A really interesting photo essay about getting access to music in a place where there's practically no internet.
- Seated practically thigh to thigh, these vendors crouch over laptops, scrolling through screen after screen of downloaded music. They are known as téléchargeurs, or downloaders, and they operate as an offline version of iTunes, Spotify and Pandora all rolled into one.
I know this isn't the focus of the article, but I actually find this really exciting. Not only does it make the preserving of music that much easier, but it also encourages accessibility. Maybe we're at a point where Music Archivists will focus less on recording and more on categorizing, archiving, and studying what other people have recorded. I think that someone like Alan Lomax would have absolutely geeked if he witnessed such a scene. The internet is a great tool for this reason alone. Things like bandcamp, youtube, what have you helps to expose people to new music and help people discover obscure stuff that could easily have been lost to history. In fact, there's a whole youtube channel dedicated to Alan Lomax's work.This was the scene Christopher Kirkley found in 2009. A musicologist, he traveled to Mali hoping to record the haunting desert blues he loved. But every time he asked people to perform a favorite folk song or ballad, they pulled out their cellphones to play it for him; every time he set up his gear to capture a live performance, he says, “five other kids will be holding their cellphones recording the same thing — as an archivist, it kind of takes you down a couple of notches.”
I totally agree with you about Lomax, a whole world of information is available to us all now and it's fantastic. My concern is that there's no thought for the long term. As music gets passed from mp3 to mp3, from youtube to soundcloud, it can only degrade in quality. It's important to preserve the originals rather than rely on third party services which will be gone in twenty years.
I agree. Although, I think we're at a point where most people (or at least the people who care) are savvy enough to know the importance of saving original files/formats. When people are really passionate about something, be it music, books, aquariums, what have you, they take the time to learn how to do things right.
Maybe yeah. What worries me a bit is that, apart from on the internet, I don't see many people who know the difference between lossy and lossless formats (for example). That, and the implication they have going forwards. That said, it's a WHOLE load more people that what we had in Lomax's time, so that's something. Plus, the technology and information to do it 'properly' is cheaply and readily available. In fact, there are whole groups of people devoted to preserving out digital history.
Africa is super interesting since it seems a lot of places are essentially skipping the 20th century in terms of technology. No landlines, no centralized power. Straight to smart phones and renewable energy like solar panels. Since these technologies don't really require lots of government infrastructure, they'll become more widespread as the cost to produce them plummets, regardless of any political turbulence.
This reminds me of something Terrence mckenna once said in an interview: "Well, I think Marshall McLuhan pointed out that any technology put in place is extremely difficult to dislodge, and that is our problem. We went for the automobile so completely that it will now be a major effort at cultural restructuring to leave it behind. The Chinese have no such problem. I think it was Freeman Dyson, or perhaps Gerrard O'Neill, who said, "No technology should be put in place that has a foreseeable obsolescence." This was his argument against nuclear power. And I think that's an excellent point. We should not commit ourselves to any course of action whose end state can be foreseen. This is why we have to commit ourselves to this kind of conscious, open-system, non-equilibrium future that futurists like Jantsch, and West Churchman and others have so eloquently described in their work."
I think Africa can make a giant leap, by skipping some obsolete technologies the rest of the world is heavily invested in.
I wish there were more large scale decentralized community sharing systems like this. You kind of see this with those little community libraries that are getting popular. Imagine if things like book, tool, or even seed sharing programs were more popular. I've read a bit about projects that have tried, but they all seem to run into obstacles, the biggest of which is the physicality of the items. It seems the success of these in Africa are due to two factors that seem almost contradictory, in a way. The lack of internet and yet the purely virtual medium of the goods being shared. Very cool solution to an interesting environment.