A friend put it to me recently on discussing my being an artist with no audience, let alone, TRUE FANS, still talking to herself: “You’re going around in circles, Sam.”
He’s right.
And then there’s Einstein who said: “Stupidity is doing the same thing and expecting different results.”
On the subject of to post or not to post, then, to increase Zuckerberg’s profit margin and not your own in the awareness he’s simultaneously limiting your exposure, ‘slow productivity expert’, Cal Newport, Computer Science professor on The New York Times Bestseller list, who has forged a niche by not using social media or perhaps, not needing to (let us be clear social media is for the disempowered) recently advised a caller on his podcast: “Don’t post anything you don’t get paid for.” Makes sense. But then even Newport with his YouTube channel is still vying for our attention in the distraction economy along with everyone else.
Elsewhere, well, on YouTube, actually, I’ve been gemming up on Prince’s recording methods and all round insane productivity via a round of musicians and sound engineers who worked with him. Prince is a great resource for me as a spontaneous song writer who records one takes and unleashes them into the world because so did he. He was compelled by the energy inherent in these takes over subsequent ones. What we are hearing in such cases is a song coming into being, which is not the same thing as a song being replicated and reproduced to death.
This rationale echoes Bruce Springsteen’s infamous album Nebraska1 (1982, Columbia Records), the magic of which the E Street Band tried many times to replicate but in the end, gave up. Springsteen famously recorded these demos alone in a hotel room on his 4-track recorder with the intention of them being re-recorded by the band but that didn’t happen. Instead, the demos became the definitive version.
Tal Wilkenfeld, the Australian bassist and singer-songwriter in conversation with American chat show host Lex Fridman, uncovers more anecdotes upon Prince’s recording ethos in that he was the first person to hold her hand, as she puts it, whilst she walked to the edge, getting her to solo her way through a song they recorded in which she had no idea where she was going.
Prince wanted to retain the emotion held in the first take as much as he wanted to hear it in the records he would listen to. He also wanted to make a new moment in time - each time. This aesthetic attitude and ethic is an antidote to the tyranny of ennui and any number of regimes. It also overrides the inevitability of the commercial release as being that which is void of the ‘liveness’ Prince vied for (tending to opt to leave flaws in) and which Springsteen embodied that night in a lonely hotel room. But polished is what sells. Not that Prince wasn’t commercial, or Nebraska didn’t sell. He knew exactly what he was doing. He would even play for hours on soundchecks when other artists would save their energy for later. If he was on stage, he was on. Even after re-recording numerous takes, he tended to opt for the first one. Or he’d be done with the one take and anyone else working with him would just have to get their heads around his sense of urgency in the studio, and then likely struggle going to have to work with other artists who needed to take their time. “I would say 80 per cent of the time take one has the most gold… but all the magic is in that take” (Wilkenfeld, cited in Lex Clips, 2024, 04:02-04:20).2
One time, when in the studio, Prince ordered Wilkenfeld not to “punch that in”. This is studio parlance for correcting something which might have been anticipated but which didn’t happen when recording the song, for example, segueing into a second verse in the right way, at the right time. She cites him as saying that all his favourite records were a moment in time, let’s make a new moment in time, to which she contends: “Nobody makes records like that anymore” (Lex Clips, 2024: 07:15).3 But what if people do? They just don’t get heard.
All this has got me thinking about proximity, again. We spend much of our time distracting ourselves from ourselves, checking our stats, and doing all else on tiny screens whilst doing something else. In opposition, Camille Paglia justly laments the loss of the movie theatre, the grand spectacle of the American West, these stupendous landscapes shifting time and space as audiences would sit in a darkened auditorium, (perhaps illicitly, of a midweek afternoon when one should have been elsewhere) caught up in a suspension of disbelief in a technicolour and ever distant horizon, whereas, now, we’re getting neck hump ads and doing our eyes in. The thing about the internet is that it has flattened reality. With an ever-proliferating quota of cookies to accept or block, ads, and perennial pop-ups to spur with, it is now a clunky experience (unless one pays for it not to be, and even then).
Why this bothers me when it doesn’t bother others though is something for me to consider. Perhaps I have too much time on my hands. Or I think about such things when there’s not much point. But when no one talks to anyone anymore in public space because they’re all staring into their phones as everyone around me now sat outside this coffee shop is doing, then it’s a problem, right? But the haptic culture of the aesthetic of smoothness which the iPhone paved the way for, having us swiping, touching, and navigating our screens through our fingertips, cyborgs, as we are, acclimatised to the various pressures and motions we intuit as if they are second-nature to us, is now being impeded by a cumbersome UX, in which to get where we want to go (if we even know where that is) we must accept, bypass, or block this or that obstacle. The immediate remedy is to look up or pick up a book.
*All images are screenshots from the music video “Volcano”, track five on Space Junk, which I shot on an iPhone dancing outside a Starbuck’s Drive-Thru until I was moved on.
Springsteen, B. (1982) Nebraska. U.S.: Colombia Records.
‘Prince recorded in one take. Tal Wilkenfeld and Lex Fridman’. (2024) Lex Clips. Available at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wb3wqxYn1aw. Accessed 20 May, 2024.
See 2.
Unique selling points are probably essential to getting paid (unless famous). The marketing problem is always (1) the lack of a ready-made audience for really new stuff that is unfamiliar and thus ignored by Joe Public, and (2) the swamping by ready-made competition when trying to cater to an established market. Marketing is political: the rivals who have big fan clubs can put out relative garbage and still remain in business for a surprisingly long while. This is also a serious problem in fundamental physics, where nonsense hardens into an orthodoxy that's defended literally to the death by duped lunatics.
I think social media is useful even if you don't get immense attention, because at least you are putting stuff out there and get the feeling of being free to publish. It is also useful to motivate writing anything at all in the freelance journalistic environment where >90% of external submissions are spiked after a glance, in favour of inhouse journalists.