Image Credit: SonicWasteland
Provocative title for a New Year, amirite?
I’m starting off 2025 (after pretty much disappearing in the last half of 2024 – explanation shortly) not trying to continue all the ‘Doomerism’ for the beginning of a New Year, but I did want to talk about things I’ve been thinking about (and talking about here in bits and pieces) for a while now, on how I’ve watched it creep into the Musicverse and Technology in general, and end with some glimmers and thoughts for a better series of tomorrows, or at least a train of thought to make you think about what you do and how you do it – and who you do it for.
Since my usual job at EduCorp® managed to rob my entire latter half of 2024 of anything remotely creative (they are in one of those ‘Seven-year Itches’ of changing pretty much everything so various higher ups can convince themselves that they are actually doing something to make things better rather than ask those of us who actually do the work what it would take to fix said issues. I’m sure this sounds familiar to oh so many of you…) So when our end of year reprieve came along, I took all the time off possible to decouple and spend some time refueling my tank with anything other than solving problems in front of my screen for countless hours per day.
I did have to check a few things for EduCorp® and had to deal with orders and whatnot for the Holidays, but that was it for Screen Time. No checking news, no hitting Websites for what’s going on in with the ‘latest’ musical or tech toys, and absolutely no time spent on ‘Social Media’. I spent as much time with friends and family as possible. Actual face to face conversation and chitchat about whatever came up. I also spent as much time as possible reading the massive backlog of books I have waiting for my attention. I needed to get away from the machine.
I did work on music a bit, but that was either with one of the ‘DAWless’ doodads I have lying about, or on one of my older computers that runs nothing but music software and doesn’t connect to The Interwebz®. I wish I could say I came up with something interesting, but I didn’t because my mind was continuously thinking about the title of this post. It came from one of the books I started reading that my oldest gave me for Christmas last year – Uwe Shutte’s Kraftwerk: Future Music from Germany. It was right on page 5 that I found the title. And it was there that I stopped reading to think about this for a bit.
I really miss these ‘stop and think’ moments when reading books. It happens with Online Blogs occasionally, but not as often IMO.
This paraphrase on a quote from Mark Fisher (and Mark based this on the work of Franco Berardi) really gelled with things I have been thinking about for quite a while now and tied into a lot of what I have talked about here and even back on <The Old Site> about the need to step back from the rampant HyperConsumption infecting everything around us. The Quietus has an excellent excerpt from Mark’s book containing this passage from back in 2013. Based on Mark’s words, Uwe decoded it simply as ‘The Future Has Been Cancelled’.
When (at least as of this writing) 500+ hours of video content are uploaded to The Tube of Yous, Tens of Thousands of songs are added to Spotify, and ‘Social Media’ is overloaded with posts, pics, and AI Slop every single day there is no way anyone can be seen or heard in this sea of consumption. But still, everyone tries, and worse yet deem it necessary to continue trying to gain traction and notoriety. It’s a Fool’s Game if you ask me, and when the only people making any money off of it are the Billionaires running the companies it truly makes me wonder if everyone is stuck in the ‘Temporarily Embarrassed Millionaire Syndrome‘ and not able to see that we are not really creating – we are being told what to create. And I certainly can’t be alone in the realization that Art seems to be stuck in the past. Yes, we are all standing on the shoulders of giants, but when was the last time we had a truly new Genre to enjoy that wasn’t just a Subset Intermingling of something we’ve been listening to for decades? When was the last time you saw a really good film that wasn’t a remake or another ‘Blockbuster’ money-grab? What was the last Art Show that moved to you to purchase something that you wanted to display proudly on your walls? Has the Future Really Been Cancelled?
And before you dismiss everything above, yes I realize that there are still Artists pushing the envelope and trying new strategies and ideas. But I will say that for the average person, exposure to them is like finding the needle in a haystack the size of a European Country. Friend and Editor Michael over at The Tonearm noted that he sees great new movies all the time, and also that there could very well be the ‘new Kraftwerk’ out there waiting to take hold of our collective ears. He’s more versed in Film than I, so I’ll have to concede to his knowledge, but as to the ‘New Kraftwerk’ my question is still ‘why has it taken so long?’
