Keen On America

Matthew Botvinick works at Anthropic, where he leads the Anthropic Institute’s research on AI and the rule of law. His new book, AI and Political Freedom, focuses on AI’s risk to democracy and how we should respond to it. It’s important to note that for this Princeton University Press book, Botvinick doesn’t represent Anthropic. That said, the fact that he just happens to be a senior policy guy at Dario’s trillion dollar startup makes both Matt and his book particularly intriguing.
He obviously knows his AI stuff. He was previously senior director of research at Google DeepMind, and before that ran neural computation labs at Princeton and Penn. He has been doing what we now call deep learning since the early nineteen nineties, when it was called connectionist modelling and few imagined it would ever amount to a commercial product. Then he went back to school for a law degree. Yale, no less. So Matt is clearly an Ivy League-trained, smart logical guy. Somebody to be (mis)trusted.
His argument is that AI doesn’t invent a new threat to democracy so much as raise the stakes on the demagogue’s playbook. It’s that familiar Trump/Modi/Orbán/Bolsonaro game of splitting the people from the elites, then, once in office, rewiring the state to entrench power and muzzling anyone who objects. What AI adds, Matt worries, is populist fuel at both ends. Thus the dangerous flammability of our current politics. Job displacement manufactures exactly the insecurity demagogues feed on, and AI hands whoever wins a surveillance and censorship apparatus that no previous authoritarian could dream of. He also expects AI-driven national security crises, and notes that states of emergency are designed to expand executive power, which makes them very easy to abuse.
I pushed Matt on whether anyone should believe any of this from a senior Anthropic policy maker. He said no, and probably meant it. There is no reason, he argued, to trust anybody from Anthropic, or any newspaper either, because a marketplace of ideas doesn’t run on trust but on the strength of the argument.
Perhaps. But my bigger concern is the ethic of the all-too-logical engineer that Matt brings to politics. As I will discuss tomorrow with the Hannah Arendt scholar Roger Berkowitz, Arendt argued that politics was anything but an engineering problem with quantifiable fixes. So when Matt promises AI enabling ancient Athens “at scale” through citizen assemblies, we should be wary. Not because this will end humanity or make Anthropic employees exorbitantly rich. But because politics isn’t code, and can’t be fixed by engineers.

FURTHER READING

•   Matthew Botvinick, AI and Political Freedom: The Risk to Democracy and How to Respond (Princeton University Press, 2026)
•   The author’s own page for the book: mattbotvinick.com

•   Adam Jentleson on Supermajority — the Democratic strategist on rebuilding a governing coalition: listen to that episode

•   Susan Neiman on whether Trump is evil — the philosopher on how half of America accepted him twice: listen to that episode

•   Jonathan Rauch and Peter Wehner on the patrimonial turn in American government: listen to that episode

•   Roger Berkowitz, A World We Share: Hannah Arendt and the Power of Friendship in a Broken World (Yale University Press, 2026) — Berkowitz is on the show tomorrow

