Night People is deliberately “the Mark Ronson book nobody asked for”. It is not about the super‑producer, winning Grammys, but about the working DJ who spent years “lugging crates into bars and nightclubs,” reading rooms and igniting the dance floor.

Throughout, Ronson is candid about drugs and nightlife excess. He provides accounts of mixing substances at Tunnel, accidentally taking heroin, watching people slip into K‑holes, and showing how thrilling and grim that world could be at the same time. He claims that it was anxiety and panic attacks that seemingly saved him from addiction.

The book is equally honest about the world of access and privilege he grew up in. From the rock‑star stepfather, Mick Jones, who was the lead guitarist in Foreigner, with crates of funk and soul he can quietly “borrow,” the mother who bought him Technics on condition he got into college, a trust‑fund safety net set up by his grandfather, and the general proximity to fame. With all this, Ronson is often modest about DJing and the side‑doors that this privilege seemingly opened, such as getting straight into Peter Gatien’s Club USA while others grind for years.

For most DJs, getting into Gatien’s clubs meant years of playing tiny bars and dimly lit backrooms before earning a spot at Club USA. I should have needed that long—building connections, making my way up gradually. Instead, I stumbled right into it. I already had advantages that most others didn’t. My mother bought me the gear. I was raised by a musician with a home studio. But this was an absurdly lucky break, even for me. The thought of playing Club USA was surreal. I felt way too green for such a big stage. But no way was I turning it down.

Source: Night People by Mark Ronson

What I found interesting about the book was how Ronson took us behind the decks of a seemingly lost art. He recounts the experience of buying his first decks at Rock and Soul, figuring out how it all works, learning to read different rooms and audiences, building sets by BPM on sticky labels, bombing, biting, improving, and slowly earning respect. I was particular interested in his experience phoning an older classmates, Manny Ames, for scratching lessons.

“You got any stickers?”
I scrambled for some Maxell cassette labels. He peeled them off casually and showed me how to mark up two copies of the same record by attaching the sticker from the center hole outward, like the needle on a compass.
“This way you’ll always know where you are visually while you’re running two records back and forth,” he said, sharing something both straightforward and mind-blowing.
The stickers allowed him to spin the record back to precise spots—2 o’clock, 7 o’clock, etc.—by tracking each revolution of the disc. Each position on the clock face corresponded to a specific sound: the kick drum might be at 3 o’clock, the snare hit at 9 o’clock, making it possible to consistently find and repeat any part of the beat.

Source: Night People by Mark Ronson

With this insight, Ronson demonstrates that success is hours, not magic.^[1] This included eight gigs a week, carrying endless demo tapes in his pocket, playing Tuesday nights in tiny rooms. Ronson calls out the place of effort and practice after watching DJ AM re-order lyrics using two records.

“Dude. How’d you learn that shit??!!” I asked, still trying to process.
“Man… just been in the crib watching old DMC battles and teaching myself the routines. Crazy what you can do when you quit smoking crack.” He gave a gallows chuckle and took a drag of his cigarette.
Looking at the scattered VHS tapes and overflowing ashtrays, I said, “I guess it helps you haven’t left this room in a year,” half joking, half in awe.

Source: Night People by Mark Ronson

With this recognition of effort, Ronson rues this lost world, an era where endless hours would be spent crate‑digging and obsessing over pressings and B‑sides. He contrasts this with his modern setup of a laptop running Serato. Although this change affords new creative possibilities and relief for his own aging body, but there is also something lost in working within the constraints of physical, story‑filled crates and mildew‑stained sleeves.

