Now OutKast isn't a band I would normally listen to, I never bought an album, yet OutKast is still something that is very distinctly present in my memory when thinking back on the early portion of the decade.
Why is that?
It could just be that because I was younger, still searching for and forming my tastes, more engaged in pop culture, that I happened upon OutKast. Perhaps because I was more impressionable, I cast a wider net back then. However perhaps it’s neither, and perhaps it has something to do with how we digest media now versus then.
Or maybe it just so happened that these changes ran concurrently with my maturation.
I would imagine the natural maturation process involves slowly learning, not only what you like, but, perhaps in a process more defining, learning what you don't like. It's true that this works conversely just as well; you start out liking very few things and slowly over time, exposed to more things, your mind is opened... but I find that truer with food. In the instance of music, one generally begins floating in a kiddie pool of general pop music, or oldies rock mostly uncritical, you float there pruning, using your parents musical tastes as floaties. Then something happens, you discover your first "in" that first thing that goes "YES!" I like this! Then you become more critical, you dig deeper down and become more specialized in a certain type of music, and this becomes your musical taste. Years later you look back and you realize you've become a mild expert in a very specific self curated genre of music you've created. And many of the friends you have overlap in your venn diagram of musical tastes.
Now something happened in this decade that ran parallel with this journey. We fractured. The digital revolution of music, along with the internet shattered the kiddie pool, and soon it became that these specialized tastes could be shared, you could communicate with the people with whom your venn diagram most overlapped. You weren't confined to friends, or music for that matter, that was in your community. It shredded the distinction of underground and pop, and created far more categories. I don't want to go into the specifics of the digital revolution, as it's a topic not only worthy of a book, but a book much better suited to be written by someone who knows far more than I do.
For me, and perhaps my/our generation, it seems extremely difficult to separate the two. Does the fact that I no longer know about Rhianna, Lady Gaga and whatever other music that is on the charts these days a testament to my age, or "The Age" in which we live? Is it that I get information in such a different way now, than we used to 10 years ago? Or is that I am just so much more cooler*? (*sic intended)
In the many splinters of the internet, we can search for and find exactly what we want, and conversely we can successfully avoid that which does not interest us. Now this is all great, niches can become more specialized, we can share our tastes, and we can more easily discover music that is more likely to interest us, and not just music, but all media.
However in all of this we have lost something, Serendipity.
Media is an act now, it's not passive. Where as in the past one collectively waited for a show to come on the TV or radio, or otherwise simply threw their hands up to the programing gods and hoped to find something that would keep their attention, now we dictate the terms.
And this brings me to OutKast.
Every morning, in the time before I had to actually lift the covers, plant my feet and shuffle to the bathroom to get ready for school, I would fire up the TV and watch music videos. I would see videos for all sorts of acts, from all sorts of genres... I knew every No Doubt video, every R&B video, OutKast, Jay-Z, Dr. Dre, Shaggy, Sugar Ray everything... I knew all the big director's... Joseph Kahn, David Meyers, Hype Williams... and here I was lying down hoping to get a Beck video before I had to leave for class. In the meantime I saw 4-5 other videos, that if forced to fill out a survey I would check the box that said "Little or no Interest".
Today I would just fire up YouTube and watch the Beck video instantly. I think, this distinction is massive. We are going to be the transition generation, the last ones who knew of the time when we were at the mercy of programming.
And in that patience that was required of us, there existed a dialog, there was an actual place where videos lived, where you could see trends, see what other directors where doing, see how artists defined themselves. There was still a sense of a collective pulse, a current that would perhaps more accurately describe youth culture in a cohesive way than the internet would today.
To make the example more extreme think of the times when there were only a handful of TV networks. Every red-blooded american, and even the godless Communists, knew of the sit-coms on the TV, and whether they liked them or not, they knew the cast, basic premise, and had general opinions about the shows. There seems like there was a much more cohesive absorption of media. The difference now being that those who are fans of a given show are fans by choice, not by monopoly of content, and therefore are seemingly more willing to be defined by it, and much more willing to create a mini-community whereby their enjoyment of the show can be shared. So while they might not encounter as many fans, or even people who know the slightest about “their show” on a day to day basis, they are sustained by their specific niche to which they belong. Their community is no longer local, and limited to those around them, but one that is intellectual and that spreads much further, and arguably deeper.
Now this niche can lived unchallenged. The member of the niche no longer has to expose himself to anything outside the niche. Just as mountain lion never tries it's hand at flying, or living at the bottom of the ocean, the viewer is never required to explore that which is it not suited for. And so, just like the Fish who knows nothing of the Mountain Lion, and visa versa, we find ourselves potentially on the verge of parallel societies. Whereby there exists the initiated, and the uninitiated (in regards to whichever given niche).
But what I am describing is also true of aging. Perhaps it’s that with each passing year one becomes ever more aware that our time is finite, and there isn’t time to waste on that which does not interest us. Or perhaps it’s that our spongey brain slowly sets, like a lump of clay left out over night and we simply cannot afford to make room for the new. But for whatever reason it is, this devision between niches is as similar as the division in generations. (As in most test cases one must throw out the self-importing boomers, who are interesting in that they are overly eager to both remain relevant, in a way to avoid confronting the fact that they are aging, and desperate to keep the 60’s as the paragon of culture. ) However when looking at it traditionally generations are essentially their own niche. So is my lack of interest in current popular music, my first step of a generational branding, or is a result of the digital media revolution? Most likely a little a both, just as we no longer see commercials with Toucan Sam following his nose into a bowl of Fruit Loops, we simply aren’t the demographic for any of this music anymore. So we will have “our” media, and the next generation will have theirs. But without the context of the future, or even really all that much of the past for that matter, it seems as though went through this process of maturation during a time in our culture when the whole society was seeming going through a similar process. Perhaps it’s with boomer like delusions of grandeur that I say that, however at the very least we are a pivot generation in our consumption of media.
The niche-ification of media will only grow more extreme and in many ways it's a great thing, our lives will be more catered to our tastes, where we are better able to support those who are like us and sustain our niches much more easily than ever. The down side being that our physical communities are no longer required to sustain our intellectual ones, and that we find ourselves even further disjointed, and removed from each other. (Which is perhaps why in modernity our manner of dress is such an important indicator of what kind of media we consume, as it becomes the signifier that turn fish nets into fishing spears.)
I can’t bring myself to say that a lost of serendipity is an bad thing either. And it’s not that we will have lost it, we will just have lost it in a very specific way, a way that has existed for nearly a 100 years. While we might find it quaint, romantic or comforting, to lament it’s lost, it’s really no different than the cliched stories of grandparents huddling around the radio and walking uphill 5 miles in the snow to get to school.
Of course we will still chance into finding things we love, it just will have already gone through more filters and perhaps be more "curated" for us. It just so happened that my first loves came while waiting for a Beck video. The first time I heard Radiohead. The first time those lights came up on The Stroke’s “Last Nite” video. And so on and so on.
We will miss it just because we where the last to have it. We will be the crying indian of media, the young kids will look up at us tell us Thom Yorke is a nerd and we will gaze into the sunset, the wind will blow in our hair and a lone tear will fall from our cheek.
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