Ubiquity is the abyss

[imomus]

Music is a good thing. Of course it is. I'm a musician, I've dedicated my life to it, and I know few better things. Music can be sacred, mysterious, otherworldly, intimate, moving, extraordinary. But, increasingly, music is the opposite of those things. It's profane, banal, public, shared, irritating, ordinary and ubiquitous. It's in every restaurant and every cafe and every car and every office and on every computer and on every website. It's in each ear, snaking in on a thin white wire. You listen to music all day, every day. Time without music is downtime. It's the triumph of music! Or is it? Maybe ubiquity signals quite the opposite; music's defeat. For music, ubiquity is the abyss.

Thank you, Steve Jobs, and thank you, Rupert Murdoch! Your marketing ingenuity has spread 42 million iPods across the world, each capable of holding weeks and weeks of music. There are almost as many MySpace pages, 37 million, each one loading up a piece of music as soon as you hit it. Of course, Steve and Rupert aren't leveraging music into our lives because they love music, or even because they love us. They're doing it because it's a key to massive profits, because we love music. Music, after all, is a key to so many other things. It's an index of taste, a measure of social class, a way to bond with others in a social network.

But for whatever reason, Steve and Rupert and the others have squeezed music into every blank bit of space in our lives. We are rapidly reaching the limits of our own ears (tinnitus, my headphoned friend?) and the saturation point at which music becomes utterly unremarkable, and thus, effectively, inaudible.

As usual, Brian Eno was the first person I'm aware of to sound a warning note. In an interview he gave around the time he moved to St Petersburg, he said (I quote from memory) "I'm beginning to be dissatisfied with the idea of CDs, the way they make all music so available to us, the way that all musical experiences are supposedly able to be shrunk down to fit this little plastic disc. I'm beginning to think it should be as difficult to hear music as it was in the Middle Ages. Imagine just hearing a concert once a month, how amazing it must have sounded!"

One good thing about iPods, though, is that they privatize the bad taste of others. When not plugged into speakers or streaming wirelessly to sound systems, iPods shrink other people's music choices (and for me 95% of other people's music taste is unbearable, sorry, other people!) down to little white buds of semi-silence. It's a start in the great work of music removal we must now begin to undertake, we who love music and want to save it by making it scarce again.



On Friday evening I attended a party celebrating Lord Whimsy's birthday at a flock wallpapered bar called The Dove on Thompson Street. A Californian dandy called Doran Wittelsbach was there, and I found his Robert de Montesquiou-esque image admirably extreme. He told me he'd been catcalled on the street by ruffians who pronouced him a "douche". "It sounds very clean, a douche," I remarked, refreshed and impressed by his capacity to antagonize the bridge and tunnel crowd merely by walking down the street in a top hat. Clothes, these days, are clearly more subversive than even the most aggressive music.

Unfortunately, the inevitable moment came. "I also make music," Wittelsbach confided. "I'd like to give you a CD later." I made hasty excuses and left, sneaking off with Karin Komoto to Japanese cafe Hiroko's Place further down the same street. I'd love to tell you we dined accompanied by the ambient, arhythmic sounds of running water, voices cooing conversational Japanese, and clattering pots. But no, Hiroko was piping in Ayumi Hamasaki. Another hour, another 15 songs.

Comments

[jimyojimbo.livejournal.com]

Hmm.  I kind of understand your argument and don't understand it at the same time.  Actually, I understand your argument in principle but don't understand in practice.  I love the ubiquity of music, I love the ease of access to it, I love the constant rubbish we're fed without our consent. Because without it, I don't think I'd ever react to it.  I think your argument is a perfectly understandable result of our "noise culture", but at the same time your argument wouldn't exist if we didn't have a "noise culture".  Speaking personally, it is the fact that I have this horrendous trash foisted upon me on a daily basis that I actually do react to it and start searching for something better.  "Cultural taste" or whatever can't grow in a vacuum, in my opinion.  The fact that I like to listen to Alvin Lucier or Clogs is probably down to the fact that I hate the diet of Girls Aloud or Eminem or what have you that I'm subjected to in public.  Would I be listening to the same stuff, would I actively seek it out, if I wasn't bombarded with drivel all the time?  Probably not.  I don't think any of us are born with "good taste".  Usually we just are drawn to a certain cultural path out of pure reaction to te rubbish.  We need the rubbish in order to have something to react against, to give us the impetus to say "nah, mate, this is rub, I'm going to look for something better."  Oh, we can, with the benefit of hindsight, say, "oooh, I hate all this rubbish", but without that rubbish to rail against you wouldn't be where you are.  What I'm saying is that we need the crap in order to know exactly what we don't want to be, innit?

[spoombung.livejournal.com]

What I'm saying is that we need the crap in order to know exactly what we don't want to be, innit?

Different music for different functions - one for childrens parties, another for a noodle house. Different vegatables - a carrot for the casserole, a brussel sprout for the baby's crib, veggies doing different things for him and her.

"Too much music" - it's an old complaint. Over exposure to water brings you out in wrinkles, over-exposure to anything will be numbing, just like correspondence from The Department of Work and Pensions.

[arwyn.livejournal.com]

I tend to agree with this.