Storm the gates

A humble welcome to gatekeep!

To paraphrase one of the internet's most dubious wellsprings of music nerddom: welcome to gatekeep!. Now get out.

The days of a select few noble, haughty mavens holding the keys to all culture are long since passed (if they ever truly existed), and the way of the gatekeeper has been atomized into a billion individualistic brands via demography and algorithms. One can barely doomscroll these days without encountering someone jealously guarding their bespoke little gates, offering only contempt to anyone naive enough to take an interest. There's got to be a better way!

As a DIY enterprise whose wholesome critical ambitions and experience bumble atop the rickety foundation of a newly established Substack, we at gatekeep! are all about magnifying our sliver of the spotlight into a broad ray of good humor and enthusiasm, dead centre of which lies the humble exclamation point that adorns our name. That stray nugget of punctuation aims to bestow a knowing irony to the elitism associated with gatekeeping (think of Gang of Four’s “Entertainment!”, which those politically-committed post-punkers surely considered more than merely that), underscoring that our intentions go far beyond shutting out the unworthy.

We commit to an irreverent tone NOT to callously heckle artists and fans from the safety of our ivory towers, but to embrace the absurdity of caring enough about art to complain when the public at large heaps praise on cynical mediocrity—or to cheer on a true masterpiece languishing in undeserving obscurity. We want our gate to be open whenever possible, and we want the world to love the things on the other side of it as much as we do!

We're not here to shame you for your streaming services, ensconced in “battletech” controversies though they may be, so much as to gently remind you of what they are taking from us in reducing our taste profiles to iterative, fundamentally non-human algorithm loops and meta-databases of relational tags. Our goal is simply to invite any and all readers to acknowledge that, at least for now, music is human. We believe that there's much more to gain in the attempt to navigate the free-associative soup of artistic symbology we swim in together, consciously or otherwise. With the proper context to frame it, we believe we can at least gesture towards how and why music succeeds in winning over some audience or other, or whether the neglect and derision that await many artists in the sharp teeth of the internet is hard-earned, hopelessly tragic, or somewhere in between.

We believe in the power of stopping to smell the roses in a world of omnipresent immediacy, of choosing to wonder in a time where we're only ever asked to consume. We believe that gatekeeping, like any craft, can be a resource of entertainment and understanding that we share graciously together, and NOT something merely received coldly, robotically via a series of tubes, and used to form a cruel pecking order of the tasteful over the tasteless. So go ahead—pore over the reviews, browse the mixtapes, avoid headache-inducing, gossip-ridden “news” articles, and take your pick of the two dozen sets of interests and obsessions and stories on offer. Find new favorites, and discover new ways to talk about old ones. Spread the word, or keep it like a secret. Enjoy gatekeep! exactly as you please—the only thing we’re here to judge is the music.