I had a bit of an epiphany last night.  I don’t know if it’s particularly profound, but I feel like my eyes were opened to a few truths that I have long known and simply forgotten to apply in my life.

First thing.  I have been a music person my entire life.  I have listened to music, thought in music, sang to myself in the car, in the shower, written my own songs, recorded music, performed music, learned instruments, collected music, obsessed over music.  I know people who maybe own two or three CDs and casually listen to Spotify, you know, normal people.   In contrast, I have literally thousands of albums in numerous formats: vinyl records, shellac 78s, CDs, cassettes, reel to reel tapes, digital files, you name it.  OK, I don’t have any 8-track carts, gotta draw the line somewhere, but I do actually own a functional hand-cranked Columbia Grafonola record player. 

I’ve personally been involved with and worked on the recording of at least 40 recorded albums or singles as either a performer, engineer, producer, or sometimes all of the above.  I have a recording studio in my basement.  I own dozens of musical instruments.  Guitars, basses, drum kits, keyboards, horns, accordions, slide whistles.  Hell, there is a documentary being made in which my musical endeavors and life’s work feature prominently. 

I say all of this to highlight the fact that you would be hard-pressed to find a person who’s life is more obviously centered around music, which makes it all the more strange to me that I’ve been so out of touch, emotionally and professionally, with music for the last few years. 

I have played in several bands and participated in the documentary, but I haven’t released a new album of original music since a minor acoustic EP that I recorded in a day back in December 2014.  I used to wonder if something was wrong with me if I didn’t release an album a year, at least, and I’m now coming up on six years with nothing to show for it except for the memories of some gigs played, a handful of unfinished projects and a few one-off songs or videos.  I have written and recorded things but I just haven’t been able to get into any sort of rhythm (pun intended) with my musical life.  I think that’s because I haven’t HAD a musical life.  Instead, I have been knee deep in the Miasma and it’s killed my sense of joy, wonder, and creativity.  At the same time, as a listener, I have allowed music to become a background wallpaper to my daily life instead of truly engaging with, appreciating it, eating, sleeping, and breathing it as I used to do.

The Miasma is a term I recently acquired from the book Fall; or, Dodge in Hell by author Neal Stephenson.  It is the catch-all term for the cultural wasteland of insanity, trolling, confirmation bias, misinformation, distortion, propaganda, bad blood, viral marketing, and lowest common denominator garbage that the modern internet has descended into.  Everything about the public discourse, the endless doomscrolling, the sheer end of the world nihilism of late stage capitalism, authoritarianism, stupidity, violence, and (bonus!) a global pandemic, it’s all so disheartening, so maddening, that turning on a television, reading a newspaper, looking at a social media feed, or visiting nearly any part of the internet for any reason is guaranteed to make whatever mood I am in worse.  Good moods become bad moods, bad moods become dire.

Instead of using music or meditation or poetry or art or any of the other tools at my disposal to counter the effects of the Miasma, I have fallen into an engagement trap based on the fact that, at one point, I used to love the internet.  I did.  I believed in it.  I thought it was a net-positive for humanity.  In the world before the web, communities were more physically isolated, knowledge harder to access, there was much more terra incognita.  The promise of the web and the connected digital society as laid out by luminaries like Ted Nelson, Vannevar Bush, Nicholas Negroponte, Alan Kay, and even Steve Jobs was so appealing.  It was almost like a second Enlightenment Age dawning.  All the worlds knowledge available, all the communications barriers broken.  How could this be anything other than an Objectively Good Thing?

Well, as it turns out, every silver lining has a cloud.  As it turns out, people were not historically hostile and tribal merely because of limited communications technology or limited access to information.  People are hostile and tribal because they have been made that way through billions of years of natural selection.  They require almost no incentive whatsoever to pick sides and develop animosity towards each other.  Kurt Vonnegut nailed it with his granfalloon concept.  Thanks to this programming, hyper-connecting all the people was always going to mean that the people who thrive on rancor, discord, and negativity would have louder voices and more power to shape our culture than they did before.  Capitalism, which naturally goes where the market leads, would naturally find ways to monetize and stoke this hostility and division in order to make money.  Religions and political parties would do the same, feeding the flames to advance power and agendas.  These are not new forces in human society, they existed as far back as written history records and likely much further back.  It turns out that the previous limits imposed by geography, technology, and access to information were also holding some of our tribalism and collective insanity in check by channeling it into narrow and somewhat isolated outlets.  That is no longer possible.  Thanks to the democratizing power of the internet, we now have all of the foibles and ridiculousness of our species running amok, unfettered, unchecked by any force, Enlightenment 2: Electric Boogaloo has given way to Idiocracy 2: Boogaloo Now Means Race War.

