Every once in a while I like to binge on YouTube comments, which can sometimes be serene and mesmerizing. I know this sounds odd. But I get all giddy imagining a commenter listening to a song, having a moment, one so intense it can't possibly be contained, and which Must be shared with the world OR ELSE. Most of 'em are like those folks at live shows who can't stand the deafening silence in their own brains between songs and must shout WOO. So you get really deep shit sometimes, like these ones from Caribou's 'Niobe:'
did not like
my body feel like
fucking tripping but my head is still oke
music is very much
like... math, actually. it is a language and has a lot of math in it. it is a
truly special and difficult art.
its unmistakable,
these guys are just musically gifted. I think they use mathematical equations
to implement the vibrations...and they align very well with my taste. Keep
steady on this path gentlemen it will suit you well.
To implement the vibrations! Man, what is it like to so powerfully need to post that? Probably a lot of people are lonely. But I think the strongest reason so many people post this stuff--stuff that not many are likely to read, and those that do read either already agree with you or hate you/themselves and are only there to troll; there's rarely a fertile middle ground where discussion and actual learning thrive--the reason there's so much of it is that it's incredibly easy to do. You go tap beep boop (like I'm, um, doing right now), click that satisfying Publish button, then smile at your own perceived wit/intelligence. Mmmmm, feels good.
It is so easy to find Anything, and equally easy to tell everyone (or at least feel like you're telling everyone; it's anyone's guess as to who's actually listening) how you feel about it. I don't think this is entirely good. Beck, who just released a great album, went to chat with the Boiling Bob over at NPR and had this to say:
"The rise of internet and all the blogs and the sort of internet criticism, I think it's affected a lot of musicians. There's sort of this critical voice in their head, like somebody's pointed a camera or a mirror at you, and you're a little more self-conscious. I feel like I've felt it in music over the last, you know, 10 or 12 years. When I started out, you were just throwing stuff out there; you had no idea what people thought. There would be a couple of record reviews, but you really were completely ignorant and unaware of what people actually thought. Unless you were at a show — you know, you could play a song and people didn't like it. That happened plenty of times."
Imagine that! Hearing something played live for the first time. Sure, you could boo the guy/gal, but as a human that's a little harder to do right to someone's face. You don't generally have somebody like EarlKrempe (see above) standing next to you on stage, arms folded, saying, "Did not like."
But see, I'm beginning to feel like the quintessential Olderish-Person-Who-Looks-Down-On-Younger-Generations. This is also not good. Because, clearly, not every musical appreciator is like that. YouTube-comments-as-societal-blueprint isn't exactly validated research. But what I do know is that music is laughably easy to find for free, chew for a bit, skip that song you don't like, write about how it wasn't what you wanted, pretend like you know exactly what the artist was trying to achieve, then spit on the floor having digested very little.
One of my band-mates in a new song talks about how instant evaluation is starting to crush his enjoyment of different types of art, and I could not agree more. It seems simple to just ignore it all, but it's becoming increasingly difficult to do as more and more folks use the Internet as a way of finding their own voice. Remember in high school how it kind of sucked and made you feel empty when everybody started loving that band you'd been following for forever? It's similar to the feeling you get when somebody tells you whatever book or movie they just devoured was the best thing ever. Your brain is instantly setup to have its expectations swung at and missed, because no one thing is the best thing ever, which transitions nicely into my next thought:
The overabundance of particular types of media might be leading a certain percentage of the population to believe that their lives aren't as worthwhile if they are not cinematic enough**, if certain moments aren't "the best thing ever." It makes people take fewer risks and retreat into what they already know they'll enjoy or, worse, what they know everybody else already enjoys. And because everybody's so keen on expressing why they love or hate something, there's all this media catering to extreme points of view, which this feller thinks tends to drown out that fertile middle ground where you can actually learn something.
Here's some quick examples: Bad Internet [note: please don't read much of this] vs. Good Internet [please read all of this]
So, if you're like me you're probably wondering what the hell to do. Unfortunately, if you know me at all you probably know I'm not entirely sure. All I can do is point you in the direction of folks I've enjoyed and who've made me think about how to handle things that make me uncomfortable. On the surface, these quotes don't directly pertain to media consumption, but I think they offer a path away from extreme points of view (and thus away from a lot of bad media), and I often find myself returning to them:
"Try to learn to let what is unfair teach you. What is unfair can be a stern but invaluable teacher."
~David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest
"To know one's own state is not a simple matter. One cannot look directly at one's own face with one's own eyes, for example. One has no choice but to look at one's reflection in the mirror. Through experience, we come to believe that the image is correct, but that is all."
~Haruki Murakami, The Wind-up Bird Chronicle
"Don't get set into one form; adapt it and build your own, and let it grow; be like water. Empty your mind, be formless, shapeless--like water. Now you put water in a cup, it becomes the cup; you put water into a bottle, it becomes the bottle; you put it in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Now water can flow or it can crash. Be water, my friend."
~Bruce Lee
Some of the things I take away from those quotes are: Don't be afraid to feel stupid, and be wary of folks pushing agendas that claim to have all the answers; Look for stuff that feels genuine to you (and remember that authenticity and originality don't necessarily go hand-in-hand, and that's OK); Little things are infinitely important.
And for the sake of all that is holy to you, please don't you dare listen to music via YouTube at anything less than 480p.
_________________________________________________________________________________
**This is something I want to think about a lot more in another post, and one thing that comes to mind is how often you'll hear the same song used across different movies/TV shows/commericials to generate emotion in a given scene, and then when something similar to that scene happens in your real life, but you don't have the music to go along with it, it might not have as strong an impact on you.
