That's what I said back then!
I agree with your previous assessment. I can also understand why Steve was/is proud of the record. How many people can say they recorded The Stooges?
Chayka: Yes, comfort is a product that people like to consume. It’s scalable. Consumers enjoy it. Even in the book, I referenced this 19th-century commentator in France who was complaining about how train travel suddenly meant that all cities were becoming more similar than different. So I think it’s a common complaint. But we live in such an accelerated version of that. We can see our tastes reflected in so many more places and at such a granular level. I mean, billions of people circulate through the same ecosystems online. And I think there’s this vast generic agglomeration of stuff that we’re just cherry-picking from each place and molding it into a great blob of generic culture.
Klein: The way I knew about movies when I was younger is The L.A. Times had a movie critic. And that person had their taste, right? They liked some things and didn’t like other things. But now I’m much more likely to just go and look at the summary judgment of Rotten Tomatoes, of Metacritic. We’ve moved away from attaching to a curator who has an individual taste and guides you through the world toward the averaging out of curators like it’s a poll, right? Like, we treat everything as a poll and not as criticism. And that felt very efficient to me for a while. And now it feels very weird.
Chayka: Over the 2010s, culture became more datafied, driven by this engagement information that was only possible through digital platforms. There have always been metrics like the Nielsen ratings or box office numbers, but there’s never before been that kind of tyranny of real-time data. So I think there was a shift from human tastemakers and human gatekeepers to this very data-driven system in which only what is popular gets more popular and what does not get that immediate attention is kind of pushed into the shadows and cannot reach more people.
Now we have so many possibilities, we can find whatever we’re looking for. But the overall ecosystem of streaming and of algorithmic recommendations does have a way of funneling us just toward particular areas of that body of culture if we’re not very actively fighting it.
Klein: What kinds of art does that end up promoting within culture? What’s something that really works in the Rotten Tomatoes world?
Chayka: My sense is a kind of Marvel’s “Avengers: Endgame,” where a piece of culture is ruthlessly optimized to appeal to the largest number of people, the committed hard-core fan to the totally ambient distracted viewer, who will just sit there and marvel at the explosions in the C.G.I. The algorithmic ecosystem ends up promoting the widest possible average. It’s the stuff that avoids alienating people, keeps you engaged as much as possible, even if that engagement is very shallow.
It’s fundamentally scalable, to use the horrible Silicon Valley word, whereas I think, historically, the culture that we prize the most is usually not that. It’s usually the stuff that is not popular but grows in popularity over time. It’s the stuff you have to be patient with, to let grow within you. I mean, it’s easy to think this didn’t happen now, but “Moby Dick” barely sold in Herman Melville’s lifetime and only became this iconic work of literature over a century. That work of art was not determined by popularity or engagement metrics. It was determined by slow word of mouth over decades and decades and generations.
Klein: I’m always surprised when I look back at the books that mean a lot to me, the books that I am thinking about a year later — they’re often not ones I really liked. They’re often not even ones I would really recommend. They’re ones I had to struggle with. And if you asked me to give it a 1 to 10, I wouldn’t even really know where to put it. Maybe it’s not a great book, but it has one really great idea. Or I actually think this book is wrong, but it forced a useful conflict in me. And it does seem to me like that is harder and harder to find, right? And the harder it is to find, the less of it will actually be made.
Chayka: I think these ecosystems and platforms prevent us from experiencing difficult content in a healthy way. We don’t have to fight through something. We don’t have to be patient. We don’t have to think so much about what something is doing to us or consider our own opinion as it develops, because we always have that possibility of clicking away, like flipping to the next video on TikTok.
I buy some of that, but as far as the music we like I think it had more to do with the collapse/acquisition of 'mid tier' record labels, distributors, and press outlets. As goofy as something like Pitchforkmedia could be in the early 2000s, a lot of people would also be exposed to something like a Black Eyes record or whatever. Now it's a fend for yourself mess for anything that's not very mainstream or established major label acts. With Bandcamp's inevitable demise your options for large scale music distribution in 2024 could soon be Spotify and Youtube, and that's depressing as fuck.OrthodoxEaster wrote: Tue Jan 09, 2024 6:39 pm Why so-called gatekeepers, as well as difficult-to-digest art, shapes people making their own personalized tastes in a way that cherry-picking algorithmically driven data cannot. Plus, how this illusion of so much "choice" actually tends to make things more homogenous.
