No Thank You For The Music – Frank Turner

Perhaps the most featured artist on all of SFTD is back to his raging best on his 2024 single No Thank You For The Music

Spitting distain and laying out a manifesto of enthusiasm over cynicism Frank Turner’s raging about something I keep seeing brought up more and more often

“I don’t want to be in any gang that you’re in, I refuse to take part in Gatekeeping peoples art”

What is gatekeeping? The logical conclusion of influencer culture? If there are people who add no value but define value, then there is clearly an opposite. Input, process, output. That bit that is processed gets changed. For better or for worse.

Frank’s having none of it.

There always were gatekeepers of course. If you grew up in the Heavy Metal scene of the 1980’s it was full of them. This band is real metal that band is false metal. Black metal is more metal than death metal. It’s very silly stuff.

“Name three songs” the middle aged man shouts at the teen girl in the rock band T-shirt. Leave it out Grandad you have no business talking to these kids.

Star Wars has it. In the first days of the internet it was populated solely by scientists and Star Wars fans. All arguing about which bits of the things they love were shittiest. I see it in fandoms a lot. It’s usually boiled down to bored lonely males getting protective and then offensive because they’re hyper focused on small things.

Gatekeepers suck. Gateways rock.

“Bees shouldn’t waste their time telling flies that honey tastes better than shit”

Well alright