I’ll wager that 99+% of every single musician, artist, producer, or whatever in the Musicverse is using a computer and some kind of DAW (Digital Audio Workstation like Pro Tools, Cubase, or Ableton Live) to work with. This means that all of the technology is digital replications of creation and recording devices. Those that prefer to use only Hardware Devices (keyboards and drum machine and samplers) are essentially in the same boat as their Software-using brethren since those devices are nothing more than simplistic computers designed for the tasks of creating, recording, and editing music information. The Modular Synthesizer Set has come to realize that a lot of what is sitting in their racks is based on a computer of some kind. Even those who have gone ‘off the deep end’ and invested in old tape machines, recording consoles, and vintage gear are still probably shuffling that over to a computer for editing and digital delivery. You can’t escape the machine.
I dealt with tape machines back in the ‘Good Old Days’ and never want to have to calibrate one or deal with all the headaches involved with it again. I dealt with the mass of wires, the constant breaking down of processors and consoles, synchronizing pre-MIDI gear together… Not touching any of that again either. I welcomed The Digital Revolution because of its many advantages over the old methods of working, but soon found it also has its downsides to deal with. The most prominent is when you can edit everything, you will edit everything, losing the spontaneity and feel of what you were trying to accomplish in the first place. Another is that because you have just about every instrument and effect ever created at a mouse click you will use them on everything – just because you can. One of the worst things is because you can keep every single thing on cheap backup drives, you have hundreds of tiny ideas scattered all over the place and nothing ever seems to get finished…
Audio Recording Technology underwent a flurry of changes from the Nineteenth Century until the early 2000’s. Everything started with people playing things live, either in a Concert Hall or on home pianos. Then the Phonograph allowed us to capture a performance and copy it to spools or disks for mass consumption. Magnetic Tape came along in the late 1930’s and went from 1 to 48 tracks of recordable/playable (and mixable) channels in less that 50 years and went from analog with its sonically pleasing character but serious noise issues to digital circuitry with its pristine signal to noise ratio This was replaced around the early 1990s to the ‘Unlimited’ count and infinite flexibility, edibility, and ease of today’s DAW’s. Effect Processing also went from the simplicity of room tone, tape-based echo, and physical Reverb Chambers to the cornucopia of flavors emanating from Guitar Pedals and Rack-Mount Effects Units, leading to the infinite palette of today’s ‘Plugins’. Keyboards started as mechanical, then Electromechanical (using pickups similar to guitars), to fully electronic devices creating sounds from transistors and other electronic components.
In the early 1970’s, synthesizers went from incredibly large and outrageously expensive to an affordable commodity due to the influx of Japanese technology from Korg, Yamaha, and Roland. But it was the 1980’s and 90’s that saw the explosion of Music Technology that we still strangely covet today. The MIDI Standard allowed interconnection of devices from different manufacturers. Computers went from Mainframes and Terminals to desktop boxes in our homes and studios. Synths went from analog to digital and monophonic (single note) to polyphonic (chords), while drum machines and sequencers allowed us to create clockwork precision with relative ease. Digital Samplers also went from modest-house pricing to affordable, letting users record anything they could hear and play it back musically (or noisily). Every year or so was a raft of new ‘tech’ showing up at the Trade Shows and in the glossy magazine pages: FM Synthesis, LA Synthesis, Wavetable Synthesis, PCM (Pulse Code Modulation, or sample-based) Playback, Additive Synthesis, Phase Distortion Synthesis, Physical Modeling… All of these new technologies led to mutations and new forms of music every month or so. It was truly like living in the future.
Then in the 90’s that we saw the first Analog Modeling Synths. Its predecessor Physical Modeling used DSP (Digital Signal Processing) Algorithms to allow you to control ‘what made a sound a sound’ – from the material it was made out of to the thing you played or struck it with. Analog Modeling used the same DSP technology to recreate the circuitry (and all of its inherent foibles and quirks too) of the older analog machines. This was the Manufacturer’s response to the second-hand market of older technology used by the House and Techno Scene because of cheap prices and ease of use compared to the Digital Wondertoys with their complex sound creation, difficult to understand programming, along with (usually) minimal on-device programming unless you paid for a computer-based editor (and had a computer to run it on).
