The Beat

Welcome to The Beat, Decential’s weekly exploration of music, culture and the new Internet – featuring all the friends we’ve met along the way.

On the culture-tech byway, things move at breakneck speeds. From web3 to AI, copyright to collective ownership, art to psychedelics, The Beat is an exercise in association. We all contain multitudes, and within them, vast differences. But there is some connective, fundamental essence to be found.

The Beat is dedicated to that essence; the rest, as Alex Ross wrote, is noise.

Phony Wars

Each week, the New Yorker arrives at my home. That and NPR have been my American moorings whilst living in London. Typically, after a moment of admiring the cover art, I toss it atop the pile. Maybe I’ll actually read this one, cover to cover, I think – maybe this weekend I’ll just do nothing but tackle the whole stack. The mind plays tricks.

But this week I did read some of them. As we approach this monumental election, I recalled a piece I wrote for Vice at the outset of the last Trump presidency. It’s a Brian Eno profile, and in it I quoted the New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik, offering his thoughts as a complement to Eno’s then-new album Reflections. Together they were meant to be a lens into the shifting world. 

At the time, I’d just traveled to D.C. to bear witness to the inauguration. I remember the air had an apocalyptic hue – urban humdrum covered in a thick sheen of dust and haze. From the piece:

Fast forward 7+ years and we have another foreboding, Trump-focused Gopnik essay:

“We may be standing on the edge of an abyss, and yet nothing is wrong, in the expected way of countries on the brink of apocalypse,” he wrote in a piece titled, “As Bad As All That” (and in the online version, “How Alarmed Should We Be If Trump Wins Again?”) “The country is not convulsed with riots, hyperinflation, or mass immiseration. What we have is a sort of phony war – a drôle de guerre, a sitzkrieg – with the vehemence of conflict mainly confined to what we might call the cultural space.”

This time, too, Gopnik invokes culture – that profound yet impalpable societal fabric that’s everywhere and nowhere at the same time. The piece reads as a sort of 2024 White Noise. It represents the culture wars as a DeLillo-esque cataclysm that we feel but can’t touch (no one, however, dies on a ski lift in Austria — ed). And indeed, these “phony” wars are intangible, intractable and still, undeniably real.

Alas, it seems we’re so buried in our respective cultural holes that we’d rather watch the world burn than discover all the things we still share…

Divergence

I was lucky enough to contribute to the latest Outlyr-e piece, which was published yesterday. Readers may remember when I gushed over the Outlyr-e philosophy: “I’m a believer in Outlyr-e’s avant-garde ethos, which is guided by principles like ‘creating consciously, not only based on what is technically possible,’ and ‘seeing and operating beyond siloes.’”

The piece, “The Music Industry as a Field of Cultural Production,” also features the words and thoughts of Oulyr-e co-builders, Jing Yi Teo and Armen Nalbandian, as well as the writer and technologist, Johan Michalove.

Collectively, what the essay demonstrates is the importance of illuminating cultural spectra – non-distinct lines and gradients that are neither Richard Spencer nor Jill Stein. Culture manifests from the networks “beyond siloes,” a vastly complicated plexus of tradition and trend. And what pushes it forward are myriad, so-called “cultural producers,” whose functions are ever-evolving.

“The role of the cultural producer thus shifts from being creators of standalone works to ‘navigators of an ongoing process of meaning-making, situated within a web of associations and relations,’” the piece reads, citing Michalove’s research.

What we’ve become steeped in, though, is a system that exploits and stunts that “ongoing process”:

As a tool for escaping our own algorithmic orbits, the piece proposes divergence:

In thinking on these questions, I was reminded of Dopr, the defunct web3 music discovery platform co-founded by Rob Abelow (the author of the newsletter Where Music’s Going, regularly highlighted in this rag).

Dopr conducted neuroscience research on “music-preference-formation,” orienting around the idea of “familiar surprise,” which, according to a piece co-written by Dopr’s founding team (a trio that included two neuroscience PhD’s) is: “that sweet spot between tradition and innovation, between appropriateness and novelty, between established structure and risk-taking... between familiarity and surprise.”

