Music to Tell a Vision
Music is more than a list of data. It has to be.
I read this tweet and tweeted a few snarky responses. Sorry for that.
But in my defense, nothing, and I mean nothing represents what is wrong with the current state of music and how we value it than what this tweet represents. I’m not mad really at Spotify, or Chris Stoneman either. It’s just infuriating in general.
I’ll explain why.
Music is not a spreadsheet.
Think about this. You seek out an artist or an album, and in whatever streaming service you decide to use, you end up at the record. What are you presented with? A square or circle picture, a large title and a columnar list.
The value of music should be more than this. It should be the gatefold vinyl, the record sold out of the trunk of the drummers car after the show. Something, in some digital representation of what it felt like to reach that point of discovery. Something with soul.
The tech world has managed to make a chat bot that can pass a college entrance exam, and yet our technology can’t make a record feel better than a real estate listing on Redfin. This is a choice, not a technological limitation.
At the other side of the album screen is an artist who desperately, desperately wants to talk to the person who’s about to embark on a journey through their art. They want to know who that person is, to shout at them, with customary insecurity: “Hey, I made this, please like it.”
Making a record is printing a moment of time that forever has to stand alone within each moment it's heard.
The DSP’s behave as if they monopolize audio in the form of music from a users device.
Guess what: you don’t.
The same media controller on the lock screen and dynamic island that lets Siri, or my AirPods, or my car pause and stop music works with any app that plays audio. Background audio was introduced in iOS 4, and a generic media player by iOS 7. We’re well past a music playback monopoly being in the hands of two companies. It can, and should be so much more.
This week, as with many weeks to come sadly, we lost a legend. Tom Verlaine of Television passed at 73 years old. For a man who eschewed the spotlight, and who’s records never really sold, the influence he and his band had over the entirety of alternative, punk and new wave music was certainly felt this week. From the pages of the Wall Street Journal to People Magazine. Rolling Stone to Pitchfork.
Marquee Moon was heralded as one of the best rock records of the 1970’s, and its title track (rightfully so) as ten minutes of perfection. And yet, this is how — in a week of mourning — Tom Verlaine’s music is presented.
We have to do better, not only for the sake of music, but for protecting and celebrating what music is to us as a species.
Tom Verlaine took every ounce of himself, from himself, and put it into a record. Through his music you hear his drive for perfection, his fights with his bandmates, you hear and feel the grittiness of CBGBs on a Saturday. You hear the years he spent from the Neon Boys through Television’s two incarnations to get to the point, four years later, to put it on record. Which then didn’t sell.
And yet, the places where the sounds of the past — and the dead — can be heard give music the same importance as a shopping list on a suburban family’s refrigerator.