But wait a minute, I hear you saying, wasn’t this post about music?  Yeah, yeah, I’m getting there, it’s my blog, I wanna take a while to get to my point, that’s my prerogative.  Keep your shirt on.

OK, so, the Miasma was probably inevitable, in retrospect, but I didn’t anticipate it.  I believed, perhaps too strongly, in the positive and empowering aspects of the always on, hyper-connected, society.  I thought it would lead me to more creativity (more ability to share what you create is good, right?), more human connection (all my old friends are here, that’s gotta be good, right?), and all the old hassles of primitive technologies would be rendered obsolete by the wireless, simple, one device to rule them all vision of the smartphone as digital camera, digital music player, GPS, movie player, social life, VR headset, internet information appliance, dessert topping, floor wax, etc.   I was an early adopter.  I was a proponent.  I was a fan. 

I was wrong.

The all-in-one device is a marvel of convenience, but it makes focused attention on any one single thing of value extremely challenging.  Always being connected is great for knowing where to find a gas station while driving in an unknown area or for settling a bet about a piece of trivia with a friend, but it creates a constant psychological drag on the real world experience of every day life because you often feel compelled to use it just because it’s there and you’re bored for 5 whole consecutive seconds.  A globally connected platform for delivering creative work to audiences is theoretically empowering for artists, but since everybody throws everything out there, nothing feels special or unique or lasting, almost everything feels ephemeral, transitive, meaningless, like a night at an open-mic where the entire audience is on-stage at once, talking at the same time. 

In the Miasma, all of these things that hypothetically could have been enriching, empowering, and inspiring have mostly turned to shit.  Devalued, corrupted, monetized, destroyed, and we as a society have been lessened to the extent where Donald Fucking Trump actually became President of the United States.  Think about that.  As far back as the 80’s that would have been the punchline to a joke about America failing as a country and IT.  ACTUALLY.  HAPPENED.

I can chart my decline in creative interest and output on a graph (yes, I’ve actually done this on paper) and it directly correlates to the rise of the post-Facebook/post-iPhone Miasma version of the internet.  My flagging interest in saying anything whatsoever to the world at large, my increasing disinterest in my OWN MUSICAL WORK, my general sense of despondency about anything, or anyone, anywhere, truly mattering at all, my ever deeper struggles with the blank page or blank tape, it all correlates perfectly to the amount of time I have spent online since the New Enlightenment turned into the Miasma. 

The question is, what is a boy to do?

The internet I fell in love with is gone, for good.  The world I grew up in is radically changed.  No use looking backwards, it is what it is. I can limit my online time, work on my mindfulness, and swear a lot, but it I can’t undo what’s been done.  This is where my job is.  This is where my friends are.  This is how the music and tech industries function.  If I want to work in technology and/or be a creative, I can’t pretend the cultural landscape is what it was 12 years ago. 

I think the answer, ironically(?), is hinted at in trends I am beginning to encounter in the habits of the generation being raised with hyper-connectivity and social networking since childhood.  They are not enamored of apps and smartthings, they don’t think they’re especially cool or interesting, and they don’t inherently think the digital stuff is better or worse than what came before it.  It’s all just tech.  This is why a lot of people these days are, apparently, rediscovering mixtapes made with actual cassettes.  I did not foresee cassettes coming back, but they are.  Why?  Making mix tapes with your own voice and choices of songs was fun when I was a kid and it’s still fun now.  Who cares that you can listen to the same songs on your phone on Spotify?  That doesn’t feel unique like a tape does.  Another example, my niece became obsessed with typewriters at age 12 despite having a smartphone and tablet.  People who didn’t experience the migration from analog to digital to networked are not inherently biased against the old tools and can even appreciate their quirks and limits but mostly they appreciate the physicality, the reality, of analog. 

