Thursday, January 04, 2018

"We Were All in This Together. And Now There's No More This"

"There are, to be sure, many healthy exceptions to this rule. In garages and basements and dorm rooms across the country and around the world, bands are forming this very minute. They are arguing over favorite songs, greatest albums, Stratocaster versus Telecaster, and inevitably which one of the members is going to have to switch from guitar to bass. These hopeful young dreamers give me hope.
"But we also shouldn't kid ourselves: they are exceptions. For every one of these fledgling anarcho-syndicalist collectives, there are a thousand or a million kids alone in their bedrooms staring at Protools screens wondering what they have to do to get the Swedish cabal to write a hit song for them. They download a file onto Bandcamp or YouTube, start logging the hits, and pray.
"And oh my God, that sounds so lonely."
Rhett Miller at The Baffler sizes up the current-day pop-music industry.

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