9: Radio! Radio!
Doodle loo doop de doodle loo loo - ding!
I’m not the only person who hates the radio. Anybody with a hunger for more eventually hits this point - looking for the “other stuff”. There’s MORE of this non-mainstream music now, but there’s more of EVERYTHING, and it’s likely just as elusive as ever.
Luckily, this “looking elsewhere” is a great thing to do for a certain kind of mind. Collectors love looking, whether that’s in bins at Goodwill, tuned into college radio, scouring Bandcamp or buying mixtapes.
Remember Filesharing?
My favourite era for discovery was short-lived but just fucking wonderful: right after Napster, there were different competing file sharing platforms, and I fell in love with Soulseek.
Soulseek just shared a public folder on each user’s computer, usually containing all their music. The magic was that if you found someone who had something unusual that was up your alley, you could examine what ELSE that person liked. You basically had access to everybody’s else’s basement and time to listen to what they had. I found the most glorious stuff on Soulseek - the Messthetics compilations, tons of field recording collections, lots of music from around the world. The secret was that you didn’t search for titles, you searched for tastes. I loved it, but it fell out of popularity and eventually, there weren’t enough peers for p2p. Nothing has replaced it.*
*[Just now, I decided to see if it still existed, and it does. I will see if it has enough users to work again. I’ll report back.]
Streaming
The comparable analogue now is Spotify (and the others - I’ve only used Spotify), which is hugely extensive, but is really just a very broad mainstream: user input is not welcome (see their “fans also like” algorithm, which is cheap and unimaginative, or their “info” about the music, which is pale and shallow.)
Add the uncomfortable fact that Spotify are just the latest version of a perpetual American scumbag, the music business guy who manages to own and control musicians, selling promises and fame for minimum wages. I use the service, but uncomfortably. I try to make sure I still buy lots of records as a sort of balance-penance.
One day the internet might offer access to ALL of the music and ALL of the knowledge in some glorious way. For now, it’s behaving like a large radio station owned by a corporate label. I want Soulseek + Wikipedia: thorough, collectively created information plus the freedom to share. I’d pay PLENTY for that service, but the critical mass needed to make it happen will likely always be missing, because of the large portion of the planet just fine with 40 songs in their lives.
Yellow Jacket Avenger
Til then - here’s something you haven’t heard, that you probably should hear. One of my favourite artists of the last 20 years, Yellow Jacket Avenger’s released album after album of angular, exploring art rock - here’s a link to his BandCamp, and here’s one to his YouTube channel. His aesthetic has roots I recognize from my youth - Andy Summers and Kate Bush and David Bowie - but all through the singular filter of Montrealer Geoffrey Pye. The two tracks below are from Put the Sun. My other favourite record is Double Nature - musical gold from end to end. Support an outlier - if you like it, buy his stuff.
Thanks for reading. If you dig this, please share it.
love,
jep
