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How Crankdat Beat Burnout With Flame-Throwing Middle Fingers and a Fan-First Mission

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When the world was opening back up after the pandemic, Christian Smith, better known as Crankdat, found himself considering walking away from music altogether.

At that point, he’d been touring professionally since 2017 after dropping out of college to pursue music full-time. But after being dropped by his agency and watching bookings slow in an industry still adjusting to life post-global shutdown, he found himself questioning everything.

It was 2022 and the electronic dance music industry felt like it had reset. Momentum was hard to come by.

“I think my time’s up, maybe it’s time to just look at what’s next for me in life,” Smith recalls thinking in a candid interview with EDM.com. “Maybe I don’t want to do anything in entertainment at all anymore. Maybe I want to go do something completely different.”

Christian Smith, or Crankdat.

c/o Press

An inflection point came that summer after a pivotal conversation with his manager, Mike Lisanti, who challenged him to commit to just six more months and give it everything he had. “You’ve been giving it a hundred percent this whole time,” he said Lisanti told him at the time. “But give it 110%. Give it 120%.”

So he did. “If you’re going to quit, who gives a shit anyway?” Smith recalled hearing. “Just throw everything you have at the wall and let’s see what shakes. So that’s pretty much what I did.”

That mindset shift was a turning point for the rising dubstep superstar, who stopped worrying about what others in the industry might think. He instead started taking creative risks, and they started to pay off.

With perfectionism no longer looming, Crankdat’s early comeback was in full force. TikTok, once a platform he avoided, became the key that reignited everything. He launched a remix video series, posted weekly content and stayed constantly visible on the platform “until people couldn’t get away from me,” he jokes.

The experiment worked as his channel ballooned to over 1 million followers, growing his fan base organically while reintroducing him to the EDM community. “It felt like I was starting over, but with experience this time,” Smith says.

By early-2023, the Crankdat project exploded with “STFU,” a dubstep smash currently on the precipice of 10 million Spotify streams. The viral hit helped transform Smith’s burnout into the feeling of forward motion.

His cult following began translating over to the live music arena, culminating in a sold-out doubleheader at the famed Hollywood Palladium and a landmark set at North America’s largest EDM festival, EDC Las Vegas, which became the most-attended performance in the history of its beloved bassPOD stage.

Since then, he’s been on a tear: a sold-out North American tour, “GET CRANKED!”; a surprise appearance to close out Coachella’s storied Do LaB stage; a coveted night-time slot at Ultra Music Festival’s 25th anniversary; and a pair of DJ sets at EDC Las Vegas.

Smith is now rolling into a jam-packed summer of festival sets at Bonnaroo, Electric Forest, Tomorrowland and HARD Summer, among many others. However, the North Star of his resurgence hasn’t been the high-profile gigs, but his deep connection to his fans.

“We talk about it every single week,” he says. “I say that line more than any other sentence in my entire life: fan experience is the number one priority.”

That philosophy has shaped every aspect of his live show. At the Palladium, he debuted “Middle Fingers Up” (MFU), a giant pair of flame-throwing middle fingers tied to the lore of “STFU.” What started as a one-off became a signature showpiece, later appearing at a secret show at Brooklyn’s Under the K Bridge Park.

Crankdat’s “MFU” show production.

c/o Press

But that was just phase one. For his 2025 tour, he retired the “MFU” stage design and built something entirely new: the ambitious “Crank Deck.” With its 360° stage design, the production brings fans in as close as possible—literally.

At each show, Smith and his team hand out Charlie and the Chocolate Factory-style “Golden Tickets” to diehard fans in GA, often those decked out in Crankdat jerseys or merch. The special passes grant access to an elevated area onstage so fans can experience the shows alongside their charismatic headliner.

This tour also marks Smith’s first major-budget production, the development of which was “hands-on in the literal sense,” he says. He flew in early to tour stops, worked alongside his crew at 9am load-ins and sometimes even built stage elements with his VJ just minutes before doors opened. Balancing large-scale production with this boots-on-the-ground energy is what makes Crankdat’s shows feel personal, even as the rooms keep getting bigger.

Developed specifically with his fans in mind, the “Crank Deck” is complete with immersive lighting elements and headbang-ready railings, infrastructure he called “really complicated.”

“Securing railings onto decking, because we wanted the railings to be headbang-able, we wanted the kids to be able to go ape-shit on those things,” Smith explains. “And that’s actually really hard to do.”

Another key addition? Lasers. Lots of lasers.

*Crankdat performing at EDC Las Vegas 2025.*

Mike Hook

Smith spent a lot of time considering how the dispersion of lasers would make his fans feel, no matter where they are in the crowd. “It is more than just seeing them,” he says. They have got to be going over their head so that they can look up and they’re like, ‘Holy shit.'”

