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MySpace, the leading social network from the pre-Facebook days, has accidentally (?) deleted more than a decade’s worth of music. Every piece of music uploaded to the platform between 2003 and 2015, some 50 million songs from 14 million artists, is gone like tears in the rain. This is an important lesson: digital does not… [more]
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Every Friday for more than two years, The Root has responded to reader emails and comments. Last week, it only replied to one. In a powerful piece of writing, Michael Harriot responds to a teacher who feels that “the rhetoric has grown increasingly anti-white, especially from the black community.” The email is long, but here’s… [more]
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In the aftermath of the Christchurch terrorist attack, every newspaper has been asking the same question: how did this happen? It’s a mystery. How could anti-muslim terror occur in part of the world where Rupert Murdoch’s newspapers ran 2,981 anti-muslim articles in a single year? Of course, Murdoch’s media empire isn’t just antipodean. He controls… [more]
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Thomas Page McBee regularly writes about his experiences as a trans man. On Them.us he writes about the tension between wanting to be masculine and wanting to avoid toxic masculinity, and there are some really engaging ideas in the piece. I particularly liked this bit. I have another body within this body — we all… [more]
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I’m not usually affected by news events but the terrorist attacks in Christchurch had me in tears this morning. As if the events weren’t horrific enough, the Daily Mail, the Daily Mirror and The Sun have all put auto-play video from one of the terrorists’ cameras on their front page and surrounded it with adverts… [more]
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Last year, lesbian women used the #LwiththeT hashtag to declare solidarity with trans people. Now it’s the men’s turn, with an open letter proudly labelled #GwiththeT. Stonewall: In solidarity with the hashtag #LWithTheT that sprung up last summer, the outpouring of support for the #GWithTheT movement and support from all parts of LGBT communities shows that… [more]
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This is Maria, who you may recognise from the 1927 sci-fi classic Metropolis. I met her at the weekend, and if you pop along to the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh you can meet her too. She’s one of the attractions in the museum’s robots exhibition, which is great fun – there’s a Terminator!… [more]
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My life isn’t all glamorous launches and rock concerts, you know. Sometimes I’ll stay in and read a book, usually a music one. Here are a few recent reads: Breaking Down the Walls of Heartache: How Music Came Out by MARTIN ASTON This is incredible. It’s the queer equivalent of Revolution In The Head, an… [more]
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One of the weird things about doing creative things is that your feelings oscillate wildly. One minute you’re the greatest, most talented human being who ever lived; the next, you’re in a corner weeping about how worthless you are as you set fire to your latest creations. There’s rarely any middle ground. I don’t write… [more]
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I went to the launch of SWIM yesterday. SWIM, Scottish Women Inventing Music, is a collective of women from across the music industry: performers and promoters, managers and marketers, DJs and drum techs. It was brilliant. The day was a mix of formal panel discussions, informal networking and the presentation of a lifetime achievement award… [more]
Read me in books
My debut memoir, Carrie Kills A Man, was a Scotsman book of the year and Damian Barr’s Literary Salon book of the week, and it was shortlisted for the 2023 British Book Awards book of the year in the Discover category.
My latest book, Small Town Joy, is a celebration of queer influences on and queer artists in Scots music and is out now.
I’m also a contributor to the excellent anthology Fierce Salvage, which is also out now.
