Got Live If You Want It (On My Flickr Page)

A discussion of the incessant(ly annoying) urge for folks to make blurry visual documents of the shows they attend is happening here and here and here. Though I've been known to snap a few pix here and there at shows, that tendency has waned exponentially along with my fascination at, you know, being able to do it. I'm not really that awed at my Canon Powershot anymore, nor at the 4 megapixel photomaker on my phone (which, at some point in the past year or so, created the wonderful image above).

Plenty of people are still enamored with theirs, though. Much of the amateur photo concert-glut is attributable to the availability of the technology, of course. But that's not all; the pictures aren't taking themselves. As the ever-entertaining Lindsay Robertson pointed out 2.5 years ago, the urge to make a visual testimonial from what's otherwise a fleeting, transcendent experience is strong:

Hey did anyone take pictures at the Arctic Monkeys show last night at Mercury Lounge? Like, maybe...100 people? Ruining the show for those of us who were there to actually enjoy it, not to prove that we saw it? Causing the lead singer to say after the very first song:

"Wow, lots of cameras...put your cameras down and enjoy the show!"

Guess how many people did? That's right: zero! 'Cause god forbid they just snap a few and then rock out like a normal person. Noooooo, they must get every angle in order to prove to their readers and friends that they were there, that they were at the cool show on the cool night with their cool camera. So cool.

Cameras are ruining everything. Everything.

Okay, well maybe. The urge to document live events has existed as long as the technology's been around to do so, but when dealing with recorded music performed in a live setting, there's a catch, I think, that's led to shows being overrun by people getting those flash-lit photos of, you know, the backs of the heads of people in front of them. To get deeper into this, and maybe move toward why the desire is so prevalent nowadays, let's start with Sasha Frere-Jones' New Yorker article about T-Pain and autotune. Toward the end of the piece, he offers a defense of studio tricks:

there is nothing natural about recorded music. Whether the engineer merely tweaks a few bum notes or makes a singer tootle like Robby the Robot, recorded music is still a composite of sounds that may or may not have happened in real time. An effect is always achieved, and not necessarily the one intended. Aren’t some of the most entertaining and fruitful sounds in pop—distortion, whammy bars, scratching—the result of glorious abuse of the tools? At this late date, it’s hard to see how the invisible use of tools could imply an inauthentic product, as if a layer of manipulation were standing between the audience and an unsullied object. In reality, the unsullied object is the Sasquatch of music. Even a purely live recording is a distortion and paraphrasing of an acoustic event.

Frere-Jones is preceded in this line of thinking (the perception of "inauthenticity" in recorded music) by Simon Frith, who in Performing Rites writes about the unique disconnect between the studio production of a song and the live performance of same. Stick with us here:

To hear music is to see it performed, on stage, with all the trappings. I listen to records in the full knowledge that what I hear is something that never existed, that could never exist, as a 'performance,' something happening in a single time and space; nevertheless, it is now happening, in a single time and space: it is thus a performance and I hear it as one, imagine the performers performing even when this just means a deejay mixing a track, an engineer pulling knobs.

Even without such naivete, I think it can be argued that the 'act' of singing is always contextualized by the 'act' of performing; and if the latter, like any other stage role, is put together behind the scenes, the former takes place in public: we see and hear the movement in and out of character; we watch this aspect of the performance as a performance.

Okay, one more. Philip Auslander is a guy I don't always agree with, but he takes Frith a slight step further here, touching on that ever-so-touchy issue of "authenticity" in a productive way:

Our ability to visualize the performance of rock music as we listen to it is dependent on the availability of visual artifacts that show us what the musicians look like in performance...the listening experience must be supplemented by additional artifacts: posters, booklets that come with the recordings, and the paraphenalia of fandom...While recordings and the visual artifacts proffer evidence of authenticity, only live performance can certify it for rock ideology.

This leads toward the question posed by all these amateur photogs at indie shows: are mp3s-- the common currency for music distribution these days-- also inauthentic representations of the music, helping create a culture in which so many feel the need to not only say "I was there", but also "The band was there!"? In other words, when the majority of people are listening to music as digital files with very limited information of any sort about the artists, does the need to "authenticate" the music by documenting its presence right in front of them increase that much more?

I'm inclined to agree with Frith and Auslander and Frere-Jones that, when you stop and think about it for a minute, recorded music is an unreal experience, something that never really existed in real time, and that is altered in the studio in innumerable (and often unnoticeable) ways. From there, we try to make the experience of simply "listening to music" into something more tangible: At the most basic level, we go to concerts, and at concerts, some of us block others by taking pictures on their cellphones for entire sets. Of course, plenty of people take (and have always taken) wonderful, high-quality photos at shows (Kathryn's the only person who comes to mind, but she's also the best example). Now, though, 20 times more people take blurry, low-light snapshots, often from the exact same position over and over until they get the perfect one, and post all of those pictures on their Flickr account or blog.

I don't think the amateur phenomenon is independent of either the current technologies that facilitate it, or the broader entertainment environment within which it's situated. You know the spiel: Access to the means of media production has been ridiculously dispersed, everything is intangible now, and ye olde evergreen lament is everywhere that No One Is Human Anymore, No One Talks To Anyone In Person Anymore, No One Can Go To A Concert Without Capturing It, and We Are All Devo. "Live"ness is thus still as much of a necessity to authenticate recorded music as it was when people played sheet music in their parlors for their friends. Within indie at the Technorati moment, it's often used as an arbiter of a band's true abilities (blowing live is often seen as tantamount to killing on CD; more than a few groups are "great live", making the mediocre recorded stuff bloom colorfully and fresh) as much as, well, proof that the band is right there.

This sort of authentication happens in the realm of more traditional criticism, too. No Age, a pretty good-but-pretty-not-great band from L.A., is inextricable from its place of origin, by their own design and, as Mike mentioned here, critics' designs as well. In his blog post, Mike laments the conservative impulse to associate authenticity with place:

If you want to see what it looks like when we become our parents, check out the idea that the internet is getting in the way of kids these days having an authentic indie-rock experience. That's only true if the internet is somehow inauthentic, e.g. not a culture of its own, and I think refusing to acknowledge that is much more evidence of being out-of-touch than not liking emo.

I certainly agree with Mike that knee-jerk reactions against the Web's capacity for community-building seem anachronistic at best. In her No Age review that Mike cites, Petrusich claims that the Web has helped disperse and lessen the impact of "real" local scenes. I disagree most strongly with the black/white binary between the two that she offers. If anything, I strongly think that local, real-life music cultures are flourishing right now exactly because they know how to use the Web exceedingly well, and vice-versa. The most conservative impulse separates off-and-online fandom into mutually-exclusive spheres (this sort of thing usually has some sort of political agenda--not necessarily in Amanda's case, though). In reality, the two leech off of each another constantly-- "real" venues benefit from the incredible publicity afforded by the Web, and "virtual" communities trade on the allure of the authenticity of a place like the Smell. Or, pictures of hip bands playing at that place.

There are now, as there have always been, numerous forms of accessorial art/mythmaking/documentation that go along with listening. It's the "coverflow" part of iTunes that slows down my entire computer. It's the reason that I've pretty much stopped buying CDs in lieu of records. It's drumming along on my desk with my fingers. It's standing up and doing this dance to "High Fidelity" and pretending my own audience thinks I'm the transcendent one. And, for better or worse, it's the Powershot brigade, coming soon to a venue near you, to enthusiastically blur beyond recognition and save to a memory card a visual document an event that most always is best kept within the capricious realm of human recollection.