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| Sonny Boy Williamson |
Call me a luddite, but this isn't "progress".
I was watching a few music videos the other day with my friend, Ken. One video was "Sonny Boy Williamson:Your Funeral and my trial", and another was "Canned Heat - Going up the country".
The Sonny Boy performance was recorded live and was tight. The Canned Heat video was recorded as part of a network television production and the band lip-synched and mimed their performance, the flute player mocking the entire charade.
Ken was commenting on the performances as recorded. The musicians in the Sonny Boy performance were very skilled and professional. The musicians in the Canned Heat video were being smart-asses and were displaying disdain for having to lip-synch and mime their performance.
"And people call this progress," Ken said.
We then got into a bit of our normal word-play, with me saying I didn't believe anybody was calling that progress, though people may call it modernization, or commercialization, or consumerization, or marketing, or whatever, but not progress. Ken replied that we were dickering about semantics, and I accused him of being anti-Semetic, and we drank another beer.
Ken was pointing out that in the span of twenty or thirty years, the actual performances had regressed in quality. I pointed out that the use of lip-synching was because of the network standards and government oversight to prevent broadcasting obscenities. That it would have been possible to record quality performances, but, to satisfy the quest for money, going through the networks garnered the largest audience and reaped the greatest monetary return, but definitely defeated the quest for quality.
The current migration from print to digital content is much the same. Instead of going to the library and having a selection of a few hundred quality books to choose from, we now go to the Internet and have the ability to choose from millions and millions of really shitty blogs.
"And people call this progress."
