t hear anything back for like 3 months. To my surprise they emailed me for an “interview” (it was a google form I think) and I started writing for the Chocolate Grinder, which was a section focused on lesser-known artists. They weren’t proper reviews, just blurbs, like 1-2 articles a week. Eventually I started writing longer form stuff and reviews. Tiny Mix Tapes is pretty much the only music publication I’ve written for, but since they’re on hiatus right now I’m trying to figure out another way to write, but, the journalism industry in general is completely dismal. I might start an email newsletter, a lot of my friends and former TMT writers are doing that. But it’s not the same as writing for a community. It’s really sad that music writing is continuing to deteriorate, but so goes the ebb and flow of media. Maybe something new will come along soon.
My favorite pieces I’ve written are my Triad God review and my 2010s decade essay Confronting Uncertainty: Consumption, code/spaces, and atemporality in the network age—both for TMT. The latter was probably the hardest I’ve ever worked on any writing, aside from maybe college theses. And my editor Marv (Mr P) was absolutely indispensable along the way. I’ve learned a lot from his guidance and the TMT community more broadly.
NC: Also—a lot of your posts revolve around literature/books (lotsa Pynchon…). Who are some of your favorite authors and what are you reading right now?
AB: It’s so hard to choose, I’m gonna look back on this and regret not saying some things but that’s how favorites go right? My favorite fiction writers ever are Tolstoy and George Eliot. Especially the latter, I really think she’s a giant of literature, and was extremely ahead of her time. For 20th century and contemporary: like you said, Pynchon, then… Mary McCarthy, Roberto Bolaño, Saul Bellow, Knausgaard, Susan Choi, Richard Wright. But I read way more nonfiction, at least lately, so for that: Modris Eksteins, Sontag, Mark Fisher, Woolf’s essays, anything published by Verso, anything published by zer0 books… Right now I’m primarily reading House of Government by Yuri Slezkine, which is the most academic history book I’ve read and I don’t understand like half of the writing so far to be honest. It’s about the Russian Revolution, which is a subject I don’t know much about but want to learn more. Also, for fiction, I’m re-reading White Tears by Hari Kunzru. Also I just started This is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality by Peter Pomerantsev, which I highly recommend for anyone interested in post-truth, misinformation, etc.
NC: You’ve mentioned a couple times the declining state of music journalism in general. How do you diagnose this? Is there a way out?
AB: When I say music journalism is deteriorating, I’m mostly talking about it in the context of the internet. As we all know, the internet has been growing less and less and less “democratic” the last decade—power has been consolidated into a handful of companies that control and/or facilitate our online experience(s). Not that it was perfect before, but it’s gotten worse. For example: Interacting “online” now involves a compulsory social media presence, individually in our private lives, but also in the commercial/organizational sphere. To not be on social media is to not be relevant. So in the music sector—particularly in music journalism—even if there’s a standalone website that people visit, all of that content will be channeled and distributed through social media. Pitchfork, Fader, Stereogum, all of the big names, they all have massive social media presence. And if I had to guess, a large chunk of their web traffic comes from redirects via Twitter, Facebook, etc. There are many, many implications there, but a major one is that a) the sites become more valuable as conduits for exposure and advertising, which means b) there is less focus on the writing itself, let alone the ideas and analysis, and less agency for the writers. The quality of the writing has gone down, the pay for writers has gone down, the boldness of their ideas has dwindled. And as a result people look at criticism as parasitic, and ultimately not an important ingredient in music culture. But music writing is indispensable. It’s sad to me—people running music websites invest less and less time on critical reflection and editing because that’s not what makes a music site valuable, and now there’s so much other business-oriented stuff to worry about. It’s all about capital, it’s the opposite of for-the-fans. And now Pitchfork might have a paywall at some point. That’ll become increasingly common, I think.
The blog circuit has disappeared, torrenting sites are dwindling, megaupload is gone, forums are less relevant, the big sites are in bed with Spotify and Apple Music, and all this power is being consolidated into fewer and fewer hands. It’s like, the things the internet might have improved about music, and indeed, at some point was improving—accessibility, more horizontal control and distribution of ideas—all of that has been appropriated and subverted by these huge tech companies. I don’t know if music journalism was perfect before all this manifested, but it’s certainly true that it could be a lot better without the chokeholds of e-commerce and the network imperialism of Facebook, Twitter, & Instagram. There needs to be a radically democratic restructuring of how the internet works and how it’s accessed, and I think the music industry should unite behind that cause.
