Belonging vs Algorithm Pt.1
The story of music has now become a part of the story of all entertainment, so I’m often left with tangled thoughts about what makes it special to me.
This post is not a slight on anyone’s methods, approach, or takes. I have just come to find value in letting it all out, and that process has become useful to me. I think it’s as useful as an industry ‘how to’; it’s the dance I believe we all do in our own way, and that we should all do more, because there are no simple answers to building careers in and around music, just process. This won’t become a weekly thing, don’t worry, but I don't want to blend in to the bland grey mess of the internet, and being myself is still the best way I know how to avoid this.
There is a music industry (or music industries)… My problem is it’s just really boring to me at the moment. It is subservient to the technological means of consumption, trends, and audiences; all is consumed through the same method. Due to the internet and now social media, the story has become the same story as selling any product, art form, or idea. I’m not talking about music making or listening here, or the feeling of belonging it gives us all. Instead, I mean that thing people of my generation enjoyed talking about so much: how you get signed, how labels work… mainly, how do you get in?
The story of music has now become a part of the story of all entertainment, so I’m often left with questions of what makes it interesting and what makes an artist interesting? Is it the characters? Like avatars all in the same game, playing by the same rules; are we just searching for our favourite player in this new format for music? The rocker, the skater, the sad rapper… vertical-video faces detached from story and history, a piece of content, a hook. How many new camera angles can our attention be held by, and for how long?
When I really think about what’s sticky about music for me, most of the time it’s the physical experience and emotional connection that still matter. They still offer a difference for music: the communities and events, the conversations and the process. The way we experience music as it is soundtracking the phases and seasons of our lives. Listening and moving together, feeling, smelling, hurting, laughing, talking and looking each other in the eyes, holding hands as it attaches itself permanently to our memories. (Perhaps these human and personal traits are what make people like DJ AG so compelling).
I like to think of music as special in this way. It is to me at least.
But wait, “all art does this” they say… So yes, if I’m being honest, I have many phases and periods of my life connected to other things too: Jaffa Cakes, the smell of apple cake, Polaroid cameras, the feeling of the duvet cover in my wife’s flat when we first met, the click of the Discman lid, the smell of spliff butts in an ashtray by my head when waking up after a session that went on all night… the list goes on.
But all these other things didn’t give me a sense of identity like music did at a crucial time. A thing to belong to, a voice that spoke to my experiences and made me feel I wasn’t alone. A changing identity, I should add—but like a lifeline keeping me from drifting away, something to cling to in the storm of my teens, giving me a direction to pull myself toward while still feeling the pull of different currents.
It was a journey that happened in a semi-private space compared to that of social media. I could love punk, then Prince, then be obsessed with the Stone Roses, then raving, jungle, then hip-hop and RnB… from J Dilla to Jehst to Wu-Tang and Roots Manuva. Trawling back through the history of music through a love of samples, discovering rare soul, ’80s RnB and folk and so much more. The journey to seek out and take part became part of my growth and growing up—the work to discover, to uncover, to speak the language.
A process and rite of passage.
Where to go to find the people, to listen, to talk, to be present in a living thing. To breathe it in. Discovering new lives and making friends with those who grew up in another world from me but who shared the same source of escapism. Face to face. Through thick and thin. Through music. Not at my fingertips, but out there somewhere in the unknown.
So much was learnt on the way, and so much strength and confidence gained. Learning to trust my skills, not just the music making, but the unpicking and deconstructing to work things out, to understand how to navigate, how to be accepted, learning the canon by ear.
Arguably, the underground is harder to take part in on the internet these days, but maybe that is making the work in real life to find your people more meaningful again. In response to the lack of meaning we find on social media, we may also admit that we discover a new club or rave that way too. I personally find myself seeking out the real, the raw, the roots again. The human. The people. The lived and the stories. Maybe the need to be there can be strong enough to push us to seek it out for real.
I hope that only watching is never enough, that we are compelled to search it out for real as the interfaces and platforms we consume through are sucking the life out of the simple thing I love the most: listening. It shouldn’t be possible. But yet here we are. Wanting to touch, to smell, to hold. The gigs where mistakes are made becoming the most memorable. The perfect becoming mundane. The same black screen of the app. The lack of context. The same sounds and samples, the same influences, the same templates, following the same guides and tips.
I hope we all go to look for what’s real. And as AI continues to emulate realism, maybe we will be forced out into the world to find what’s really there. Our screens becoming like magazines once felt as we fell in love with our phones: flat, uninteresting, bland and plain. Lifeless.