Archive for August, 2009
Daft Punk vs. Basement Jaxx
Sasha Frere-Jones makes a good point about Daft Punk vs Basement Jaxx. One which I totally agree with. I’ve always thought that Basement Jaxx was a band I liked more in theory than in practice. In practice there is something so powerful and tribal about Daft Punk. So raw and pounding and basic. And, let’s be clear, so cool. Robots are just cool.
When I run, I listen to Alive 2008 and I listen to ‘Television Rules the Nation’ and I raise my fist in yuppified glory as I run through Central Park and I point at people and tell them that television rules the nation. Do you remember the first time you heard those Daft Punk songs? Those late nights. Those gleeful smiles when ‘Da Funk’ comes on and it feels so good?
Here’s what my initials namesake has to say:
I first heard “Discovery” driving across the flatlands of Peoria in a rental car. I drove circles around my destination just so I could get the end of the album without stopping. It was one of the most satisfying musical experiences I can remember, and certainly better than the gig I was in town to cover. On top of all that, Daft Punk mounted a genuinely entertaining live electronic-music tour. This is odd, not because live electronic music is necessarily a contradiction in terms—it just doesn’t usually work. But then, not everybody can afford a neon pyramid.
It’s both more and less than the neon pyramid but it’s a good point. Listen. The bottom line is that robots are cool. That’s just true.
Is Twitter A Cyber Ghetto?
Cody Brown wrote a post on his blog comparing MySpace to Twitter and hypothesizing that similar forces that worked to submerge and undermine MySpace will come to the fore and ultimately sink Twitter.
I believe the crux of the argument is that the use case has not been clearly articulated, that people are using Twitter for a variety of different reasons, those reasons are all commingled and confounded and, as a result, cleaner more brand-articulate services will emerge that are specifically tailored towards a desired use-case.
The argument, and again I’m both paraphrasing and editorializing, is that MySpace became a “cyber ghetto” for similar reasons. Namely, that people were using it for any number of different reasons and that those reasons undermined the user experience. Certainly it’s true that the spamminess of MySpace and it’s closed nature made it difficult to adapt. Even now, there aren’t third party services that integrate into the blog section of MySpace so that you can feed your stuff in there without having to log-in.
Invested Listening
John emailed me yesterday and wrote the following:
I just skip through songs. Don’t finish them, start listening to something, think of something else and jump to that. There is always something better out there to listen to. I think I’ve always thought this way which has led me to search new and different music, but it seems different now when music is at your finger tips. It used to be that I would buy an album, put it on, and seriously devote time to it. I still that when I actually go to the record store and buy things. When I plunk my hard earned money down, I am investing in that music. So I tend to take my time with it, some more than others, but still a not unsubstantial amount of time. But online, its like I don’t give it time. Even buying things on iTunes, it basically vanishes into this morass of the digital music I own. It doesn’t really stand out. Not like the CDs that are on top of my player. I wonder is this is perhaps symptomatic of music itself where people just don’t care enough about it anymore. People were devoted to certain artists and now they’re not. So they don’t go to concerts, don’t buy the CD, etc.
I tend to agree. Don’t you? This is, of course, not just true of music, right? When Bezos is calling books “long form reading” we’re no we’re in a spot where attention is becoming scarcer and scarcer and we’re less able to concentrate and focus on specific things. To really digest them. I wrote about that concept when I was talking about one of my favorite records of the year, Microcastle by Deerhunter, which technically was released last year but which I fell in love with this year. No coincidence that I bought it on CD and listened to it in the car on my way upstate on the weekends and that it took me awhile to put it on my iPod.
Things take time.
Open Questions On Music
I sometimes find myself thinking that music is the poetry of the 21st century. That’s not a new or original thought. Many people have talked about it. The fact that poets would never expect to make a living. That most poets wouldn’t view poetry as a vocation but as an avocation. That there is no expectation that one could ever “make money” at poetry and that reall people are pursuing beauty and recognition among people they respect.
There are still many open questions about the music industry and, when I think about whether music is today’s poetry, I suppose I’m asking the fundemental question:
Will there be a music industry or will there simply be music?
Answer: Yes. There will be a music industry. It will continue to get smaller. None of the current big ideas will work mainly because they’re big. Small ideas have some chance of working. But the cost/benefit involved in making a living creating pop music and writing songs will continue to diminish. The pop music industry will be small. Not so different from now but an even smaller percentage of artists will be able to make a living writing songs and performing them. Many and most are already and will move to hobbyists and the talented will increasingly shift to music production.
Should there be a music industry?
I don’t really know. I’m not sure people are owed the right to get paid for making art. For those that can, they’re very lucky. And for those that can’t, that’s life. You shouldn’t make music with the expectation of making money anyway.
But that’s not fair. That means that only rich people with great jobs or the very very select few will be able to continue to make professional sounding music.
Yes. I’m sorry.
Top 5 On WeFollow
Dream Tweam
Last night I got together with some fellow tweeters for a mock fantasy draft on Twitter. Something similar to Fantasy Football but for this new media platform. It was, of course, both nerdy and fun. The way it works is that you get $1,000,000 fake “dollars” that you use to purchase followers on a 1-to-1 basis. You hold onto those Tweeters (or trade them or sell them or buy new ones) and then you see what your total “follower” balance is by Thanksgiving.
So yes, no need to make fun. I’m aware of what this looks like.
