Mellotron Sounds

Exploding Notes and Letters

Being in the English department, I hear a lot of talk these days about the clash between “technology” (namely the internet) and older forms of information communication (books, newspapers, etc.). People are saying that it’s the start of another new age, that the web has not only changed the way and what we read, but also our attention spans and even our patience for anything that can’t be turned through and digested in one sitting. And it’s true. Newspapers everywhere are scaling back or going out of business. The literacy rate is falling. Movies are being watched on iPods. Music is being downloaded instead of bought, shuffled and skipped through instead of taken in as full, coherent pieces of work. The effects are undeniable. But then there are those who set up the phenomenon not as a hiccup in a cultural transition but as a to-the-death battle between technology and tradition—intellect and vacancy. And I can’t help but laugh.

Sure, so much of how technology is used today does miss the point. Movies on 2-inch screens can never lend the same experience as one in a theater; mix-tapes can be fun and moody but their affects are fleeting, never deep; and cherry-picking chapters online from a book instead of sitting down with the whole thing is just a tiny bit shy of pointless. But doesn’t this obsession we have technology, this infatuation that spurred the technological explosion in the first place say something about our thirst for knowledge and emotion, our desire to feel? To me it’s proof that we still have it, that it hasn’t gone away or been too drastically distorted. It’s there, we just haven’t figured out yet how to mediate it yet, how to fulfill it and have it make sense in the muddy waters of sensory and information overload. So we’re stuck.

The trouble, though, really isn’t about choosing one or the other: technology or art. It’s in making each work together, taking advantage of all the benefits of the age while still respecting the art and the artist. Because, obviously, all of the effects of technology aren’t bad—and I don’t think anyone is saying they are. No one is crying to go back to the days of road trips without cell phones as safety nets, or even of DOS systems on their computers. But somehow so many book loyalists and media purists still seem to group our overarching culture of change into the simple and one-word scapegoat: “technology,” pitting it against what they see as the truer, less taintable forms of media—while completely looking over the human element in any artist-audience relationship, the driving force behind why anyone seeks out these modes of expression in the first place.

I recently read a quote from a book critic who said that if book reviews were phased out of papers, books would be next—because (and I’m paraphrasing) people wouldn’t have the reminder there in front of them. They wouldn’t’ have the “experts” telling them what to read, so they would read nothing. Almost as if people would turn into deer in headlights, frozen, so stricken with indecision that they would just stand still and forget what they’re supposed to like.

Reviews did start phasing out, though. And then blogs came, and people starting talking more about books than ever before, having running dialogues with amateur reviewers, a back-and-forth with them, following several literary forums at a time.

The whole thing really makes me think of hundreds of years ago when people had to travel to certain pin-pointed places around the country or world to read specific texts. Did anybody then say that information loses its gravity when you don’t have work to find it? Wasn’t the printing press once considered hi-tech, too?

It isn’t technology that should analyzed and criticized here. It isn’t a matter of boundaries that’s the problem. It’s the fact that, right now, people seem to be taking for granted things that they used to cherish, replacing them with just parts of the whole, bells and whistles.

It’s like right now we’re frantic, looking around and seeing everything’s that’s possible and wanting to experience it all at once, a kid at birthday party who runs and runs, then tires out and sleeps while everyone else is blowing out the candles. The phrase “hog wild” comes to mind.

But how do you effectively attack a group’s actions and thought? It’s easier to pick a symbol.
Look at PORCUPINE TREE’s Steven Wilson, for example. Little by little, Wilson seems to be embracing a leader position in the anti-where-things-are-going movement, citing in almost every interview I’ve heard or read of his the bastardization of music, art being smoked down to clips or pieces in a computer’s shuffle, tainted by the flat, metallic sound of iPods that, he assumes, people of this new age don’t even notice or know better from anymore. And this is a recurring theme with him, not just how modernity affects music but the rest of life, as well.

He first took on these concerns directly in PT’s ’07 release, Fear of a Blank Planet, where technology as a theme is explored at length, the fact that screens are growing to replace music shops and the smell of bookstores and the world outside. Everything surrounding us today, he argued, everything that kids are growing up with, is only working to “distract people from what’s important about life—which is to develop a sense of curiosity about what’s out there.” You don’t need to leave your room anymore these days, he noticed. You don’t have to wait for anything.

Then last year he released Insurgentes, his solo album, and it’s said that he produced it in a way where every song had hundreds of tiny digital fractures put through them to make shuffle playback on iPods impossible. But more interesting is how he marketed the record. Along with its release, he went on an iPod-destroying campaign, posting a new video online every few days of him killing another one of Apple’s tiny, white devices, each time in a different and more explosive way (literally: running them over with cars, burning them with blowtorches till they popped, shooting them). And the album’s booklet and accompanying DVD are jam-packed with pictures of crippled pods and footage of him blasting and destroying them.

