Pattern exhaustion through pattern convergence

"The first-ever era of musical stasis"

Some footnotes to the last update, cut because the thing was already running too long.

Let’s go back to Silicon Valley heretic Jaron Lanier grousing about the internet not going the way he’d hoped in his 2010 manifesto You Are Not a Gadget. He’s got a bone to pick with digital culture’s preference for mining the past rather than looking towards the future:

The distinction between first-order expression and derivative expression is lost on true believers in the hive. First-order expression is when someone presents a whole, a work that integrates its own worldview and aesthetic. It is something genuinely new in the world.

Second-order expression is made of fragmentary reactions to first-order expression. A movie like Blade Runner is first-order expression, as was the novel that inspired it, but a mashup in which a scene from the movie is accompanied by the anonymous masher’s favorite song is not in the same league.

I don’t claim I can build a meter to detect precisely where the boundary between first-and second-order expression lies. I am claiming, however, that the web 2.0 designs spin out gobs of the latter and choke off the former.

It is astonishing how much of the chatter online is driven by fan responses to expression that was originally created within the sphere of old media and that is now being destroyed by the net. Comments about TV shows, major movies, commercial music releases, and video games must be responsible for almost as much bit traffic as porn. There is certainly nothing wrong with that, but since the web is killing the old media, we face a situation in which culture is effectively eating its own seed stock.

He is similarly pessimistic about the effects of digital culture on popular music. As far as Lanier is concerned (circa 2010), it has been in stasis since the Y2K years—right around when Napster launched.

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“Popular music created in the industrialized world in the decade from the late 1990s to the late 2000s doesn’t have a distinct style—that is, one that would provide an identity for the young people who grew up with it,” Lanier sighs. “The process of the reinvention of life through music appears to have stopped.”

First: that process is a new one. Prior to the erection of a culture industry, neither folkish nor haute monde music underwent radical metamorphoses in the span of just one or two decades, barring unusual circumstances.

Second: the cause of the detachment of musical preferences from the seat of identity was technological, and I’ve touched on it before: digitizing recorded music liberated it from scarcity. At the turn of the twenty-first century, a person’s music collection was no longer limited to the physical media objects they’d gone out and purchased. With the displacement of .mp3 folders by streaming playlists, there was no longer any such thing as a music collection where most listeners (particularly younger ones) were concerned. The discrepancy between the level of personal commitment involved in buying fifty albums and putting together fifty playlists from a practically infinite index of songs (pirated at no cost during the aughts, and streamed for a nominal subscription fee today) accounts for the erosion of popular music’s twentieth-century position as the keystone of youth-cultural identity.¹

Lanier continues:

What once seemed novel—the development and acceptance of unoriginal pop culture from young people in the mid-1990s (the Gen Xers)—has become so commonplace that we do not even notice it anymore. We’ve forgotten how fresh pop culture can be.

Where is the new music? Everything is retro, retro, retro…

There are new styles of music, of course, but they are new only on the basis of technicalities. For instance, there’s an elaborate nomenclature for species of similar electronic beat styles (involving all the possible concatenations of terms like dub, house, trance, and so on), and if you learn the details of the nomenclature, you can more or less date and place a track. This is more of a nerd exercise than a musical one—and I realize that in saying that I’m making a judgment that perhaps I don’t have a right to make. But does anyone really disagree?

I have frequently gone through a conversational sequence along the following lines: Someone in his early twenties will tell me I don’t know what I’m talking about, and then I’ll challenge that person to play me some music that is characteristic of the late 2000s as opposed to the late 1990s. I'll ask him to play the tracks for his friends. So far, my theory has held: even true fans don’t seem to be able to tell if an indie rock track or a dance mix is from 1998 or 2008, for instance.

This happened to me recently: I was listening to Philadelphia’s alternative radio station, and guessed I was listening to an indie rock track from the late 2010s. Turned out it was recorded in 1989. A week after that, I switched to the same station during a drive to visit the gastroenterologist, and was startled when the DJ informed those of us just tuning in that he was doing a “Best of 2025 thus far” show. Each of the four songs I’d just heard could have conceivably been recorded at any time in the last three decades.

Lanier argues that this couldn’t have happened much during the twentieth century, and it’s hard to dispute that. A popular song from 1969 would never be mistaken for a 1989 radio hit. If we were to hop in a time machine, travel back to the 1940s, and play a Chemical Brothers track in a dance hall, it’d be like the Rite of Spring fiasco in miniature. Nobody would have any idea what the fuck they were listening to or how to respond to it. I doubt “Block Rockin’ Beats” would have been well-received on MTV and rock radio had it hit the airwaves even ten years before it did.