We need to stop and think about that last part for a bit. While the manufacturers were putting their R&D Departments in full force pushing the bounds of technology and sound manipulation, the Underground artists were lapping up the cast-off dregs and creating the next wave of Electronic Music. As House and Techno (and the myriad of offspring genres) began to migrate their seeds to Pop Culture, the Manufacturers followed suit by creating Digital Replicants (Analog Modeling Synthesizers) emulating features of what they had already made years or decades in the past. And surprisingly (and sadly) it’s where we still are right this moment. It’s easily been close to three Decades of ‘reinventing’ what they had already done – Music Making Technology is essentially stuck in the 70’s and 80’s.
Meanwhile, Every DAW in the past 20 years or so (and most standalone Hardware Musical Instruments) has hundreds or even thousands of sounds that cover the gamut of recording, synthesis, keyboard, sampling, and effect technology. They all do the same thing (record, edit, and mix) with basic derivations between them. If one DAW adds a ‘new’ feature, within a ‘dot’ version every other Developer will have this feature added to theirs. There are Online arguments over which one is the best, but sonically they are all similar, with the differences hashed out being those of workflow or esoteric features. In essence, everyone is using the same tools. We often joke about these being ‘tools in the toolbox’ since they have been about as standardized as what you probably have in your actual toolbox.
But even though your DAW can do just about anything you need, we are now inundated with scores of ‘Third-Party’ Developers and Companies doling out versions of devices we used decades ago, complete with realistic-looking panels and controls to lure musicians into getting that ‘magic’ from way back when. These tend to follow trends (of what I have no idea) like a specific effect processing type or a certain vintage keyboard, and I find it comical to wonder just how many virtual MiniMoogs one really needs, because absolutely no one will know the difference on a recording. I also find it quite sad because it’s rare you find anything truly unique or ‘forward-thinking’ with any of these Virtual Devices.
It’s universal throughout the Electronic Music World, with The ‘Major Players’ in the field like Roland and Korg and Moog trotting out Software Versions of their ‘Greatest Hits’ along with (equally retrospective) Hardware Counterparts. Musicians complain about Behringer copying anything and everything in the ‘Back Catalog’ of Vintage Music Tech, but honestly who can blame them – if everyone else is doing it, why shouldn’t they?
Again, Michael reminds me that ‘Digital is Perfection. There’s nowhere to go from here.’ Again, absolutely true, but I countered with there is good Digital and bad Digital. Just one example: ‘Analog’ Distortion sounds warm and pleasing to our ears (and can be modeled Digitally without issues). Digital Distortion (Intermodulation, Aliasing, or Clipping) is not pleasing in any such way, although it still has musical uses. The worst offender is called Foldover Distortion where you exceed Digital Zero (the absolute loudest any purely recorded Digital Signal can be recorded) and the resulting waveform is ‘folded back down’ on itself mathematically. One could also argue ‘at what point is Digital truly perfect’ which starts Online arguments about higher Sampling Rates, increased Bit Depth, and other nonsense, so let’s stay well clear of that shall we?
This is what gelled in my brain about The Future Has Been Cancelled. When Mark Fisher asked ‘why there wasn’t a Twenty-First Century version of Kraftwerk – how there be ‘futuristic’ music based on decades-old technology?’, I immediately thought the answer was surprisingly simple – Kraftwerk got there first, used up the technology of the time, got usurped by artists copying them and elaborating on their sound, had to resort to updating and touring their own Back Catalog because the Music Technology Companies decided to eschew doing anything new and just ‘played to the crowd’ by retreading the old standards. Why take chances when you can rest on your laurels?
