I think you’re being too hard on the world and yourself.
“Less work to do”? Don’t know what that means. But songs are going to be written.
Movie reviews on the net and ebooks; I don’t see your point. Some links are broken. Meanwhile no matter what you give as a musical example, chances are I will be able to DL it or look at it on youtube, right now. And as time goes on there is more and more. What is not there today may be next week. That’s my experience. There must be a lot of passionate curators out there for that to be the case.
Lost and Found has been going for over 25 years. I don’t see your point there either. A station keeps a show for 2 weeks so you don’t have to listen in real time. You want it up there forever? Or else it’s the end of art as we know it? It’s just a radio show.
For me in the internet era I have collected immense amounts of music and interviews, live shows that I was at, tv themes, song poems, 365 days, comedy, the howard Stern show from 9/11/01, and loads of other items.
I do have my doubts too about what happens when there is a generation that doesn’t have any scarcity or romance to their musical impulse. No decision about which record to buy that week, no waiting for hours to hear your favorite song on the AM.
But you haven’t addressed the validity of my “death spiral” statement. You have defined musical passion and serendipity out of the equation.
Many many musical acts over the last 100 years are being looked at much more favorably than in their release year.
Gram Parsons, Syd Barrett, Black Sabbath, Nick Drake, Tom Waits, Big Star, Velvets, ad infinitum. Pop music from their eras has come and gone. Those have returned.
“The Blues” as a genre is something that would be unrecognizable to citizens of the 20s or 30s, black or white. Robert Johnson is a modern conception. He barely existed when he was alive. No influence at all on music, until Eric Clapton and Mick Jaggers era. Those black performers were encouraged to 'sing those blues" in the studio by white label owners. They probably played just as much pop, hokum, folk and old time material in their shows. (I’m cribbing from “Escaping the Delta” by Elijah Wald here).
Anyway I didn’t mean look up as look back necessarily.
I think with this conversation I’m defending a different thesis than my original, with which people do not seem to have radically disagreed. But since it’s interesting, I’m happy to discuss it with an intelligent poster such as yourself.
The point is actually that those reviews mostly don’t exist any more, at least not in a form that is easily accessible. A ton of old web content disappears every year.
I agree that an amazing amount of stuff is up on YouTube right now, and stuff I looked for a couple years ago and couldn’t find I can now. Keep in mind, however, that this stuff tends to be the music that was actually released by record companies and achieved some level of recognition in its time. Tends. As we progress further into the hobbyist era of music, I should think more and more stuff will be simply be lost.
Analogously, is anyone curating all the small print runs of poetry, the chapbooks, hell even some of the would-be-major collections of new poetry from the 1950s onward? Hell no, no one cares. (I have [had?] this collection of new poetry from the early 70s called “New Voices” (IIRC) that is pumping up these new, mostly young poets. I have googled some names and (again, IIRC, this was years ago), there was no sign of them any more. A couple of the poems are actually quite good IMO. It’s the kind of nicely produced book that probably had some meaning back in 1972 but none now. No one is curating this stuff. Another example would be James Carroll, who became a famous writer but was once a priest writing poetry. Books produced in beautiful full color. I have “Elements of Hope”–really good stuff. My friend even met him at a signing, and the guy himself basically doesn’t care about his own poetry. My friend complimented him, and he said, “Thank you, you honor me.” It’s a subtle thing, but it as if he appreciated the compliment on the poetry but didn’t consider it in the realm of his current life…)
BTW, we should not assume that every culture is as good as curating its music as the US. The vast, vast majority of Japanese records were never re-released on CD, and it is much harder to find stuff up on YouTube that is obscure.
I am merely pointing out that I don’t share your confidence that everything of value will be preserved. It sounds like a good radio show, but it doesn’t keep the files up for more than 2 weeks. I regularly see songs I put in my YouTube “Favorites” disappearing as well.
Yeah, there is the whole “skin in the game factor”: people not valuing what they don’t have to pay for, either in money or effort.
Perhaps you could restate it. I thought you were extrapolating from my own position to show its weaknesses instead of making an original thesis.
Fair point. And people will love music 200 years from now. If new music were never created, I think the mining of the past would continue and deepen until every damn track was known, cataloged, and rated for the convenience of future generations. But I don’t think this will happen in a future of nigh-infinite music production (i.e., the present but more distant from the era of prestige and limitations in music).
I don’t think this is true of the 20s and 30s. “Race records” clearly sold well.
This seems to be true of Blind Willie McTell, one of my favorites, based on his recordings. Not sure about Robert Johnson. His complete works, two CDs worth, is all blues.
Anyhow, I don’t know what’s going to happen in the future. I am merely emphasizing that it will probably not be like the past. I think people in the 19th century would be very surprised that 100% of the stage plays from their era would be (justifiably) considered worthless not long after the close of the century; that the best-selling poet of the century, Longfellow, would be considered a joke (with Evangelinenot considered a timeless classic); that the big men of letters like James Russell Lowell and John Greenleaf Whittier would fade into obscurity; that only two American poets from the century would be considered any good (Whitman and Dickinson, with only a handful of other poems by others thought of as worthwhile); and so on. But their likely hunches on other things, such as the enduring popularity of Dickens, would be right.