The Miasma is an endless stream of mostly negative messages masquerading as news, relationships, and information which is tailored to hook you, personally, and to shape your world and your view of it.  Unconnected technology only puts out what you put into it, there is no agenda, no secret influencers.  Maybe the way to get creative again is, in part, to only use tools and technologies that don’t try to influence my behaviors. 

And while I do think that’s a part of it, the real insight I had is that the flip side of the Miasma is how it makes you, me, everybody who participates, into both influenced and influencer.  We are all trying to culturally signify our alignments, beliefs, and affiliations.  We are all posting selfies and liking posts and crafting a semi-public persona as a type of performance art.  This is not an environment that fosters or encourages actual creativity.  In fact, it’s an active impediment because it creates the illusion of creativity.

Taking a photograph and applying some funny filter to it or cobbling together a meme is an act of creation, sure, but it’s more craft than art.  It’s more like making a hand-print turkey painting than it is like writing a confessional poem.  These types of minor creative output are mostly imitative or derivative, and the primary value is amusing other people.  These are all performance, but not all art is performance.

I recently read something written by Jeff Buckley in the liner notes to the posthumously released collection of material he was working on at the time of his death “Sketches for My Sweetheart the Drunk”.  He wrote the following about his songwriting:

There is also music I’ll make that will never-ever-ever be for sale. This is my music alone, this is my true home; from which all things are born and from which all my life will spring untainted and unworried, fully of my own body.

And this is something I have known for a very long time but I have let myself forget, the simple basic fact that you need to create first and foremost for your ears alone, for your heart alone, for your soul alone, if you want to have a home to share with others.  You can’t make that kind of art with the thoughts, feelings, opinions, or judgments of other people in mind.  You can’t be wondering if they will like you or what you have to say.  It’s not about them.  It’s the opposite of performance.  It’s self-exploration.  The more my life has become about the performances and manipulations of the Miasma, the more I’ve come to critically judge my own work and the less free I have felt to just play, explore, experiment, and enjoy the process of making music that nobody will ever hear.  I’ve been laboring under the false feeling that if I make music that I don’t think is “releasable” then I shouldn’t have bothered to make it.  When I was in high school sitting cross-legged on my bed with a four-track recorder recording ambient soundscapes about Tony Bennett or swarms of bees I wasn’t worrying about anybody hearing me or caring what I was doing…  I was having fun.

Fun.  Yes, fucking FUN.  Where is fun in 2020?  Where is joy in 2020?  Where is there joy to be found in the endless doomscroll of the Miasma or the viral marketing hellscape or the endless disgusting behavior of the bigots and fundamentalists or the constant manipulation of influencers and trends and memes and the barrage of messages and notifications and micro and macro time sinks of modern life?  I’ll tell you where it is.  Nowhere.  Missing in action.

And there, ladies and gentlemen, there is the key in all of this navel gazing.  Without fun, without joy, even the joy of painful catharsis (and yes, there is joy to be found in working through painful emotions, just think of the joy of relief when you remove a really bad splinter), what are you sharing?  What have you got other than an empty “look at me”? 

I’ve let the Miasma train me.  I’ve let it get me focused on publishing, producing, consuming and being consumed, constantly trying to drink a bottomless pool dry, and neglecting the square one of unplugging, playing, doing things just because they are interesting, making music for nobody else to hear, remembering that the bad news will still be there whether you look at it or not but that your soul won’t be if you won’t look after it.  When was the last time I just put on a record and listened to it without also being online?  When the last time I picked up a guitar and just made something up with no plan?  When was the last time I turned away from all screens, tablet, television, phone or e-reader, and just lived in the world of the actual senses? 

I am not sure.  I know that my entire life was spent in real space up to a point, and then it started digitizing, and it eventually wound up twisted around this shared online fiction we now call a culture, but the answer is not about “going back”, it’s not about “disconnecting”, it’s about remembering that the Miasma cannot provide meaning, it cannot provide true joy, but music can, real life can, and if I want to find that again, I need only remember how to play, how to write for myself and myself alone, and then to make a conscious decision to stop participating in the endless performance.