"Change no longer happens all at once for everyone, as it did with the rush of Punk puncturing the ennui of 1970s mainstream culture. In digital networks, change is happening everywhere, constantly, and the mainstream is a much more fragile and temporary consensus than it once was. There will still be moments when something breaks through to enough people at the same time to feel like Punk, but it won’t be the same thing. There are a hundred punk moments happening every day, if you look hard enough."

“The New Patterns of Culture: Slow, Fast, and Spiky”

The whole essay is well worth the read.

"I’m not saying that the monoculture is a fantasy created by myopic critics who willfully misremember the past and project their personal experiences onto a diverse population…actually, that’s exactly what I’m saying. Not only do monoculture fetishists romanticize a bygone era of centralized media that nobody really misses — three TV networks! Limited radio playlists! Art-house films that only play New York and L.A.! — they have constructed a utopian concept of cultural ‘togetherness’ that only ever appeared to exist because of that very same centralized media."

Steve Hyden

(via marathonpacks)

"As a matter of fact, records that I’ve been craving for years…are languishing unlistened-to. I’ll never get to them either, because I’m more interested in the hunt than I am in the prey. The minute I get something, I just crave more. And so something has really changed – and I think this is the real epiphany: the ways in which culture is distributed have become profoundly more intriguing than the cultural artifact itself. What we’ve experienced is an inversion of consumption, one in which we’ve come to prefer the acts of acquisition over that which we are acquiring, the bottles over the wine."

Kenneth Goldsmith, founder of Ubuweb, in The Wire

(via Bruce Sterling)

"…[Music is] the third rail of life. You grabbed it to shock yourself out of the dull drag of hours, to feel something, to burn with all the emotions you didn’t get to experience in the ordinary run of school and TV and loading the dishwasher after dinner."

Joe Hill, Horns

"…[P]articipants just appear, looking for that new thing—the thing they always wanted to see—or the old thing that might be seen anew—and having seen it, they seek to invest that thing with new value. They do this simply by showing up; they do it with their body language and casual conversation, with their written commentary, if they are so inclined, and their disposable income, if it falls to hand….You do the same if you recruit all your friends to go listen to a band in a bar. If all your friends show up and have a good time, you will almost certainly pay more at the door the next time the band plays. But thats the idea: to increase the social value of the things you love, and the extra bucks are a small price to pay. They are next to nothing, really, compared to the value of forming a new, eccentric community, or compared to the pleasure of having one’s views prevail."

Dave Hickey, “Romancing the Looky-Loos”

Thanks to Andrew for the gift of Hickey’s book, Air Guitar: Essays on Art & Democracy.

"Among older listeners, the problem is even more acute. Access to an endless stream of decontextualized music speeds our free fall into nostalgia. We forget that DEVO was protest music, the Talking Heads made social commentary, the Pet Shop Boys were gay liberationists. These weren’t just songs that played at prom, they were reactions to the Cold War, to Reagan, and to America’s rust-belt decline."

John Roderick, “The Shuffling of Music Has Diluted Its Cultural Impact”

The argument that music used to be hard to get and so we appreciated it more always puts me in mind of the Monty Python Four Yorkshiremen sketch, but this is an interesting point.

"Do you know what, it was cultural,” he concludes. “I never came from the place that those people came from, so to come in and go, ‘I’m just going to try and make this stuff’ was probably a bit naive.” He’s at pains to point out that the divide wasn’t racial […] but one of geography and background; Blake comes from Enfield, dubstep started 27 miles away in Croydon."

James Blake, from this Guardian interview.

As a North American, the concept of being an unwanted, uncomprehending outsider because you’re from twenty-seven miles away makes me boggle. I actually thought this might be a very deadpan joke; Dan Hancox has been kind enough to enlighten me about UK musical microregionalism.

Matisyahu, in this essay over at All Songs Considered:

But the real reason Jews don’t have more Hanukkah music is that historically, American Jewish singer-songwriters were too busy making Christmas music. “White Christmas,” “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” “Silver Bells” and “The Christmas Song (Chestnuts Roasting)” were all written by Jews. Both Neil Diamond and Barbra Streisand have their own Christmas albums. The No. 1 best-selling Christmas album of all time is from Kenneth Bruce Gorelick, the Jewish smooth-jazz legend Kenny G. American Jews have always produced a lot of holiday music, just not Hanukkah music.

Jewish musicians might feel more inclined to make Hanukkah music if they knew that someone would actually want to listen to it. Until the holiday music market shows it can support Hanukkah songs, it’s highly unlikely that we will ever hear Jewish holiday music at the mall, or the gas station, or the DMV, or on every radio station that Santa currently rules.

[hat tip to Chris for the pointer to the Neil Diamond vid]

"[W]e started talking about the fact that our kids listen to a lot of the same music that we do. Because music has become so flat and because there’s, you know, 50 years of it available on the web, and because you don’t actually always know when the music you like was recorded — you just know that you like it, here’s something and it’s fun — that music no longer becomes the cultural divide that it used to be…."

Neil Gaiman, quoted in this interview.

The decline of mass media and the rise of digital distribution means that music is not only splintering across audience, but it’s splintering across time; listeners are cratediggers as a matter of course.

Rhymes to retire from pop music lyrics

The following rhymes have given pop music lyrics decades of useful service, and it’s now time for them to be honourably retired.

maybe/baby

money/honey

rain/pain/gain

love/above

cry/die

fire/desire

knees/please

Any more rhymes that you want to add to the list?

Thanks Vanessa, Joles and Sophia for suggestions.

Hip-Hop Girl in a Techno Club

This is painfully familiar, even to someone who is neither a hip-hop girl nor a DJ.

(ht Liz and Rob)

How to disappear (almost) completely

Over at zed equals zee proper, I discuss how there are a small number of artists who’ve decided to make themselves inaccessible online, using a variety of approaches. Some pick unGoogleable names. Some hide behind Unicode characters. Some pick names that will deliberately be confused with other bands. Read more about strategies for obscurity: How to disappear (almost) completely

"

There are two models of how originality could be used up. For both let’s say there is a song that is popular to remix, and it has already been remixed 100 times.

In the first model, there is diminishing returns to remixes in the utility function. Consumers values originality and so they experience diminishing returns to listening to additional remixes. Here originality being “used up” means that you’ve already consumed all 100 remixes, and therefore the 101st provides zero utility. Thus consumers have to experience the first 100 songs in order to be affected by the zero marginal utility of originality, and they will only be affected if they are fully sated. In contrast, if copper is entirely used up, consumers will be affected by consuming none of it. Thus the non-rival nature of music is key here. In general, it seems people worry about the sustainability of rivalrous goods, not non-rivalrous ones.

"

When economists argue about music.

The above is part of a convincing rebuttal to this blog post, which addresses the sustainability of music, and the possibility that we are ‘using it up.’ (“Each new song sits somewhere in a range of originality, from very original to very derivative. The more new original songs are developed and marketed, the harder it gets to develop and market new songs that will be seen as relatively original.”)

Thanks to David Boy for pointing me to the posts!

"You are a person reading an article about music on the Internet. From this, I can safely assume that you are an American straight white male."

“Disco.doc”: a defense of disco over at Something Awful. Go read it. You may particularly like it if you are, like me, not anywhere close to 4 for 4 on that lead sentence.

[via Line Out]