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The Politics of Nostalgia

01.31.2019 by M Donaldson // Leave a Comment

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I’ve written previously about the phenomenon of music made to sound like it’s playing in a mall and the evocation of fake nostalgia. A recent piece in MEL Magazine examines this oddball subgenre and attempts to make sense of it all:

… Tills’ life at the mall is imaginary. He’s nostalgic for the 1990s, which he thinks was a better time to live. At the core of this mental construction is “mallwave,” a lo-fi subgenre of vaporwave that listeners refer to as “music optimized for abandoned malls.” Like Vaporwave creators, Mallwave musicians use soft drum tracks, ambient sounds and low-quality synthesizers to create soft, calming electronic music. But they also mix in pop music associated with the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, with the purpose of creating a holistic “nostalgic” experience, one that recreates the experience you would have had when visiting the mall. Or, in Tills’ case, what that experience might have been like, for people who lived it. […]

To Grafton Tanner, author of Babbling Corpse: Vaporwave and the Commodification of Ghosts, the turn to nostalgia in vaporwave is all about this reflection of contemporary societal trends — whether it’s grappling with late capitalism or dreaming of an allegedly sunnier bygone era. Speaking over Skype, he tells me, “Nostalgia is a popular tool in marketing, and it’s probably the most defining cultural product of our time. You see it in movies and TV with reboot trends, and of course, apps like Spotify use algorithms that recommend music that you’ve probably listened to in the past.”

Simon Chandler, writing for Bandcamp Daily, dares to dig even deeper:

… society for decades has been pursuing consumerism and neoliberal capitalism when it’s often accepted that neither are perfect, and the way some of us have coped with this is through adopting a position or attitude of irony (cf. David Foster Wallace). We’ve mocked politicians on both sides while continuing to elect them and we’ve ridiculed McDonald’s while continuing to buy Big Macs, and vaporwave has masterfully symbolized this social phenomena by subverting clichéd samples while relying on them to a massive extent. […]

Nonetheless, it can be argued in vaporwave’s defense that, like much uncompromising music and art, the genre’s ‘mission’ appears to be focused more on mirroring our imperfect world than on reforming it. It may not offer any solutions, but it almost perfectly depicts a political domain in which media-generated images have alienated us from reality, and in which a minority of us have drifted into self-conscious irony as a way of coping with an imperfect environment (we think) we can’t change.

There’s an interview with Brian Eno (that I can’t find) where he says that he often makes music as a soundtrack to his hopes for a better world. This is like the opposite of that.

🔗→ The Teens Who Listen to ‘Mallwave’ Are Nostalgic for an Experience They’ve Never Had
🔗→ Music of the Spectacle: Alienation, Irony and the Politics of Vaporwave

Categories // Items of Note Tags // Brian Eno, Genres, Nostalgia, Vaporwave

We Would Call That a Demon

01.27.2019 by M Donaldson // Leave a Comment

On a fascinating episode of Douglas Rushkoff’s Team Human podcast, “technologist, futurist, inventor, and mage” Mark Pesce has a fascinating observation about social media’s knack for social engineering:

What is Facebook doing? It’s watching your responses to build a simulation – simulacra, really – of you and then it can check against that simulacra what your emotional state is. Okay, so, it’s built an A.I. that can essentially read and tamper with your emotional state. If this were the 14th century and I talked about evoking something that could then tamper with you emotionally and that you would feed energy that it would feed back to you in a different form – we would call that a demon.

There’s also a meatier-than-usual post on Kottke.org by Tim Carmody about where the web went wrong and how the spirit of blogging might point to the desired way forward:

A lot of the efforts to reshape social media, or to walk away from it in favor of RSS feeds or something else, are really attempts to recapture those utopian elements that were active in the zeitgeist ten, fifteen, and twenty years ago. They still exercise a powerful hold over our collective imagination about what the internet is, and could be, even when they take the form of dashed hopes and stifled dreams.

These days I’m thinking about this stuff all of the time. I know I’m hardly the only one.

🔗 → Ep. 116 Live at Civic Hall Pt. 2: A Demonology of Algorithms with Mark Pesce
🔗 → How to Fix Social Media by Injecting A Chunk of the Blogosphere

Categories // Items of Note Tags // Blogging, Douglas Rushkoff, Podcast, Social Media

Clean Socks and the Touring Musician

01.23.2019 by M Donaldson // 1 Comment

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Here’s an article in yesterday’s New York Times about Hans-Jürgen Topf, a German man who has created a successful business in a microscopic niche — he handles the laundry needs of major touring acts:

His company, Rock ’n’ Roll Laundry, provides equipment and laundry staff for touring productions. […]

When on tour, he often spends three to four hours every afternoon ironing the performers’ clothing, his least favorite part of the job, while simultaneously washing the crew’s garments. On some tours, he spends up to 20 hours a day doing laundry, he said. After a show, the machines go into specially built rolling cases, so they can be loaded onto trucks and brought to the next location. […]

Joe Pomponio, a stage manager for numerous festivals in Europe who has worked frequently with Topf, said by phone that, for many acts that have spent years on the road, comforts like professionally done laundry have become vital. He added that he did not know anybody who offered services comparable to Topf’s, and that Rock ’n’ Roll Laundry was a fixture on the European festival circuit.