So, by pumping an iPod’s guts full of lead, he decided to send a message. This is him taking a stand. I’m just not sure it’s a stand a can get behind.

I understand that when he picks up a rifle and shoots iPods on stumps, he’s more shooting at what the iPod represents, its symbol—albums heard piecemeal, art’s presentation simplified—than he is the actual device. I get that. (And it was also probably a bit of a publicity stunt, too). But still, I can’t help but feel that the whole display is a little lost in its own message, that Wilson’s extremist-to-get-noticed stance can’t help but feed the wrong-headed, pick-a-side mentality of all-out technology war.

I mean, let’s not forget that people used to criticize Technicolor when it first got big, saying that real films were shot in black & white. New music mediums in the past got slammed, also, their opponents saying that music just wasn’t music if it wasn’t accompanied by a record’s crackles and buried static.

To me it just comes down to avoiding the black and white. The iPod murders, no matter how cool and funny and attention-grabbing they are, seem pointless and divisive. Because after the pods have been trashed and held up as some kind of contemporary trophy of the musically enlightened, what’s left? Nothing’s accomplished—except maybe convincing kids who missed the point, or Wilson-loyalists who didn’t look for it, that iPods are dumb and dumbing. These people may return to vinyl or take a stand in school by being the one person without buds in their ears on their way to class—because they’d know better—but it’s dancing around the heart of the issue, and Wilson knows that.

In a recent interview, Wilson announced that PORCUPINE TREE’s newest record (planned for Sep.) may just be one long 50-minute track (think: JETHRO TULL’s Thick as a Brick). And this is the kind of thing I can get behind. He, like every musician, releases albums, not songs, and he wants them to be received as such. So with this he’s attacking the issues at their most basic: one long track, one piece of work, one statement. It’s definitely a risky thing to try, but that’s why I like it. He’s seeing what can work and what people actually do want, testing the waters—not just shooting them when the waves seem too big to swim through.

Let’s just be honest: portable CD players suck. They’re bulky, always skipping; but iPods are small and sturdy, and people are listening to way more music now (and more varieties) than they ever used to. A lot of them may be caught up in the overload—a part of the “download culture,” as Wilson calls it—playing through everything on shuffle and never putting in a disc to appreciate its superior audio quality, but not all of them are. There is an up-side to this coin.

No doubt, things are definitely changing, but the real conflict here isn’t between the old and the new, print vs. pixels. It’s about learning how to have each coexist with the other. It’s about taking advantage of the benefits, without tainting what it was about art that made us seek better alternatives in the first place. And I think that’ll happen in time, when the dust settles, this all becomes old-hat and more musicians and publishing companies and everybody else start taking more risks, doing like PORCUPINE TREE and taking the first step toward some kind of compromise. At that point, I think that we’ll catch our collective breath and want a semi-return to the way things were—books instead of blogs (I know. Hypocrite, right?), albums instead of songs, theaters instead of iPod screens. We’ll miss them too much not to.

The search for art and knowledge is buried somewhere inside of us, it’s a part of who we are. We need that reminder that we’re connected to something bigger; we need to find new things and get excited. We crave those packed and heavy emotions that can never really be articulated, the ones that can only come from something whole. Right now we’re trying to get that in things like online social networks and blogs and downoaded songs that we hope will catch our ear on the first listen. But that won’t last forever.

It’s the classic extreme reaction to anything new—like the ‘60s and their rebellion against almost everything, or the ’80, when videos were blowing up and were supposedly going to “kill” music. But soon everyone did start cutting their hair—and now there are more reality shows on MTV than there are videos.

I don’t know if the radio will ever play new and interesting stuff again, and I don’t think that books will ever be as big as they used to be, but maybe Steven Wilson is shooting bullets at the wrong symbol. His iPod murders may be done with the intention of simply bringing attention to the issue, but maybe his reaction is just as extreme and polarizing as his targets’ affect on society.

Take a long look around: it’s not art’s Armageddon; it’s just cloudy and kind of crappy weather. And like any kid who was never allowed to bike ride passed the driveway when they were little and then went crazy in college, drunk off their newly-found freedom and anxious to spit in the face of their oppressors—all these extreme reactions are just fuel to feed a pointless resistance to change.

Posted in: essay/social crit

Tags: Steven Wilson

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 12th, 2009 at 7:00 pm and is filed under essay/social crit. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.