FIVE TAKEAWAYS

1. AI doesn’t invent the threat. It raises the stakes. Botvinick is careful to say that AI does not create some exotic new danger to democracy. What it does is sharpen a vulnerability that democracies have always had, and which the American founders worried about explicitly. The pattern he calls the demagogue’s playbook begins with populist appeals that divide the people from an allegedly hijacking elite, and proceeds, once the demagogue is in office, to two objectives: rewiring the machinery of government to entrench power, and muzzling dissent by attacking the press and civil society. AI feeds the first stage and arms the second.
2. Job displacement is the fuel. The mechanism by which AI raises the risk is economic rather than technological. People who feel insecure about their livelihoods and their standing in society look to political leaders to solve problems they cannot solve privately, and that is precisely the demand that demagogues exist to meet. Botvinick is candid that he cannot predict the timeline, because how fast AI diffuses through the economy and how fast employers actually use it to replace labour are harder to forecast than the technology itself. His position is simply that serious displacement is coming and that we should prepare rather than argue about the date.
3. Emergencies and surveillance are the weapons. Two tools in particular worry him. The first is the state of emergency: he expects AI to cause national security crises, cybersecurity above all, and points out that states of emergency are not inherently anti-democratic but are intrinsically designed to expand executive power, which makes them very easy to exploit. The second, and the one he considers more serious, is that AI is an extraordinary instrument of domestic surveillance and censorship — for tracking political opponents, silencing them, and preventing the coordinated action that protest depends on. China, he notes, is not a hypothetical.
4. There is no reason to trust him, and he says so. Asked directly why anyone should believe an Anthropic employee with stock in the company, Botvinick did not reach for a reassurance. There is no reason to trust anybody from Anthropic, he said, just as there is no reason to trust any newspaper; the point of a marketplace of ideas is that it does not run on trust at all, but on the strength of arguments and the information people put into the open. AK pressed back that the marketplace of ideas is itself a contestable position rather than a self-evident truth, which Botvinick accepted without abandoning it.
5. Ancient Athens at scale. The hopeful half of the book rests on the deliberative democracy movement and the citizens’ assemblies championed by the Yale political theorist Hélène Landemore, whom Botvinick calls one of his heroes. These assemblies are good at putting people in a frame of mind to argue openly and from facts, but at present nobody knows how to run one much beyond a hundred participants. The question the book leaves open is whether AI can enlarge them to the scale of a republic without destroying the thing that makes them work — and Botvinick is explicit that this requires experiment rather than deployment.

ABOUT THE GUEST

Matthew Botvinick is a member of the technical staff at Anthropic, where he leads the Anthropic Institute’s research on AI and the rule of law, and a senior fellow at Yale Law School. He was previously se...

The retired money manager Greg Steinmetz has now written three books about very rich men. The first, The Richest Man Who Ever Lived, was about the sixteenth-century Augsburg banker Jacob Fugger. The second, American Rascal, was about the nineteenth-century robber baron Jay Gould. The third, The President and the Oligarch, came out this week, and this time the rich man has a president as a co-star. It’s a book about the relationship between Franklin D. Roosevelt and Andrew W. Mellon.
Mellon was the third richest American of his age, behind Rockefeller and Ford. He was, above all, a banker, installed as president of his father’s small-town Pennsylvania bank while still in his twenties, and building it into one of the largest banks in the country. Warren Harding, reasoning that anyone that rich must know something about money, made him Treasury Secretary. He served Coolidge and Hoover too, eleven years in all, the second longest tenure in the department’s history.
And then, in 1934, Franklin Roosevelt came for him. Steinmetz’s revisionist argument is that FDR’s pursuit of Mellon was pure politics. Mellon, who by then was in his late seventies and out of office, had done nothing to him. His supposed crime was taking a tax write-off on art he had donated to a foundation, the sort of thing, Steinmetz claims, (rich) people do every day. Roosevelt’s own attorney general told him there was no case and a grand jury threw it out. Roosevelt pursued him in tax court anyway, until an unloved Mellon died with the matter unresolved.
Steinmetz suggests this is where the modern American fashion of deploying the tax code against political enemies begins. The irony is that Mellon’s paintings that triggered the persecution morphed into the National Gallery of Art — for which Roosevelt took the credit. Poor persecuted Andrew W. Mellon. Or, more accurately, rich persecuted Mellon. Unlike Steinmetz, I find it hard to feel sorry for such a miserable old sod who didn’t even have any fun with his wealth. Maybe Steinmetz’s next book should be about persecuted poor people. He’d find no shortage of subjects.

