my dwellings among the savages: technostalgia, part 1

by Alejo Manrique

Here’s my new favorite urban legend:

Worried about the current and future state of their business, the honchos of a music corporation round up the dozen smartest teenagers L.A. could provide for a focus group. The reunion happens on one of the rare days when the C.E.O. is actually C.E.O.-ing in his office, so afterwards he comes down for a meet ‘n’ greet with the bright young things. Eager to impress them, he takes the bunch on a tour that ends in the storage facilities of the endless catalog, encouraging them to take home as many CDs as they like. Impolite as only teenagers can be, they all go: “Yeah right” and walk out, turning their backs on unlimited free access to the world’s greatest warehouse of recorded material. What was a teenage wet dream just a decade ago is now as interesting a visit as the accountants’ cubicles on the eighth floor.

Corollaries:
1. This seems like it was bitterly made up by someone sued as music downloader.
2. And is possibly only believed by said corporate music honchos.

But more intriguing: Why does it bother me?

To find that out, you’re going to have to bear with me through yet another “growing up Catholic took away the best of me” grieve fest, only this time I’ll throw in girls, deer and even prison movies.

It was the end, the end of the century.

In retrospect, it seems I spent most of my preteen years in a fighting spree amongst my peers — a sacrifice the strict social hierarchy we imposed upon ourselves demanded. During the first two months of every school year — after the long separation of the summer — an iterative process prompted us to put our forces to the test. Like a prepubescent and slightly idiotic version of a prison movie, every slot in the pyramid had to be filled before peace could be achieved. This ritual was so instinctual it resembled an animal’s mating season, but without the sexual healing payoff at the end (This is, by the way, an apt definition of teenage Catholicism as a “hole”). But hey, this was the late 80s when kids were a resource society disposed of nonchalantly; nowadays we would spend years in counseling, but back then it was just kids having fun. And it was. Fun.

By the time we reached high school, physical violence had ceased to be en vogue. For one thing, girls entered the picture, and our exciting ways were instantly rendered primeval recreation under their influence. Also, we were getting bigger and stronger — most of us seriously involved in athletic disciplines, some in actual contact sports. Fights got more serious and thus scarcer. Turns out civilization provides just the right cocktail of lust and cowardice.
But that obviously generated a schism; if the rules no longer worked how were we supposed to know who was in charge? On what battle ground could we resume our quest for coolness? A few of us found the answer in music.

This was not a Disney-ish love of music, nor a search for pure knowledge, but a game in which to test a new intangible social craft. We had practice already: our Spanish baby boomer parents’ complexes of having let — so close to the super-cool albeit equally useless French revolutionary posse — a fascist dictator peacefully rule to his last breath were by now projected on us. We, the chunky offspring, were made insanely political, comically beyond our grasp too; we went on strike in protest against war by age 12. Don’t ask me what war, I have no idea.

All that belonged to the adult world though; it was not ours. But music was ours, our game, our turf. For those of us who cared, it was the only accessible field in which we ruled without a superior authority who had all the answers. The only available truth emanated from what we could decide through discussion. And there were influences, radio programs (God bless Radio Tres) and magazines, but they were weak and almost never managed to set an agenda — the topics du jour seemed to come up spontaneously. I am really sure most of what was said was nonsense, but that wasn’t what mattered; it was the effort to impose your opinion, searching for patterns to rationalize your preferences and competing ideas that counted. The Holy Discussion is the only faith this country professes. It was useless, noisy and idiotic, as fun is supposed to be. A great part of whatever faculty I have to judge character, to size people up comes from that glorious time when “Don’t you see why I can’t date you? You like Bon Jovi.” was uttered without a drop of irony.

This relationship with music, where what’s important is not the songs — much less the artist or the recording company — but us, and what we think about it, is really hard to profit from. It has little respect for what the musical establishment expects from a record fan. I don’t know where most of my records or CDs are; for me it’s far more important to lend a record to a friend to get some feedback or to share the emotional state the songs generate than to possess the physical object. Cherishing record collections always seemed boring to me, a form of entertainment fetishism (i.e. I like the Coke not the can). Just like those teenagers.

Turns out the honchos know this and it makes them go hmm… (to be continued)

tagged under:america, europe, music, spain, technology