The article goes into detail how Topf happened onto this business idea (trigger warning: Ted Nugent is involved). This business is fascinating because, in a way, it’s a no-brainer. When a band is on tour, reliably getting laundry taken care of is a source of much stress. Any major group would be happy to dedicate a portion of a tour budget to have this worry off the plate. That Topf stumbled into this by chance makes one realize all the other unserved niches out there waiting to be filled. It’s also brilliant that Rock ’n’ Roll Laundry travels with their own machinery.

Clean clothes were a constant concern on the four extended bus/van tours I traveled with as a performer. We anticipated and planned for concert venues on the itinerary that had washing machines on premises or nearby — these were the holy grail of touring — and panicked if there was nothing definite on the horizon. On the bus tours, we rarely slept in hotels, but we’d sometimes get a hotel room for a day so we could use the laundry facilities. And then there’s one artist I toured with whose solution was to wear cheap white t-shirts. He’d toss a shirt after a couple of days and, once he ran out, would take a cab to the nearest Walmart to buy another shirt, socks, and underwear pack.

I’m mostly romantic about my touring days, but this article reminded me of all the grit, dirt, and sweat. Tour-life is an alternate reality that helps one appreciate the simple luxuries, like clean underwear.

🔗 → He Knows the Stars’ Dirty Laundry. Because He Washes It.

Categories // Items of Note Tags // New York Times, Touring

Blocked on Spotify: The Public Has Spoken

01.22.2019 by M Donaldson // Leave a Comment

via Thurrott:

With an upcoming update, Spotify will let you block music from any artist you don’t like throughout the app. This means it will block music from that artist on your personal library, playlists, automatically curated playlists, charts, radios, and everything else. In fact, you won’t be able to manually play music from an artist you’ve blocked even if you wanted to — and you’d have to unblock an artist before you can play a certain track from them.

I’ve seen this being sold as a way to no longer hear artists that annoyingly keep popping up in algorithmic playlists — the feature is touted as “much-requested” and I think that’s originally why it was requested — but it’s obvious this is Spotify’s way of dealing with deplorable artists on the platform. It’s a passing of the buck, if you will, after Spotify’s disastrous attempt at self-censorship.

I can’t say I blame Spotify for putting this decision in an individual user’s hands. At least they’re responding and doing something. Knowing Spotify, I’m sure there’s some data-gathering at play, too. It would be in the platform’s best interest to learn of artists that are being blocked en masse by its users. Then Spotify would be able to quietly downplay those artists in playlists and features. The public has spoken.

Update: Another take, Spotify’s New Mute Feature Is a Patronizing Misstep

Categories // Items of Note Tags // Censorship, Spotify

Word of the Day: Chimping

01.16.2019 by M Donaldson // Leave a Comment

A candidate for ‘word of the day,’ via Shutter Muse:

What is Chimping?

Chimping is the act of looking at your camera’s LCD screen as soon as you have taken a photo. The term is jokingly derived from the noises that photographers often make when they see a shot they like on the back of the camera (oooh ohh), followed sometimes by “ape like” hand motions for others to take a look.

I look forward to my first opportunity to use this phrase in the wild. Also, it must be noted that Shutter Muse doesn’t necessarily consider ‘chimping’ a bad thing.

Categories // Items of Note Tags // Definitions, Photography

Put It Into the Fire Without Reading Any Farther

01.13.2019 by M Donaldson // Leave a Comment

Brain Pickings reproduced a fan letter that Bram Stoker wrote to Walt Whitman and I’m going to steal its opening text for the greatest cold email template ever:

If you are the man I take you to be you will like to get this letter. If you are not I don’t care whether you like it or not and only ask that you put it into the fire without reading any farther. But I believe you will like it.

Categories // Items of Note Tags // Email, Literature

Immune to Misinformation

01.08.2019 by M Donaldson // Leave a Comment

I’m happy that John Green is doing this Crash Course series on Navigating Digital Information. This is important and I look forward to all the episodes.

Watch on YouTube

John recently gave up all social media for a year. Here’s his first-day video and here’s his one-month follow-up. In the latter he states: “Now I have sometimes believed that I’m like immune to misinformation but I’ve come to understand that such a belief actually makes you more susceptible to it.”

