Music History In The Age of Streaming

 

Chart from Reebee Garofalo's 1975 book, Rock 'n' Roll Is Here To Pay

 One of the objectives in Bob Stanley's book Let's Do It seems to be the parsing out a chronology of very old music from the early 20th century, e.g. the ragtime music that was released as 78s. It's really an issue these days because you can't suss out a good chronology when you're on streaming services--for example, hearing something for the first time from what you think is the 60s, when it was actually recorded in the 90s--just sounding like the 60s. It takes some effort to sort that out now, but what you come away with is the story of how media has evolved and how things are still echoing from sometimes 100 years ago. Even in my artwork I'm capturing those echoes and using them as if they weren't echoes: I'm doing things that might have been done in the 1920s. My music can be very 70s because I'm using that same instrumentation and not using the latest synth sounds. I wouldn't have that awareness if I wasn't aware of 70s history, but I already knew it. It wasn't that I went hunting for it, and then made the work based on the factoids I found.

What's particularly interesting now is the reaction video using history gleaned from an online source. Would they include books? Probably not, but even if they did, those books might also be scraped from the internet, or now generated by AI.

One of the problems with background information on something is that it tells you what to see and hear. When I watched a reaction video to Paul Simon's Rhymin' Simon album, specifically American Tune, I realized I had none of that information when I was listening to it in the 70s and 80s but was very moved by it (particularly the string arrangement), and certainly immediately after 9/11, when it had a strong poignancy. Conceivably, these reaction videos can be done by AI, if all AI is doing is scraping information and re-packaging it without having a meaningful experience. It's a Report, like a news report.

One of the biggest distortions of our time is that everything is seen as information to be mined, discovered, processed, scraped, manufactured--when in fact something can exist on its own without having to interact with it and endlessly change it.

The interesting thing about music history is that as the generations die off, there are fewer people to personally speak for it (or more importantly respond to it). People are cherry-picking things from the net and social media that seem to have verisimilitude, when in fact they might be untrue or partially true, which is why it is important for living artists to be able to respond.

Perhaps in the future social media will promote the idea of absorbing information instead of just being bombarded by it and maybe some of it will sink in, but that's not the way it works. So it's good that people write these kinds of books. I would be interested in reading more of them.