ahier wrote:digging up an old thread here, but... if you read the book, the music genre argument is a very small proportion of it. one of his more compelling arguments is against wikis and social networking sites. rather than, as in the old days of the web, people having personal sites they designed themselves, now 'people' are represented as statistics. sites like facebook give you options out of categories, so relationship status as single or in a relationship or married, and a selection of things to 'like'. So rather than unique, creative expressions of our personality, we are now representing ourselves as a part of a database. rather than using the machine to show our personality, we create our personality out of 'bits'; all it really does is make an approximation of personality, but more often than not people take it as the whole.
the problem with wikis is that people who add to it are not putting their knowledge to a unique purpose, they are handing it to the wiki itself. information that isnt necessarily objective is presented in an objective and authoritarian way; more often people are taking it as an authority too. so individuals uniqueness of knowledge is being smudged by the collective desire for freedom, which actually is more limiting than anything.
and regarding music, whilst his points ignore the fringes of creativity, as a general trend he does have a point. whilst each decade since post war has brought its own musical revolutions, since the 90s it has somewhat stagnated. lots of new types of music are really just a mashup of old types. Whilst this is definitely debateable, it definitely seems to be the case in mainstream media. he argues that the desire for creative commons and free media has led to this stagnation. musicians genuinely innovating are rewarded less for their creativity, where a cobbled togegether mashup of old media, of the sort that litters youtube, can gain just as much attention as a genuinely inspired artistic creation, what is the point?
This type of filtering and recontextualising isn't really new to the internet generation though is it? Perhaps this dude should address his issues starting with early 20th century Modernism, tell TS Eliot he was being creatively bankrupt when he wrote the Wasteland, because it relied so heavily on recontextualising older poetry and art, or James Joyce for using the Odyssey as the basis for Ulysses. I think he'd find that a lot of people would have some sympathy with that argument. Even if you don't think it's convincing to say that the things (it seems) he's complaining about originate then, you can definitely argue that they originate in the 60s/70s with postmodernism and that - so much postmodernist art relies on reappropriating previous artistic products - whether it's transporting tropes to new settings, or lending them more modern concerns, like with neo-noir cinema, or being more explicitly reflexive - like with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead, or indeed most of Tom Stoppard's earlier plays. If you really wanted to you could trace it back even further, such as the way in which Romantic poets revived the greek classical form of the Ode because they fucking loved the ancient greeks.
I think the problem isn't with that at all. I mean obviously youtube crazes and stuff aren't TS Eliot, but that's more because the internet lacks the forms of quality control that traditional media develops, which you might argue is a good thing but there is certainly a noticeable culture in some quarters of the internet of not being critical or judgemental enough, while people don't necessarily put as much thought into their artistic products; if you want to send a book in to a publisher, that's something you think hard about and spend time working on, because if it's shit you've wasted everyone's time, mostly your own. The same sort of risks aren't there when you are putting something up on the internet for free. The other thing I suppose is just the disposability of so much popular culture, and the speed with which fads and crazes are consumed and jettisoned. If something becomes a truly worldwide phenomenon, which the internet makes possible - then you might see an intense flurry of creativity around it, but every permutation is explored and then people just get bored of it. Does this make sense at all?
One thing that I think makes dubstep creatively a cut above, or used to, is that while the internet helped draw a geographically disparate fanbase together and cement the idea that there was a market for it, it was being backed up by tangible, old-fashioned productivity - club nights, vinyl pressings, independent record-labels and so on. The best of what the internet offers and the best of what traditional media can offer, if you see what I mean.
