Broadcasting Brain

I used to listen to a lot of music in my teens and early 20s. I was a guitar rock fan and that’s what I would usually listen to. As time and circumstances changed I cut back on my music as I focused on career, education, and family. I’ve been able to start squeaking it back in my days thanks to streaming audio, my new iPod, and YouTube.

YouTube is a funny thing. On one hand it indexes a lot of new or recent content. New short videos, films, TV show episodes: there’s a staggeringly big mixture of both professional and user generated content that lives at YouTube. Fresh new material is created daily to satisfy artistic urges, commercial needs, and consumer desires.

And yet… there’s an awful lot of OLD material on YouTube. The material comes from the same kinds and genres of content, but there’s no expiry date on what gets stored there. As long as the content was on film or video of some kind, there’s a good chance that it will wind up on YouTube. I’ll bet that you can find a copy of the vast majority of music videos that were ever made on YouTube. You can also find tons of live performance clips by either original artists or cover bands for many, many popular songs.

Guitar rock isn’t just about instrument envy

Given that I’m often a dead ringer for Clark Kent (minus either suit, of course), you might not expect me to be the kind of guy who likes loud guitar rock. I didn’t expect me to like guitars either, but at some point during my adolescence I heard some power chords and guitar solos and it clicked somehow. It lead me to play guitar (acoustic, unfortunately) and electric bass for years, not to mention all of the air guitar.

To me, hard driving rock has a very physical aspect to it: arm swinging (think of Pete Townshend’s classic windmill move), propulsive strumming, or rapid-fire fretboard fingering provides one half of the equation. The sound - pure, distorted, or layered with effects - is the other half. Just think of the otherworldly sounds that guys like Jimi Hendrix coaxed out of their amplifiers and you’re left with an image of some kind of overworldly being that’s part conjuror, part snake-charmer.

So, guitar music can be pretty physical. And that’s excluding the people that used to smash guitars and light them on fire.

Emotion (pre-emo)

In addition to the physical experience, popular music serves as a kind of emotional bookmarking that trumps Delicious any day of the week. Music and emotional events link together permanently. When something significant happens to us (good times, bad times; kisses, hugs, and more; fights and breakups), we’ll always remember the music that played at that moment. In turn, the music brings back the memories of those times, good and bad, each time that we hear the song or melody in question.

No social bookmark could work as well as that, or any better.

Then and now - ch-ch-ch-ch changes

TV shows, movies, and music videos are time capsule entries from the days that they were produced. Fashions, slang, contemporary references, body language and attitudes can sometimes be deciphered through the pop cultural materials of those moments in time.

If you want to contrast two different moments in time, try looking at performances of the same song years apart, preferably by the same band.

I’m going to use the example of Canadian band Honeymoon Suite, which formed in 1982 and still tours and records today.

New Girl Now was this band’s first single. If you didn’t hear it on the radio or see the music video (which is quite likely if you didn’t live in Canada in the early 80s), you might have heard part of this song on a Miami Vice episode (one of their other songs, Bad Attitude, was featured in the last episode of Miami Vice and they also performed the title track from the Lethal Weapon soundtrack).

Here’s the video:

It would be easy to write these guys off as a heavy metal light hair band with a few catchy riffs. The video attempts to sell us on the cool, girl magnet qualities of the lead singer and the guitar prowess of the lead guitarist. It’s a bit contrived, manufactured, and doesn’t hold a candle to the best works of the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin or… many other great musical acts.

Nonetheless, this song reminds me of that awkward time when I was transitioning out of adolescence into full-fledged teenagerness and starting high school. The riffs had enough power to make me feel… good, I guess. It’s a bookmark.

Now, let’s contrast this with the same band and the same song performed over 24 years later.

(skip ahead to about 0:40 to hear the start of the song)

So, what changed? A number of things:

• No fancy costumes, makeup or hairdos here. These guys are wearing jeans and casual clothes.
• The lead singer has lost a bit of vocal range, but he still gets it right. He’s gained some pounds, some lines, and he seems a bit weary, but you can tell he’s having fun. He’s playing rhythm guitar, helping to anchor the band and the sound, and he’s driving things along.
• Most of the band members are looking older with less hair, but they’re still rocking out.
• The lead guitarist, who has a bit of that young Peter Frampton quality to him, still looks amazingly young. He’s mugging for the camera and playing Joe Rockstar, but he’s still got his chops. The guitar solo is virtually note for note from the 1983 version.

I’d argue that this band is better than the one that recorded the single in 1983. Granted, the music they’re playing doesn’t require extensive chops or skills, but they work very well together. They’ve still got it.

The inevitable comparisons

Remembering the past and how you felt back then brings inevitable comparisons to the present. Twenty-four years seems like an increasingly long time in this age of Web 2.0. Some of you probably weren’t even alive back then. The Internet had very limited uses at the universities of the world. PCs and Apple computers were just starting to appear in the marketplace. Cellphones were almost unheard of in those days. And so on.

If I compare myself from 1983 to today, I’m more like the lead singer than the guitarist. I’m bigger, heavier, and older. I don’t have all of the same skills and chops that I did back then, but I’m a lot more experienced. I’ve got some wrinkles, a bit of tinnitus, and I probably need more sleep now than I did back then. Old worries are replaced with new worries, while I have far more confidence in some situations that I would have back then.

Sometimes I cringe at the thought of my awkward younger self. Other times I wonder where the heck my youth has gone. Regardless, I value the opportunity to compare both versions.

So what does this have to do with social media?

Michael Martine reminded us last week to think about our legacy, both online and offline. Blogs, videos, podcasts, and other forms of social media are like digital scrapbooks and archives that could be around a long time. Maybe ten, twenty, thirty years ago, we’ll be able to look back and see what we saw, thought, and felt in 2008. We’ll have the opportunity to compare ourselves, then and now, to see what’s different.

We’re building our own time capsules whenever we interact with social media. YouTube is just one example of how we continually build and preserve the past with Web technology.

Memories can have a domino effect, especially when shared. One memory can trigger another memory and so on, even between different people. Repositories like YouTube represent slices of a collective consciousness than can be tagged, commented on endlessly, and repurposed.

This might not seem to have a lot to do with social media, even after all of this exposition. However, by sharing these thoughts with you, this blog takes one step into the realm of social media.

Do you have a similar memory, thought, or story? Then why don’t you take a similar step forward and share your thoughts? That’s the social right there.

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