Well, the modern age had to have something useful to offer, and I've just discovered it: YouTube.
Okay, I'm a bit late, but we only got broadband recently.
The information revolution has promised so much, and delivered so little, but I can now report that if you want to see Kraftwerk's 1971 performance on German TV (sans Ralf, who had gone off in a sulk), well it's on YouTube. Want to see Funkadelic perform Standing on the Verge of Getting it On? On YouTube. Want to see the KLF's unfinished and unreleased movie The White Room? It's on YouTube (or at least, most of it is). Want to see Jean Michel Jarre's hilarious Equinoxe part 5 video, considered even by the Man Himself as nothing more than a shampoo advert? Well, you know the answer.
Over the course of a weekend my world turned upside down. Forget lonelygirl15, YouTube's real value is not in promoting home made videos (fake or otherwise), it's as a giant repository (as great in its own way as the Library of Alexandria) for ancient music videos. What arcane secrets can you discover therein? Why, you can learn, for instance, the perplexing fact that the Orb's Little Fluffy Clouds, and Blue Room videos, as well as FSOL's Papua New Guinea video, all feature dolphins.
The White Room is the most interesting relic for me. I've banged on more than once about the marvels of the KLF's genre-hopping eschatological hooliganism. So here I go again... I'm not sure whether the soundtrack to the video (featuring early mixes of KLF classics) was actually put together by the KLF, or whether it merely features stuff tacked on later by fans, but its narrative-free footage of two 30something men floating around the Spanish hinterland mucking around with dead eagles, combined with a fairly genuine document of a rave-era nightclub ca 1989 (where everyone dresses normally and drinks piss), is nothing short of revelatory.
The sad thing for me is that nothing happening today musically has anything like the appeal. It's tempting to say that it's just me being old, but I didn't actually get into the KLF until the mid 90s, so it's not like it was part of the zeitgeist when I tuned into it. These days... I dunno, it just doesn't seem as interesting. The rave era opened up a seam of innovation that was exahusted in the late 90s, around the time Red Bull started sponsoring everything.
I think that innovation was mostly about music technology. If you'll excuse the use of my musical evolution theory again, the advent of the musical sequencer (a machine that can remember sequences of notes or rhythms) in the 1970s provided a sort of punctuated equilibrium: it was a new way of doing things musically, and meant that people could throw away guitars and try something new (in the same way that the advent of the turntable as a musical instrument meant that all those wonderful soul groups vanished). It took a while for the technology to refine itself and for the ideas it created to work themselves through, but I think these ideas have exhausted themselves. If there are new niches left to be filled, they're pretty small ones.
I once read a chilling (well, to me anyway) interview of Ken Thompson. Ken Thompson? You fool, Ken Thompson, the guy who invented UNIX! Anyway, he said to an interviewer that there wasn't much point getting into computer science these days, as the most interesting stuff had been done (the pinnacle of which, IMO, was the invention of UNIX*). Thompson said he'd advised his son to get into biotech, since that seemed to be the way of the future.
Taking this approach with the arts, let us consider what art form is left that hasn't been thoroughly ravaged by millions of practitioners. Ah, none. Video technology is still coming on in leaps and bounds, though whether it's still leading to genuinely new art, I don't know. But with music, that really is a dead duck. Once any sound can be considered music, you're left with nothing but silence. And that's music too, according to some musical mystics. You might point out that music is still changing, but you're just mistaking musical fashion (which tends to involve making what was cool 20 years ago cool again) for musical innovation.
Thing is, though, no one's going to stop listening to music, or not having interesting musical experiences. I'm just sad that I can't be in on a wave of musical exploration, and instead have to merely knock off imitations of stuff that's come before, and often has more life.
And I also have to say that if I truly lived and breathed music, I probably wouldn't be writing these sorts of things ;-).
* Or at least the TCP/IP stack implemented in BSD Unix in the early 80s, which pretty much meant the internet could happen.
Posted by stuart at October 3, 2006 9:03 PM