I haven’t DJed with records in years. Instead, I use Serato, software that lets me manipulate songs on my laptop via turntables and CD players. Instead of crates, I have a MacBook. My back thanks me, but the truth is, I’m not the DJ I used to be. Back then, limited by crate space, I’d sit on my apartment floor crafting my entire set beforehand, agonizing over every choice. Should I pack the hefty double-disc Classic Funk Mastercuts or the equally bulky Classic Jazz-Funk Mastercuts? Asking myself, will the crowd be funky or jazz-funky? Do I bring the Isley Brothers’ Go for Your Guns, with the all-time slow jam “Footsteps in the Dark (Parts 1 & 2),” or their album The Heat Is On, which has “Fight the Power” and “For the Love of You”? Now, with Serato, I rock up to the club with the entire history of music under my arm. But the sheer number of choices is paralyzing. With seconds left on Drake and Wizkid’s “One Dance,” I frantically scroll through thousands of tracks and land on “Ring of Fire” by Johnny Cash purely because the computer says they’re both 104 BPM. Meanwhile, these songs have as much in common as a goldfish and a lampshade.

Source: Night People by Mark Ronson

Along with insight into DJing, Ronson takes us into a pre‑gentrified New York, with grimy clubs, record stores, basements and lofts, club‑kid Times Square, and a nightlife ecosystem (promoters, doormen, record‑company promo guys, bouncers) that feels both hyper‑specific and now mostly gone.^[2] With this there is a lot of name dropping. However, it feels different in tone to say Moby’s memoir Porcelain as I would argue that Ronson is placing himself in other people’s orbit, not vice versa.

On side note, Ronson’s acknowledgments at the end of the book spell out his writing process in a way that could be seen to mirror his crate‑digging. Inspired by the realisation that memories and people were starting to fade, he interviewed hundreds of DJs, promoters, dancers, doormen, bouncers to reconstruct a vanished. However, more importantly, in calling out this process he recognises that the number of people and choices involved in any creative art. Something that it is easy to forget at times.

Overall, Night People provides an insight into not only Mark Ronson, but a world now seemingly lost. For me it sits alongside Damian Cowell’s podcast associated with the album Only the Shit You Love and Jarvis Cocker’s Good Pop, Bad Pop. Each have a penchant for the small incidental stories, always wary about getting too Glenn A Baker. Although he has discussed this world in the past (see his Crate Diggers interview for Fuse), the book goes into more detail. It was also made even better having it read by Ronson himself, which I found via Libby.

1. This reminds me of a comment from Tom Morello and the willingness to practice: “I’m disgusted by the fact that a lot of young people these days aren’t willing to sit down and practise the electric guitar for eight hours a day. They are all looking for an easier route to becoming famous. Look at the Top 50 songs on the radio in the US – there are no guitar solos in them.” ↩
2. It is interesting to contrast Ronson’s New York with Phillip Glass’ New York as detailed in his autobiography Words Without Music in which he lived in a loft on 22nd Street. I guess the reality is places never stay the same? ↩

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In This Is What It Sounds Like: What the Music You Love Says About You, Susan Rogers (along with co-author Ogi Ogas) provide a scientific scaffolding for experience of falling in love with a song. At the heart of the book is the Listener Profile, a methodical framework that categorises our musical “sweet spots.” Rogers breaks down the listening experience into seven primary dimensions:

• The “What”: Melody, Lyrics, Rhythm, and Timbre.
• The “How”: Authenticity, Novelty, and Realism.

While Rogers’ background as a cognitive neuroscientist shines through, she balances this with various “behind the desk” anecdotes from her time engineering for Prince during the Purple Rain era and her work with Geggy Tah and Barenaked Ladies. These snippets provide a necessary human pulse to the clinical approach.

One of the interesting aspects was Rogers’ discussion of novelty and our appetite for musical risk. This is captured by a novelty–popularity curve: simplest, most familiar music on the left; boundary‑pushing, complex music on the right; sales/popularity on the vertical axis. This curve is ever evolving and what might be considered complex today, can easily become more familiar in the future.

Though its shape remains the same from generation to generation, the curve itself slides steadily to the right along the axis of novelty as different musical innovations become commonplace. The peak of the curve - along with the most popular style of music -retains a balance of familiar and novel elements, but what those elements sound like changes as audiences get accustomed to musical advances.

Source: This Is What It Sounds Like: What the Music You Love Says About You by Susan Rogers and Ogi Ogas

I could not help but draw parallels to Raymond Williams’ theory on cultural evolution:

• Dominant: The music that defines the current “mainstream.”
• Residual: The sounds of the past that still shape our present.
• Emergent: The new, “novel” expressions that push boundaries.