FURTHER READING

•   Greg Steinmetz, The President and the Oligarch: Roosevelt, Mellon, and the Triumph of Big Government (Simon & Schuster, 2026)
•   Greg Steinmetz, The Richest Man Who Ever Lived: The Life and Times of Jacob Fugger (Simon & Schuster, 2015)
•   Greg Steinmetz, American Rascal: How Jay Gould Built Wall Street’s Biggest Fortune (Simon & Schuster, 2022)
•   William Hitchcock on A Shadow Over the World — the companion revisionist case on FDR and the 1930s: listen to that episode

FIVE TAKEAWAYS

1. The man who had no fun. Mellon was the third wealthiest American of his era, behind only Rockefeller and Henry Ford, and he appears to have enjoyed almost none of it. One contemporary journalist wrote that he looked like an accountant who had just lost his job. His English wife, brought over from horse country outside London, took one look at the smokestacks of Pittsburgh and within three years had taken up with an Englishman. Steinmetz describes a man who was never happier than when he was alone in the bank with a balance sheet, and likens him to Warren Buffett reading financial statements all day — except that Buffett at least plays bridge.
2. The vendetta. In 1934, with a midterm approaching and pressure building from Huey Long, Father Coughlin and Francis Townsend on his left, Roosevelt needed to demonstrate his progressive credentials without adopting their actual programmes. He chose to scapegoat Mellon, blaming him for the persistent unemployment and for the Depression itself. Mellon was by then in his late seventies and years out of office, and the case against him was a tax write-off taken on art donated to a foundation. Steinmetz is blunt about what followed: the attorney general said there was nothing there, a grand jury of ordinary working people threw it out, and Roosevelt pursued him in tax court regardless, until Mellon died with the matter still unresolved.
3. What actually caused the Depression. Steinmetz changed his own mind during the research. The stock market crash was not the cause, he argues, pointing out that the Nasdaq fell seventy per cent in the dot-com bust and produced only a mild recession. What turned a downturn into a decade was European: German reparations, German bank failures, and the indecision of central bankers across the Atlantic, compounded at home by the Federal Reserve’s refusal to put money into the economy — the Friedman and Bernanke diagnosis. On this reading, Mellon’s record at Treasury was in some ways the opposite of ruinous: he ran a surplus every single year, and paid down the debt built up by the First World War by cutting taxes rather than raising them.
4. The National Gallery. The strangest turn in the story is that the donation which triggered the prosecution ended in a gift to the American public. Mellon owned a hundred and twenty-nine masterpieces — Rembrandts, Titians, Raphaels — and he gave them, along with the money to build the building and endow its maintenance, to create the National Gallery of Art. He pointedly did not call it the Mellon Gallery. He and Roosevelt met one to one to discuss the gift while the tax trial was still grinding on, and Roosevelt took the credit for the museum. Steinmetz forecloses the cynical reading: Mellon was already dying of cancer, and the value of what he gave away dwarfed anything the tax case could ever have cost him.
5. The pendulum. The research also altered Steinmetz’s politics, and in an unexpectedly hopeful direction. He is unmoved by the argument that American democracy is finished. American history, he says, is a pendulum: Harding won sixty per cent of the vote in 1920, the biggest landslide since Washington, because voters wanted tax cuts and an end to inflation; by 1932 those same voters demanded relief and got it. He expects the same correction now, with the Democrats reversing much of what Trump has done. For all that his book is a grim story about persecution, he takes from it the conclusion that democracy tends to solve its own problems.

ABOUT THE GUEST

Greg Steinmetz was born in Cleveland, took his BA at Colgate and a master’s at Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism, and spent fifteen years as a reporter, including as Berlin and London bureau chief for the Wall Street Journal. He later became a securities analyst and a partner at a New York money-management firm, from which he is now retired. He is the author of The Richest Man Who Ever Lived, a biography of Jacob Fugger, and American Rascal, on Jay Gould. The President and the Oligarch: Roosevelt, Mellon, and the Triumph of Big Government is published by Simon & Schuster. He lives just north of New York City.

ABOUT KEEN ON AMERICA

Everyone, That Was The Week publisher Keith Teare breathlessly announced this week, is about to be offered an AI personal assistant. Or, to put it in Silicon-Valley-speak, a digital chief of staff. OpenAI unveiled Dot at its developer day. Meta already has Muse, Musk has Grok Bot, and a British start-up called Instinct raised a billion dollars at a ten billion dollar valuation while adding group chat, so that an entire team can share this same digital master of the universe. My instinct is that Instinct might be the Pets.com of this bubble. I would check with my digital chief-of-staff, if I had one. Which I don’t.
 
