living in the 'experience' world

I write. You read. That's it.

I’ll begin with music, as I so often do.

Music is perhaps more tightly woven into our daily lives in the era we live in than at any other point in history. With the press of a button or the stroke of a few keys I can listen to nearly any song, on repeat, ad infinitum.

Does that cheapen the listening experience? Honestly, it might. The songs themselves aren’t worth less. The experience is. I don’t like making sweeping generalizations, but it stands to reason by simple supply and demand that ubiquity reduces value.

I think that’s why more and more we turn to experiences as a culture to fill our time. What’s the difference between experiencing and an experience? An experience is the event-ification of daily life. A movie can’t just be a movie anymore. It has to be a movie experience. A dinner cant’t just be a dinner. It has to be a dining experience.

The word ‘experience’ is riddled with uncertain meaning in this context. It implies unlike-anything-else-ness — essentially uniqueness. The opposite of ubiquity. Baked into the word is a sort of challenge, an assertion of quality, not because of the experience itself or whether it’s actually worth anything, but simply because it is an experience. An experience must be worth having simply because it is.

This age of convenience and so-called efficiency has primed us to seek out the slightest purposeful inconvenience, transforming the everyday into an experience. Think: secret entrances to a “speakeasy,” waiting in lines (digital or physical) for almost sold out tickets, paying thousands to sit in a fancy clubhouse with other people.

Ironically, the less distance we now regularly have to travel to attain something the more of a pseudo-journey we’re willing to make. Because that’s what experiences really are: pseudo-journeys, pretend exclusivity, false scarcity.

Which returns me to music.

Cast your mind back. Pre-iPhone. Back more. Pre-CD. Back even more. Pre-jukebox. Keep going. Pre-phonograph, pre-vinyl, pre-all recorded music. This takes us to at least the early 1800s. The EMI Archive has 1857 as the year Frenchman Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville — say that five times fast — invented and patented his phonautograph. But we can go back even further. How about the early/mid 1700s, before the Swiss invented the music box in 1770 (according to Brittanica).

So here we are. The olden days, the bad ‘ol days, the days of bards and traveling bands. The only way to hear a song is to see it too. To see the instrument, to see the vocalist. The visual and aural qualities of music are bound tight.

Let’s hit up a tavern. Grab a pint of ale while we’re at it. Oh look, a mandolier — aka a dude playing mandolin. We listen with our ale in hand. The kitchen in the tavern is turning out some kind of stew — I’ll leave what kind up to you. (I’m personally picturing possum though.) The song ends. We clap. Some people even stomp their feet.

Here in the 1700s, all music is live music. By which I mean lived music — music that is heard, seen, touched, smelled, tasted, felt, experienced.

This may read as diatribe against shallow modernity and yearning for imagined past. As man shaking fist: “see what the world has turned into…” or “back in my day…” or “in the old days…” But it’s not.

I’m as much a product of my time as anyone I’ve ever met. I don’t know what I’d do without my Spotify or my iPad or any of the rest. My handiness at research, at unearthing off-the-beaten-path tidbits of music or books or movies, is as intrinsically tied to the technology at my disposal as seeing and hearing was to music in the old days.

Then again, seeing and hearing are just as tied up with one another these days, if not moreso. And this time it’s not out of necessity. I can click onto Spotify and see a little looped video as I listen to FKJ. Music videos remain somehow relevant even as MTV fades in the rearview mirror. The artist formerly known as Kanye West leveraged a successful music career into a successful fashion design business worth potentially billions, transmuting aural into visual.

Perhaps it’s because a song on its own doesn’t seem to hold as much weight as it once did? Perhaps just a song, or just a record, is now so easily repeatable that artists, labels, and platforms try to integrate as many sensory elements — particularly vision — as they can. They try to make it an experience.

David Bowie sang:

“Don't you wonder sometimes
About sound and vision?”

All the freakin’ time.