Rogers argues that our “Record Producer Brain” is constantly scanning for these elements. However, taste is rarely static. You might find that your profile shifts as you age or changes depending on your social environment. This fluidity suggests that the Listener Profile is not a fixed DNA sequence, but a living document that evolves with our life stages.

The identities we construct for ourselves are reflected in the things we collect and like, so much so that when we unveil a drastic change in the food we eat, the hobbies we enjoy, or the genres of music we’re into, people who know us understand that something important about our identity has changed. Empirical research has shown that our conception of personal identity is linked to our musical choices.

Source: This Is What It Sounds Like: What the Music You Love Says About You by Susan Rogers and Ogi Ogas

Another thing that stood out was tension between Rogers’ profile and the concept of guilty pleasure. When we align Rogers’ science with Donald Winnicott’s concept of the True Self and False Self, a “guilty pleasure” is often just a conflict between our True Self (the raw, emotional response to a melody) and the False Self (the persona we present to fit social expectations). Rogers’ intent with the framework is to provide the structures required to strip away the “False Self” and understand why a specific timbre or rhythm resonates with us, regardless of its perceived “coolness.” It was interesting thinking about this alongside Chilly Gonzales’ Enya: A Treatise on Unguilty Pleasures and how it comes to grips with personal taste.

During quiet moments in the studio, I enjoyed asking record makers to name a guilty pleasure—a record you would be embarrassed to admit you liked. Such confessions can be deeply revealing. The records we treasure covertly reflect facets of our musical self that we’d just as soon not have others know about.

Source: This Is What It Sounds Like: What the Music You Love Says About You by Susan Rogers and Ogi Ogas

I was once told that “no one likes your music.” Of course, the comment was said in spite, but ironically it is true for when it comes to the Listener Profile, we are all unique, there is no average. As a combination of neurological wiring, personal history, and emotional associations, our relationship with a song is unique.

If Michel Faber’s Listen - On Music, Sound and Us is a soulful, visceral exploration of the act of hearing, Rogers’ work feels like its intellectual counterpart - an exploration written “from the head up.”

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I was recently introduced to someone, with the person do the introducing stating, “He is a musician too.” I was caught unaware. It felt strange. Yes, I play music, casually, whether it be tinkering with guitar and electronic instruments, but I have never labelled myself or identified as a ‘musician’. Especially reading how Tom Morello describes a musician, that is certainly not me:

“I’m disgusted by the fact that a lot of young people these days aren’t willing to sit down and practise the electric guitar for eight hours a day. They are all looking for an easier route to becoming famous. Look at the Top 50 songs on the radio in the US – there are no guitar solos in them. I see [Tom’s 2018 all-star solo album] The Atlas Underground as a Trojan horse. I want it to turn a new generation of kids on to cranking up the guitar.”

Source: Tom Morello: “Metal will be here long after other genres have come and gone” by David Everley

While reading memoirs by composers such as Phillip Glass and Steve Reich, I often feel out of my depth. They live in a world of musical theory, whether it be counterpoint or rhythm, that feels foreign to me no matter how many Jacob Collier or Andrew Huang videos on I watch. I get it, but I do not really get it. If I was using a Solo Taxonomy, I would be ‘Relational’. (Sadly, there was no discussion of circle-of-fifths in my guitar lessons growing up, while I definitely cannot sight read. If I had to I could find my way through music notation, by it would be somewhat laborious.) Clearly I know stuff, I am comfortable finding the chords to a song to accompany my children, but it does not feel that proficient or ‘Extended Abstract’.

In regards to performance, I remember reading Dave Grohl’s The Storyteller where he reflected on the difference between being a live musician as opposed to a session musician. On the high-tension recording sessions for The Colour and the Shape, he made the decision to re-record William Goldsmith’s drum parts as they were missing something. Grohl explained how the “session” mindset as one of surgical precision and perfection, often influenced by the intense pressure of a producer (in this case, Gil Norton). He noted that while a drummer can be incredible in a live setting, carried along by energy, vibe, and the visual performance, the studio is a microscope. In this world I am all vibe and could not even imagine playing with any semblance of the studio precision.

