Great ep, love his perspective on playing live; "it's trench warfare". First I heard of his contact mic on the penis trick....don't think I'll be pulling that one off any time soon.
With regards to gatekeeping, I think it's a word that's gone on to mean "things I perceive are dominating the conversation"; that is, due to the nature of social media algorithms, fans of the genre find themselves exposed to the artists/labels/distros which also engage in social media, thus creating a false sense of perceived authority, which breeds resentment.
Here's a hypothetical:
Label X is prolific, and has "high engagement", and posts a lot on instagram. Fan Y sees their posts more than other, less prolific posters. Fan Y begins to feel that Label X is dominating the conversation in a way that could be perceived as "gatekeeping" when in fact it's the algorithm that's driving this resentment.
When there isn't an active environment of information sharing in the genre, people default to social media, and the result is a distorted view of reality. Basically, we need more zines, more podcasts, more live shows, more active forum posters, and generally a larger landscape of critique, info sharing, and documentation. Is anyone even capable of gatekeeping? Just zuckerberg and his AI legions at this point I think..
