p2pnet special:- When the personal stereo appeared in the early 80s, I was precocious enough to want one and fortunate enough to have parents that listened. Mine (a housebrick-sized and -weighted object which ate up four AA batteries in a couple of hours) was among the first at my school, and though I’ve never been someone who worried much what other people think of me, I remember that even I felt a little selfconscious walking around with wires dangling from my ears. People – strangers, often – would stop me to ask “what are you listening to?” and expect to be “given a go” on this exotic toy.

This, of course, doesn’t happen now. Which is a shame in some ways. We no longer seem curious about others’ inner sound world, or are too grateful for our own to engage our fellow humans in potentially life-enhancing, music-swapping chit-chat. But whereas my young self would usually have to sheepishly admit that, yes, I was listening to Pink Floyd again, now the answer would quite often be: “I have no idea”.

I tend to prefer randomized playlists, and unless my algorithmic DJ has chosen a song I know well, I might have only a hazy idea who the artist is without a surreptitious glance at the screen. There are even, shamefully for someone who used to publish a music magazine, artists I now love about whom I know nothing.

At the moment, for example, I’m listening to a mix whose author and contents are unknown to me. It’s high quality melodrama in a laid-back DJ Shadow style (though I don’t think it’s him) – it might be the handiwork of a pro DJ or ‘just’ the peer from whom I downloaded it. The point is that peer-to-peer has enabled those of us who like to walk the perimeters to stray further from home than ever before.

I frequently download stuff I’ve never heard of from people with cool collections on the offchance that I might like it. This is part of the appeal of the p2p experience: not only is the music free and on-demand, it also comes with the potential for risk-taking and the excitement that implies.

But there are other ways now to hear out-there music of unknown provenance, which are probably more legal than p2p*: music-discovery services, to coin a completely boring name. From Indy and iRate (which draw on free mp3 downloads from around the web) to Pandora (with its afterthought-like links to iTunes and Amazon) to Yahoo! LaunchCast (which is essentially a teaser for their download store), these engines have a common approach. They start by playing pretty much anything at you, you rate what you hear, and the engine builds up a profile of your tastes and tries to stay on your good side by playing other things it thinks you’ll like. As the hidden dossier on your music taste becomes more sophisticated, little gems can start to appear among the curveballs.

This is great for randomophiles like me, up to a point. After a few weeks using LaunchCast, it knows me so well that, although it often surprises me what it can dredge from its one-million-song archive for my pleasure, rarely now do I hear something with which I’m completely unfamiliar. In fact the experience has become eerily similar to my own mp3 collection in AutoDJ mode. I can’t help thinking that a million songs is really not all that many, as the history of music goes, especially when you consider how many recordings are duplicated, some several times, within its archives, what with all those compilations. And where are the mashups? The cutups? The DJ sets? The concert bootlegs? The outtakes? The rarities? The vinyl rips? The home recordings? It’s no wonder the pay services make “safe” a point of pride. Since no-one ever caught a virus from an .mp3, the only other meaning that applies is the one used by protection racketeers.

I can only assume – and the success of Virgin Radio in the UK proves it – that there’s a large constituency out there who want to keep their exposure to new music within carefully controlled limits. And who can blame them? The world is a scarily big place; there are just so goddamned many of us. And it’s become much, much harder to hide from this uncomfortable fact. (Fear seems to be the defining characteristic of today’s establishment: fear of change; fear of difference; fear of other people. Not to live in fear is a political statement in itself. I’ve also heard it said that fear is the opposite of love.)

The danger of the bunkered route isn’t one of creating a monoculture, but of failing to notice through our sand-lidded eyes the irrelevance of the one already being pushed at us by the **AAs and their apologists in the mainstream media.

The upside of there being so many of us – in your face, right now – is that we can all get a better grip on what it means to be human. That, after all, is the point of art. (Yeah, that’s right: there really is a point to it. Don’t forget.) If my worldview is circumscribed by Oasis and Coldplay, say, or - I don’t know – traditional Islamic prayer music, then my scope for personal development and, by extension, the evolution of humankind, is necessarily smaller. It’s not a bad thing that white college students enjoy Gangsta Rap: perversely, one’s empathic ability expands even through contact with an intolerant and scared worldview. And those who also imbibe folk, prog, electronic, soca, classical, wig-out rock, ambient dance grooves, flamenco and lo-fi home tape experiments grow into their humanity more with every perverse step.

Now we must acknowledge that recorded music, and particularly its solitary consumption, is just a photocopy – a facsimile of cultural engagement. Its dissemination should be no big deal. Recordings aren’t culture itself, but they are a potent reminder of culture’s importance, while the debate about their distribution reminds us only of the untenable dominance of money.

Perhaps, once as a people we’ve debunked monoculture and relinquished our fear, opening ourselves up to the multitudinous experiences of our fellow humans in all their warty glory, we can finally acknowledge that we really do have one culture after all, albeit one that’s a bit bigger and messier than we once felt able to cope with.

I’m doing my bit by staying tuned to Pandora. Unlike other discovery engines, which make their choices based on the tastes of a lot of other tunnel visionaries like myself, this one uses supposedly objective musical qualities to rifle through its grab-bag (of unspecified size, but there are some real rarities in there) for the next tasty morsel.

I’m not sure if this is musicologically valid – I certainly can’t find “excessive vamping” in my copy of Grove’s Dictionary – and it seems almost impossible to prevent the engine’s suggestions from straying wildly from my initial input. But that’s why I love it. Please, guys, don’t fix whatever it is that makes Pandora veer directly from Yes to Four Tet without passing the Go-Betweens.

With the old p2p network falling apart around us, this is just what I need while I wait for the new global darknet, lifting my head occasionally from my work reverie to murmur to myself: “What the fuck is this?”

[*Only probably. Don’t let anyone tell you that filesharing “is illegal” – it has yet to be put to a legal test in any country in the world. Innocent until proven, or rather decided to be, guilty. A pleasure either way. Is drinking alcohol in a French café today illegal because it was in the US during Prohibition?]

Chris Ovenden - Brighton, England

[Ovenden is a self-confessed technology freak who says he always ends up writing about culture, or who is perhaps a culture nut continually drawn towards the hi-tech, he plays guitar, makes websites and teaches. Editorships of various on- and offline publications lurk in his past, “and possibly his future”. Ovenden says he’s is happy to live in Britain’s most forward-thinking town, where his three children have the good fortune not to go to school.

Not at all incidentally, thanks to the cultural nature of the Net, Ovenden’s daughter Io, who’s in England, and p2pnet editor Jon Newton’s daughter, Emma, who’s in Canada and who’s also home-schooled, are beginning to form an online relationship, aided and abetted by an RPG they both enjoy. Cool.]

===============

Something you think we should know? tips[at]p2pnet.net

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 1st, 2005 at 5:47 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

HOME

Viewed 3994 times