#internet

Via Open Culture, who apparently posted this ages ago, here is a nearly-complete archive of Alan Lomax's massively important historical field recordings. Used to be, you'd have to wander into some NPR-friendly record store or maybe Barnes & Noble and pick up a CD box set of something like this, lend it to Moby, and never see it again. Well, now you can pop online and search by a few different criteria. It's fascinating.

While I’m all-in on re-decentralizing the web, there are certain places where putting a lot of the same kind of content together does make sense. For instance, a music store. But that doesn’t mean a profit-driven version of the music industry that’s even worse than the old profit-driven music industry. Yes, I’m talking about Daniel Ek but I’m also talking about Bandcamp, which is somehow doing worse than it was under the Fortnite people.

So what would an alternative look like? According to Subvert, it would be a collective. It would build slowly, it wouldn’t require endless growth, and it would have a straight-up manifesto in the form of a zine. They have a pretty solid vision for a musician-owned world of digital presence. This checks way too many of my boxes to just ignore, so I signed up as a founding musician. It's got an interesting old-school aesthetic too.

We now have our music up on the alpha site, and if you're interested in supporting me and our tunes, I'd dig it if you gave that a shot. It's hard to break through the monopolies and duopolies of the current tech world, but I'm cautiously optimistic.

Here's some good and fun news on a day when we could use it. One of the greatest internet mysteries of the past decade has been solved.

Maybe you've heard it on a podcast, or possibly read about it in a news story from Buzzfeed or NPR. But since 2019, a group of detectives have been trying to track down The most mysterious song on the internet, sometimes shortened to The Mysterious Song or TMS.

The song itself is really good if you ask me — it has a goth/post-punk vibe but a strong and catchy hook in the verse. The singer has that doom and gloom gothic voice that might remind you of other post-punk singers like Ian Curtis, Andrew Eldritch, or Rodney Orpheus. The guitars, likewise, do similar things to Joy Division or Echo and The Bunnymen, but there's a Yamaha DX7 adding some additional textures that bring a 1987-88 vibe to what feels otherwise firmly early-80s.

The saga actually begins much further back, when a German kid recorded the song off the radio in (probably) 1984 but never heard the DJ say what it was. His sister started looking for it online as far back as 2007. Here's a good rundown from a subreddit dedicated to the search, including links to deeper explainers and even redditors obsessing over DX7 patches.

The story continues with a lot of rabbit trails, false starts, and even some obscure Greek post-punk musicians claiming the song and uploading the crappy radio recording to Spotify as their own (sad, really; Statues in Motion turned out to be a good band that a lot of folks in the search enjoyed listening to, but their efforts to co-opt the song kind of taint them). But 3 days ago, a user made a post confirming that the creator of the tune, a German group called FEX, was found. To prove its validity, he added a different recording of it to his post. Turns out, the radio version was just a demo, which is why the German radio station didn't retain the tape — it was their policy to toss demos after playing them.

So now we know: the song is called "Subways of Your Mind" by FEX from Kiel, (West) Germany. We have multiple songs from them and at least one of those is also pretty great. They plan to get back together to make a modern re-recording of the tune.

And that's it. On one hand, I can't help but feel a little sadness at one less mystery in the world (the imagination can always create something cooler than reality, of course). But on the other, these guys who had no idea what was going on for the past 5 years are now going to get their due. And there are more lost tunes to find, even if they're not all as famous as this one.

A year after Billie Eilish justified her baggy clothing by saying she "didn't want people to have access to [her] body, even visually," Chappell Roan is trying to take things a bit further by asserting that her fans don't own her and that she'll just up and quit if they don't back off.

The fact that she's doing this on TikTok starts to get into the complicated nature of what's going on here. When artists and celebrities are on social media sites and talk so directly to their fans as she does, it exacerbates the parasocial feelings that some fans already have, which were probably initiated by the unique and sometimes explicitly confessional aspects of her music and lyrics. But how else to communicate that she is indeed a person and wants to be treated as one? Hard to unravel. it's similar to Eilish's dilemma about sexualization: how to feel positive about people praising her baggy clothes when she feels there's an element of slut-shaming to it?

Of course there are always the commenters and even music writers who'll say that she knew what she was getting into, that this is fame. But fame these days is a different beast, and you're gonna get it from all sides if you're a young woman (from the girls your music is aimed at because you spoke so directly to them, and from men because uhhh we're creeps). Despite being discovered on YouTube, Roan seems like a pop star who belongs in a pre-social-media era, when her stage name could've been the only thing people knew about her. But in the 2020s, Stan isn't even an outlier anymore.

I don't really have a point, not sure I even have an opinion, but I do feel for these young women. Sure, they wanted fame, but for an artist that usually means "sharing the stuff I make with people," not sharing their entire existence.