js-alexander wrote:
I think the Christgau quote "I miss monoculture. I think it's good for people to have a shared experience." is a strange one. I get what he's trying to say, and maybe I'm nitpicking, but isn't todays culture of p2p'ing facebookers one of sharing experiences? hehe. Interesting article.
i have to say i agree with Christgau. i come from a small city (400,000 people) and there used to be one great radio station - an ex university station that turned into a commercial enterprise but still played excellent music - that everyone listened to. and i mean everyone. there was a real sense that all the people in the city were grooving to the same music. a couple of years back the programme manager was a guy whose big thing was dub - so the playlists contained huge amounts of dub and reggae, and for two whole summers in a row that was what everyone else in the city loved, as well; there were live, free open-air gigs every other weekend in public parks and for a while on the beaches as well, and it was mostly dub and dub-rock, and everyone was loving it. this radio station and the sense of community it creates are, to the best of my knowledge, still alive and well.
i'm currently living in places where radio has been dead for a long time, and i feel musically isolated in a way i never did back home. i don't care if other people on the other ends of my internet connection like the same kind of music i do - i want to go to a local gig and hear the kind of music that people where i'm living listen to, to be able to have a dance with a crowd of complete strangers who have all been listening to the same musical input, form a band with people who, by and large, have the same musical inspiration. and i really feel i can't do that, now.
i've by and large closed down my musical input, because it's too hard. with all the choice i've been given, i don't have the time to sift through the dross to find the good stuff; and so i find myself just listening to music that other people have given me randomly in the past, or old music from the time when there was a monoculture, so that i can safely say, yes, this was the good music for 1976.
this sense i think, is one of the most subtle but most important mis-truthinesses of the free market/globalisation/'the long tail': by providing so many different options, it allows you to make choices, which is ostensibly a good thing; but with the collapse of the choice-making authorities (ie the monoculture), you are forced to make these choices yourself. i don't like making choices. i don't have the time or the energy to sift through the dross to find the good stuff. but with the way things are, i am forced to. so i don't.
(and if you say, what about the podcasts, i say to you - how many thousands of podcasts are there out there? how do i know which ones are going to be worth the download? and even if i do download one that a whole bunch of people tell me is the best, there's no guarantee i'll even be able to find purchase on it, because i don't have a musical context in which to place it. at least within a monoculture, if i hear a new piece of music i have a shared contextual framework in which to understand it; if my friend loves it, there's a much higher chance that i'll love it too, because in our monoculture we've been listening to the same contextual music for so long.
this all shouldn't be taken as a defence of standard commercial radio/MTV/*, but rather a defence of the idea that having some geographically local authority or authorities on what is good music, so that as long as at least one of said authorities has good taste, there can be a geographically local sense of musical community, of shared musical experience.)
with this collapse of community, i find that music in 2008 is a very isolated/isolating experience. like this guy says, http://www.cyberrodent.com/ipod.html : the 'i' stands for 'isolation'.
-- damian stewart | +31 6 5902 5782 | damian@xxxxxxxxxx frey | live art with machines | http://www.frey.co.nz --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: microsound-unsubscribe@xxxxxxxxxxxxx For additional commands, e-mail: microsound-help@xxxxxxxxxxxxx website: http://www.microsound.org