This tension between ‘vibe’ and ‘precision’ left me wondering: if I am not a ‘musician’ in the clinical sense, what am I doing when I pick up the guitar or play the synthesiser? It had me looking past the mechanics of music and toward the fundamental nature of being creative.

In the 2015 John Peel Lecture, Brian Eno challenged the idea that the arts are merely a secondary “luxury” compared to STEM fields, instead asking the fundamental question: “Is art a luxury, or does it do something for us beyond that?” To structure the conversation, he provided a broad definition of art.

Art is everything you don’t have to do.

Source: BBC John Peel lecture - 2015 by Brian Eno

While we must eat and move to survive, the way we style our food or the way we dance are the essential stylisations that make us human. Just as children learn through play, Eno argued that adults create little worlds through art, immersing ourselves in alternate realities that act as a psychological flight simulator.

Children learn through play, but adults play through art. So I don’t think we stop playing. I think we just carry on doing it, but we do it through this thing called ‘art’. And so the reason I made that big list of things - which could, of course, have been endlessly long - was because I want to say that all of those things, from the most exalted (with inverted commas) like symphonies, to the most mundane like cake decoration or nail painting or something like that, they are all doing the same thing. They are all the construction of little worlds of some kind.

Source: BBC John Peel lecture - 2015 by Brian Eno

These spaces therefore provide a safe place for interesting experiences, allowing us to explore the joys and freedoms of a false world so we can better navigate the complexities of the real one. In our modern era, where we are all specialists now and often isolated in our professional silos, Eno sees art as a vital cultural ritual we are contributing too.

Coming at the question of art from a different perspective, Brené Brown talks about the importance of play and creativity as being essential to embracing a full and rich life. For Brown, play is doing things with no goal other than enjoyment.

Opposite of play is not work, it is depression.

Source: Dr. Stuart Brown

She argues that there is no such thing as “creative” and “non-creative” people. Instead, there are those who use their creativity and those who do not. The problem is that unused creativity is not benign, instead it metastasises into shame, grief, judgment, and resentment.^[1] When we play, we loosen our grip on perfectionism. When we create, we practice being vulnerable. Together, they form a “rebound” effect - the more you play and create, the more resilient you become to the shame triggers of the outside world.

To create is to make something that has never existed before. There is nothing more vulnerable than that.

Source: Daring Greatly by Brené Brown

Brown argues that we often stop using our talent to avoid the feeling of being “flawed.” This can stem from a paralyses associated with a memory of an experience where somebody told us that we are not very good.

I felt this paralysis a few years ago, when I sold my gear in the name of seriousness. The mixers and synths I had bought over time - a Roland MC303 and a Korg MicroKorg - felt like clutter in a life that no longer had ‘room’ for them. I kept my guitars, but in letting go of the electronic tools, I did not realise I was amputating a part of my identity.

The ‘condition’ of creativity does not just go away because you clear the desk space. It is for this reason I eventually found myself re-purchasing various pieces of kit, including a Roland MC-101 and an Arturia Microfreak. The challenge now is not about having the ‘stuff’, it is about finding the time to do stuff with no purpose or guilt.

Coming at the question of talent from a different angle, Michel Faber, in his book Listen - On Music, Sound and Us, devotes a chapter to asking whether everybody can sing. He explores the limits we place on ourselves and others. This might include such constraints as physiology, health, age, training, and temperament which set boundaries on how and what you can sing well. In the end, Faber concludes that everyone can sing, the challenge is often about finding “what your voice was meant to sing.”

How many people are born to sing superbly? Not many, I suspect. As many as are born to compete in the Olympics, perhaps, or play professional tennis. The others make do with what they’ve got, and sometimes manage to turn their humdrum pipes into distinctive, emotive instruments which compensate for their lack of might and purity with bags of character.

Source: Listen - On Music, Sound and Us by Michel Faber

To extend Faber’s argument that singing is often about finding what is right, I wonder if being creative in general is about finding what your creativity was meant to create?

