Essay 3 of 5 · same channel, different show

The 2021 Revival

After three years averaging 8 episodes, 2021 puts out 145. The volume is back at 2012 levels. The content is not. Of the year’s top fifteen title-words, only one (world) is a Newz word. The rest are venues, bands, and song titles.

The hole closes hard in 2021. By raw count it is the second-densest year in the whole archive — only 2012 puts out more, and only by six. Whatever quiet 2017-2019 was, it is over.

The content has changed, though. Top title-words for 2021 are renegade (17), funk (14), bar (13), montys (9), monarch (9), love (7), mhor (6), blues (4), dub (4), circus (4). Those are not news topics. Funk Renegade is a band project. Monty’s Bar, Monarch Bar, Mhor84 are Scottish venues. The titles read like a gig calendar: Deek Jackson — Live @ Mhor84 dec 30th 2021, RESONATORS MONTYS BAR 3, DUB RENEGADE MONARCH BAR, Funk Renegade part 2 — Live Monarch Bar 031117.

A lot of the 2021 uploads are also retrospective — that 2017 Monarch Bar gig is being uploaded in late 2021 with a 2021 timestamp on YouTube. The channel is doing two jobs at once: documenting present-day live performance and back-cataloguing four years of unreleased club footage. The result inflates the year count, but the per-episode duration tells you what is happening: 2021 median is 6 minutes, but the longest 2021 items are 60+ minute sets, and the recent-era mean of 28 minutes lives mostly here and beyond.

The brand is the same. The vocabulary is different. FKN Newz as a satirical news bulletin is being subordinated to Deek Jackson as a Scottish blues / funk / dub touring act with a back catalogue. The cleaned/other tree on disk has a separate folder for "songs-and-music" because by 2021 the music side is its own thing, not a sideline. The 2008 era page on this archive calls Deek the show’s voice; the 2021 data calls him the show’s musician.

You can read this two ways. Either the show pivoted, or the host was always primarily a musician and the news bulletin was the side hustle that got famous. The data supports the second reading more than the first.

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