Bohemian Rhapsody was on the radio.
I was driving. The car was full of my friends, 17 and 18 year old guys. We were singing, wailing on air guitars and stamping our feet. When the solo ended and the drums pounded back in, we started to really rock out, yelling,
“So you think you can love me and leave me to die-eyie!”
Our heads smashed up and down so hard we’d hardly move our necks the next day. I was paying so little attention to the road that I jumped a curb.
I loved moments like that, but they could be dying out.
Teens and young adults are losing their attention spans. Music, movies, and TV shows are less and less art and more and more Paris Hilton (who has had an album, movie roles and an inexplicably successful reality TV show). People from my generation only listen halfway through songs before skipping ahead. They’re watching TV shows in pieces on the internet. They’re losing interest in movies that repeat the same story over and over. Why is this, and how will it impact our world?
***
Mary-Elizabeth Moran and Katie Hiltz are roommates. They’re average university students. They get good grades; they have boyfriends; they drink on weekends.
On a Friday night you can see Hiltz dancing by a laptop, sipping a bright red drink through a curly straw. She’ll stop, look down, click the mouse, and the song will change. In a minute or so, she’ll do it again.
“I just wanna listen to the chorus and then move on to the next song,” said Hiltz.
Moran and Hiltz use Limewire, a file-sharing program, to download songs. When they’ve listened to a song a dozen or so times, it normally gets deleted and replaced by something newer.
“I think I just like, it’s called a hook. That one really catchy part, so I might just listen to half of one song.
“When I’m sitting in the back of a car and I don’t have control over the radio I freak out. Say my mom and my brother are in the front, they won’t change it. So I’m saying change it, change it, change it and poking them,” said Moran.
***
I guess I’m a throwback. I love going to a used record store. I love the weird music in the background, the sweet smell of old cardboard and vinyl, even the reek of cigarette smoke that often surrounds the scruffy looking guy behind the counter. But records cost money, and the ones I want are often hard to get.
My new record store is online. I use a file sharing method called Torrents – it’s like other file sharing programs but bigger and faster. It lets me download not only full albums, but full discographies. So far I’ve got over 3000 CDs, very few of which actually exist in the real world.
Erin Keating is another university student. She collects records and listens closely for the lyrics in songs.
“I love putting on a CD and listening to it the full way, the way the artist meant it.
“It’s a shame that people are getting into digital music more and more and albums aren’t selling. Because I think that it’s the best way to experience an artist, is an album not just a single.”
Stephen Peacock is a university professor and a classical guitarist. When he plays a CD for his students, he listens. His eyes are lowered, his fist held near his chest in anticipation. When the drums slam or there’s an aggressive chord, his arm pumps, his head bobs, his leg might even kick out a little. Then he goes on listening until the song is over.
He said commercial music isn’t held to the same standard it used to be.
“It’s good if it’s successful, if it sells. … I wonder if there’s not a whole lot to hear in commercial music.”
Peacock said that the way people listen to music is changing.
“It’s not listening to music maybe. But listening to a kind of backdrop
There is a decline in what people know about music. That’s not a slight on people, but maybe on our education system.”
Peacock said some musicians, like those who perform classical and art music, are going to lose their audiences in Canada. He has already noticed niche record labels, like Bruce Cockburn’s True North, have pulled out of the Maritimes. However, he says the music industry is healthier in Europe, and that it may never die in North America.
“I think the music industry has collapsed, and that may mean there isn’t much out there for a while. … but it will come back.”
Keating says finding the music she likes keeps getting harder and harder.
“It’s hard to find because everything we’re exposed to is commercial and poppy and all marketing and all this crap. It’s hard to find people out there today, whereas back in the seventies everyone knew Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchell because, well I don’t know why, I guess video killed the radio star.”
***
When it comes to movies and TV, Moran and Hiltz are interested in flash.
Both girls watch MTV. They even get their news from it.
“They relate (news) to our age group. They’re stylish, they don’t wear suits,” said Hiltz.
Moran doesn’t watch MTV on television; she watches video clips of it online.
“I don’t really like watching TV. I can’t be like, oh I’m always gonna be free like Thursday at nine to watch this show.”
Television news is changing to try and grab what precious little attention people have left. The Poynter Institute gives awards to American journalists and showcases nominated and winning TV news stories on its website. All the stories are full of flash and extremely fast paced. One story about drumming has a shot change on almost every beat, and on almost every syllable when people are speaking. Even a story about a farmer who lost his arm is so flashy it gives you motion sickness. These types of stories haven’t made it to Canada yet, but what is popular in American media becomes popular in our country very quickly.
***
Tony Tremblay used to teach a pop-culture course at St. Thomas University, until he stopped because his students weren’t interested. He says the way people take in media has changed drastically.
“Young people are going to file sharing sites, to social networking sites, to blogs, to a whole array of what people in my generation would consider radical venues. But they’re not radical to young people. They’re normative to young people who have much more of an online identity.”
Tremblay says TV is dying, and that its content (especially reality TV) is now largely irrelevant.
“The most dominant forms (of media) are brief, fragmentary, disconnected, episodic forms. You only have to look at a television narrative or a music video or go on to a literary blog online to understand that there’s no tolerance for very much ponderance or very much reflection in our media anymore.
“People have been confused by this for years and have believed that violent television will make young people more violent. And I don’t think that’s true. But episodic narrative does make people think more episodically.”
He says this is going to have a serious impact on Canadians.
“All history is bunk, when you think in the moment. When the present becomes your dominant temporal mode of operation, there’s no more history anymore. And when history is gone our understanding of who we are and where we’ve come from disappears. Which is a very dangerous thing.”
Tremblay says the internet and new forms of media are causing people to lose touch with their communities and with their neighbours. He said this will make people into digital citizens who are less and less connected to their communities.
“Young people today are 10,000 miles wide and a quarter of an inch deep. They know a little about a heck of a lot, and they don’t know a lot about very much.”
***
Hocus Pocus was blaring.
My roommate and I were jumping back and forth, wailing on air guitars to the driving drum beat and screeching solos. Some friends were over drinking at our apartment, and we wanted to get pumped up before going out. Then someone turned off the music. The girls were anxious to get to the bar, to hear either a bad cover band or some terrible country/dance music.
It’s a sad thing when these great songs get cut off. Art is dying, because people aren’t interested. They aren’t exposed to it anymore. The internet allows people to access anything, but too often they chose the dumbest stuff available. The television, music and movie industries are producing formulaic, unoriginal trash. Not always, but most of the time. That’s the stuff that sells. As more crap is produced, less quality is demanded. It’s a vicious cycle, and it means fewer and fewer people will be exposed to the Marlon Brando’s, to the Bob Dylan’s. It means fewer great artists will make it because they won’t fit what the focus groups want. It means fewer people will be inspired to become great. Maybe we’ll start to lose sight of who we are. Maybe we’re intellectually lazy. Maybe we’ll become detached and calloused and uncaring. That can’t be said for sure, but the world needs art. Without it, who knows what will happen.