With Eno, Brown and Faber in mind, I wonder if the issue with being a “musician” is as much mindset? Yes, I could be more proficient and I could spend more time practicing.^[2] However, neither of those aspects prevent me from being a musician?

Listening to people like Adrian Sherwood or Jamie Lidell talk about music, I realise that maybe it is not always about proficiency in theory or even technique. Or maybe proficiency comes in different shapes and sizes? For example, in Jamie Lidell’s conversation with Kieren Hebden (FourTet) on the Hanging Out With Audiophiles podcast (Episode 78), the two dive deep into the philosophy of creation versus the mechanics of gear. While both are known for their technical wizardry, the discussion regarding technical proficiency was somewhat subversive. Hebden made the case that technical proficiency is not about knowing every tool, but about mastering a specific, often limited, workflow until it becomes like an extension of your body.^[3] Hebden also shared that he lacks a strong background in formal music theory. He views this not as a deficit, but as a technical advantage. By not knowing the “correct” way to resolve a chord or build a scale, he allows for more serendipity and “happy accidents.” Sometimes deep theoretical knowledge can lead to predictable results, whereas Hebden’s “weakness” forces him to rely on his ears and taste.^[4]

Susan Rogers and Ogi Ogas touch on the formal theory dilemma in their book This Is What It Sounds Like. In talking about authenticity in music, they contrast the ‘naive’ music that comes from the heart as opposed to ‘cerebral’ which comes from the head. They given the example of The Shaggs as being from the heart, whereas Sebastian Bach being from the head.

The naïve, below-the-neck authenticity of the Shaggs reminds record makers of what honest, uncorrupted feeling sounds like. I’ve listened for it in every record I’ve made since I first heard Philosophy of the World.
The opposite of naïve music is sometimes called “cerebral” music. Composers and performers of this kind of music express their feelings using deliberate principles and well-honed craftmanship. Johann Sebastian Bach is a good example. His music communicates a wide array of potent emotions, from dramatic expressions of triumph and sadness to more nuanced feelings of longing and spirituality. He accomplishes this feat not by spontaneously expressing the tides of his heart but by carefully deploying a well-honed arsenal of polished techniques. Simply put, Bach could authentically express sadness without being sad. Musically untrained listeners can experience the sadness (or joy or anger) of Bach’s music in an immediate and intimate way, while a musically trained listener can deconstruct Bach’s methods and identify the specific compositional techniques he used to achieve his emotional effects.

Source: This Is What It Sounds Like : What the Music You Love Says About You by Susan Rogers and Ogi Ogas

What is significant is that both The Shaggs and Bach are musicians and authentic, but following different paths to achieve this. The question then is whether being a musician or an artist is about what what is actually done or produced?^[5]

In Julian Barnes’s memoir on death, Nothing to Be Frightened Of, he argues that art serves as a means of escaping death.

Even the greatest art’s triumph over death is risibly temporary. A novelist might hope for another generation of readers - two or three if lucky - which may feel like a scorning of death; but it’s really just scratching on the wall of the condemned cell. We do it to say: I was here too.

Source: Nothing to Be Frightened Of by Julian Barnes

In Smarter Than You Think, Clive Thompson unpacks a number of myths associated with technology. One point that comes up again and again is the way in which technology can extend us and how it already is. A particular example of this is the way in which the internet and blogging can help clarify our thinking.

Having an audience can clarify thinking. It’s easy to win an argument inside your head. But when you face a real audience, you have to be truly convincing.

Source: Why Even the Worst Bloggers Are Making Us Smarter – How Successful Networks Nurture Good ideas by Clive Thompson

Austin Kleon extends on this idea of figuring out what we think in his discussion of portals.

You step into the portal and sometimes discover what you didn’t know want to know.
That is the gamble. The roll of the dice.
A book is the safest portal, and a diary is the second-safest portal. They are both private. When it comes to public portals, a blog, I think, is one of the safest, most forgiving portals.

