Spotified in the Cosmos

Dan Brooks tells us that "Streaming Music Has Left Me Adrift:"

To care about obscure bands was to reject the perceived conformity of popular culture, to demand a more nuanced reading of the human experience than Amy Grant’s “Baby Baby” and therefore to assert a certain kind of life. That assertion was central to my identity as a young adult, and I found that people who shared it were more likely to agree with me on seemingly unrelated issues.

For those looking for an insight into the "autonomous self" Walker Percy discusses in Lost in the Cosmos, look no further. Brooks waxes rhapsodic about his taste in music--a little--and how that taste made him feel special--a lot.

Percy discusses how autonomous people--probably the majority of people in America--find their definitions through their choices, be they consumer or lifestyle or otherwise. Thus, a die-hard conservative participates in a Chik-Fil-A day and a hipster grows out his beard.

Brooks spells it out, while discussing the change that streaming music has brought to the music industry:

Consuming music, an act central to my being for as long as I can remember, has changed forever. Who knows how that will change me?

This is probably the most spiritually hollow, narcissistic perspective to take on the subject.

Maybe this is a better one:

My history as a cult movie buff sounds like it was contemporaneous with Brooks'. My friends and I spent a lot of time combing mom and pop video stores for rare movies, often traveling out of town, as well as ordering bootlegs from the back of Psychotronic and other zines.

One of those films was Last House on the Left, Wes Craven's first film. For a long time, it had a reputation as being one of the nastiest films of the 70s. It's still occasionally remembered for its trailer's tagline, "Keep repeating to yourself, 'It's only a movie, it's only a movie.'"

Because its director went on to become one of the most successful horror directors of all time, it is not especially obscure. But, in the early 90s, before Scream and during a real low in Craven's profile, it wasn't easy to find. When I did discover it, I was excited because I had heard about it for years.

A dozen years later but before the Hollywood remake, a much younger woman asked me, "Have you ever heard of Last House on the Left?"

I told her that I had. "I just bought it," she said.

"You bought it? Where?"

"At Target."

At Target? I couldn't believe it. Something that had been only words on a page to me for so long, something I had to keep in mind just in case I might find it, something that I'd only stumbled upon when I did find it--that something was being sold out of a bin at big-box stores across the nation.

Had something been taken from me? Not really. I still had my whole personal history with the film, from the trailer highlighted on late-night television to all the information about it that collected in my mind before seeing it to the moment I found it in the video store, with its crappy VHS box and terrible print.

I still had the experience. All my friend had was the movie, which really isn't very good and looks very dated to younger viewers, if they can get past the amateurishness.

This is what's lost in the digital age, not some aging Gen-Xer's self-image. From an individual's standpoint, the joy of discovery needs to spring from a search. We can call up Last House on the Left anytime we want to--but playing it is no different than playing Hart of Dixie on Netflix. The only experience left around digital media is the surprise of really loving the work or really hating it.

Also, think of how Crispin Glover personally tours with his film What is It? and won't release it for home viewing. Digital media strips the work of its context. Last Year in Marienbad is just a boring foreign movie that can be switched off the moment one is tired of it, while when it was released, critics believed that true cineastes had to come to terms with it. Today, it's as accessible as Turner and Hooch.

I like having so much more at my fingertips. I miss the age of discovery but I don't fool myself about how much energy I wasted in its pursuit. For every Last House on the Left I thought was...okay, there were five that bored me to tears. For every one that I truly loved, twenty that I struggled to watch, hoping in vain for one standout moment.

Then again, I didn't end the movies by finding someone to brag to, either.