I went to an Eels concert in Santa Ana last night – a small warm-up date for their upcoming world tour. I have never owned an Eels album and have no songs in my brain connected to their name. But Adam bought the tickets, they are one of his favorite bands, and it was his last night in town before a long Cincinnati sojourn, so I came along and sprung for dinner/drinks. It was an expensive springing.
I loved the show – heard some great blues/roots influences and appreciated that there was absolutely no lolly-gagging, they just stomped their way from song to song with style and joy. It was exuberantly lo-fi without being punk; but E (lead singer/songwriter/rhythm guitarist/only permanent band member) could turn it lush and melancholy in an instant with no warning. They made at least one new fan in the crowd.
Adam indicated he had a robust collection of Eels music on his computer and offered to share some of it over. And it tied into this nagging big thought I’ve been having – I wouldn’t be paying for any of it. File-sharing is as inevitable now as mix tapes; I’ll be one of those old fogeys who has to explain that when I was a kid, we would hold a tape recorder up next to the radio to capture a song we liked. Then I’ll have to explain what a tape recorder was.
And to a marginal degree I see no problem with that. You want there to be a little deepwater churn going on in a culture – back-channel communication, as it were. Mystery Science Theatre 3000 included an exhortation in the end credits of every episode to “Keep Circulating the Tapes” – and the health of that cult can, I believe, be directly attributed to the fact that the fans listened and obeyed. I try to hold myself to certain standards when it comes to piracy – after all, I hope to make a living at creative work, which sort of requires that not everyone in the world give up on paying for it just because they’ve got high-speed Internet. Adam balances his music downloading karma by buying band merch at shows – he figures they see a higher percentage from that than the album – and he’s probably not wrong on the numbers.
But whatever your personal ethical system, I don’t think legal sanction or public shaming can really stuff this thing back into Pandora’s Box. In fact, I think that the more connected the world gets – the faster the speeds, the greater the storage capacity, the easier for n00bz to comprehend – the more piracy is going to become as common as bubblegum. And it won’t just be TV episodes; you’ll be ripping whole filmographies in minutes with a click.
We have already passed the threshold where you can – easily and for just the price of a computer – download and store more professionally-produced entertainment content in your lifetime than you can actually consume in your lifetime. We have become Digital Hoarders, and unlike other hoarders who have the decency to live with their filthy habit in loneliness and shame, Digital Hoarders are some of the cockiest dipsh*ts you’ll ever know. Oh, you’re superior to my excitement about seeing a movie because you already got the work-print version on Bittorrent? It must be so awesome to not love anything.
A huge slice of American culture is about sameness. McDonald’s rose to dominance in the freeway era because road-trippers wouldn’t have to gamble on what they were going to get there – the restaurant was going to be clean, inviting, and the food was going to be the same as the last McDonald’s. You can make up your own mind about whether or not Coca-Cola is the greatest soft drink ever created – but its success in this generation has less to do with taste superiority and more to do with leveraging its omnipresence – walk into any movie theatre or restaurant, and you don’t have to wonder what your beverage is going to taste like. I respect that – most people can barely deal with the mysteries they have, they don’t want to be drinking mystery as well.
And the corporate megalopods that control the movie industry are gradually applying the same approach via digital distribution. Instead of making film prints and stuffing them in canisters, “distribution” will eventually just be a matter of pushing a button and streaming a perfect digital print to authorized theatres. In the days of Gone With the Wind, some small towns had to wait as much as two years to see the movie they anticipated so feverishly, because there were only so many film canisters, and they weren’t leaving the theatres they were at until the people there had their fill.
We can’t go back to that, and I don’t think we should. But since, for the modern consumer, there will be less labor and less expense involved in just taking the content, and the resolution of the content on-line will get closer to broadcast quality, what you are effectively doing nowadays when you go to the box office is not buying a ticket for a show, but renting the theatre’s giant screen for a couple of hours. And it will be exactly the same movie here as it is in Portland, Maine.
But the sameness that makes Coke dominant is going to be ruinous to media – because you can’t burn Coke to a DVD. In essence, to restore value to content, content will have to evolve in a way that refutes the all-access multiplicative sameness offered by the bits universe. More and more, people will only buy tickets to things that they HAVE to be there for.
This means, for people who want to make a living at this, more live happenings – more concerts, more live theatre, more special celebrity appearances, more merch, more improvisation, more festivals, more people banging drums on street corners. People – I truly believe – still YEARN to gather and have moving experiences as one-off tribes-of-the-entertained. And it is our job to deliver them that, even if technology has made the record-and-replicate aspect of what we do increasingly valueless. We had to know that was inevitable, didn’t we? And it requires an adjustment, but I’ll survive it better than the guys in the office towers, because I never thought of myself as a content recorder and replicator, and I’ve never needed to become a millionaire from doing this to consider myself a success.
The warm-up act for The Eels was a ventriloquist. This was a horrible idea on so many levels. He wasn’t even a good ventriloquist – just a lot of lame “blue” jokes and every over-exposed bit in the book (ooh, you can drink a liquid while singing, amazing!) The crowd got hostile. I thought it was as bad as it could be when he pulled out his Sarah Palin puppet – his “Sarah Palin” voice was pretty much exactly his; so if there was a joke where he was suggesting Sarah Palin is a drag queen, I missed it.
But no, the worst part was when he asked for volunteers from the crowd so he could do a human dummy routine (where he pinches their necks to make them open their mouths and say “funny” things).
For his dummy, the crowd gave him a kid with Down’s Syndrome.
Now, as I said to Adam at the time – if it were Andy Kaufman on stage at a moment like that, he would have made damn sure he left the stage never allowed to perform in Orange County again. As it is, the ventriloquist panicked and replaced the kid as soon as he realized what was happening. But for a few seconds there, we were in the midst of a moment of amazing, accidental, un-recreatable danger.
And as terrible as that opening act was, I count it now as part of what made it worth the price of admission. Really – you just had to be there.