I’m sure it’s more complicated than that, but it does make sense…
Surely you’ve noticed other Artistic fields imitate this mindset from filters and effects on digital cameras and Apps, the use of ‘Film Grain’ in movies shot on Digital Video, classic video game reissues and sequels, recreating older typefaces into ads, and Movie Studios hashing out remake after remake. Office buildings and new homes all look the same. Clothing hasn’t changed a whole lot. It’s really hard to tell one car from another…
And just like the music stuff, and the art stuff, our Technology is stuck too. Your smartphone or computer really doesn’t do anything different than it did 20 years ago (and they all look the same too). The underlying technology has gotten better (CPU’s, Memory, Storage), but they still do Word Processing, and Spreadsheets, and Games, and deliver Email. Even The Interwebz® is stuck as companies merge, consolidate, and slowly turn everything into a ‘Platform’ or Social Media site. This is what happens when the ‘Scrappy Tech Innovators’ get replaced by the ‘Bean Counters’ whose only concern is ‘Number Go Up’ to make their Stakeholders happy with every earnings call. When the ideas run out, employees who cared about what they make and what the company was doing are either hired by other companies, leave to start their own, or just get laid off or fired to save money for those at the top and those who hold Stock. Maybe this is what happened with the Music Tech Industry too – they have succumbed to the same Acquisitions and Mergers like every other ‘Big Tech’ Enterprise in order to compete and ‘stay profitable’.
And we’re watching this catastrophe accelerate in real-time.
This is probably the place to jump in about ‘AI’, but it’s better to read Ed Zitron explain the myriad of ways it’s just dreadful in almost every possible way. He has a lot better info and explanation that I do, but the simple truth is it’s also just mining the past to create ‘new’ things, since they’ve run of ideas because they’re obsessed with The Money Train. We’ve seen these reruns with all the ‘Next Big Things’ of the last decade: Cryptocurrency, Web3, NFT’s, AR, VR, and the (shudder) Metaverse. All nothing but Digital Simulacrums of things we already have, and have had. Solutions in search of Problems.
And of course ‘AI’ has it’s wrapped its tendrils around the Music Sphere like it has every other corner of Technology. Large Language Models (LLM’s) have some usability in the Audio World (they’ve been around for years as in every other Tech Industry) but the fact that ‘AI’ is rapidly approaching being able to replicate anything ever made sonically (or visually) should be a big red flashing klaxon to every creative to run for the exits. ‘AI’ needs all the things made to (maybe possibly) come up with something ‘new’, so anything you have put onto The Interwebz® as a song, an idea, a sample pack, or your entire catalog has probably already been a part of its training data. You will not be compensated for any of this by the way, and if the Technocrats get their dream of a continuous stream of ‘AI’ music that can be all things to anyone who coughs up the Subscription Price, your music suddenly becomes even less valued than it is now.
And herein lies a dirty little secret – The tEcHbRoS are desperate. They all want the next ‘Big Thing’ (think iPod/iPhone) and they have convinced themselves ‘AI’ is going to be it. They know they have been playing the same song to diminishing audiences for decades now and have laid off or fired troves their staff to make sure ‘Line Go Up’, so they’ve now concocted a way to steal the creativity needed to help them keep The Money Train rolling along. Notice how no one is saying ‘AI’ is going to do your laundry, or clean the dishes, or empty the cat box for you? It’s always going to make the next video game, movie, or fill your Inbox with ‘millions of songs made just for you’… It’s a ploy to give these out of touch, power- and money-hungry jackwagons the one thing they cannot do – be creative and not have to rely on actual human beings to help them overcome their lack of it.
My Sisters and Brothers in Art, we have officially met the Enemy.
So what now?
My thoughts are you have two choices: ‘If you can’t Beat ’em, Join ’em’ or Run in the Other Direction. Let me offer some encouragement for choosing the latter:
Remember this from above?