But the connection doesn’t end when the lasers shut down. Through it all, a few things have stayed the same: build fearlessly and never take the crowd for granted.

“That is literally my favorite thing to do,” Smith says of fans tagging him in videos. “Just laying in my hotel room and tapping through all the tags I get. It’s the closest I’ll ever get to watching my own show. Phones pick up the crowd reactions, especially during big SFX moments. That’s what I want to feel. That’s the version of the show I care about the most.”

And there’s plenty more new music on the way.

“I have more original music than I have had basically in the past two years combined,” Smith confirms. “It’s going to come out this year, which is going to be fun.”

Follow Crankdat:

Instagram: instagram.com/crankdat
TikTok: tiktok.com/@crankdat
X: x.com/crankdat
Facebook: facebook.com/crankdat
Spotify: spoti.fi/3l8FXz0

Black Sabbath’s Tony Iommi Plays on Robbie Williams’ New Song

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The Britpop icon has teamed up with the former Black Sabbath guitarist for a track that will appear on the former’s new album. Continue reading…

Paul Weller announces new album, Find El Dorado

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Paul Weller has announced details of a new studio album, Find Eldorado. The album is released on July 25 on Parlophone.

THE JULY 2025 ISSUE OF UNCUT IS AVAILABLE TO ORDER NOW: STARRING NICK DRAKE., A 15-TRACK NEW MUSIC CD, THE WHO, BLACK SABBATH, BRIAN ENO, MATT BERNINGER, PULP, BOB WEIR AND MORE

The album is a deeply personal collection of reinterpretations. “These are songs I’ve carried with me for years,” Weller says. “They’ve taken on new shapes over time. And now felt like the moment to share them.”

The album has been produced and arranged by Steve Craddock and features collaborations with the likes of Hannah Peel, Declan O’Rourke, Robert Plant, Seckou Keita, Amelia Coburn and Noel Gallagher.

You can hear two songs from Find Eldorado below.

“Lawdy Rolla” below – originally by an obscure French studio band called The Guerrillas, who featured African jazz star Manu Dibango in their ranks.

And Brian Protheroe’s 1974 hit “Pinball”, which features saxophone from Jacko Peake.

You can pre-order the album here.

And here’s the Find El Dorado track list – with the artists who originally recorded the songs in brackets…

Handouts in the Rain (Richie Havens)
Small Town Talk (Bobby Charles)
El Dorado (Eamon Friel)
White Line Fever (The Flying Burrito Brothers)
One Last Cold Kiss (Christy Moore)
When you are a King (White Plains)
Pinball (Brian Protheroe)
Where There’s Smoke, There’s Fire (Willie Griffin)
I Started a Joke (Bee Gees)
Never the Same (Lal and Mike Waterson)
Lawdy Rolla (The Guerrillas)
Nobody’s Fool (The Kinks)
Journey (Duncan Browne)
Daltry Street (Jake Fletcher / PP Arnold)
Clive’s Song (Hamish Imlach)

The post Paul Weller announces new album, Find El Dorado appeared first on UNCUT.

Journalists at Chicago Newspaper “Deeply Disturbed” That “Disaster” AI Slop Was Printed Alongside Their Real Work

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Journalists at The Chicago Sun-Times are speaking out following the paper's publishing of AI-generated misinformation.

Writers at The Chicago Sun-Times, a daily newspaper owned by Chicago Public Media, are speaking out following the paper’s publishing of AI-generated misinformation, urging that the “disaster” content threatens the paper’s reputation and hard-earned reader trust.

The Sun-Times came under fire this week after readers called attention to a “summer reading list” published in the paper’s weekend edition that recommended books that turned out to be completely nonexistent. The books were all attributed to real, well-known authors, but ten out of the 15 listed titles didn’t actually exist. When 404 Media got in touch with the bylined author, he confirmed he’d used AI to drum up the list.

But the writer said he hadn’t double-checked the accuracy of the AI-generated reading list. The list was just one small piece of a 64-page “Heat Index” guide to summer, which, as the Sun-Times noted in its response to Futurism and others, had been provided by a third-party — not by the Sun-Times’ own newsroom or other staff. (Other sections within the “best of summer” feature, The Verge found, included similar erroneous and fabricated attribution issues that hinted at AI use.)

Shortly thereafter, 404 Media confirmed through the Sun-Times that the content was provided by King Features, a subsidiary of the media giant Hearst, and wasn’t reviewed by the Sun-Times before publishing.

“Historically, we don’t have editorial review from those mainly because it’s coming from a newspaper publisher, so we falsely made the assumption there would be an editorial process for this,” Victor Lim, a spokesperson for Chicago Public Media, told 404 Media. “We are updating our policy to require internal editorial oversight over content like this.”

