The very long 90s (Week Notes, 9, 2025)

What is Music Podcast — the REM season

What is Music? is a podcast that does deep dive discographies on one band at a time. The overall approach is serious-fun: Adam Scott Glasspool is the show runner, and he brings a lot of well-researched structure to discussions backed by music theory and some beautifully expressed pop analysis. Adam's very funny but is essentially the straight man of a three-way comedy conversation with his mates, Steve Murphy and Lucas Way, who he gently educates each week.

The current season began in November 2023 and it covers the work of REM — tomorrow (Monday 3rd) will bring down the curtain on the band's final studio album, Collapse into Now. The season should run a little past that, as there will be a mop up of compilations and so forth, as well as final thoughts, but it feels worth marking things here, with Michael Stipe's cheeky wave goodbye.

This has been my first season of the show, as I was drawn in purely for REM. I came in late (I think the guys were already up as far as Monster), caught up quickly and have since been thoroughly impatient for new episodes to drop. I've always loved REM, but this podcast has really opened the band and their records up for me in new ways—like when you add a drop of water to a great whisky.

If you like REM (or the Manics, Radiohead, Muse, Billie Eilish, Lauryn Hill...) this show is well worth your time. And if you like this, Luke O'Neil's collection of REM fans writing about their 5-favourite REM songs is too.

More topically, Bill, Mike, Peter, and Michael appeared on stage together this week — oh my heart.

Frickin lasers

HP's printing as a service product gets a bad rap, but I've been using it for a long time now and it's generally been fine. Did I pay more for ink than I could have done? I guess. But did I ever need to rush out and get some ink so I could print something? No. And did I really miss the four quid a month it cost? In the grand scheme of family outgoings, it was fine.

I honestly think it's a good product for someone who does modest amounts of printing and wants things to just work. However, we're printing more at home now, inkjets are slow, and the current machine is becoming erratic.

Nilay Patel's Best Printer article for The Verge remains my favourite tech review, and I have followed those instructions to the letter:

just buy whatever Brother laser printer is on sale and never think about printers again.

Mopping up books

I have had a few half finished books knocking around that I cleared house on.

How the Railways Will Fix the Future: Rediscovering the Essential Brilliance of the Iron Road, by Gareth Dennis.

My interest in transport policy is pretty casual, and I stopped following the history of the railways at the end of my GCSE module on the Industrial Revolution (so, 1990 for them, 1995 for me), so how did I end up here reading this?

Gareth Dennis appears on all the great podcasts (unofficial sixth mic on Trashfuture and now a series regular on Well There's Your Problem) to talk at length about trains, and why they're like that. He's an incredible communicator of railway and transport policy, and not afraid to say what he thinks is right.

So how did I end up reading this? I guess Gareth just got me train pilled.

If you've been following his work for some time, this a pretty comforting compilation of best bits, if you're new to Gareth's line of thought, here's some of what you'll get:

• an interesting overview of rail history, that veers between the political economy and the social and cultural.
• a passionate call to protect and enhance railways, by putting them at the heart of a sustainable, green economy.
• an interesting and nuanced argument around technology.

On that last point, Dennis is an engineer and he loves technology; he loves how the railway balances a simple idea that barely changes (steel wheels on iron rails) with well thought out innovations, but he also offers strong critiques of the less useful transport technologies and white elephants that are holding the railway back (over automation of railway labour, the pursuit of self-driving and electric cars) as well as the educational ideology of STEM which he sees as counterproductive to the very real human and ethical work of engineering the future of railways. Here's a decent review that expands these points.

The Nineties & I Wear The Black Hat by Chuck Klosterman.

Just going to lump these two together as they circle a lot of the same material. The Nineties is a history of the longest damn decade we ever had. It's a fun nostalgia bath, but it is very US-centric (because Mr Klosterman is American, that's fair enough) which does mean that some chapters flew past in a haze of disinterest (it's hard to build some big thesis off the back of US college sports if you want it to land outside of the States). The most fun parts were the more universal western pop culture and Internet narratives.

I Wear The Black Hat dwells a lot on things from the 90s too. It's a study of what villainy is, and it looks at a number of situations to discuss who was the baddie, and why they might have got away with not being vilified. My main note on this is how sad it was to read this in the current moment. Written in 2013, Klosterman builds the book from a place where he feels secure in the USA's position as the on-balance good guy, and where he can see a narrative of liberal progress that marches into forever. I'll leave that hanging ominously here.