Icon: Music Through the Lens, episode 6: “On the Net” (Cheese Film and Video, Eagle Rock Productions, PBS, 2020)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After The Falcon Out West I put on the sixth and last episode in the series Icon: Music Through the Lens, “On the Net,” which showed the rise of digital photography in general and smartphones in particular and included the predictable laments from veteran professional photographers that the new technologies have made things entirely too easy. It seems like everyone – or at least a large chunk of the audience – brings their smartphones to concerts (there’s no way to ban people from bringing cameras into concerts the way promoters could do in the old days) and often film the entire show, or as much of it as they can. Nick Mason, the drummer for Pink Floyd, said he wondered whether all the people so industriously filming their concerts with smartphones actually upload their videos to their computers and watch them again. (Enough do, though, that literally within days of Paul McCartney’s last San Diego appearance at Petco Park in September 2019 so many clips of individual songs from the concert had been posted by smartphone users to YouTube you could see almost the whole concert if you took the trouble to log on to it, song by song.)

For me, this final episode emphasized one of the things I like least about the digital age: its ephemerality. As I wrote eight years ago in my blog post “The Interblob,” in which I complained that the Internet was taking over virtually every other form of social interactions, Ken Burns was able to make the films he did about the Civil War and World War II because the soldiers who fought in them wrote their letters home on paper. Certainly a lot of them were lost over the years, but enough of them survived to give him material to work with and bring the past alive through the words of the people who lived it. With paper letters having been replaced by e-mails, texts, direct messages and other computer-based forms of communication, how will a future Ken Burns​ tell the story of our own time? Computerized communications are so ephemeral that there are files from only a decade or so ago that, though they exist in electronic form, can no longer be read because the software to decode them no longer exists. What’s more – as I’ve long believed and worried about – I think the rise of computerization is essentially killing off the whole idea of a “classic,” a work of art in any medium that’s good enough to stand the test of time. The whole ethos of the computer world is that newer is always better: that you constantly need to throw away everything you’ve accumulated and start over. This started out in computer hardware and software largely as a form of planned obsolescence to get you constantly to buy new equipment and thereby make the tech industry money – but I think it’s become an aesthetic of its own, a belief that the past has nothing to teach us and only the newest music, the newest photographs, the newest artworks, the newest films have any legitimacy.

Today the whole idea of “collecting” is becoming obsolete – at least partly, I suspect, to the increasing inequality of income that is making it difficult for young people to afford homes with enough physical space to store collections. Instead they’re being conditioned by the tech industry and by capitalism in general to regard that as a virtue. You no longer need to own a record collection; you can just “stream” everything and get the music you want to hear at a moment’s notice, then dispose of it electronically once you’re tired of it. At the same time as a lot of veteran photographers interviewed for this show (including Baron Wolman, who got bylines in Rolling Stone and probably had more to do than anyone else with creating the idea of “rock photography” as a career) lamented the rise of digital and the way they’re forced to work with digital equipment (largely because clients want the near-instant turnaround of digital and don’t want to have to wait for photographers to develop their film), there’s been a backlash and a renewed interest in film technology, with photographers accepting the technological limitations of film and using them for artistic inspiration. Though Dick Carruthers, who directed these programs, and whatever writers he used didn’t make the point themselves, it’s an attitude oddly parallel to the way musicians are eschewing digital recording and playback, going back to recording on analog equipment and releasing their albums on vinyl. (In 2019 vinyl records outsold CD’s for the first time in 30 years, though both physical formats are now niche markets and streaming accounts for over 80 percent of all music sales today – even though artists, including established ones like Mariah Carey, complain that whoever is getting paid for music streams, the artists themselves are making pittances off them.) Also, photographers like the return of vinyl if only because a vinyl record is three times as large and therefore the cover art looks that much better than it does on a CD.

This show was somewhat at odds with the immediately previous one, “On the Wall,” which was about the museum-ization of music photography and the fact that photos of 1960’s and 1970’s rock stars, both portraits and concert shots, have become a fine-art commodity, commanding three-figure prices for original prints and sometimes quite a bit more in the collectors’ market later on. In some ways the era of the 1960’s and 1970’s, both in the emergence of musicians as cultural icons and avatars and the recording and photographing of their performances, seems to have passed – one wonders whether even the most devoted fans of, say, Ariana Grande will be hankering for wall-ready prints of photos of her 50 years from now. In some ways the computer revolution has expanded the art world (today, as a number of the veteran photographers complained in this episode, digital cameras in general and smartphones in particular have made everyone a photographer, and you no longer have to worry about technical concerns like exposure, lighting and focus because the computer already does all that for you); but it’s also enabled a lot of people to put out a lot of junk out there and call themselves “artists.” It’s part of the same phenomenon that medical researchers are complaining about with respect to phony arguments against things like COVID-19 vaccination: just about anyone can post something that looks like a scientific paper, whether or not there are any real data behind it (and, ironically, it may have a considerably larger audience than real scientific papers on the same subject because the real papers are often hidden behind ultra-thick paywalls because the business model of journal publishers is to charge scads of money for their content).

The advent of computers, the Internet and the digitization of most culture is going to change the history of art (and indeed the act of writing history in general) in ways we still haven’t fully seen – and one down side is that it’s highly less likely that future generations will see enduring value in works that in their time was considered ephemeral. I’m thinking of the great 1920’s jazz records that were regarded as disposable commodities in their day but are now considered artistic masterpieces – and the way the criteria for evaluating them have changed. The Internet has been a good thing for preserving culture in that it’s made the music, literature and visual arts of the past almost instantly obtainable (I quite often listen to a favorite record of mine on YouTube these days rather than go to the trouble of hunting down my physical CD copy), but it’s also put in serious question just how long the culture of the present will survive and whether future generations will be able to hear the music of today at all, let alone with fresh ears that discern things in it we missed when it was new.