Lim added that Chicago Public Media is “reviewing” its relationship with Hearst, which owns dozens of American newspapers and magazines. The Sun-Times has since posted a lengthy response online apologizing for the AI-spun misinformation making its way to print, while promising to change its editorial policies to protect against such gaffes in the future.

The human journalists at the paper have responded, too.

In a statement provided to media outlets, including Futurism, the paper’s union, the Chicago Sun-Times Guild, issued a forceful statement yesterday admonishing the publishing of the content. It emphasized that the 60-plus page section wasn’t the product of its newsroom, and said it was “deeply disturbed” to find undisclosed AI-generated content “printed alongside” the work of the paper’s journalists.

The Guild’s statement reads in full:

The Sun-Times Guild is aware of the third-party “summer guide” content in the Sunday, May 18 edition of the Chicago Sun-Times newspaper. This was a syndicated section produced externally without the knowledge of the members of our newsroom.

We take great pride in the union-produced journalism that goes into the respected pages of our newspaper and on our website. We’re deeply disturbed that AI-generated content was printed alongside our work. The fact that it was sixty-plus pages of this “content” is very concerning — primarily for our relationship with our audience but also for our union’s jurisdiction.

Our members go to great lengths to build trust with our sources and communities and are horrified by this slop syndication. Our readers signed up for work that has been vigorously reported and fact-checked, and we hate the idea that our own paper could spread computer- or third-party-generated misinformation. We call on Chicago Public Media management to do everything it can to prevent repeating this disaster in the future.

They’re right that reader trust is fundamental to the work of journalism, and it’s an easy thing to lose. Other AI scandals have gone hand-in-hand with reputational damage, as in the cases of CNET and Sports Illustrated, and we’ve seen journalists and their unions from around the country issue similar statements following instances of controversial AI use by publishers.

This is also the latest instance of third-party media companies distributing AI content to legitimate publishers, in many cases without the direct knowledge of those publishers. As a 2024 investigation by Futurism found, a third-party media company called AdVon Commerce used a proprietary AI tool to create articles for dozens of publishers including Sports Illustrated and The Miami Herald; that content was published under the bylines of fake writers with AI-generated headshots and phony bios, manufacturing an air of faux legitimacy. Some publishers, including the Miami Herald and other local newspapers belonging to the McClatchy publishing network, scrubbed their sites of the content following our investigation, saying they were unaware of AI use.

Here, it seems the editorial process was so lacking that AI-generated errors made their way through not just one, but two reputable American publishers before winding up in the Sun-Times’ printed edition. (The freelance writer Joshua Friedman confirmed on Bluesky that the error-riddled “Heat Index” guide was also published in The Philadelphia Inquirer.) Which, as the paper’s union emphasizes in their statement, meant it was published alongside the journalism that human media workers stake their careers on.

More on AI and journalism: Quartz Fires All Writers After Move to AI Slop

The post Journalists at Chicago Newspaper “Deeply Disturbed” That “Disaster” AI Slop Was Printed Alongside Their Real Work appeared first on Futurism.

Tom Petty’s Wildflowers album to be celebrated in new book

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Tom Petty‘s 1994 album Wildflowers is to be celebrated in a new book from Genesis Publications and the Tom Petty Estate.

Tom Petty: Wildflowers will go behind the scenes of Tom’s self-proclaimed favourite album, featuring never-before-seen photographs and handwritten lyrics alongside reflections from Petty himself, The Heartbreakers and close collaborators.

THE JULY 2025 ISSUE OF UNCUT IS AVAILABLE TO ORDER NOW: STARRING NICK DRAKE., A 15-TRACK NEW MUSIC CD, THE WHO, BLACK SABBATH, BRIAN ENO, MATT BERNINGER, PULP, BOB WEIR AND MORE

Carefully hand-finished and produced in a limited run, you can find out more by clicking here.

The post Tom Petty’s Wildflowers album to be celebrated in new book appeared first on UNCUT.

Rod Wave Arrested for 14 Serious Charges

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Rod Wave arrested in Atlanta. Continue reading…

Human‑Inspired Agents: Translating Workflows into Robust AI Systems

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When ChatGPT and its peers burst onto the scene at the end of 2022, the analyst community immediately began probing one question: could large language models write SQL for us? The appeal is obvious. More than 400 million Office 365 users—and upwards of 90 percent of firms—still rely on spreadsheets for core analysis, so any effective AI tool for analysts taps a vast, lucrative market. I have argued before that such tools are shifting analysts from “dashboard jockeys” to strategic AI orchestrators who pair domain insight with machine assistance.

