MUSIC AND THE INTERNET

Music and The Internet
Subtitle: "I'm so weirded out by the internet"

There are obvious pros and cons about how the internet affects your music scene. (I write 'your' rather than 'the' because music is, I feel, at the present moment, a personal possession and responsibility of the public, you.) The majority of musicians I encounter are experiencing opportunities not otherwise available in absence of the internet. We, as music apostles, are hearing new music, gaining fans, divulging music education, networking with bands, buying/selling merch... We, as internet fiends, are giving into homogenization, gentrification, pirating, marginal successes, the superficial super-fiscal... Tremendous access of this magnitude is equated by a high sense of anxiety, presenting the new-age and quite fucking nostalgic quandary: How are we to handle the responsibility of the internet? How can we adjust and sustain our careers within the music and art culture as it now primarily exists by way of the world wide web?

These are just a few of the confusions posed with the onset of 'being connected'. I write that and get a sense of repulsion. Derogatory and invading -- It's just sad, dudes. What are we connecting into? Who is accessing that information? Answer: I dunno But there is one allusive illusive mogul profiting from this insecurity. Without standards and protocol the media runs amuck. And duh, they do. Gallivanting across this digital playground, they have access to so much information on mass markets, and however dumb I like to think they are -- they can be just as smart. Yet yet yet yetyettttttt they are just as naive to this whole internet revolution as we the productive counterparts and patronized patrons are. Their human minds are just as blown when trying to grasp The Internet. All in all, The Media must keep up with us and our many network avenues. They have to swindle and sell trust in order to maintain your committed attention. But the pyramidal shape to which the previous standards of news media elated itself to is moot as an informational source. No longer is there a need ... fuck that... no longer is it accurate to instill authority within few major sources.

The internet is in the sweaty hands of the people; and readily malleable and extensive and elusive. With that, there is an increased need for responsibility. Or we're just gonna dick around trying to keep up with what's popular as some sort of validation for quality. Hello, Warhol's 15 minutes of fame is dead. Turnover within popularity is so high that there is no linear progression. What's more important is establishing a community within your online network. Community and subcultures are expanding in definition beyond the boundaries of land locality. I stress community as a solution for sustainability. I have an international crew of fools who I respect and admire and just the same influence me. I predominantly look to their promotions and record labels for upcoming releases and other news because I trust them and find comfort and familiarity in them. More primary source and less secondary hi-brow privileged cyclical media. The DIY ethic isn't an alternative reservation, it is the fucking future, man. Oh, and reviews are lame. Cybering is lame. Drunk ichatting rules. Cats purring in my ear rules.

Huh?

I'm getting rid of my cell phone, laptop and twitter account, and starting a progressive commune.

--

"They Called for More Structure" by Donald Barthelme; ©1983
An interlude on thoughts of promise, budding antics and mocking the esthetics of grandeur.

They called for more structure, then, so we brought in some big hair four-by-fours from the back shed and nailed them into place with railroad spikes. This new city, they said, was going to be just jim-dandy, would make architects stutter, would make Chambers of Commerce burst into flame. We would have our own witch doctors, and strange gods aplenty, and site-specific sins, and hunuhunhunkunukuapuaa in the public fish bowls. We workers listened with out mouths agape. We had never heard anything like it. But we trusted our instincts and our paychecks, so we pressed on, bringing in color-coated steel from the back shed and anodized aluminum from the shed behind that. Oh radiant city! we said to ourselves, how we want you to be built! Workplace democracy was practiced on the job, and the clerk-of-the-works (who had known Wivi Lonn in Finland) wore a little cap with a little feather, very jaunty. There was never any question of hanging back *although we noticed that our ID cards were of a color different from their ID cards); the exercise of our skills, and he promise of the city, were enough. By the light of the moon we counted our chisels and told stories of other building feats we had been involved in: Babel, Chandigarh, Brasilia, Taliesin.

At dawn each day, an eight-mile run, to condition ourselves for the implausible exploits ahead.

The enormous pumping station, clad in red Lego, at the point where the new river will be activated ...

Areas of the city, they told us, had been designed to rot, fall into desuetude, return, in time to open space. Perhaps, they said, fawns would one day romp there, on the crumbling brick. We were slightly skeptical about this part of the plan, but it was, after all, a plan, the ferocious integrity of the detailing impressed us all, and standing by the pens containing the fawns who would father the fawns who might some day romp on the crumbling brick, one could not help but notice one's chest bursting with anticipatory pride.

High in the air, working on a setback faced with alternating bands of gray and rose stone capped with grids of gray glass, we moistened our brows with the tails of our shirts, which had been dipped into a pleasing brine, lit new cigars, and saw the new city spread out beneath us, in the shaped of the work FASTIGIUM. Not the name of the city, they told us, simply a set of letters selected for the elegance of the script. The little girl dead behind the rosebushes came back to life, and the passionate construction continued.