Friday night I was kept awake reading an article on Facebook in "The New Yorker".\u00c2\u00a0 I assume not everybody reading this knows what Facebook is.\u00c2\u00a0 Just like our parents had no idea what rock bands like the Doors or Crosby, Stills & Nash were.<\/p>\n
Facebook is a social networking site.\u00c2\u00a0 Established by a Harvard student.\u00c2\u00a0 He started out a self-taught coder.\u00c2\u00a0 He might have ripped off the idea for the site from fellow students.\u00c2\u00a0 But what he created was INSTANTLY successful.\u00c2\u00a0 With thousands of people signing up in a week.\u00c2\u00a0 That’s the power of the Internet.<\/p>\n
Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder, is not quite like the rock stars of yore, the ones who flourished in Southern California in the late sixties and early seventies.\u00c2\u00a0 To Zuckerberg, money was always paramount.\u00c2\u00a0 But, like the work of those great bands, Facebook is cool.\u00c2\u00a0 Everybody wanted it.\u00c2\u00a0 And still does.<\/p>\n
Music is passe.\u00c2\u00a0 History.\u00c2\u00a0 Oh, don’t blow chunks, don’t get your fingers walking on the keyboard.\u00c2\u00a0 Just sit there and contemplate.\u00c2\u00a0 Music has been around since the dawn of time, and will continue to exist, great records will be made.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s just that today music is not where it’s at.<\/p>\n
I just finished reading the book "Hotel California" by Barney Hoskyns.\u00c2\u00a0 The second half is such a disappointment.\u00c2\u00a0 It reads like a Zagat guide.\u00c2\u00a0 All pasted together quotes.\u00c2\u00a0 But the first half, which I read second, is the movie filmmakers have tried to make but have never succeeded in getting right.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s the story of the birth of Southern California rock and roll.\u00c2\u00a0 And if you can put it down, you’ve never been touched by any of the acts featured.<\/p>\n
Linda Ronstadt left Arizona at age 18 to live at the beach, singing songs to stay alive.\u00c2\u00a0 Would you let YOUR daughter do the same today?\u00c2\u00a0 Without buying her a car with airbags all around and calling her cell phone five times a day?\u00c2\u00a0 Nobody really leaves home anymore.\u00c2\u00a0 Nobody takes a risk.\u00c2\u00a0 Hell, they’re taught not to, having worn bike helmets their whole lives, having never walked to and from school, their parents worrying they’d be stolen.\u00c2\u00a0 Their whole lives are arranged, like the playdates their mothers scheduled from the time they were born.\u00c2\u00a0 The concept of starting a new life on a whim, it doesn’t even enter their brain.\u00c2\u00a0 But that’s what the old rock stars did.\u00c2\u00a0 In patched together automobiles they made their way to Los Angeles.\u00c2\u00a0 And ensconced themselves in Laurel Canyon.<\/p>\n
Locked in traffic on Laurel Canyon Boulevard today it’s hard to fathom that this avenue wound through the heart of musical creativity in the sixties.\u00c2\u00a0 Like a giant summer camp, musicians lived in different houses and journeyed to their friends’ cabins, to hang out, get high and sing.\u00c2\u00a0 There were no news crews.\u00c2\u00a0 Not even any record companies at first.\u00c2\u00a0 It was about lifestyle, not fame.\u00c2\u00a0 And with this genesis, with the sixties values as a backdrop, the most enduring music of the rock era was created.\u00c2\u00a0 The exquisite poetry of Joni Mitchell and the sales of the Eagles.\u00c2\u00a0 Take your pick.<\/p>\n
Where’s the music scene today?\u00c2\u00a0 Where’s the community of like-minded musicians in it for the tunes rather than the bucks?\u00c2\u00a0 In an era where the buck is king even Bonnaroo changed its jam band ethic to draw more attendees.\u00c2\u00a0 Everything’s so sold out\/whored out that there’s no belief involved.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s just endless product.\u00c2\u00a0 That is essentially meaningless.\u00c2\u00a0 And without meaning, you’ve got no hooks, nothing to stick to the audience.<\/p>\n