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The first thing we all tried was fine tuning. However, simply fine-tuning pre-trained LLMs for text-to-SQL quickly reveals critical limitations. Natural language is inherently ambiguous, database schema context is often fragmented, and models frequently lack the factual knowledge needed to generate correct queries. For production applications—especially customer-facing ones—this unreliability is unacceptable. Analysts will only trust systems that consistently deliver accurate results. The industry needs more robust approaches beyond basic fine-tuning to make text-to-SQL viable for real-world implementation.

Learning From Human SQL Craft

At the recent Agent Conference in New York, Timescale’s CTO Mike Freedman laid out a blueprint for a more reliable text‑to‑SQL agent—without further fine tuning or post-training. His starting point is disarmingly simple: observe how experienced analysts write SQL, then mirror that workflow.

Timescale distills those observations into two companion modules:

Semantic Catalog. Think of this as an always‑up‑to‑date knowledge base that maps user vocabulary to database reality. It stores table semantics, column aliases, units, and business definitions. When the LLM receives a prompt, the agent first queries the catalog to ground ambiguous terms (“revenue” versus “gross_sales”) and to inject table‑specific hints. Because the catalog is version‑controlled alongside the schema, new columns or renamed fields propagate automatically—no retraining required. As I noted in an earlier piece on GraphRAG and related approaches, Timescale is part of a broader shift toward grounding RAG systems in structured knowledge rather than vectors alone.
Semantic Validation. After the model drafts a query, the agent runs EXPLAIN in Postgres to catch undefined columns, type mismatches, and egregious cost estimates. Invalid plans trigger a structured error that the agent feeds back into the LLM for another revision cycle. The loop resembles a compiler pass more than a chat exchange, and it neatly aligns with how modern coding copilots lean on build tools to sanity‑check generated code.

The practical effect is a system that converges on syntactically and semantically correct SQL in a handful of turns—often faster than a fine‑tuned model that “hallucinates” table names it was never shown.

From Text-to-SQL to Broader Lessons in Agent Design

The Timescale approach yields tangible results, sharply reducing query errors, particularly for complex joins, once its Semantic Catalog and Validation components are active. More importantly, it offers a methodological blueprint. Instead of merely layering a large language model onto existing interfaces, Timescale started by dissecting how expert analysts actually write SQL—understanding intent, mapping terms to schema, testing, and correcting. They then encoded this structured workflow into an agent that intelligently combines probabilistic generation with deterministic checks.

This specific example highlights broader lessons for building effective AI agents. Firstly, it underscores the value of deeply understanding the human workflow you aim to automate or assist; modeling the human process provides critical insights into the necessary information and feedback mechanisms. Secondly, it reinforces the idea that realizing AI’s full potential often requires transforming workflows, not just augmenting them. As others, including Microsoft, have argued regarding AI agents, the most significant gains come when we redesign how work gets done, integrating AI tightly with deterministic tools and structured data sources rather than treating it as a simple add-on.

For practitioners building AI applications, particularly those involving complex generation tasks, several practical takeaways emerge. Invest in building and maintaining structured context layers (like semantic catalogs or knowledge graphs) to ground the model accurately. Leverage existing deterministic tools—databases, compilers, APIs, linters—as cheap, reliable oracles for validating AI output. Finally, design agents with tight feedback loops, enabling them to interpret structured validation results and iteratively self-correct. The journey towards trustworthy AI systems relies significantly on such thoughtful system design, combining generative power with structured knowledge and verification.

The post Human‑Inspired Agents: Translating Workflows into Robust AI Systems appeared first on Gradient Flow.

Bruce Springsteen Releases EP With Trump-Bashing Speeches

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Bruce Springsteen’s pre-song speeches bashing Donald Trump at the E Street Band’s European tour opener last week are immortalized on the new digital EP Land of Hope & Dreams, which also includes four full live performances.

At the May 14 show in Manchester, England, Springsteen labeled Trump as “corrupt, incompetent and treasonous” before he and his bandmates had even struck a note. “In my home, the America I love, the America I’ve written about, that has been a beacon of hope and liberty for 250 years, is currently in the hands of a corrupt, incompetent and treasonous administration,” the Boss said prior to “Land of Hope and Dreams.” “Tonight we ask all who believe in democracy and the best of our American experiment to rise with us, raise your voices against authoritarianism and let freedom ring!”

Gorillaz Construct ‘House Of Kong’ For London Exhibit

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Gorillaz will bring fans into their bespoke cartoon world this summer as part of the exhibition House of Kong, which will be staged Aug. 8-Sept. 3 at London’s Copper Box. Click here for tickets.

Per organizers, House of Kong will trace the Damon Albarn-led band’s “life of misadventures, musical innovation and groundbreaking virtual ways” since their debut in 2000 with “Tomorrow Comes Today.” See the exhibition trailer below.