The Heap

I love music. I love music to bits. And now my love for music is - literally - in bits.

And bytes.

Remember the thrill of vinyl? You went to the record store and asked for today's brand new Smiths release - on 12" if available - and you took it home. You pored over the (huge!) sleeve, looking for detail, insights into the workings of the mind of the mighty Morrisey. Why Terence Stamp on the cover? Why Joe Dallesandro? What did the cover do for the song?

Then there was the whole ritual of playing the damn thing. You gently tipped the sleeve on its side, the inner sleeve slipping to your palm. You turned that upside down and dextrously removed the artifact. Taking great care not to get prints on the grooves, you managed the single with your fingertips on the label and the edge resting in the gap between thumb and forefinger.
You balanced the edge with your other hand, and pressed the central hole onto the spindle of your Garrard deck.

This is where the real work began.

You'd set the deck to play and watch the dust and fibres reflect on the skin of your newly-spinning disk. You'd remove your anti-stat cloth from its protective pouch and press the slightly moist chamois against the grooves, oh-so-gently. Finally, with a lasting line of grime on your cloth as proof of cleanliness, you'd use the little lever to raise the arm holding the cartridge. Happy at last in the knowledge that you were about to get absolute, perfect sound fidelity from a £1 lump of petroleum, you allowed the needle to gently wreck itself on the outer edge of the disk, before settling into the groove.

Your song of choice was about to play.

Compare and contrast.

I bought the latest Mercury Rev CD last week. I saw them on tour last year, thought joyous thoughts, and determined that I absolutely must buy that CD when marked down 75% in the dying throes of my local Zavvi.

I got it home, removed the CD from the sleeve, placed it in my computer drive, and let iTunes do its wonderful, rippledy stuff. 6 minutes later out pops the CD which I filed, fairly confident in the knowledge that it will never actually be used again.

I like Mercury Rev and I loved their gig. So why won't the CD be used again?

Because I listen to music on Shuffle / random / your choice here. Let's call it Radio Steve. I rip, I play, but I always play shuffle.

I have about 400 ripped CD's, so the odds against the new Mercury Rev coming up are 400-1 at least.

I may as well have tossed it on the Heap of all my existing CD's, picked one at random and hoped ity was the new Mercury Rev.

I'm sure it's a great album but I will almost certainly never listen to it as an entity. Odd tracks will surface at random times and, as happened with the Arcade Fire two years ago for me, one will pop into my conscious and say "F*ck me - that's extraordinary."

And that's why my musical life is in bits. I listen to my MP3 player all the time. I use the living room stereo maybe, once a week. Going by the current rate, I'll play that Mercury Rev album on my home stereo in 2019. And I'll think "Damn! That hangs together well..."

So is it just me? Or does your new music go on the Heap as well...

This Parasitic Culture

I blame French & Saunders.

While I'm in a rich vein of rant, and following on from last night's slightly demented post, I was listening to a podcast today about Battlestar Galactica. If you've watched the new show, you'll know that it's bright, intelligent, confusing and sensual. So how come the most-downloaded podcast about the show was so full of ...

nothing.

It was a two-hour podcast about a one-hour show. In the podcast they debated the merits of an RPG, interjected poorly-sung songs into the conversation, and discussed the merits of a half-remembered movie from the eighties that they couldn't actually remember the title of. When they remembered, they got back to BSG, and provided the most surface-level, numbskull commentary, full of personal anecdote and devoid of critical insight.

Which is when it occurred to me;

Loads of the media is just like this.

It's chatter about chatter.

Last night I was talking about the importance of actual, real creativity - the crystal castle - and the mediasphere of comment, from blogs, to Twitter. But today it occurred to me that, actually, the vast majority of all media is hugely parasitic. The ideas of the few are disseminated and broken apart by the many - and the many make money on the ideas of the few.

(Worried about sounding a bit Ayn Rand at this point.)

This is potentially the biggest opportunity for human creativity that there has ever been. As I mentioned in my last post, the great opportunity and the great problem are one and the same - that there are no barriers to entry for creativity on the 21st century. Meaning that any uninformed idiot with an opinion can broadcast.

Am I stupid to think that's wrong?

So Danny Boyle makes a great, original movie. And gets a well-deserved Oscar. And 200,000 critics around the world write a positive review - and get paid for that positive review. Which might just be "**** - The Sun."

Now that's not a bad thing - Danny (who has made many a cracking movie, and couldn't get arrested when 'Sunshine' came out) makes a few extra quid and so do Indian slum children actors.

But the point I'm making is that the person who wrote for The Sun (and 'The Sun' here is a metaphor for the great tabloid steam train, not the actual paper) made money for that review. Is Slumdog a good movie? Say, compared to 'Battleship Potemkin'? Don't know? Wait a minute - weren't you just paid for your opinions as a film critic?

It gets worse. The person who 'wrote' the metaphorical Sun review probably earnt £80 for those four stars. But what about... the parodists?

I love a good parody. I laugh out loud at a critique which finds its subject, holds it up to the critical maw, tastes it, enjoys it, references where it came from, and then says: "You're a bit 'out' here. Something tastes wrong. Whilst I applaud your artistic achievement, I'm just going to nip here and here and remind you that you're not perfect."