The novelty, Keith insists, is the virtual machine. It’s a computer in the cloud that your agent owns, where it can run a browser, read your email and write code on your behalf. So we have one interface instead of the fifty chat windows that I use on Claude. No keyboard, no mouse, no screen. As a particularly wealthy and busy man, Keith has given five of these assistants access to everything (and I mean everything) he has: multitudes of credit cards, bank accounts, brokerage logins. He confesses to spending a combined thousand dollars a month on AI subscriptions. But the fruit of all this — his argument for our agentic future — is that he recently asked one of them, by voice, to find him a sub $40 Hoya lens hood with the correct thread. $1000 to save $40? Even a human chief-of-staff might flag that raspberry.
 
What do we become when we talk to machines? I asked Sherry Turkle this week. Idiots, I suspect.
 
Discussed also this week:
 
•       Nicole Nguyen in the Wall Street Journal on whether she would let an AI agent run her life.
•       David Robinson in The Atlantic on why he quit OpenAI, and why frontier labs should be run like nuclear plants or busy airports.
•       Adam Tooze in the Financial Times on why AI is not the Manhattan Project — and Evgeny Morozov, in the same paper, on AI sovereign wealth funds as techno-imperialism.
•       Steve Rattner’s six charts on why we need AI, including the case that Democrats rarely make — with a sting in the tail about kill switches.
•       Richard Waters in the Financial Times and Alex Kantrowitz on why Anthropic’s IPO feels so weird.
•       The New York Times on the religious scholars who met Anthropic and came away stunned.
•       That Was The Week — Keith’s newsletter, with everything discussed here, and last week’s editorial.
 
Five Takeaways
 
•       Everyone Gets Offered One. The week’s actual news, in Keith’s reading, is not that everybody will have a personal agent but that everybody will be offered one. OpenAI announced Dot at its developer day, joining Meta’s Muse, Musk’s Grok Bot, OpenClaw and Hermes; the British startup Instinct raised a billion dollars at a ten billion dollar valuation and added group chat, so that a whole team can brief a single agent. What these share, and what Anthropic conspicuously lacks, is the virtual machine: a computer running in the cloud that the agent owns, on which it can open browsers, handle email and write code. The effect is to abstract away the fifty separate chat sessions in the left-hand column and replace them with one relationship — a chief of staff that knows about your travel, your calendar, your book and your commercial dealings all at once. AK’s scepticism was practical: he has perhaps fifteen conversations going, knows which is which, and cannot see what the extra layer buys him.
•       A Thousand Dollars a Month. Pressed on what he actually spends, Keith eventually admitted to around a thousand dollars a month across personal and professional accounts, and accepted AK’s observation that this places him in the top fraction of a per cent of users. He has given five different agents access to everything — credit cards, bank accounts, stock accounts — on the grounds that the benefits are unavailable otherwise, and does not regard this as a privacy risk because the agent runs in an encrypted virtual machine he owns rather than inside a company. His example of the new convenience is almost comically small: asking by voice for a particular Hoya lens hood with the right thread for under forty dollars, and never visiting Amazon. The serious version of the claim is about interface. Dispense with the keyboard, the mouse and the screen, and any task that currently requires a browser can be done by talking while walking around Orange County.
•       The IPO That Leads With Its Liabilities. The strangest thread of the week. Richard Waters in the Financial Times and Alex Kantrowitz both wrote about how odd Anthropic’s flotation feels, and Keith offers an explanation: the labs have realized they are legally liable for whatever their models do, and in America they will certainly be sued. If AI ends up in everything, the liability is effectively infinite — plausibly larger than the valuations being discussed. Hence a leaked S-1 that discloses liabilities up front, which AK believes may be a first in the history of public offerings. Saturday Night Live caught the same thing in a sketch depicting Dario Amodei as a man simultaneously begging to be stopped and begging to be funded. Keith’s view is that Amodei chose this narrative and could have chosen another; Sam Altman, meanwhile, spent the week trying to find daylight between himself and Anthropic on exactly this question, and did not find much.
•       Run It Like a Nuclear Plant. David Robinson resigned from OpenAI saying its culture is broken, and argued in The Atlantic that frontier labs need the redundancy and slow, careful planning of nuclear power stations or busy airports. Steve Rattner, in a piece Keith admired for making the pro-worker case for AI that Democrats rarely make, ended with a sting: new products should be tested by a government entity, and should carry kill switches. Keith regards the kill switch as technically illiterate — the models are already running on millions of devices, and nothing short of a callback to the cloud would reach them, which would not touch the Chinese ones at all. On Robinson he is warmer, because the onus falls where he thinks it belongs: on the labs, to write better harnesses. He adds a factual point worth keeping: almost all the alarming AI behaviour so far has occurred in laboratory testing of unreleased models without those harnesses. His only complaint is that R...

