Even though I'm the same age DeBoer (2000 grad), I actually don't know if things were better in the 90s or not--not because I had a different lived experience, but because I have so little connection to what it's like to be a kid now. I have a 3 and 5 year old, so they're not yet in a mode where they're discovering friendships and culture for themselves. My guess is that some things will be much better than they were for me and some things will be much worse, but most things will be similar. My millenial cred is high. I failed out of high school while trying to drink myself to death on two separate occasions and doing as much LSD as I could get my hands on. But outside of movies and record stores, which were objectively better than what we have today (and I'll fuckin' go to the mat on both accounts, though maybe not with you!), I don't remember it nearly as fondly as DeBoer. That's probably because I took my flunkie ass to community college, then to a third tier state university that wouldn't rank in US News' top 1000 schools and got an education that was productive and useful. One superpower I have is the ability to see what's useful in the long run, and I think that separated me from many contemporaries. The late 90s were when first tier state schools started really preferring students with high test scores and high GPAs (though nothing like today's rat race), and everyone was focused on getting to the good school rather than what comes next. For me, what comes next has always been paramount, and probably insulated me from the broader anxieties experienced by many peers. You'd hear all the time, "You can't do that," but followed by an empty stare when you asked why not? I think where a lot of the millenial bitterness comes from is that we were all banned from biking more than a half mile from the house, but everyone thought the covenant was that we'd always be protected. The forced tradeoff of security for freedom only turned out to be a one way street. But I never bought into that bullshit, and just kind of went my own way. And I find myself at 40 with a high-paying job that doesn't really stress me out too much, but I'm still thinking about what comes next. The whole security for freedom trade still isn't working in my mind, and I hope it never does. But enough with the navel gazing. I think that the one thing that is inarguably horrible about being a kid these days (and again, I'm not too adjacent, just trying to synthesize what I see around me) is social media. I am not being hyperbolic when I say I think there is nothing redeeming about it. (Hubski isn't social media, so no, I'm not being hypocritical.) In fact, I think given the permanence of anything posted on the internet, we should treat it more like a tattoo than an ephemeral moment in time. I would argue that social media should be illegal for anyone under 18, and I actually don't think that's an unreasonable position. I don't know at what age kids start using it, but I am certain that it will spark fights and outrage in my house. But other than that, I would imagine being a kid these days isn't so bad. I think parents are more interested in their kids than my parents' generation was (I literally think my mom has no idea what I do for a living and I see her about once per week), and most people seem happier and less apathetic to me (surveys of self-reported mental health notwithstanding...I think there's a lot of reason to doubt many of those) than they were in the 90s. Being interested in anything in any serious way in the 90s was enough to get you bullied. Apathy was the coin of the realm, and that is not something to be nostalgic about. Having kids is an optimistic act, and I definitely wouldn't have had them if I didn't feel good about the future. I guess that's against the grain of a lot of millenials, but to me the world, shitty as the news cycle can be, is in a really good place.
