Our long arc stretching through
Thomas Edison, The Beatles, and Radiohead is now closed. The story is far from over though. Here are two revelations that came to me
while I was doing all this research into recording technology:
1. I sometimes wish I could live for 300 more
years just to see what people will think of the time period I was born in. I would love to see the reaction of kids in a
history class that crack open their textbook, read about us, and say
“What? They really did that?” I am especially curious to see what people will
think of the music of our time. I find
it fascinating that we have no problem lumping 300 years worth of music
together and calling this “classical music”, but we find the compelling urge to
have 100 different sub genres for 20 years worth of electronic dance
music. Our lens is so small now. In the future, will we look back and be able
to give a unified sound to Elvis, Shania Twain, and Skrillex? What’s the common thread there? All made using recording technology. So if I had to take a wild guess, the word
“popular music” is going to go out the window because it is such a loaded word
(if Verdi made Italian opera so popular back in the 1800s, doesn’t that
constitute “popular” music?). This music
we know and love will be dubbed by the thing that Edison helped to grace the
lips of music for the first time: “electronic”
music.
2. Where are things going to go next? I am excited to see. I know that I cannot even possibly conceive
how music is going to change in the next 100 years. My brain does not have that capacity any more
than it has the capacity to comprehend how many stars are in the night
sky. Can you imagine if you dropped
someone from the year 1900 into the year 2000?
They couldn’t even process 1/1,000 of the information bombarding
them. Having said this, the last 100
years have been pretty radical. Maybe
things won’t change as much, but I think it would be foolish to say music will
stay the same for the next 100 years.
One thing I have thought about is
if we could consider the internet to be a new artistic medium for music. You could argue that it is not an actual
medium, rather it is just a means to transport existing music quicker. After all, wouldn’t someone have figured out
how to utilize the internet to revolutionize the process to create music by
now? Remember, though, that this is
exactly what people thought of recording technology when it first came
out. It took many years (and many
different upgrades in the hardware) for recording technology to go from a
passive transmitter to an artistic medium.
The internet might have a long way to evolve.
For the sake of argument, let’s say
someone has already figured out how to utilize the internet in the same way
that The Beatles used recording technology to shift music. Is it possible we just haven’t noticed? There is a great term out there to describe
the current landscape of culture: “cyberbalkanism”. We all exist in these small, fractured
little bubbles. Or more accurately, they
are more like little echo chambers. With
everyone so entrenched in their own interests, it is hard to make a piece of
art (say, a piece of music) that would resonate across these fractured little
bubbles in culture. Everybody listened
to The Beatles in the 1960s because the flow of music was more like a dripping
spigot back then (remember my first post when I talked about “music as a
commodity”?). Now it is an open body of
fresh water where you can take a drink from wherever you want to (“music became
ubiquitous”). So paradoxically, the
internet might be causing its own problems.
It has created of sea of information so vast that any major evolution
might go unnoticed. Disturbingly, the
only thing that has come close to resonating across many swaths of culture in
recent memory is Gangnam Style. Does
anyone know of a cultural fast forward button?
Please tell me you didn’t lose the remote.
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