Agreed. I think that's why so many kids responded so strongly to Kurt's music when it broke out in the early 90s. It wasn't so much the notes and melodies (although Kurt had a great ear for those sonics), but moreso that kids loved that here was a genuine person behind the music. Greasy hair, acne, depression, divorced parents...it resonated because here was a real person creating art that really mattered to him. And when that happens people respond to it hugely. I can't imagine an album as personal as In Utero getting made in the late 80s on a major label.Tom Wanderer wrote: Wed Jan 10, 2024 8:48 am From the article; "It’s the stuff that avoids alienating people, keeps you engaged as much as possible, even if that engagement is very shallow."
For the past decade or so I've kept this constant understanding in the back of my mind that mediocrity is what rises to the top in our culture in terms of art, entertainment, etc. I think that quote sums it up pretty well. It's why Hollywood remakes art films, why Elvis was idolized over the countless black performers he ripped off and imitated. Why people love The Da Vinci Code or Denis Leary or American Idol or the Joker movie. It's skim milk that meets low expectations, massages the psyche with a vague sense of familiarity and offers virtually nothing but distraction, and even if it thinks it's edgy or revelatory or subversive...it's not. It's hackneyed. Sure, every once in a while something genuinely authentic or original or subversive manages to sneak through, but generally it's the middling that gets celebrated. And technology seems to be very good at accelerating that and showing us more and more of what we have already seen to the point that we think it's what we like.
I watched The Daytrippers the other night. A little indie movie from the late 90s. And while it wasn't revelatory or anything, it was a nice little movie with an original story and a good cast that took place on a small scale and didn't have any special effects or CGI or merchandising tie-ins. It was subtle, fun, personal. The kind of movie that would never be made today. And that sucks.
Right. It's the technology and the drastically shorter attention spans that have really ramped this up. I'm not even sure something as organic as a Nirvana or even a Pavement could make the kind of dent it once did. Nowadays, "grassroots" often means some jerk that became popular on (fundamentally ad- and click-driven platforms) like YouTube or TikTok.Tom Wanderer wrote:Sure, every once in a while something genuinely authentic or original or subversive manages to sneak through, but generally it's the middling that gets celebrated. And technology seems to be very good at accelerating that and showing us more and more of what we have already seen to the point that we think it's what we like.
penningtron wrote:I buy some of that, but as far as the music we like I think it had more to do with the collapse/acquisition of 'mid tier' record labels, distributors, and press outlets.
penningtron wrote:As goofy as something like Pitchforkmedia could be in the early 2000s, a lot of people would also be exposed to something like a Black Eyes record or whatever. Now it's a fend for yourself mess for anything that's not very mainstream or established major label acts. With Bandcamp's inevitable demise your options for large scale music distribution in 2024 could soon be Spotify and Youtube, and that's depressing as fuck.
penningtron wrote:Someone noted a few pages back that this board is harder to navigate on smartphones. I believe that point.. but FFS why!? It's a few more clicks and scrolls from a pocket sized device you can use on your patio, a train, or even an airplane shitter. We would have killed for these abilities in 2005.
At risk of getting into David Lowery territory, even the shittiest aspects of the old school record business were, y'know, still in the business of making records. The tech platforms have figured out that they are better monetized for podcasts, influencer 'content', ie. hours and hours of disposable shit that won't matter in a week. Music is an inconvenience to them.OrthodoxEaster wrote: Wed Jan 10, 2024 9:29 am The thing about so-called gatekeepers is that there was usually still some humanity there. It was still possible (if challenging) to win editors over w/enthusiasm and convince them to take a chance on some freaky shit. It's harder when most "editors" have been replaced by bean-counters, SEO-optimizers, and tech bros.