The moral panics of the '80s were AIDS, Dungeons & Dragons, drugs and rock music. The moral panic of the '90s was No matter where you were, no matter what you were doing, someone nefarious (and as you were a mature adult, and as there was a whole generation younger than you, they definitely listened to Pearl Jam ifyouknowwhatImean) was going to Steal.Your.Child. This is important because it reflects an inversion: in the '80s, children had to be kept on the straight and narrow lest they fall afoul of temptation. In the '90s, children had to be wrapped in bubble wrap and held in isolation against errant strikes of lightning. There's an agency in upbringing that has been there throughout time: up until the '90s, the concern has been "what will the kids get up to." Compare and contrast 50s, 60s, 70s, or 80s horror/exploitation films with the '90s. Serial killers used to come after you if you transgressed. "I know what you did last summer" worked in the '90s (the book was written in the '70s) because it's about kids just living their lives who end up being stalked and murdered. Final Destination? Frickin' causality itself is the villain. Movies are vastly worse. Record stores have the advantage of curation, but I never experienced a record store that had any gift of curation. I include the record store run by a friend of mine that sold exclusively industrial music - because he sold exclusively industrial music, he sold all industrial music and lots of it is terrible. It's worse than that - the late '90s were when things shifted from "you should go to college" to "of course you're going to college" and the prices matched. Millennials took the brunt of that, too - there are far too many people with degrees, so degrees get deprecated, and there's no limit to how much you can owe. But again, no generation has had as much parental involvement in their college as millennials. The agency is notably absent. Well, scratch that. We see a lot of GenZ who are so mollycoddled by their GenX parents that they can't so much as go out and interview for a job without Mommy coming, too. But there are also a lot more GenZ who took one look at the college landscape and said "If my choices are working retail with no debt or working retail with $40k of debt, I'll skip the debt, thanks." And this is why I hate Strauss & Howe - it fucking makes sense. I'm eight years older than you but I was walking to school in 2nd grade, coming home to an empty house and half the time making my own dinner. My wife is three months younger than me but her parents are 'boomers and she still talks about that amazing time in 3rd grade when she walked all the way to school and back. Now granted - I grew up in legit don't-tell-the-social-worker neglect and she didn't. But there was a very real cusp between the feral and non-feral children in my cohort and it was, to a man, how young are your parents. I think social media will die with the boomers. I think it was created by millennials for them and their parents and I think GenZ doesn't give a shit. Our experience with GenZ is they don't fucking care, Facebook has always been a trap, don't hustle for clout hustle for money, an online presence is a massive net-negative and if you're not being remunerated don't bother. My kid is ten. She has a friend that desperately wants a youtube channel. She and my daughter and two of their other friends endlessly rehearse online skits that shall never be online, constantly revising, constantly discussing, with no real intent to ever actually do anything with it. I have a number of friends whose children are approaching college, in college or freshly out of college and none of them give the first fuck about social media. My experience with community college is the younger you are, the less you engage with social media of any kind. There was a frontier where it was beneficial but that frontier was full of McDonald's and whorehouses by the time GenZ made it there and they have better shit to do.I think where a lot of the millenial bitterness comes from is that we were all banned from biking more than a half mile from the house, but everyone thought the covenant was that we'd always be protected.
But outside of movies and record stores, which were objectively better than what we have today (and I'll fuckin' go to the mat on both accounts, though maybe not with you!),
The late 90s were when first tier state schools started really preferring students with high test scores and high GPAs (though nothing like today's rat race), and everyone was focused on getting to the good school rather than what comes next.
I think that the one thing that is inarguably horrible about being a kid these days (and again, I'm not too adjacent, just trying to synthesize what I see around me) is social media.
Curation was non-existent at Borders, but at least there was a "new releases" section that I could browse on Tuesdays, which, fortunately for me, was the day I got paid for my line cook job every week. So there was an order of operation--pick up check; cash check; go to music store. And usually I'd be on the lookout for whatever the local college radio station was playing for the previous few weeks. I know people find new music now, but I honestly don't know how, and I think I'm too old to care to figure it out. We've gained so much with the ubiquity of the internet that I am not at all nostalgic for the days that came before, but I think there is a lot of good that comes from being at a particular place at a particular time, record shop or otherwise. Example, I work remotely. I fucking love working remotely. I put in a solid 15 hours of work per week, get paid for forty, and spend the rest of my time working on my side business or running errands (or going to the gym, playing tennis...whatever I want, really). It's awesome for someone like me who has a lot of contacts and is very comfortable in his career. The woman who works for me? The 28 year old who jumped directly from post-doc to this company? Not so much. I fear that she and all like her are siloing themselves into a really bad situation. People need to get to know you and you need to get the know the world around you. Record shops were just one of a bunch of ways to get out and meet real people and make human connections that are more difficult to do in online only environments.
