Opinion
14 Mar 08

Rant In D Minor: Too much information

Thanks to the internet, we can now follow - and comment on - our favourite musician's every move. But is the loss of mystery a good thing?

Sometimes I think the internet, particularly band message boards and blogs, amounts to nothing more than flypaper for malcontents. Anytime an act releases a new record – could be The Frames, or Nick Cave, or the Manics – you can bet that a sizeable proportion of its online disciples will weigh in on the forum complaining that it doesn’t sound like the old stuff.

You might say that this is a manifestation of punter power, or a testimonial to consumer choice. Except it all gets a bit dodgy when the consumers decide they want to dictate the terms to the talent. Why? Because us proles don’t always know what’s good for us.
Some of the most enduring albums – Bitches’ Brew, Astral Weeks, Funhouse, Tonight’s The Night, Funeral, Lullabies To Paralyze – are bloody hard work at first. You have to live with them, absorb them by osmosis, get used to their smell, learn their language. The converse also holds: catchy, user-friendly records tend to wear out their welcome after half a dozen plays. (In his book The Spooky Art, Norman Mailer wrote that great novels are by definition tough going. Sometimes they’re even a bit boring. But, by god, when you come out the other end of Moby Dick, you know you’ve read a book.)
In the vinyl years, you got Piper At The Gates Of Dawn or Marquee Moon or Ocean Rain with minimal information, no apologies, no debate, no explanation and certainly no dialogue. But like it or lump it, we’re now in the age of dial-up art, of order to-spec, where you can download an album onto your mobile phone or iPod like you’d order a pizza with choice of toppings, and then harangue the chef in a public forum if you don’t like the taste.
It’s not just musicians who are held accountable for their work in the Torquemada trials of the threads. Film directors submit to second life in-camera interrogations in order to hawk their wares. Authors are prevailed upon by their publishers to keep a regular blog and maintain a visible net presence.
This needn’t always be a bad thing. William Gibson posted work-in-progress chunks of his last novel Spook Country on his blog and incorporated some of the online community’s suggestions into the final manuscript. But I can’t help thinking that if artists are ubiquitous, interactive and available, they’re just not as interesting. There can be no Dylans or Kubricks or Pynchons in the MySpace age. Can you imagine Francis Bacon publishing Kodak snaps of an unfinished Portrait Of Pope Innocent X in order to elicit public feedback?
Great art is never achieved by process of democracy. It’s the product of an individual vision, forged in a state of cranky and uncompromising autonomy. We, the people, get to vote with our credit cards and cash when the work is done, but we have no business intruding on the creative process.
It’s just like my painter friend Bill said: ‘The eagle never lost so much time as when he submitted to learn of the crow.’