Examples? Wally Wood's "SuperDuperMan". Airplane. Morecambe and Wise do "Singin' In the Rain." That's parody. And those creators deserve every penny, because what they did provided thought and insight into the matter of origin.

But parody is easy. At least, it's easy to do badly. The subject matter is there and obvious. The jokes don't have to be good to make money - they just have to be present. So the 'creators' of "Meet the Spartans" make a shedload of cash from Frank Miller's research and add nothing. Does Frank get a few cents? I doubt it. Peter Kay sings "Amarillo" in a parodic fashion and adds NOTHING - although, granted, the money went to charity.

Which brings me back to French & Saunders. I saw F&S on the first Comic Strip tour, 1980, University of Reading. Everyone was nervous because Rik and Ade weren't on that night, despite being top-billed - one was ill. But they came on, Alexei Sayle rocked the house, and F&S picked subjects they knew about, generally female insecurities, and skewered them.

Fast forward twenty years to French and Saunders, primetime BBC. In which they parody "Silence of the Lambs," "Titanic," and "Thelma and Louise.". And it's the same joke, every time. "Here's Silence of the Lambs but...IT'S A BIT CRAP." "Here's Thelma and Louise but...IT'S A BIT CRAP." That's the joke. That's the whole fucking joke.

I honestly think that they were the first to do it. The first to say, "Here's our amateur remake, just what amateur adults would do - isn't that funny?"

And now, there's a whole Hollywood industry who think that it's the same, but IT'S A BIT CRAP justifies a $20m budget. Epic Movie, Scary Movie...they're just a bit crap.

The people who make the Battlestar podcast are sponsored - they get paid. But the best function of what they do is to provide an aide memoire of last week's episode. They make their money from someone else's creativity. The whole, current, parody industry does just the same.

Here we are, with all these ideas, all this creativity. All these sources (that's you lot...) and many of the best paid of us make a living from quoting and parodying the really bright ones.

So make a vow, you bloggers, you writers, you readers. No cheap jokes. No parodies unless they are VALID. Tell us about you. Every one of you has led a life different to every other person on Earth. Tell us about you. If you have critical insight on another creator's work good -- but tell us why.

Why do I write - at all? Because, as a human being the one thing that I can absolutely never do is be another human being. But, by God, I can imagine it. So tell me about you - thoughts, insights, about where you're from. I don't care about what you think of "Titanic," or what jokes you can make at the expense of James Cameron's creativity. But I might care about you.

Why Twitter doesn't matter

I'm a Twitterer. I'm also a Facebooker, a LinkedInite, a FriendsReunitedee and now apparently a blogger.

I have the opportunity never granted to my parents' generation to disseminate my wisdom around the world.

Then comes the question which all writers dread: "What, exactly, should I write about?"

And here's my problem - with social networking, with blogging, with twitter updates.

What if few of us have anything of substance to discuss?

Being a published author has been the ambition of millions of people for a couple of hundred years. The chance to have your words savoured, relished, repeated. The opportunity for your thoughts to live on in time. You used to have to handwrite a lengthy document and submit it to an editor, who would emasculate your precious thoughts, shredding them to the bone, leaving only a lean beast for the typesetter to print up. There were, in effect, barriers to entry.

You needed: an education, the ability to (hand)write, contacts with publishers, and often, another source of income in order to become a writer. That's a vicious, soul-sapping process, but in the end, it resulted in many, many respected works of thought and art which have indeed lived on.

Now look at today. In order to be a published author with a far greater audience than Dickens ever had, you need a £100 laptop, two fingers, and the internet. No barriers to entry at all, really.

You don't have to be bright, or even educated. You don't have to spell. There's no editor, so you don't have to be truthful. You're not even obliged to be interesting. All you need is the desire to be published.

Which is why the majority of self-published contributions out there on the web are either parasitic, or ill-informed, or both.

There are not enough generators of original and interesting content. Those people that do generate content are linked to or commented on in a desperate attempt to replicate the aura of the original. Writers and bloggers of repute spend their time providing little more than links to other people's work. The pool of creation is small; the ocean of tittle-tattle overwhelming.

What's the root cause? We're spending our time writing, not learning. We're broadcasting before we're inputting. We write half-formed opinions on things that someone, somewhere, once researched. Those that do create go unpaid, and then watch their valid words and opinions get tossed around and mutilated by the uninformed.

We need to research. We need to learn. We don't republish, we don't claim others' work for our own unless we can add something to the discussion. We need to think, and reflect, and come up with articulate, well-argued points of view.

Why doesn't Twitter matter? Because you can't say it in 140 characters. You can say nothing of consequence in a tiny space. All you can do is express an opinion, without the wherewithal to explain why. (and yes, E=MC squared, you say, or any of the Ten Commandments. And I say, now explain any of those concepts in a Twitter.)

We've spend centuries creating vast structures of artistic and scientific achievement, and, as a culture, we're obscuring these crystalline structures with post it notes. "Read This. Thought you might like it. LOL."

So go and read something. And here's a suggestion - read something that's not on an LCD screen. Pick up a book and spend a few hours. Luxuriate in edited thought, constructed argument, meditative consideration. Then see what you honestly, genuinely think as a result. Does this work deserve your recommendation? How can you add to the argument? What can you contribute? Then blog if you feel you genuinely should.