Categories // Items of Note Tags // Information, Internet, Social Media, The Battle for Your Mind

It’s Hierarchy in Disguise

01.05.2019 by M Donaldson // Leave a Comment

Via The New Yorker, last night I read this thought-provoking profile of Elizabeth Anderson, a philosopher of growing renown in that male-dominated field. She’s working to disconnect the inverse relationship between freedom and equality. That is, the idea that freedom is expanded at the expense of equality and vice versa. I never thought about the ‘left vs. right’ debate boiling down to that underlying assumption. From the article:

If individuals exercise freedoms, conservatives like to say, some inequalities will naturally result. Those on the left basically agree—and thus allow constraints on personal freedom in order to reduce inequality. The philosopher Isaiah Berlin called the opposition between equality and freedom an “intrinsic, irremovable element in human life.” It is our fate as a society, he believed, to haggle toward a balance between them. […]

The trouble was that many people, picking up on libertarian misconceptions, thought of freedom only in the frame of their own actions. If one person’s supposed freedom results in someone else’s subjugation, that is not actually a free society in action. It’s hierarchy in disguise.

The piece is a long one (Pocket estimates 38 minutes), but it’s worth the read, sometimes heady but entertaining throughout: The Philosopher Redefining Equality

On a side note, mid-way through the article there’s a New Yorker cartoon that’s the most bizarre one I’ve ever seen.

Categories // Items of Note Tags // Philosophy

‘Ways of Hearing’ Explores Listening in the Digital Age

08.08.2017 by M Donaldson // Leave a Comment

I’m excited about this new Radiotopia podcast named Showcase. Mostly because the first season consists of the six-part series Ways Of Hearing, hosted by Damon Krukowski who you may know as the drummer for Galaxie 500 and a member of Damon & Naomi.

Apparently inspired and culled from Damon’s recent book The New Analog, Ways Of Hearing explores how listening has changed as audio delivery moves from analog to digital. It looks to go much deeper than that, touching on subjects like modern changes in the sharing of information and how audio affects our sense of time. So far the podcast doesn’t go down the tired analog vs. digital rabbit hole, and I don’t expect that it will. Listen to the first episode HERE.

On a side note: certain bands or songs send waves of melancholy down the spine. For me, Galaxie 500 is one of those bands. When “Tugboat” starts playing in the first episode of this podcast I’m overcome with tingles. The song evokes a time and a place, an overwhelming nostalgia, a part of my life (my early 20s) filled with loneliness and sadness. I recorded a Galaxie 500 copycat song, complete with my imitation of Dean Wareham’s first album wail, and played it for a girl I liked. She asked me why I was so sad and then I never heard from her again.

And if you’d like to read the harrowing tale of a great band dissolving then you should check out this oral history of Galaxie 500 on Pitchfork.


Update: If you’re having trouble listening from the player on the show’s site then try this player on PRX’s page.

Categories // Items of Note Tags // Audio, Music History, Podcast, Recording, Technology

If You Are Losing the Game, Best to Change the Rules

06.06.2017 by M Donaldson // Leave a Comment

Ben Thompson for Stratechery:

The long-rumored competitor to Amazon Echo and Google Home was, fascinatingly, framed as anything but. {Tim} Cook began the unveiling by referencing Apple’s longtime focus on music, and indeed, the first several minutes of the HomePod were entirely about its quality as a speaker. It was, in my estimation, an incredibly smart approach: if you are losing the game, as Siri is to Alexa and Google, best to change the rules, and having heard the HomePod, its sound quality is significantly better than the Amazon Echo (and, one can safely assume, Google Home). Moreover, the ability to link multiple HomePods together is bad news for Sonos in particular (the HomePod sounded significantly better than the Sonos Play 3 as well).

Of course, superior sound quality is what you would expect from a significantly more expensive speaker: the HomePod costs $350, while the Sonos Play 3 is $300, and the Amazon Echo is $150. From Apple’s perspective, though, a high price is a feature, not a bug: remember, the company has a hardware-based business model, which means there needs to be room for a meaningful margin.

The result is a product that, beyond being massively late to market, is inferior to the competition on two of three possible vectors: the HomePod is significantly more expensive than an Echo or Google Home, it has an inferior voice assistant, but it has a better speaker. That is not as bad as it sounds: after all, the iPhone is significantly more expensive than most other smartphones, it has inferior built-in services, but it has a superior user experience otherwise. The difference — and this is why the iPhone is so much more dominant than any other Apple product — is that everyone already needs a phone; the only question is which one. It remains to be seen how many people need a truly impressive speaker.

Coming from a music industry POV, an emphasis on sound quality as a feature – as it applies to music playback – is a great move and may even raise the bar for competitors’ forthcoming hardware. I look forward to personally assessing just how good this HomePod speaker sounds, and find it fascinating that the HomePod has been successfully positioned so that the sound quality is what I’m mostly curious about.

Categories // Items of Note Tags // Apple, Audio, Music Tech

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8sided.blog is an online admiration of modernist sound and niche culture. We believe in the inherent optimism of creating art as a form of resistance and aim to broadcast those who experiment not just in name but also through action.

It's also the online home of Michael Donaldson, a curious fellow trying his best within the limits of his time. He once competed under the name Q-Burns Abstract Message and was the widely disputed king of sandcastles until his voluntary exile from the music industry.

"More than machinery, we need humanity."

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