“500+ hours of video content are uploaded to The Tube of Yous, Tens of Thousands of songs are added to Spotify, and ‘Social Media’ is overloaded with posts, pics, and AI Slop every single day…”
You can’t compete with this. Seriously, you can’t. Music (and I’d argue Art as well as Tech in general) has essentially been rendered valueless unless you had any traction (a hit) in the past. Even if you have been doing it for decades with a well-established audience you know deep down that ‘They’ have control of the Algorithm and your fate is simply a click away from ruin. If you are just starting out, you have to copy what others are doing to get any kind of traction – along with every other Wannabe Influencer trying to do the same thing. And if you do wind up being successful you will find the same fate as the Old Guard when something younger and ‘more interesting’ comes along.
There are Three Major Record Labels left – Universal, Sony, and Warner. They have a echelon of Sub-Labels under their control and have essentially complete control over the recorded music market. LiveNation/Ticketmaster (and perhaps newcomer Mammoth) have the lock-in on touring and venues. Broadcast Radio is controlled mostly by iHeartMedia with a handful of other owners (EMF, Audacy, Cumulus) picking up the rest. Satellite Radio is dominated by SiriusXM. Again, you can’t compete with this unless you are already in their system, because these companies don’t take chances for fear of upsetting their stakeholders. We all know that just to get the attention of a major label in today’s market you have to have already established a sizable audience. There is no A&R anymore – they’ve been outsourced to ‘Social Media’.
On the ‘Attention Economy’ side, Microsoft (Computers/some Web Services), Amazon (most of the the Web Services), Twitter (I’ll always Deadname this Site) Meta (Farcebook, Instagram), Spotify (Music/Audiocasts), Apple (Computers/Music/Audiocasts/Video), and Alphabet/Google (The Tube of Yous, Search) have you locked in – they think there’s nowhere else to go because they’ve also stacked the cards in their favor.
The Billionaires, CEOS’s and TeChBrOs don’t care about you or what you are doing. You are nothing but a moneymaker for them either as a creator (for now) or as a consumer just as long as you can make them more of that sweet, sweet moolah – culture, people, and environment be damned. They are (almost) to the point where anyone that tries to compete will be either bought and destroyed or assimilated. They have also integrated politics into their strategy to keep the Grift from collapsing.
I’ll say it again – you can’t compete with this.
But ‘AI’ is their Achilles’ Heel. Hundreds of Billions are being invested in this fantasy (and Billions are being lost too) to make it work, because they are out of ideas and all they have left is insane amounts of money. It this fails, they are all in very big trouble…
Besides, isn’t The Interwebz® just terrible anymore? ‘Social Media’ is neither – just hate, conspiracy theories, and AI Garbage. Search is terrible – you can’t find what you need in all the Ads and SEO (Search Engine Optimization) crud. Everything is meant to keep your eyes on one site, Doomscrolling or Schadenscrolling forever. Subscriptions and Scams everywhere. It’s not fun, or interesting, or even entertaining anymore.
So let’s Disrupt the ‘Disruptors’.
You and I – Communities and Networks of Human Beings are the way out.
The simplest way of doing this is making the companies (and their tEcHbRo CEO’s) scared of their customers again. The Major Manufacturers and Digital Platforms used to be great because they knew we could always go buy from someone else or go to another service and they didn’t want to chance losing their customers or the money that came with it. Cory Doctorow’s idea that we need to Seize the Means of Computation again to show that we don’t want the ‘slop’ being served to us on a daily is a great place to start, but first we need to understand that Humans have a lot more power than ‘They’ do.
‘They’ need us to make their schemes work, and if we stop using their broken toys then they lose the power and vast amounts of cash that come with it. They either vanish into the haze of a million other failed businesses or are forced to listen to the people who use their services to make them do what we want them to. The sad truth about this is that the TeChBrOs are so out of touch with the things we have to deal with and have acquired so much money, power, technology, and patents that they honestly believe that they know better than we do. Without Governmental regulation and Antitrust they can easily ride out our demands. In other words, it needs to be done but it’s going to take time. But when our current lives demand the we need to be ‘Techno Literate’ to even function properly, time is something we don’t really have. So the only other choice is to Run in the Other Direction.
Here’s what I’m doing to counter this, and maybe it gives you some ideas on how to make the change you want to Uncancel the Future:
Dealing with Online Life:
-Major Platforms are the enemy. Small websites and Blogs are the way back to a Good Interwebz®. Create your own to get your ideas out. Share and Support the ones you find that are doing the good work.
