Let Go and Haul: thrifting, the social media party, pirate radio
Week 13, 2018 – Brooklyn
Journey: where we’re at
Hi fam! This email is a day late because I spent most of my weekend doing grant writing for the second phase of NSF stuff. I’ve never actually written a grant before so this was harder and took longer than I thought it was going to. Learnings!
We have been on a mission to make our studio feel cozy now that we got a sweet spot with enough room to not be on top of each other which has been a fun little side project. One of the creators in our community, Barry, who is also a professional thrifter has been helping us out with this and brought us a sweet haul from Connecticut where everything is cheaper, especially if it is second hand. Pix coming soon! Barry and his outfit Thrift Lift is the place for all your vintage needs!
Journal: what I learned
I got some cool responses to last week’s email about advice to my younger self, acquiring professional polish and being like the Pink Floyd prism of personality.
I got this question in response:
“How do you personally manage different personalities on different social media?”
Great one. So stressful isn’t it? In one of our creator focus groups, we asked how many Instagram accounts they averaged (this is JUST Insta, people – we’re not even talking across all socmed) and the answer? FIVE.
A related insight is once I was talking to a creator about finstas, and he was just like yeah – all the “kids” younger than him who grew up with social media their entire lives just inherently knew they needed a safe place to be themselves. Preach.
Honestly, I’m not sure I’m super good at it because these days I feel like I barely have time to post let alone look at social media (and I feel kind of frustrated with all of it), but I’m going to try to answer this anyway, since it is something I’ve been thinking about a lot recently especially in relation to the company’s social media presence.
Similar to the white light/crystal metaphor from last week, you probably want to show some different vibes in different places. LinkedIn and Instagram, pretty different versions of yourself probably. Unless it doesn’t make sense for them to be; depends on what you do. I think the main question to ask with each one is: “why am I here?”
If you think of each platform like a party, and you can answer the “why am I here?” that helps a lot. Are you there for networking? The fun? Just to be seen? Because your friends are? To answer this question, you need to know what the party is about, which means understanding the vibe.
Knowing the vibe of a party is usually the first thing we try to figure out when like, getting dressed for it. It’s probably also going to influence our conversations. Sometimes, it’s not so easy to understand the vibe of a new party, especially if it’s different from anything you’ve ever been to. For example. I know exactly what clothes to pull out of my closet for a techno party in BK and exactly which friends to text. If someone like, invited me to Wimbledon I would definitely be at a loss. I think you wear a… hat? So, hang out a bit, make sure you understand the vibe first. Talk to some people who know that party really well, get some info from them. Based on that, figure out how you want to present yourself and try out a few different moves. Once you catch the vibe and you feel comfortable you can ask yourself the question “why am I here?” and I bet which aspect of your personality to show off most is going to be clear. You might have different goals at different parties. One might be about your main job, the other might be a side hustle. That’s cool, it’s pretty rare anyone is going to look at your ‘tent across different socmed in one sitting unless, they are considering hiring you.
I used to worry about this stuff so much more. I would be so concerned that a post would live forever on the internet and I was writing my life in stone or something. Sharing felt so heavy and deliberate. Once I started treating every platform like a party, a lossy medium, where when I leave and close the door, I am literally not thinking about the conversation there until I go back through that door, everything changed. I started treating it much more like a regular conversation that gets forgotten and moved on from and idk, it got a lot easier to experiment and eventually, catch the vibe :)
Jams: what I’m into
Radio, radio, radio. I’m having a serious breakup with Spotify right now. It just feels so… impersonal and lonely. There are no real people in it, I can’t talk to anyone about music, I’m not connecting with any humans there. It’s just a sterile black box I can press play on. The novelty of my personalized recommendations has worn off and I just feel like I’m sucking up the feed of recommendations delivered to me on Mondays and Fridays and well, shit, that is a boring way to live.
Instead, I’ve gone back to my favorite stations from when I lived in the UK (if you’re not familiar with the history of pirate radio in the UK, get on that!) as well as a few new ones since then! Pirate radio and the ethos around it shaped so much of my early adult life – I think it’s one of the reasons I feel so strongly about UGC.
“What do you do if radio stations aren't playing your sound? Start broadcasting it yourself.”
Here are the radio stations I’m listening to instead of Spotify:
Rinse FM: London. The original grime/dubstep (not the American kind) station
NTS: Hackney, London. Super diverse. Two stations. “Don’t Assume”
dejavufm: London. House, UK garage, reggae, grime
Point Blank FM: West London. Underground dance, house
Radio 6: UK. The BBC’s “digital” station, weirder stuff. Not yer pop charts.
G 98.7 – Toronto.“The Way We Groove” Caribbean, African, RnB, soul, hiphop
K-100: Atlanta. Up and coming hip hop, impressive community on Twitter
Soulection: Los Angeles. The chillest future RnB. Soundcloud & Beats1
Hot 97: New York. This is always the station I ask for in the uber lol. Hiphop.
👉Get em all: tunein.com 👈