And Then There's This_ How Stories Live and Die in Viral Culture - Bill Wasik [24]
“Can’t afford a fucking apartment, man,” said Adam.
“We’re still climbing the hill,” Mike said philosophically.
Kenny, Adam, and Mike had been playing together since their early teens, when they had a punk band called Timothy’s Weekend. That was in 2000, they said—2000!—and suddenly the youth of these guys struck me. They played with the sophisticated sound of bands five or ten years older.
“We’ve been probably playing music together for the same amount of time they’ve been playing,” Kenny pointed out.
“We just got a head start, that’s all,” offered Adam. He added that they hadn’t even listened to Arcade Fire, Animal Collective, or Broken Social Scene until the comparisons started. His own influences, he said, tended toward the older: Paul Simon, Brian Wilson. “They’re just trying to compare us to bands that are current, you know?” he said. “There’s not really anyone else they can compare us to.” He paused. “I think.”
THE HIPSTER CONSENSUS
In The Long Tail, Chris Anderson saw the Internet as taking us out of a “watercooler” era—when we “listened, watched, and read from the same, relatively small pool of mostly hit content”—into the “microculture” era, when “we’re all into different things.” Anderson’s conclusion on this score is predicated on the basic economist’s view of human nature: we each have preexisting tastes and preferences, and we use our market choices to satisfy them as best we can. As a medium, the Internet is indeed unprecedented in its ability to sustain fan bases around anything, and thereby segment us around narrow interests. But as we saw in chapter 1, the Internet is also an unprecedented medium for the bandwagon effect, which sways large numbers of people not through some atomized personal choices of each but through each being influenced by the herd behavior of the rest.
The phenomenon that Anderson described is certainly happening, for much the same reasons that our profusion of cable-TV channels has made it impossible for any show, even the Super Bowl, to garner the overwhelming market share that could be achieved in the days of only three networks. More choice translates into more fragmentation. But I would argue that the Internet is working in two contradictory ways on the cultural landscape, and that the interaction between the two forces—the “Long Tail” effect (toward ever splintering niches) and the bandwagon effect (toward more clustering around the same thing)—is a complicated and intriguing one. Think about just this wrinkle: through the Internet, our microcultures all now have watercoolers of their own, and the social pressure within those cultures to rally around common cultural products can be far greater than in the old, offline world. Also: our microcultures, being available online to membership by everyone at all times, can become magnets for huge followings—at which point, arguably, they are not so “micro” anymore.
This has certainly become the case with indie rock, which is more broadly popular by far than it was during the hardcore or college-rock days, and perhaps even more popular than during the corporate-marketed “alternative” rock heyday of the early 1990s. It has become the musical lingua franca of an entire demographic of not just college students but a large chunk of educated urban twenty- and thirtysomethings, whether in New York or San Francisco or D.C. or Seattle. They all vote Democrat, too, and in this regard they reside in the “urban archipelago,” as a very smart essay in Seattle alt-weekly The Stranger called the urban liberal consensus just after the heartbreaking (for us) 2004 election. But more remarkable than this nationwide political consensus is the nationwide cultural consensus that has sprung up within or alongside it. Far from splintering into ever narrower niches,