-Use an RSS reader. It’s the best way to access Online Content quickly and efficiently. Be prepared to pay (not much) for a good RSS Reader, but it’s worth it unless they have some silly subscription plan.
-Subscriptions are Money Vampires and should be completely avoided. If you have to use a Subscription Service, Mike Wuertherle over at the sorely-missed Space Javelin Audiocast recommended using April Fool’s Day and Halloween as the two days to go through your Subs to manage/eradicate them. Always seek out and use free or Open Source alternatives to things you are paying recurring fees for.
-Buy your $#@! Those Subs let you watch and/or listen to a lot but you own nothing once they disappear or you cancel. Hit the Thrift Stores or buy used for your media and it’s your forever to do with as you please.
-Support small and/or Open Source Devs for software and Indie Artists who sell on their own sites or co-op platforms.
-Use Ad Blockers, but be prepared to whitelist the small Sites who have to rely on that revenue. Everybody’s gotta eat.
-If you have to read the News, go to ProPublica or 404Media or States Newsroom. They do great work. Or hit your Local Library. They probably have App or Web access that costs you nothing for books, audiobooks, videos, and much more. Your taxes probably support it, so get your money’s worth.
Think More IRL: For far too long we have been holed up in front of computers and blinking light sound machines meticulously tweaking time and space all by ourselves. It’s time to get out and get your tweakings heard by other people, or better yet get together with other people and share ideas and make noise in the real world. ‘AI’ can’t play live, and although Covid is still out there (and closed venues make ‘superspreader’ events) and the spaces to do such events are sometimes hard to come by, masks are cheap and more redily available than in the beginning of the Pandemic. I’m betting some searching will find a coffee house, bar, youth club, or other venue that will let you do something. Do it on a dare so see what happens. Maybe you can inspire others to do something creative too. Regardless, get out into the real world as often as you can. Touch grass. Talk to a tree. Have lunch with a friend. Just take a walk…
Getting your Art out there: The ‘mp3 Era’ made it so easy for us to dump anything and everything we made out for public consumption. Some even made some money and entire careers out of it. Now it’s so devalued that I really wonder why anyone even tries anymore. I really feel like you should skip putting things out digitally, instead waiting until you’ve built up some tunes and an audience (playing live of course) and then invest in a 45 or even a cassette release that you can then sell in a Local Shop or on your own or a Music Co-Op site. Art Shows and other ‘Arty Events’ also need tunes or tracks or just good old noise too. You’ve read that I’ve already asked my friend Michael about this Post in general, but I’d like to talk with him more about this to get his thoughts and ideas on these in the future. Stay tuned…
And yes, I know I’m going back on that whole ‘retro thing’ here, but people like physical products, and vinyl sales are not slowing down. Bobby O even had a story about the latest advances in pressing technology a month or so ago. Cassettes will never go out of style as far as I’m concerned. 🙂
Gear and Tech. This is a no-brainer – stop buying it since you probably have more than need already. 🙂 If you’re not a gearjunkie like I am, then buy used. You can still find deals on eBay and Reverb (believe it or not) if you hunt around a bit, and there are still places in every town that take in and sell used musical instruments. As a bonus, buying IRL lets you test the thing out before you drop the cash and there’s no waiting on shipping… Don’t forget Flea Markets and Garage Sales too – they are hit and miss, but you never know what you’ll find. If you are (or plan to be) completely computerized then learn what you already have (I’ll repeat this below – it’s that important). If you don’t have anything yet try something for free. There are plenty of great Devs making free DAWs and Plugins to get you started. Drop them some coin if you like what they do. But remember: The most important thing to keep in mind here is that you need to learn what you have now before you start getting more stuff. Daniel Miller’s creed of ‘Limitation is Liberation’ is so very, very true. You absolutely do not need the latest and greatest to make amazing things – regardless of what Art you make.
