January 2025

New music, new online lessons, new writing, and exciting China connections

January is the cruellest month. There is the bleak weather, being broke after Christmas, and the popular sacrifices that people put themselves through, for example Dry January. I managed to muddle through with some of the following.

Output

On my The Kev YouTube channel, I have started a new series titled Kevaoke, with instrumental versions of the songs:

This month’s releases also included a joke about a nun, and a new song about sexual freedom.

On my guitar YouTube channel, I uploaded four guitar lessons, on songs including ‘Everybody Hurts’ by R.E.M and ‘Far Away Boys’ by Flogging Molly.

In the past month, I also finished three essays, including one on why I think musical comedy is a serious artform. I also reproduced ‘The Naked Wedding’, which was my first ever short story to be published.

Activities

Paid work was never meant to be enjoyed, but even if I won the lottery, I would want to go to a workplace to fill my days. To write about the world, one first has to be part of it. For example, on Thursday afternoons, I attend a three-hour lecture on the subject of Genocide. This kind of work really helps look at issues with fresh insight.

As my China years disappear further into the past, and as the Western and Chinese internet are split in two, with very few bridges, I am still doing a lot to stay connected to the People’s Republic. I appeared on Dragon Voice radio, which is recorded in Greater Manchester, and uploaded two songs to Chinese platform Douyin, gaining tens of thousands of views and dozens of comments from people saying my Chinese lyrics were relatable.

My monthly online Chinese lesson was on a much-loved nineties Mandopop song:

I also appeared on Radio North Manchester’s Hannah’s Bookshelf discussing several books I recently read, including Booker Prize winner ‘Orbital’ by Samantha Harvey.

Wider World

In The Guardian, an opinion piece by Rebecca Shaw contained the headline “I knew one day I’d have to watch powerful men burn the world down – I just didn’t expect them to be such losers.” In his first successful run for American president in 2016, Donald Trump’s appeal was largely as an outsider and an anti-establishment candidate. This time he invited tech billionaires including Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Elon Musk to his inauguration.

Amazon has long had military contracts, and as well as big tech, there is ‘little tech’, which is rather misleadingly titled because it is worth billions. Palantir, whose founder Peter Thiel helped groom new vice president JD Vance for a political career, published a manifesto attacking the Pentagon’s established contracting practices and its reliance on corporate behemoths with cumbersome corporate structures.

In his final address, outgoing president Joe Biden warned of a ‘tech industrial complex’. Figures like Bezos, Thiel and Musk’s ties to the military and dependence on state power make a nonsense of the supposed libertarianism and aversion to military aggression of the new administration.

Symbolically, during the swearing in, TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew was seated next to Tulsi Gabbard, President Trump’s nominee for director of national intelligence. On a micro level, this means that the internet is becoming less a playground for nerds like it was thirty years ago and more a bot-generated, corporate-sponsored weapon of war … for nerds.