The Myth of Closed Circumstances pt. ii
There’s a conversation—or there was, as expected it’s farted out—going on between 1 Tumblr I do read and one I didn’t really know existed. It’s tangentially related to digital music and through that, iPods and also a rant I responded to here a little while ago: The Myth of Closed Circumstances. You’re not getting any links to that discussion because you probably already read it and pissing contests on Tumblr are really low-stakes.
Speaking of low-stakes. This whole “the internet’s ruined how people got music” or whatever, really means, or at least I hope it means, “I’m mad because kids that don’t know dick act like experts because of the internet.” One more time: Realize how petty of a concern that is. Also, people who act that way did so before the internet and gleaned all their info from rock magazines or wherever else. Basically, this sense that if you discover stuff or gain your info on music from the internet you’re less this or that is just ridiculous. And nostalgic.
And when you engage in it, you end up looking foolish always. Because say, the guy who didn’t have his music on CDs or say the nerdy teen in the 1950s who wandered to the poor part of town to find race records is gonna call bullshit on people who had easier access to LPs or CDs.
The keyword though in all this is “circumstance”. If one had enough dough to take a trip to a foreign country and physically handle cool music from that country, that’s a circumstance. If my dad had business trips in NYC so I got to go there and get mixtapes that’s circumstance too. If my mom was cool enough to let me walk down the street from the mall while she shopped so I could go to this record shop, that’s a circumstance. If my chill alt-bro roommate was playing Ducktails and I liked it so he sent it to me, that’s a circumstance. If a review on Pitchfork or wherever else grabbed my eye and led me to google blog search an album, that’s a circumstance too. They’re all the same.
Let’s also add another circumstance: The economy. Not only because people have less to spend on records, but because of how limited stores’ stock is these days. How the Best Buy in my shit town had Pussy Galore records and weird Rap-A-Lot releases and how now, it won’t have those things at all. Blah blah blah, insert narrative on complete corporate takeover etc. here. I’d say it’s really, really hard to get the stuff you’re interested in at most stores these days.
But if part of the “closed circumstances” thing was some kind, beautiful and sexy sense of making do with what’s around you or something, well that’s just ridiculous. I’m basically a Libertarian, so I don’t dig on “limits”. And this sense of limits being cool or attractive is again, really classist. It’s no joke—fascist.
What all this bullshit bemoaning about how “Everybody has the internet” really is, is a bunch of people with way more resources than most bitching about how now, lots of people have resources.
What anybody/everybody needs to realize before they turn dicks on internet people is that not everybody once had the access to this or that. WE WERE LUCKY ENOUGH—and interested in stuff enough—to gain access. It isn’t like the internet just opens up and provides people with music, one does have to search it out. They still had to read about it, think about it, hear about it, somewhere before googling/searching. In short, some kind of circumstance led them to google blog search. So get off the high horse.