NC: Can’t believe I forgot to ask this earlier. Who are some of your all-time favorite artists/genres/scenes? What music did you grow up with? What do you listen to now and how has that changed?
AB: Like anyone who is “into music” this is a pretty tough question for me. But I grew up fairly immersed in music—my dad is extremely musical, plays a lot of instruments, has a lot of records, was very encouraging of my musical interests as a child. By the time I was like 10 or so, illegal downloading was becoming really rampant, and the floodgates kinda went down from there, my dad showed me how to use Kazaa and LimeWire and I was just internet digging and downloading whatever in between playing Starcraft. I got into skateboarding too in middle school, which had a huge impact on my relationship to music and counterculture stuff. I loved downloading skate video soundtracks—Enjoi Bag of Suck, Foundation That’s Life, Baker 3, I listened to all those soundtracks endlessly in middle school. Later in high school I joined What.cd, a private torrent site that sadly got shut down in the mid 2010s, which was pretty much the Library of Alexandria of music. Living in a small Southern town I had never really heard much techno, ambient, noise, and just so many other genres and sounds. I downloaded so much stuff and a lot of my musical education came from that site and its forums. I later did college radio at WXYC in Chapel Hill, and that was an extremely quintessential part of my musical trajectory, both because of the music I was exposed to and the radio community. In college I’d say I was mostly interested in techno, house, club music. I was DJing pretty regularly at house parties and clubs, and I was co-coordinating WXYC’s dance music specialty show with some friends. After graduating I moved to Asheville and started working in a music venue called the mothlight (which sadly was forced to close last week in the midst of covid—so sad about that). There’s not much of a dance scene at all there, and though I DJ’d for a bit, it just wasn’t something I was interested in doing there, as the “dance” scene is virtually non-existent. I ended up moving into a house with some random people who would later become my very close friends and bandmates in Space Heater, a kind of prog-fusion band, I guess (I play sax). They’re all into a vast array of music, and besides being great friends, they’ve exposed me to some really amazing music and scenes. Fast forward—now I’m living in Raleigh with my girlfriend, been here about a month or so and since literally everything is on pause because of the pandemic, I have no idea what my trajectory will be here musically. Who knows.
NC: Also, I think this has become much more relevant since we began the interview: Who are some of your favorite Black artists (/who do you think the most important Black artists are right now) and what are some things music listeners can do, for their part, to help dismantle racism?
AB: I think Dean Blunt, Klein, and James Ferraro are extremely visionary artists and have probably had the biggest impact on how I perceive music, especially in the context of racism and capitalism.
As far as dismantling racism, the fundamental goal, of course, needs to be giving more power to black artists and black industry folks, and figuring out how to do that will take a lot of work. Reparations need to be a part of it, which is obviously an issue that extends far beyond music, but ideally would help balance the music industry.
In systemic terms, there needs to be less consolidation of money and resources at the top, more black people promoting and organizing and doing “behind the scenes” work instead of just having black artists tokenized on line ups. I think having more DIY spaces and better funding for community spaces is important too, because city DIY spaces, whether we like it or not, can definitely be part of the recipe for gentrification….But anyway it’s a huge, huge question that will require a vast amount of action and different narratives and analyses. A lot of it will take collectivization of course, but I suppose on an individual level, giving money to black artists and other black people—whether buying music, merch, art, whatever— is extremely important. Racism, both in the music industry and outside of it, is intimately linked to capitalism, and so money and redistribution of resources has to be central to the solution.
NC: I’m a huuuge Sontag and Verso fan so after you mentioned them in your last responses I realized I needed to ask: Favorite Sontag pieces/Verso books?
AB: Favorite Sontag is probably Against Interpretation, because it influenced my writing a lot. She was a visionary.
For Verso… The New Dark Age by James Bridle is an absolutely incredible book, it really hits the nail on the head in demystifying the current political climate and its connection to technology/the network/etc. One of the more important books I’ve read in the last couple years. I recommend it all the time.