One Robert Slack recounts popular music’s great leap forward between the 1950s and 1960s:

Think about how dramatic were the changes in style and mindset between the 1950s and 1960s, from greased-back hair in 1959 to red bandanas on shoulder length hair in 1967. For a more concrete illustration, think about the trajectory of the Beatles between “Love me Do” (1962) and “The Long and Winding Road” (1970). In eight short years, they went from a being a cute mop-topped boy band to long-haired freaks complete with Indian gurus—a rocket blast of transformation in the span of eight years, or about the distance between 2017 and now…

Sha Na Na was an oldies band formed on the campus of Columbia University, who also helped drive the 50s nostalgia fad of my childhood. They seemed to have been booked at Woodstock as a kind of joke, as this music was hopelessly stale by 1969. I suspect they were meant to serve as contrast, as if to say: “Look how far we’ve come!” Sha Na Nah was as far away from Jimi Hendrix or Country Joe and the Fish as you can imagine at a rock concert.

The band performed 12 songs that day. Of those songs, half of them were released in 1957, which was apparently a banner year for popular music. This represents a span of 12 years, or the equivalent 2013 from today. Two songs, “Wipe Out” and “Duke of Earl,” were released in 1962—only seven years before! Styles, attitudes, and culture had progressed with such velocity that Sha Na Na was an oldies band playing seven-year-old songs. We don’t listen to a song from 2018 and feel as if we’re living in a completely different cultural reality.

But the Dua Lipa song that got stuck in my head (to my immense regret) a year or two back could have been released in 2014, and nothing at all like “Marty McFly plays guitar at the 1955 high school prom” would have ensued. While I understand that most Zoomers (accurately) consider Taylor Swift a Millennial thing, I somehow doubt “Shake It Off” sounds as gross and outdated and to their ears as “Bad Medicine” did to an early nineties sixteen-year-old obsessed with Nirvana and Pearl Jam.

We can ascribe this apparent stagnation of popular music to a flattening of the progress curve. Recorded music is really only about about 150 years old, and explosions of exciting new genres were precipitated by new gear, or by new uses of and improvements to existing gear. The electric microphone invented crooners. The electric guitar created rock n’ roll. The synthesizer was invented in 1964; the first sequencer software was released on the Commodore 64 in 1984, two years after the MIDI protocol debuted as the (still reigning) industry standard. During those decades, electronic music lurched from the avant-garde towards pop.

In the last twenty-five years, has there been an advance in the technology of music-making as utterly transformative as electrification was during the first half of the twentieth century, or digitization during the second? No—but the format has been revolutionized, and so has the mode of distribution and model of production. Such changes to the economic calculus alter the determination of what kinds of music actually get made (and who makes it).

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“A hypothesis,” Lanier pronounces, “links the anomaly in popular music to the characteristics of flat information networks that suppress local contexts in favor of global ones.”² Digital culture bends musicians more towards a virtual global audience than proximate local ones. The result is the aural version of “all airports look the same.”³

Members of Seattle rock scene whose leading lights ascended to international renown in the early 1990s first wrote and performed music with a Seattle audience principally in mind. True, the records they listened to were recorded by artists from far and wide, and many of them probably did aspire to reach national or international listeners—but in a milieu such as theirs, each artist was most often in dialogue with likeminded peers and friendly competitors in other bands from the same area. During the latter decades of the twentieth century, you could easily hear whether a punk band or rapper hailed from Southern California or New York City. Prior to digitalization, the geographical areas in which music was made for a limited audience and later harvested for mass consumption could act as Galapagosian hothouses. They still can, but to a mitigated extent.

No matter how much the ambitious musician from, say, Boise, Idaho wants to say that there’s a “Boise sound” he represents, he gets most of the music he listens to from Spotify, not Boise. He’s thinking about Spotify, because a digital audience will get him money and fame, while playing to a Boise audience earns him pats on the back and free drink tickets. On the face of it, his long-term interests are more expediently served by trying to play the algorithmic metagame than impressing other Boise scenesters.⁴ Same as anyone with a YouTube, TikTok, or even a novel to sell.

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When I first moved to Philadelphia ten years ago, all of the coffee shops in my part of town had stacks of a weekly newsletter called The Secret Admirer sitting around on a counter or side table. I picked one up every week to do the crossword and chuckle at the reader-submitted “Overheard in Philadelphia” section. A couple of years later I moved to a different part of town that the Secret Admirer’s editor didn’t bike through on his drop-off route, and I don’t suppose I blamed him for skipping us over. The few coffee shops we had were all kind of shitty: not neighborhood hangouts so much as office spaces for work-from-home professionals. In my nostalgic recollections of South Philly’s coffee shops, with their more relaxed atmosphere and grittier clientele, a copy of the Secret Admirer printed on blue paper was consistently part of the picture.

I happened to pass through the area a couple of weeks ago, and visited the café I used to lounge around in with an ex. Before even looking at the new menu or scrutinizing the renovations, I searched for copies of the Secret Admirer. Nada. I was disappointed, but not surprised. An interval of seven years is a long time where an independent project like that is concerned.