excerpt from the manifesto that saved my show It's really funny. Tidal hooked up an AI to their recommendation engine. You can type requests like "give me an hour's worth of music that goes well with Prodigy's 'Firestarter'" and it will give you bizarre r&b tracks you've never heard of. "genre" was this thing that fans did by hand and there's no real collation. Soundprinting? GraceNote does that automagically, that's why your Android phone tells you what song is playing in the background on your lockscreen. But GraceNote has never bothered to pull in ID3 tags, standardized or otherwise. You wanna see the search string I use to find new music? That's for Gazelle, which drives most torrent sites. The ! means "fuck off don't give me any of that shit." I'd totally "!alternative" if I could, but anything to the left of Journey gets labeled as alternative. I probably listen to ten hours of new music a week. It's work. Streaming services won't do it for you. Your friends will. My kid went through the pandemic remotely. She figured out how to sneak into her teacher's assistant's Google Meet room when the assistant wasn't there because she was (and is) an idiot. She'd go hang out with her friends in the "secret meet" and there'd be five of them, locked down in a pandemic, figuring out how to watch netflix together or play video games or who knows. We did bring it to the attention of the teacher just to keep her out of trouble? And she promptly deliberately forgot. They kept using that "secret meet" for as long as they had school laptops. Would she rather play in person? Every time. There are better games to play and it's much more interactive. But we've got a whole generation of kids who had to figure out how to pass time in the digital, which makes passing time in the real easier. I think some people don't make friends well, and that the situation can make things more challenging? But nature finds a way.I know people find new music now, but I honestly don't know how, and I think I'm too old to care to figure it out.
Goth/Industrial music is grossly under-represented in today’s streaming landscape. ID3v1 held 80 genres, five of which overlap with On The Edge’s typical playlists (Industrial, Euro-Techno, Gothic, Darkwave, and Techno-Industrial). Spotify, on the other hand, has over fifteen hundred. From a curational standpoint, Amazon and Tidal have none. Discovery of Goth/Industrial has become nearly impossible, partially though commerce and partially through design as the music has become exclusive enough to be invisible. It has become necessary for someone to push music at the pullers. That someone should be us.
industrial, industrial.techno, synthpop, witch.house, IDM, shoegaze, !experimental, !pop, !psychedelic, !minimal.house, !freely.available, !hard.techno, !art.rock, !retrowave, !metal, !black.metal
Bandcamp remains a very good way to find new music, for anyone else reading kbs comments. Kind of cool to search by region using tags on that site.
I don't know that I agree. To make Bandcamp work you need to set yourself up to follow every label or artist that's interesting, and often the labels worth following are 70-90% garbage. Bandcamp does have "ratings" but they appear to consist of "top downloads, of the past few hours, within our narrowly-defined genres." I have a buddy who "topped the charts" last week on Bandcamp. LAST WEEK. This week, if you search for his name and spell it exactly, you are on the second page of results - not on the charts, within general search. If you look up the album that "topped the charts" (and I mean, he was between #5 and #1 for a week) for his genre, it has 40 downloads. On the other hand, I can go "discover - best selling - any format" and today, the second thing it throws up at me is a single released two days ago with twelve downloads. Last week, the first thing it threw up at me was an album from nineteen-fucking-ninety-TWO. Meanwhile, the whole "scene" if you will is trying really hard to like that shit new VNV nation album and it's nowhere on the charts. Yeah you can buy it on Bandcamp - and it's got 1200 purchases. And that doesn't include every DJ who got it free whether they like it or not; it's been fairly compulsory to play a couple spins whether you like it or not, because it's VNV Nation (unless you're lucky enough to live in a locale that hates VNV nation on sight). I'm probably a thousand dollars into Bandcamp because I think artists should eat, and I'm $20 a month into Tidal for five years because I think artists should eat, and I'm a seedbox into torrenting because I do discovery my way, and the fuckin' torrenters actually use taxonomy. I know a guy who was in the room when Jerry Yang turned down Larry and Sergei when they tried to sell Google to Yahoo for one.milllllllion dollars (pinkie ring). Guy confirmed what I already knew: Yahoo, at the time, was a hand-tuned hand-selected hand-curated list of useful links while Google was "here's an algorithm." Yang couldn't see automating his life-blood so he passed. He shouldn't have? But if your whole business is around hand-fit non-scalable curation, the bots are never going to do it the same way. You wanna see how an algorithm picks a hit song?
To me, the discovery from Bandcamp is in the followers feed and nothing else. I add people I know, or who have already bought an album I love and sometimes they'll have something interesting. Certainly a lot of noise to signal, I'm sure your torrent system is better. But what I like about it most is that it is definitely not an algorithm.