Pod People
The frigid Brooklyn night disappears as Josh Clark takes me down into the warm, wooden bowels of a former warehouse, a warren of studios and lofts on the edge of Park Slope, where he and his colleague, Charles Burst, have built the Seaside Lounge. The recording studio, patronized by musicians such as Obits, The New Pornographers, Neko Case and Ted Leo, is also a portal to the sound of the past–in the form of a 3M 16-track analogue tape recorder that once belonged to rock god Eddie Van Halen.
Clark, who is 32, tall, lean and, like many men in Brooklyn of a certain age, bearded, talks eloquently and lovingly of his 16-track as a marvel of machined technology and about the tinkering he has to do each week, given that it is composed of so many moving parts. But he is not a curator, and this isn’t a museum: the 3M is the studio’s flagship machine because in the age of digital sound, analogue is rich, detailed, wondrous–and as Clark puts it, “exciting.”
It may be odd to hear a 32-year-old describe himself as a bridge to the age of analogue, a quaint era of gears and levers and screws, and yet many of the musicians who use the Seaside Lounge will have grown up listening only to the tapeless, ethereal sounds of binary code. This gap between kids who grew up with the Internet, says Clark, and those–only marginally older–who grew up with hi-fi is huge. “No one sits down in front of good speakers anymore, no one cares about buying gear for life,” and, sometimes, he thinks, no one born after 1985 is ever going to sit or care as people once did or now do in dwindling minorities. Nevertheless, even those musicians who arrive knowing only the sound of digital are open to being wowed by the possibilities of analogue.
I wanted to see the 16-track because I have been wondering about the gap between the rhetoric and the reality of the digital revolution we are so often reminded is taking place, with or without our assent. And I was thinking specifically about sound after cracking open The Chaos Scenario, a recent addition to the library of “what does the Internet mean for media and what to do about it” by NPR’s On the Media cohost and Advertising Age editor-at-large, Bob Garfield. Garfield has a complex thesis, dubbed “listenomics,” which he wanted to use as the book’s title except, except–as he notes in the introduction–he “was preempted by Wikinomics and freakin’ Freakonomics, two fine books that went all ‘-omic’ on the publishing world before I got a chance to.”
Listenomics, according to Garfield, is responsible for the “death of everything,” and everything’s reimagining in a “New World Order,” where the herd of consumers will be heard and in order to influence consumers one must give up influence. Inevitably, such claims offer much to argue with on almost every page of Chaos Scenario, not least with what Garfield calls the “pod people” and what they are doing:
Surely you’ve noticed them, on the subway or at the gym, all those folks milling about with little white buds in their ears. This is not a hygiene problem. This is a prima fascie [sic] evidence of the ongoing revolution. These people may seem placid enough, but as they pump away at the elliptical machine or stare into the middle distance avoiding eye contact with their fellow straphangers, they are actually storming the Bastille. As they privately groove to digital recordings … they are simultaneously dismantling the Old Word Order. Thanks to the iPod, the record business and commercial broadcast radio are in extremis.”
The book is dense with passages like this, well written but sometimes verging on the obtuse through overwriting: who, precisely, are the readers puzzling over the ubiquity of iPods, and how old must they be to have missed the Sony Walkman era? The more important question, of course, is whether the economic woes of big music’s Bastille are terminal or just temporal–accidents of technology that may be reversed through newer technology. As Zhou Enlai said of the French Revolution, “it is too early to say.”
For what is really startling about the revolution in music is that the “pod people” are not just keeping vinyl alive and sales steady, or going to live concerts and nurturing micromusical climates at a local level. They also have altered one of the basic principles of rock ‘n’ roll in a way that might bode well for the future economics of the music business: They like their parents’ music.
Paul Rachman, director of American Hardcore, a terrific history of the homegrown American punk movement, noticed this when he was doing the promotion for his documentary: The kids didn’t just want to talk about punk, and they didn’t talk at all about contemporary music; they wanted to talk about Led Zeppelin and ZZ Top and AC/DC. He then noticed that his friends’ teenage kids were playing old classic rock, and that videogames such as Guitar Hero were composed of classic rock songs, marketing them, in effect, to a generation bereft of the kind of supergroups created by the massive advertising budgets of the past. Confirmation that he wasn’t simply imagining this trend came from Terry Stewart, president of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, who told him that for the first time in history of rock, parents and teenagers were not in rebellion about their music; they were in agreement.
What does the craving for classic rock supergroups mean for “listenomics?” It means a certain kind of music is valuable. For Rachman, who is working on a documentary series with the working title of “lost rockers”–those who almost made it huge–it means that we’re in a transitional period, where the business models to exploit this value are being rebuilt. What it doesn’t mean is that kids will never pay for music.
The point is this: Much of what is theorized about the behavior of consumers in a digital age takes place in a temporal fug, where contingent practices–don’t pay, won’t pay–take on the adamantine quality of laws handed down by God; but just because something starts one way doesn’t mean that it is bound to continue on the same course, immutable and unyielding to change.
We may have traded the convenience of musical portability for a staggering loss in audio quality, a leap backwards that might be compared with taking away Raphael’s paints and giving him an Etch-a-Sketch. But at the same time, revolutions create people like Clark and spaces like the Seaside Lounge: people and places that mediate between technologies and eras, and in doing so draw attention to what might be lost and what should be preserved. They all have the power to alter the seemingly linear path of revolution.
Garfield’s Chaos Scenario is, perhaps, best interpreted as a scientific metaphor for nonlinearity, where the multiple inputs of an open-source crowd tempt us with determinable outcomes but, in fact, yield odd and fascinating unpredictability. One possibility in that unpredictability is that we could eventually return to the past, where we paid for entertainment and preferred the sound produced by tape traveling through an elaborately mechanical box.
Indeed, the complex dynamics of the digital era may give even more power to top-down influence than ever before; after all, the ghost of marketing budgets past is still alive and kicking–and clearly able to deliver what the kids want: epic music. Who could have predicted that this digital era would bring about concord between musical generations, uniting rather than dividing parents and teenagers–at least until a new generation of supergroups and epically marketed rock sunders them again?