I recently found out the editor died in 2020.

I mention the Secret Admirer because it was something conceived, created, maintained, and enjoyed in a purely local context. In the 2010s, passion projects executed in that form and on that scale were already increasingly rare. For all intents and purposes, the zine and the free urban weekly were obsolesced by the blog in the same way the stage show was marginalized by film and television.

Most creative endeavors that digital culture incentivizes are intrinsically aimed at audiences without respect for place. Moreover, an air of futile or spurious parochialism often clings to blogs, Instagram accounts, YouTube channels, etc., created and maintained by people with the energy and ambition to regularly create new content for a local audience on a global platform. It runs contrary to the internal logic of cyberspace; it’s liable to coming across as a marketing tactic to make oneself a big fish by artificially shrinking the size of the pond.⁵

A globalized awareness tends to diminish perceptions of local affairs’ significance, or even the value of the people and events in one’s backyard. The contribution of this phenomenon towards an aesthetic flattening, and a convergence of public taste and culture industry produce around the logged values of a worldwide “hive,” is obvious—as is the impact of economic models which must take into account the scarcity of customers willing to pay money to view a particular movie, own a particular book or album, subscribe to any particular “channel” offering proprietary content, etc.

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“A common rationalization in the fledgling world of digital culture back then was that we were entering a transitional lull before a creative storm,” Lanier recounts of the web’s early days, “or were already in the eye of one.” What Lanier hoped and expected of the revolution was apparently grandeur—enchanting, startling, and wholly new vehicles for aesthetic pleasure and intellectual engagement unimaginable in a previous epoch. What he got instead were memes, AMVs, YouTube Poops, sprite comics, slash fanfic, pop song mashups, Rule 36 smut, parodic fandubs of anime series, longform critical essays on old video games, etc., because these were the kinds of content whose production digital culture made possible and encouraged.

“We had instead entered a persistent somnolence,” Lanier mourns, “and I have come to believe that we will only escape it when we kill the hive.”

This is as much a pipe dream as the suggestion of an old-fashioned London intellectual of 1840 that maybe the social upheaval wrought by industrial capitalism might be reversed through a little thoughtful legislation. McLuhan ascribes the invention of “the public” to mass media; “the hive” is likewise an inevitable consequence of a globalized multidirectional information medium, an intensification of the public. From the beginning—as soon as we kept digital music on our desktop computers and then got our computers to share information over telephone lines—something like Napster was bound to happen, preparing the way for a musical new world order under something like Spotify. Given a preexisting world of pop-culture obsessives, a general Trekkification of fandom couldn’t but ensue when those obsessives were given the tools to construct globally-accessible virtual community spaces through which the infectious conviction of the convention floor could be transmitted into the home. Usenet contained the seeds of Facebook, Reddit, Tumblr, Twitter, and even YouTube. The web demanded the creation of a hive as much as Watt’s steam engine necessitated the mechanization of industry. Only a draconian flex of political muscle could have precluded either occurrence, and would have come at a high cost for those exercising it.

Electronic communications technology “merges the individual and the mass environment,” McLuhan writes. Looking outside of and transcending such an environment, he adds, “would seem to require a technological extension of consciousness itself.”

Perhaps the resolution of the Stuck Culture paradigm, which so many others have lately joined Lanier in decrying, can come in one of two ways: through another revolutionary leap forward, or the press of a reset button. Singularity or collapse. In either case, we’d have a hell of a lot more pressing matters with which to concern ourselves than stale pop music and content mill sludge.

1. In his case for restoring physical objects to music distribution, Lanier’s first argument is that they bring an air of romance to consumption and fandom. Romanticism is not merely “enhancement,” he says, “it’s the central issue. Romance, in the broadest sense, is the product the music business sells.” Given the existence of products like the BTS “bomb,” the K-pop industry is fully aware of this.

2. Again—Lanier misidentifies the anomaly here. The “stagnation” he worries about is more like a recursion to an old normal under new circumstances.

3. When we were shut in during the winter, my wife and I were poking around YouTube out of boredom one day and found a video compiling opening sequences from popular anime series, arranged chronologically. The first clips are from shows aired during the 1970s, and their themes sound Japanese. There’s no other way to put it. Once we got into the 2010s, the tunes sounded like—well, like what pretty much all popular music in the developed world sounds like these days.

4. (1) That is, if he’s not willing to relocate to Nashville, New York, Los Angeles, or some other city with a record industry tarmac and market his variation of the “Boise sound” over there.

(2) Full disclosure: I don’t know if there are Boise music scenesters. Forgive my ignorance on the matter.

5. This isn’t the case for cosmopolitan megacities like New York. Consider, however, what your initial response might be to a YouTube channel called “Humans of Grand Rapids, Michigan” with an accompanying Twitter feed, Patreon, merch page, etc.