It was divergence by another name, and an important alternative to repetition, which creates those closed cultural circles and stunts our own personal exploration.

We can extrapolate that phenomenon from music to all of our belief systems. Simply broaden the Outlyr-e sentence and it remains true: “These recommendation formulas go a step further and make the user more predictable by feeding them information that has greater predictive capacity over what they’ll do and think next.”

We’re products of platform and political manipulation, predictable end users who have unwittingly eschewed our own autonomy and rationale. We’ve become pawns in a game of leviathans, one-dimensional and easy to sacrifice. So accustomed are we to our own familiar, isolated worlds – designed for our own personal consumption – that we’ve become afraid of anything that might surprise us. What we’ve lost is wonder, wisdom and each other.

One healing salve is reflection. Last night I went to London’s Buddhist Center, which for more than 40 years has explored a more contemporary sect of Buddhism – one intended to meet the modern world halfway. Between meditations, our teacher expressed the urgent need for more wisdom in the world. He attributed a growing, collective sadness to our declining relationships with the natural world and our own communities. Always, until now, these links have been integral to humans’ well-being.

These losses are all spurred by divisive platforms, which are built for addiction and not for deep thought. They’re machines where instant gratification meets confirmation bias, blinding us to difference, stealing our ability to empathize, and pigeonholing us further into one extreme or another.

From the Eno profile (the NFTs note is a new addition):

In his recent piece, Gopnik once again cited traditional divides in our “electoral space”: “the overlooked vs. the elite, the rural vs. the urban, the coastal vs. the flyover, the aged vs. the young.”

These are all real. But if one reflects for a moment, they’ll realize that so are all of the things we still share: a desire to love and be loved, to be happy, to not have to worry about food or shelter or clean water – and, of course, there’s music.

And even the polarized reflections are a mirage. No one is just one thing. Perhaps if we practice – and design for – familiar surprise and divergence, we’ll understand that. Like Eno, “given some reflection, most of us would probably realize we contain more of the other than we think, too.”

Coda

Last Friday, we lost Phil Lesh. The bassist and founding member of the Grateful Dead died at the age of 84. Known for his high vocal harmonies and for using the bass as a lead instrument, Lesh helped turn the Grateful Dead into an expansive cultural producer that knew few bounds. The band’s eclectic style pulled from rock, blues, folk, country, gospel, reggae, jazz and various other genres.

Even more notable than their music, though, was their committed fanbase of Deadheads. These were people who followed the Dead around the world, drawn as much to them as to the community and ethos that surrounded it.

The band amassed their following by word of mouth, and by the free exchange of live recordings. (They allowed fans to tape their shows.) And it worked.

Earlier this year, despite only ever having one Top 40 single (“Touch of Grey”), the band broke the record for the most Top 40 albums to chart on the Billboard 200 (an astounding 59). It’s a testament to what’s possible.

It’s a sentiment alluded to in another recent edition of the New Yorker, where the writer Hua Hsu reflects on his experience as a music journalist, noting his “glamorous assumptions” of what it must be like to play in a band.

The piece is a review of the book, Band People: Life and Work in Popular Music, by Franz Nicolay (who also plays in the band, the Hold Steady). “The fact that people make music together,” Hsu wrote, “has always appeared to be proof that community is possible.”

Likewise, the fact that the Grateful Dead were able to do what they did – avoid the typical promotional games, shirk the conventions of intellectual property, and unite a truly dedicated and diverse group of people – is proof that more harmonious ways of being are possible.

In 2005, Lesh – considered “the most academic of the group” – published his autobiography, Searching for the Sound: My Life with the Grateful Dead. In it, he reminds us all of our agency – and our responsibility – in pursuing that path:

“If, as some savants of consciousness suggest, we are actually agreeing to create, from moment to moment, everything we perceive as real, then it stands to reason that we're also responsible for keeping it going in some harmonious manner.”

Now go outside and listen to music – it’s a beautiful day.

My name is MacEagon Voyce. For more music and less noise, consider subscribing to The Beat. And if you already do, consider sharing with a friend. Thanks for being here.