Do you have an iPod yet? There are certain painful issues of identity and crisis bound up in the whole business of music. There’s a painful line in Cameron Crowe’s excellent film about rock and roll, Almost Famous, in which legendary rock journalist Lester Bangs, the film’s spiritual guru, talks about the death of authenticity in music. He sees it all going to hell and the music he loves becoming simply, “an industry of cool.” Having waded through the knee-deep slurry of the latest Apple launch, this chilling phrase takes on a terrible and convincing force. What colour iPod nano are you going to buy?
I like the quote from Almost Famous so much it’s worth revisiting it more closely. “They are trying to buy respectability for a form that is gloriously and righteously dumb! And you’re smart enough to know that. And the day it ceases to be dumb is the day it ceases to be real. Right? And then it will just become an Industry of Cool.”
There’s no question that the cult of Mac has always done cool. The phenomenal success of the iPod has expanded the cult of Mac computing into a mass-market industry of cool. We’re supposed to see plucky old Apple sticking it to those creeps at the record companies with its whole music-for-the-people schtick. The reality is that the record business knows all about building an industry of cool and has found its evil twin in the form of Steve Jobs and his polo-necked left-bank tech hipster millionaire act. Together they’re going to make us rich. Everyone’s invited. We can all be cool together.
The moment of obeisance to the rock gods at Apple’s latest launch comes at the end, when after talking for an hour about market share, product, and his bright vision of the future, Jobs proclaims nobly, “Let’s not forget. It’s all about the music…” At which point a cool act comes on, like a dancing monkey, to show how cool Steve is, for putting music first, and how cool we are, for owning Apple products, and how cool everyone will be once they’ve downloaded the next version of iTunes. Where is Jarvis Cocker, to show his bared-arsed contempt for this ghastly smugness? Yeccch. I couldn’t quite figure out why this made my flesh creep so much, until that old line came into my head, “never trust a hippy capitalist.” Absolutely. Steve, you’re beautiful. And we’re beautiful. And that’ll be 200 quid please.
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There are some beautiful mysteries of identity at work in role that music plays in our life. Research shows that most people spend most of their money on music until the age of about twenty-five: after that, their interest wanes dramatically. We often explore music as we do art and many other forms of self-expression in the early part of our lives, when our place in the world is unsure, and we are growing tremendously, and experimenting with different ways of being ourselves. As the hero’s sister in Almost Famous puts it: “This song explains why I’m leaving home to become a stewardess.”
Out of this musical maelstrom of the self come the artists, and the people who love them. Into its dark waters slip the marketeers, the salesmen, and the shysters, as they have always done, an Ike for every Tina Turner, a Colonel for every King. There’s nothing clean here to spoil, as it’s always been messy. Yet I can’t help feeling there is something grim about the way present forces are building ever slicker ways to make the dumb business of music cooler, smoother, and more universally soulless.
Why do we need so much technology? We bought the albums. Then we bought the CDs. Then we downloaded the MP3. Then we bought the iTunes version. Then we downloaded the album cover art using an innovative feature in iTunes 7 called Cover Flow, which according to the Apple Store, allows us to “flip through your digital music and video collection just as you would CDs.” Am I missing something? Didn’t we get rid of our CD collections because the cover art was so small? The end game here is that Steve announces a new music format in which songs are sold in large round disks with great big sleeves, enabling beautiful cover art, which can be flipped through “just as you would using Cover Flow.”
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At the crux of Almost Famous is the fear that a journalist will be seduced and betrayed by his subject. Remember what Lester Bangs advised journalists? “You cannot make friends with the rock stars.” At Job’s press conference last week, he showed the assembled members of the press ads for his new products. There is no question that Jobs is the closest thing the technology industry has to a rock star. They clapped him when he told them the new version of the nano would be available in different colours. I had to watch the video twice to confirm it. They clapped him for offering his product in different colours. He showed them ads. They clapped again. If an independent press claps not just the latest version of the products but the advertising materials that will be used to promote them as well, then the industry of cool has won and we can all go home.
And yet… I just hope that somewhere a teenager is flipping reverently, and with great dumbness, through a heap of his grandfather’s old vinyl LPs, and pondering Lester Bang’s line: “The only true currency in this bankrupt world... is what you share with someone else when you’re uncool.”
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