"Art of Noise" refers back to both a Futurist manifesto and a British electronic group most influential for the fact that they really weren't a band at all. Currently it's also an exhibition at New York's Cooper-Hewitt museum. Some of the old music players are quite striking, suggesting in a few instances a fictional history a la Steampunk or Dieselpunk.
I read a review of this show in the hard copy edition of the New York Times. The article suggested that the era of owning music is ending. Could well be, but if you're able to resist this trend, you probably should. Consider that there are words that there are words artists or record companies could want to censor out, or feel pressured to do so. Or perhaps worse, feel a need to insert words that weren't there. Or, say, the single edit of a song is such a hit that the album version eventually disappears. A world of streaming-only music probably would be quite a bit smaller by comparison.
2 comments:
A couple of those items I remember quite well and one of them, the i-pod, is still in regular use. Who is going to give up a device that holds the music from all the records and cds you've ever owned?
One of them looked much like the old close 'n play Jer bought for Chris when he lived in California; along with it he sent Ummagumma by Pink Floyd - Chris especially loved Careful With That Axe, Eugene. Imagine Adie's reaction to that.
I think resisting the trend is a good idea for the reasons you note and, considering how it's already happened with books that have been disappeared not to mention movies too, we have solid proof the powers that be like to reduce an already broad supply of classic entertainment in order to sell their latest product.
You just can't trust these people to respect the culture.
You can still find new and lightly used iPods on the market. They may have fallen a little out of use because so many people use their phones for listening to music now. Of course the problem with that is that a phone is a phone, so you don't know when your song is going to be interrupted.
Sending Ummaguma to your little sister is one way of making sure that she develops a taste for the finer things in life. But yeah, the first time hearing "Careful with That Axe" come out of that little box must have been quite an experience.
"Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past." That was of course one of the adages of the state in Nineteen Eighty-Four. There's a lot of controlling you can do if you've cornered the market on all the originals. Once you start thinking about why they want to manipulate our memories of the past, you might come to some interesting conclusions.
Don't trust those whose only value in culture is utilitarian.
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