A Song A Day

Two current stories on the web have elided in my mind and are causing my brain to overheat. So I’ve decided to use this post to try and work out the issues.

The first story is an amusing overview of the current ‘indie’ scene here in the UK, from the Independent. It’s wilfully curmudgeonly, but ultimately on the money: my own take is that we are, currently, living through a re-run of the mid-‘70s, with radio full of anodyne, identikit rock and one-off formula hits. We desperately need another cultural revolution like Punk – but where is it going to come from?

Some industry types have been harping on, in response to the article, that (to quote Weller, once the snarling anathema to all of this de-politicised, neutered, ‘landfill’ music) “the public gets what the public wants”. That is: stop saying Scouting For Girls are suicide-inducing in their dreadfulness, they’re successful so it’s obviously the kind of stuff music consumers like.

So I’m thinking – are music fans still, after all this time, just passive receptacles into which the industry, if they’ve got enough marketing dollars, can pour endless indie shit like SFG?

The second story is actually a video. The faintly smug Clay Shirky reveals that we should stop watching TV and start creatively participating in the wonders of the web (Why Don’t You figured this out years ago).

His argument boils down to: TV is shit because you just passively sit in front of it and do nothing, and oh yes all the programmes on TV are shit as well, while the internet is a wonderful utopia of creative possibilities where you can participate in creating stuff and share it with your friends and discover new things in an endless cycle of participatory creative sharing joyfulness.

Ok. So on the one hand, people will passively accept what record companies throw at them and buy self-evident rubbish like SFG by the bucketload. On the other hand, they really want to be participating in creative web projects, and would do so willingly if only someone would switch the TV off (or stop plying them with SFG records).

Is there a middle ground between these two extremes?

Let me put it another way. ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ and The Sopranos are (with a few honourable exceptions) more enriching, and more important to me, than anything the internet has ever offered. Do I think either would be improved by my participation? Of course not. I trust the artists behind these works of art. I want to be dictated to them for that reason. I don’t mind being completely passive in that relationship.

But what if there are no great artists around to dictate the cultural zeitgeist? What if, as now, popular music has reached an utter, ideas-free nadir? Shouldn’t we intervene, using all the participatory tools the internet puts at our disposal, to ensure that something like Scouting For Girls never happens again?

I hold my hands up and admit I’m not sure where I’m going with this. As I said, it’s making my brain hurt and this is merely an exercise in playing with some ideas. There’s a part of me which thinks these web evangelists like Shirky, who think participation is everything, are utterly deluded – but then I feel like a cultural fascist. There’s another part of me which thinks he’s right – the next revolution will come from all these loose collectives on the web sharing ideas, and rejecting the concept that the general mass of people just want to be spoonfed product by the old cultural elites (whether that’s record companies, TV networks or film studios).

So I’ve called this post Brain Doodle. That’s all it is. And hey! Why not participate by leaving a comment, heh heh. Seriously, maybe you can help me make some sense of all this.

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