Facebook is exciting because it’s about community.\u00c2\u00a0 Connecting with other people.\u00c2\u00a0 That’s the guts of MySpace too, music has almost nothing to do with it.\u00c2\u00a0 People want to meet others, they want to flirt, want to exchange information.\u00c2\u00a0 Only oldsters could focus on predators.\u00c2\u00a0 These are the same people whose parents were worried about their kids going to the rock show thirty five years ago.\u00c2\u00a0 They miss the point.\u00c2\u00a0 People want to be free, they want to feel ALIVE!\u00c2\u00a0 Mark Zuckerberg is the enabler.\u00c2\u00a0 Unlike MySpace, Facebook doesn’t allow just anybody in.\u00c2\u00a0 You’ve got to be a student, an authorized one.\u00c2\u00a0 And you get to choose, to a degree, what information is revealed and who gets to see it.\u00c2\u00a0 End users have control.\u00c2\u00a0 Where is the control in the music business?\u00c2\u00a0 The music business is one way.\u00c2\u00a0 We concoct it, you buy it, FUCK YOU!\u00c2\u00a0 It’s like the entire business missed it, the Internet revolution.\u00c2\u00a0 There’s a community as strong as there was in Laurel Canyon, it’s just virtual.<\/p>\n
As for the acts exhibiting their wares on MySpace and other places on the Web, they’ve been exposed to twenty five years of MTV, they’re experts on exploitation, but light on soul.\u00c2\u00a0 The sale precedes the tune.\u00c2\u00a0 Imaging is key.\u00c2\u00a0 Everybody’s got a business plan, nobody is growing his talent.<\/p>\n
Reading about Los Angeles in the few music papers extant during the heyday of the scene, I couldn’t wait to graduate from college and come.\u00c2\u00a0 I guess if I’d had any balls I would have dropped out and arrived earlier.\u00c2\u00a0 Then again, unlike Ronstadt and Jackson Browne and Don Henley I couldn’t completely let go of my past, I depended on it, I wasn’t ready to reinvent myself.\u00c2\u00a0 I wasn’t ready to live on absolutely nothing, knowing that all you’ve got is your experiences, and your physical assets don’t really count.<\/p>\n
Don’t feel bad if you don’t get today’s music.\u00c2\u00a0 It doesn’t have what the old tunes did.\u00c2\u00a0 It doesn’t have a sense of adventure, a sense of limit-testing, a sense of JOY!\u00c2\u00a0 Because it’s coming from a different place.\u00c2\u00a0 If not mercenary, a desire to be so DIFFERENT that it WANTS to exclude you.<\/p>\n
It’s hard to create a scene today.\u00c2\u00a0 Because as soon as you’ve got a flame, the press fans it into a conflagration, and then it burns out almost instantly.\u00c2\u00a0 You’d think the record companies would finally understand this movie, having seen it again and again and again.\u00c2\u00a0 But chasing the buck, they run acts up the flagpole and overexpose them again and again and again.\u00c2\u00a0 Nothing is allowed to grow.\u00c2\u00a0 Acts are not allowed to percolate, growing their base a fan at a time.\u00c2\u00a0 And if you don’t make the kind of music that’s easily sold, if you’re not willing to play ball with the corporate behemoth, you don’t get to play at all.\u00c2\u00a0 Unlike in the late sixties and the early seventies, the act is not king, but the label.\u00c2\u00a0 And the label likes this, feels entitled, for risk is anathema to these corporate entities.\u00c2\u00a0 And, as delineated above, risk is primary to great art.<\/p>\n
We all want something to believe in, something to live for.\u00c2\u00a0 I ask you, with endless conventions, books about how to make it, institutionalized success paths, who can get excited?\u00c2\u00a0 Not only not the talent, but the audience either.\u00c2\u00a0 Isn’t it funny that everything kids get excited about is on the Web, built by their peers and populated with content they’ve created?\u00c2\u00a0 And isn’t it fascinating that the corporate behemoths have missed this every stop of the way, and can only get in by buying sites that could die tomorrow?\u00c2\u00a0 You’d think MTV would own music on the Web, but with a corporate commercial viewpoint, the music video channel missed it.<\/p>\n
Morning has come to Morgantown.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s clear that the old days, the old systems are done.\u00c2\u00a0 The structures are decaying, they’re empty.\u00c2\u00a0 A new world is being built by young ‘uns the same way young ‘uns built the music scene in the last century, stealing the whole business from old farts.<\/p>\n
I can’t tell you what’s coming.\u00c2\u00a0 But I can tell you what we’ve got now is dead.\u00c2\u00a0 Kaput.<\/p>\n
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