Source: Stepping Into the Portal by Austin Kleon

What each of these things touch upon is something done. This reminds me of Hannah Arendt’s discussion in The Human Condition of the labour required to make thinking tangible:

If labor leaves no permanent trace, thinking leaves nothing tangible at all. By itself, thinking never materializes into any objects. Whenever the intellectual worker wishes to manifest his thoughts, he must use his hands and acquire manual skills just like any other worker. In other words, thinking and working are two different activities which never quite coincide; the thinker who wants the world to know the “content” of his thoughts must first of all stop thinking and remember his thoughts. Remembrance in this, as in all other cases, prepares the intangible and the futile for their eventual materialization; it is the beginning of the work process, and like the craftsman’s consideration of the model which will guide his work, its most immaterial stage. The work itself then always requires some material upon which it will be performed and which through fabrication, the activity of homo faber, will be transformed into a worldly object. The specific work quality of intellectual work is no less due to the “work of our hands” than any other kind of work.

Source: The Human Condition by Hannah Arendt

My wonder of such labour is whether art without something to show for itself is really art? Or to come back to music? If musician plays music in the forest and nobody hears them, did they really play?

During a discussion of USB002 by Fred Again … on the TapeNote podcast, Fred Gibson made the remark that he estimates only 2% of the work that he creates actually gets published. Some of this is unfinished ideas, while some is work done producing for other artists. Is this then the reality of the labour associated with art and music? Although there is validation in publishing something, this is never the measurement of the final outcome.

Coming back to Austin Kleon, he makes the case against publishing everything, suggesting that it is important to have a private space left fallow.

I find that my diary is a good place to have bad ideas. I tell my diary everything I shouldn’t tell anybody else, especially everyone on social media. We are in a shitty time in which you can’t really go out on any intellectual limbs publicly, or people — even your so-called friends! — will throw rocks at you or try to saw off the branch. Harsh, but true.

Source: Why I keep a diary by Austin Kleon

Thinking about the perspective of the musician, I wonder what happens if something is not finalised or published? Some musicians spend their whole life dedicated to mastering the works of others. Maybe then it is all simply about a deliberate process? To come back to Brown, maybe it is about enjoyment? Maybe, as Prince suggested, it is about a higher truth?

Try to tell me how to paint my palace
That isn’t where it’s at
That’s like trying to tell Columbus that the world is flat
If the song we’re singing truly is the best
Then that, my brothers, is the ultimate test

Source: Can’t Stop This Feeling I Got by Prince

Looking back at that moment of being introduced as a “musician,” I feel that my initial discomfort stemmed from a binary view of talent. However through the lens of Eno’s “flight simulators” and Brown’s “vulnerability” a third path emerges. The reality is that being creative is not a status that is just conferred by a degree or a 500-page theory book. It is, as Hannah Arendt suggests, the “work of our hands” to make the intangible tangible. Whether that work reaches an audience of thousands or remains fallow, the act itself can be considered as the definitive marker.

1. In an interview with Zan Rowe, Damon Album describes creativity as a condition. Coming from Brown’s perspective, maybe it is a condition we all have that we either embrace or let it transform into something else. ↩
2. I wonder if Chris Hemsworth learning to play drums for Ed Sheeran in the documentary series Limitless demonstrates what is possible with time and effort. ↩
3. Fred Again makes a similar point during a TapeNotes interview, suggesting that what matters it liberating your mind. “You want to do the things that liberate your mind to be hearing well, not whether or not [you’re using] this compressor or this distortion or this distortion… the thing that’s most dangerous about getting into that is that you’ll forget about whether or not the chorus is wrong, or whether or not the chord progression is actually not serving the feeling right.” ↩
4. Hebden also highlighted that a different kind of “proficiency” comes from active listening. He mentioned his practice of listening to a full album every single day. For him, the “technical” work of a producer is 90% training the ear to recognize what makes a record “sit on the shelf” next to the greats, rather than learning how to use a new plugin. ↩
5. On The Next Big Idea podcast, Susan Rogers provides a different perspective on the above and below argument, touching on the ease and accessibility of creating and being a musician. "It’s becoming less of a refined art and more of a practical utility in our lives. This, by necessity, will change music’s form. Producers will be making records that are a little bit more utilitarian." ↩

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