Localism, Technology and Quality Rock 'n' Roll—Pick Two

Several members of the Party of the Right crashed the Liberal Party’s discussion last night (“Will Technology Set Us Free?”), and instead of the Left and Right slugging it out, the paleocons, anarchists, and Marxists had a big neo-Luddite love-in.

Highlights include:

"The cassava plant is the world's most anarchic vegetable."

"Some technology is centralizing, like television, and some technology is decentralizing, like the open-source self-replicating 3-D printer. We'll know in a few years which kind the Internet is."

”But you think we should go back to the Stone Age!"
"When did I ever say that?"
"The other night at Rudy's."
"I'm going to disavow that on the grounds that I was drunk at the time."

"...but technology has given us the two most important material things in my life: coffee and tall buildings."

Not knowing anything about cassava recipes, pre-agricultural societies, or self-replicating printers, I was most interested in a thread that got picked up very briefly about whether technology is responsible for the dismal state of pop music. Setting aside the question of whether synths and turntables have been a net gain or loss, my biggest problem with the music scene as it currently exists is that the idea of a local sound has become obsolete. I'm not sure that Philadelphia soul, Texas garage, or Elephant Six make sense in a world where a band is as likely to be reacting to music being made across the country as to music being made down the block. There are some hold-outs (here's a game: take any record put out by a Boston band and spot the Jonathan Richman), but for the most part localism in rock 'n' roll is a thing of the past, and I think its disappearance is reflected in the blandness of a lot of the new music out there.

John Darnielle has interesting things to say on the subject:

This area certainly has a musical heritage. How aware were you of its past or its current music scene?

Well, it was important to us to live someplace where touring bands stopped, and, of course, I knew about Merge. I didn't actually know jack about just how rich North Carolina musical history is—Doc Watson? String band music like the stuff the Carolina Chocolate Drops play? Are you kidding me?—but have since been pretty amazed at how fertile a place NC has been for, oh, say, three hundred years or thereabouts. I grew up in Southern California, so the whole concept of a local music history is still kinda novel to me.

You recently played a benefit for Durham's music scene, and you played the first Troika Music Festival and the Durham Music Festival the year before that. You don't depend on those gigs for your success. Why play them?

You gotta rep your hood! Durham is an awesome town full of creative people, and, like any creative community, it's forging its own voice! But, at the same time, I feel like too much scene-boosting tends to be the death of a community. It's not like I get the offers and say, "Oh, yes, I gotta do this for Durham!" It's more like, "The Armory? Richard Buckner? Chris Stamey? Yes, please, sign me up."

Incidentally, a lack of local voices has taken its toll on criticism, too. Independent weeklies usually have house critics, but a lot of local papers run syndicated reviews. In North Carolina, for instance, there used to be Godfrey Cheshire for film and Dan Neil for cars; Cheshire went to New York and Neil to LA. Like Suderman, I don't think the problem is that critics are answering the wrong questions ("Should I see this movie?" instead of "What is the cultural value of this movie in milli-Truffauts?"), but I'm not as optimistic that internet-driven diffusion will fix what's wrong, or even help at all. Darnielle's right: you gotta rep your hood.

Update: Moistworks does just that.