“A book about truth needs to be truthful.” — Steven Rosenbaum
 
In April, the New York City based tech impresario Steven Rosenbaum came on the show to discuss The Future of Truth, his then new book about artificial intelligence. He warned that AI is a spectacularly good liar and that we should be concerned about the future of truth. A few weeks later, The New York Times reported that the book contained untrue quotations — among them one (mis)attributed to the notable tech journalist Kara Swisher.
 
No, you couldn’t make this story up (if you did, it would be called a lie). Not surprisingly, the world’s leading expert on truth (which he still claims to be) got mocked everywhere from Wired to the Daily Beast. But taking a leaf perhaps out of his fellow New Yorkers Roy Cohn and Donald Trump’s playbook, Rosenbaum has fought back. He claimed that these fake quotes came from ChatGPT, and spent the summer meticulously rewriting the book to eliminate its errors.
 
Rosenbaum is unusually frank about it. Even unapologetic. Defiantly so. He says he gave ChatGPT his own interview transcripts and asked for pull quotes, assuming that a machine given primary sources would return what was in them. Instead, he says, ChatGPT went rogue and decided it could improve a few of them. That said, Rosenbaum takes full responsibility for the original book. He admits he dropped the ball, and — for the first time publicly — thanks the New York Times reporter who wrote the original story. He also stripped every endorsement off the new edition, including Maria Ressa’s introduction, so that none of his illustrious friends might be embarrassed by the brouhaha.
 
I gave the masochist a hard time anyway. He didn’t much enjoy the comparison with Roy Cohn. But I meant it as a compliment. Declare victory and move on was the Cohnian mantra which he taught the current American President. And that’s exactly what Rosenbaum has done with this crazy AI story. What chutzpah! And it’s all true. Kind of.
 
Further Reading:
 
•       The Future of Truth: How AI Reshapes Reality by Steven Rosenbaum (Matt Holt Books) — the corrected second edition, with two new chapters, now on presale.
•       Benjamin Mullin’s New York Times report on the fabricated quotations, and Will Oremus’s follow-up in The Atlantic — both discussed here.
•       Prof Joe Cruz from Williams College arguing in the New York Times that teaching students to think need not mean teaching them to write — the controversial piece that opens the conversation.
•       Earlier this week on Keen On: Sherry Turkle on what we become when we talk to machines.
•       The Sustainable Media Center, which Steven Rosenbaum runs, and whose board includes fifty Gen Z members.
 