The other things about not buying anything new are 1) since most electronic toys pretty much make the same sounds you really aren’t missing anything tonal-wise (same for most other instruments really), 2) if the manufacturers see sales declining they might actually start investing in new technologies again, and 3) You are also helping ‘small businesses’ and keeping possible e-waste out of the ecosystem. Think of these as win-win-win.
Getting Noticed. I really think this is almost useless in today’s hypersaturated market, but as I said above you can still make free (or really cheap) websites. I truly think that ‘just getting out there and playing/doing’ can help create buzz (and create better networks) and word of mouth can be so much more powerful than a random ‘Social Media’ post. If you get to the point where you need a place to hawk your wares, having your own website can let you do that if there are no indie record shops around. Plus, it’s yours and you have all the control. I do still love Mastodon for Social Networking, but like all of ‘Social Media’, you really have to continuously maintain who you follow and what you see. Regardless of what you do make sure you own and control everything you put Online.
Survival. There’s an old saying that goes ‘Someone will win the Best New Artist Grammy, it just won’t be you.’ Fame is a fickle and elusive thing. Fans are fickle and elusive things. Money is a tool we’ve elevated to the status of being worth more than anything else in our lives. That was a semi-humorous attempt of saying you’re going to need a gig while you’re doing gigs. I worked in a factory and a record store while playing with bands when I was younger. I continued to work in a music store selling gear while I was working in a studio learning how to be an engineer. I was a bartender while we had our record label, and even today I teach while making music, mixing and finalizing tracks, and writing things here as well as other places. We all have to work to try and eke out an existence in this world. Things are tough, everything is expensive, and it can be hard just to stay afloat day by day. Having other human beings in your network can be a big help when the chips are stacked against you, so seek out the others.
I have every belief that you will ‘make it big’ but for now the reality is that you’ll be doing something else while pursuing that dream. You can also think of it as ‘even if I don’t make it big I have something to keep me sane when I’m done with my ‘real job”. I’m not trying to sound like your parents here, but the truth is that we’re rebuilding the future and that’s going to time, energy, and sacrifice. You got this.
The Damned‘s drummer Rat Scabies said this about the Punk Movement in the 1970’s: ‘You’ve created somebody who has nothing. Out of nothing, I’m going to build a whole new suit of clothes. Out of nothing, I’m going to look great. Out of nothing, I’m going to terrify your children.’
A bit macabre, that last bit, but Punk was a reactionary movement to break out of the status quo of the times and its main tool was reactionary sound and vision. I was too young to be a part of that scene, but came of age in its after affects of the 1980’s – that same time we seemingly want to stay in today… Punk quickly went from underground to commonplace and lost it’s edge, and anything like that came about today would be immediately swallowed up by the gaping maw of The Interwebz® and monetized until it would be replaced with the ‘Next Big Thing’. We’ve seen happen many times over the decades.
But there is one thing we can take from the early days of Punk – it started with people who wanted something different, something better, and they made it out of that nothingness, and it struck a nerve with others wanting the same thing. People have the ability to do that, but it has to be people with honesty and commitment – because just doing it to ‘make phat ca$h’ will always be seen for what it is sooner or later, and just impedes things moving forward. Look to the Punk Rock MBA scandal as the latest example of Grifterzoic Era BS and always remember that The Interwebz® is where it was born and where it will die, so it’s yet another good reason to be (hat tip to Ed Zitron) Better Offline.
So yeah, the title here is catchy, but I don’t think it’s completely true – yet. In sour times, people want to be entertained – a brief respite from the daily drudges of life. Pop Culture tends to be the ‘junk food’ many like, but that is also driven by those whose use art as a cultural force to reflect what’s happening around us and motivate us towards that something different, something better. We’re missing that latter ‘comfort food’ in today’s art and technology and it can’t be made while we’re all stuck in our silos waiting being spoon-fed whatever pabulum the Technorati think is viable (and profitable) this week. I’m going to stoke the fires here at SonicWasteland in chorus with the ones I’ve found from other fields to make sure the future doesn’t get cancelled – because although I’m betting things get worse before they get better, I want that better.
Until next time…
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