Podcasts Circa 1970

 

Almost everyone had some kind of a tape recorder when they were in grade school in the 1970s. I had several, my first a Panasonic (several perhaps) because the Panasonic catalogs were so compelling. I was essentially making very lo-fi "Podcasts" back in the early 1970s. 

Listening back to The Monkees Headquarters after Nesmith's death, I realized lots of those recordings are very lo-fi, even though they were made in professional recording studios.

The democratization of technology always starts out with people making art with it then gets entangled in the collective psyche, or enters the memosphere. Young people still experiment in the spirit of Zilch, and as we saw in the Get Back film, the early versions of the songs were a form of "Zilch". In the beginning, when you don't have ideas (coming up with zilch) you have to just do anything, and I think that's what this is. It's the period of extreme exhaustion before you can sleep on it.