Five Takeaways
 
•       What Actually Happened. The errors were specific and few. Benjamin Mullin of the New York Times — who, as Rosenbaum notes drily, had the temerity to actually read the book he was writing about — found three. One was a misattributed citation on a quotation Meredith Broussard confirms she did say. The others were worse: text that appeared inside quotation marks and had never been spoken, including a line about Asimov’s laws of robotics given to Kara Swisher, who told the Times it sounded as though she had a stick up her backside. Rosenbaum’s account of the mechanism is the part other authors should read. He had fed his own primary-source interview transcripts into ChatGPT and asked it to pull quotations, assuming that a machine handed the actual words would return the actual words. In some cases it decided the first-person material could be made a little better. Across five versions of the manuscript there were nearly four thousand tracked changes and more than four hundred citations; a copy editor flagged the Swisher line, the citation was altered rather than the quotation checked, and nobody caught it. His own verdict is unqualified: he dropped the ball, and he is one hundred per cent responsible.
•       The Rewrite. His publisher, Matt Holt, did not immediately drop him; they said they would withhold judgment until he produced a detailed account of what had gone wrong. He hired a new fact checker, spent the entire summer working through the manuscript with new proofreaders, had it laid out again with a new index, and added two substantial chapters. The new edition is on presale now. Two decisions in that process deserve notice. He asked the publisher to strip every endorsement from the book — Maria Ressa’s introduction, Nick Thompson, Kurt Andersen, Michael Wolff — not because anyone demanded it but because he did not want friends and acquaintances forced into a public choice about whether to stand by him. And he went to Amazon to ask them to enforce their own policy against reviews by people who state in the review that they have not read the book; sixty-eight per cent of the ratings are one star. They did not really answer.
•       The Cross-Examination. AK gave no quarter, and Rosenbaum did not ask for any. The central charge: a man whose entire book argues that AI is a spectacularly good liar then trusted it to supply his quotations, in the book, without checking. Rosenbaum’s defence is that this was a year or more ago, when the models routinely produced fake URLs and fake DOI numbers and authors had not yet learned to distrust them — and that he is now in a large and growing club of doctors, lawyers, poets and nonfiction writers who have been caught the same way. He flatly rejected the distinction between a conversation like this one, where a slip costs nothing, and a four-year book with a team and a publisher behind it: told that the two were not comparable, he replied that he thought AK was absolutely wrong, and that the obligation to tell the truth is the same in both. Asked whether there was something Cohnian in his refusal to go quietly, he turned it round — he will take not agreeing with Roy Cohn as a badge of courage, and Trump can be added to the list.
•       Whose Fault Is It? Rosenbaum’s larger argument, and the one he came to make. He has asked several developers how hard it would be for an AI company to stop placing text inside quotation marks unless it can be reliably traced to a source. All three said it would be trivially easy. So why isn’t it done? Because, as he says the systems themselves will tell you if you ask, these companies want to grow quickly, and delivering confident answers that are occasionally wrong is a risk they are prepared to take. They are not, in their own account, in the truth business. His analogy — that a car manufacturer cannot disclaim responsibility for the brakes by telling drivers to pay more attention to the road — did...

“When Dylan was booed, at the festivals or on tour, even over in England — some of that was Tom Wilson’s fault.” — Steven E. Jones
 
Five years ago, the Los Angeles based Ron Brownstein came on the show to argue that 1974 was the greatest year in American cultural history. Steven E. Jones has a rival candidate. His new book, Everything Is Everything, makes the case for 1966. In contrast with Brownstein, Jones builds his argument not around a Hollywood star but around a record producer most people have never heard of.
 
Tom Wilson was born in Waco, went to Fisk and then to Harvard, where he read economics, ran a show on the college radio station and founded the Harvard New Jazz Society. He started his own label and produced a remarkably eclectic group of musicians including Coltrane, Cecil Taylor and Sun Ra. Then he went to Columbia and was handed a young folk singer, a complete unknown. The rest is musical history.
 
Wilson was not only the man who encouraged Bob Dylan to go electric, but the man who transformed Simon and Garfunkel’s The Sound of Silence into a worldwide hit. He signed Frank Zappa thinking he was getting a white R&B band. He produced the Velvet Underground and wrote Sunday Morning for Nico. He was Black, six foot four, impeccably dressed, and drove an Aston Martin. Cooler than 007.
 
“Everything is everything” was Wilson’s mantra. He meant it as an embrace of radical eclecticism, a refusal to commit to a single genre. Steven Jones dedicates 1966, the last truly eclectic musical year, to this remarkable record producer. Where have you gone, Tom Wilson? A musical nation turns its lonely eyes to you.
 
