Issue 8 of Don’t Do It is now live!

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Featuring an interview with NTS Live DJ Debi Ghose

Poems from Roy Moller, Catherine Edmunds and Jerrold Lam

Plus an essay on Andrew WK from Sarah Broadhurst:

I guess I have to now admit that my opinion changed – I learnt to love Andrew WK. I embraced ‘Party Hard’ as the joyful paean to having a great time that it is. To me his music is fun and energetic, and well meaning. You can party together, you can party any time, you can party to forget your rubbish job – WK even implores us to “have a crazy party by yourself!” on album opener ‘It’s Time to Party’. Sure you’re probably not going to have a spiritual awakening listening to I Get Wet but who the hell knows – maybe you might? Andrew WK’s music certainly gets tarred with being mindless and empty and ‘unworthy’. What even is emptiness in music? What does something need to sound like to be ‘full’? Why are so many reviewers full of such shit?

And we talk to artist Michael Pybus about Pikachu, Ikea, and why cafes have such awful decor:

We started visually before we had text. Cave paintings. Text takes longer to consume and people are more time-conscious now. We’re going back to hieroglyphics, to emojis: you look at the image and it’s shorthand for something else. I read that the most used word last year was the heart symbol – it wasn’t even a word anymore, just the heart emoji. And I thought, ‘God, I do use it a lot, actually.’ You’re not going to write ‘Love it’, you just put a heart and people know. I don’t know if ‘likes’ are enough now. Facebook’s too curated. Instagram’s a lot less about saying ‘I’ve got an amazing, interesting life’ and more about showing how you look at the world, the visual language. It’s a diary. When you look through people’s Instagrams, they’re all pretty coherent – you can get a sense of the person and what they look at. It’s less about status.

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Read it here now.