Diamond Jubilee and the Politics of Inaccessibility
There is much to be said about the state of music criticism in 2025. Much to be criticized, in fact. But one of my main problems with it is how little some reviewers seem to spend with the records they write about, and how much that sense of urgency for clicks comes through in clearly rushed write-ups. I am of the opinion that one should fully immerse oneself in the music they’re trying to convey feelings about, either to hate it, love it, or not to care about. Then, I stumbled upon Diamond Jubilee, the seventh album by Cindy Lee, the music project of Canadian musician Patrick Flegel. With 32 tracks, the double album is dense, weird, and absorbing.
That a record this long is difficult to parse through is no surprise. But what makes Diamond Jubilee such a challenge is not its length, really, but its sheer brilliance added to how much there is to be talked about. Each song is a country of its own, with complexity, density, boundaries, and so on. Each warrants its own paragraph in a review. So, how exactly does one go about spending time with a record of this magnitude and density, with such indescribable ethereal melancholy, until they finally feel ready to try and describe it? Many critics did it, and most of them did it well. Bear in mind that, writing about a record as obscure as this requires a lot of explaining and contextualizing. When I was doing research to write my own, I stumbled upon a comment on Reddit that asked, “is the buzz around this album simply because of how it’s been made available?”
I thought the question was pertinent, stemming from how Flegel chose to release it. By limiting access to a Web 1.0 website and a single YouTube video, Diamond Jubilee forces a different kind of engagement. You can’t shuffle these tracks on Spotify or let an algorithm decide their order. You must sit with all two hours, understanding how “Demon Bitch” bleeds into “Lucifer Stand,” how the static between songs becomes part of the composition itself. Sure, the album works just as well for passive listening; in fact, I can imagine it playing at the restaurant of a fancy Four Seasons as well as at gas station in the Midwest. But that seems unlikely to happen due to the album’s inaccessibility—a contradictory statement, I know, since the album is on Youtube. But not as many people listen to music on Youtube as on Spotify or Apple Music. Flegel, then, just didn’t make an artistic choice—it made a dare to modern listening habits. Still, the album figured in almost every year-end list for best albums of 2024.
So, is the album’s intentional inaccessibility enhancing its appeal to a certain type of music fan? The kind who views difficulty as merit, who sees streaming platforms as the death of “real” music appreciation? Let’s face it: indie fans love exclusivity and are not the biggest haters of gatekeeping either. There’s something almost too perfect about a lo-fi, gender-bending, experimental pop record being distributed through obsolete digital channels. It checks every box in the indie credibility handbook.
Yet Diamond Jubilee transcends its own mythology. Yes, tracks like “Baby Blue” and “Golden Microphone” hit different when you’ve had to work to find them, but they’d be remarkable regardless of their delivery method. The production decisions—the way vintage pop dissolves into noise, how Flegel’s falsetto pierces through waves of distortion—serve the songs rather than some abstract notion of authenticity. What we’re left with, then, is an album that’s both brilliant and brilliantly positioned. Its distribution model forces the kind of deep listening that modern criticism often lacks, while its musical achievements justify that attention. Maybe that’s the point: in an era where algorithms curate our experiences and hot takes replace reflection, Diamond Jubilee demands we remember how to really listen—not because it’s exclusive, but because it’s worth it.
You can listen to Diamond Jubilee below or, yes, on Youtube.