Further Reading/Listening/Watching:
 
•       Everything Is Everything: Tom Wilson and Pop Music in 1966 by Steven E. Jones (Stanford University Press, September 29, 2026).
•       Rock Me on the Water: 1974 — The Year Los Angeles Transformed Movies, Music, Television, and Politics by Ron Brownstein, a previous guest on this show, and the rival candidate for the greatest year.
•       Irwin Chusid’s pioneering web archive on Tom Wilson, by way of WFMU — where Jones first discovered who had produced his Batman record.
•       Freak Out! (1966), The Velvet Underground & Nico (1967) and Chelsea Girl (1967) — three Wilson productions worth hearing in sequence.
•       Dont Look Back (1967), in which Wilson briefly appears, and A Complete Unknown (2024), in which he appears more briefly still.
 
Five Takeaways
 
•       The Man Who Isn’t Quite in the Movie. Jones came to Tom Wilson through the first record he ever bought, aged seven, with his own pocket money: a Batman album, bought in a supermarket in 1966, which turned out at home to be a gloriously raunchy dance record and which his mother did not much care for. Only decades later, through the musicologist Irwin Chusid’s website, did he learn who had produced it. Wilson was born in Waco, Texas, spent a short time at Fisk and then went to Harvard, where he studied economics, presented a show on the college station WHRB and founded the Harvard New Jazz Society. He started his own label, Transition Records, and recorded early work by John Coltrane, Cecil Taylor and Sun Ra. When the label folded he went into the industry proper, arriving at Columbia in time to be assigned a young folk singer. He appears briefly in A Complete Unknown, which Jones enjoyed — but the film stages him as though he were the engineer, when every account describes a commanding presence running the room.
•       Everything Is Everything. The phrase was Wilson’s own, repeated so often on his promotional radio programme — distributed to DJs on twelve-inch discs to be played straight to air — that Jones took it for a title. It was already part of Black vernacular culture by the middle sixties, turning up in the literature of the Nation of Islam and audible in the studio chatter at the beginning of Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On, and it travels forward through Eric Burdon and the Animals to Lauryn Hill’s 1998 song and beyond. In other mouths it means something close to it is what it is, an acceptance of how things are. In Wilson’s it meant the opposite: a celebration of radical eclecticism, an insistence that the significant music always borrows and mixes, and a conviction that rock was mutating into a kind of meta-genre. He called himself, half-jokingly, the folk-rock czar. AK’s suggestion that the hopeless term world music might simply be renamed everything got an immediate yes.
•       What He Actually Did. The list is startling even by the standards of the period. He put electric instruments behind Bob Dylan, which is why, as Jones cheerfully concedes, some of the booing at the festivals and on the English tour was Tom Wilson’s fault. He took The Sound of Silence — a track from a failed album by a duo who had already broken up — hired session musicians, overdubbed electric guitar and drums, and released it without consulting either Simon or Garfunkel; it went to number one around the world. He arrived late to the first Velvet Underground record, re-recorded several key tracks, and added Sunday Morning from scratch because he wanted a potential hit, writing the vocal for Nico while the band were busy pushing her out. He then produced her solo album Chelsea Girl. He signed the Mothers of Invention after hearing them play something that sounded like straightforward R&B, believing, in Zappa’s telling, that he had signed a white R&B band — and then backed them anyway, funding Freak Out!, one of the first double albums in rock, and giving Zappa the freedom to bring in freaks off the street to chant and make animal noises.
•       A Year of Contradictions. Jones resists the tidy narrative in which 1966 is a peak and everything afterwards is decline. What he sees instead is a set of responses to immediate pressures, some of them creative and some of them frankly commercial: radio formats were multiplying and differentiating, FM was arriving as the underground alternative, and the industry needed different kinds of music to fill them and different audiences to sell them to. The result was the most plastic and superficial moment of the decade and its most inventive, at the same time. Warhol was everywhere that year — at the Batman premiere party, photographed with Nico dressed as Batman while he played Robin, making his own film Batman Dracula, presiding over the Dom where the Velvets played. At the end of the year the Monkees arrived, an American Beatles manufactured for television. Which is precisely the atmosphere, Jones argues, in which e...