It was a sequence of just two lateral, crab-like steps that took me from Pete Townshend of The Who to one of the more obscure corners of melophilia. So it turned out that Soli Sorabjee, whose avuncular smile imparts a sunny, SoBo charm to Delhi바카라s Jazz Yatra, is not the only man with that name in music. For here was , an elusive half-European composer who had scored some of 바카라the most technically difficult piano works of the 20th century바카라. The notations onscreen have furious lines and squiggles. Nigh on three decades of obsessively stalking music hadn바카라t even alerted me to his existence바카라and here he was, aswim on YouTube, of all places. Two more steps, and another creature of the deep,. When someone is monikered as 바카라the Russian Schoenberg바카라, you know you바카라re in some plutonic sea.
A full inventory of chance encounters would screw up my word count. But one had long abandoned that initial disdain for this video-sharing jukebox, with its schlocky name, for a very good reason. YouTube inverted the entire logic of scarcity and desire that drove us on hot, lonely afternoons to tiny cassette shops, trying to score a Tarapada Chakraborty, or a Henry Cowell CD. And it did so more pervasively than the cache-and-carry economy of downloading바카라for there, you still stuck to the familiar. As YouTube hit maturation over the years바카라it turned 10 last year!바카라its catalogue of billion-plus videos grew around one premise: the rarer a piece of music out there, the higher the chance that some ex-hippie in a shack in Tennessee would put it up. All you had to do was give yourself over to aleatoric bliss. Learning that Yusufsaab could actually hold down a tune with Lata is so much better than your 2016threplay of RD바카라s klepto-classics.
So now to driving the household up the wall with The Second Dream of the High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer, Polwechsel, UNESCO바카라s Gagaku videos, Blues 101, How to Travis-Pick. But wait바카라music isn바카라t the only thing there. There바카라s How to Speak Korean with Prof Oh, and (for other Africans), there바카라s beef rendang tutorials, there바카라s lymphatic drainage, Tabata workouts, , oil-pulling and enough wellness to make you live till 3016 AD, there바카라s the Chomsky-Foucault debate and bell hooks Speaking Freely, there바카라s that odd jaywalk through Jayan-Jayabharathi moments before one dives into vaults and Tiger Varadachariar. Phew바카라I contain multitudes. Schizoid many times over. There바카라s plenty scopophilia, and cosplay cavortions, and a viewing history that바카라s nothing short of a historysheet. In between, the TV turned into a computer. Out goes ArGo! Click on Apps and let the Chabrol filmography, Chris Marker shorts and Clouzot unspool on your 32-incher. Via the good offices of Chen, Hurley and Karim, the ex-PayPal boys who cooked up this cosmic storm, this online society of the spectacle, with an inane Me at the Zoo in 2005.
Ritwik Ghatak had that laconic quip on (1896), one of the early Lumieres, that it바카라s about 바카라one machine watching another바카라. A similar cusp moment: we바카라re all human-technology symbionts now, they say, 바카라thinking systems whose selves are spread out over biological brains and non-biological circuitry바카라. Still, there바카라s a laser line drawn between the ages. Whether you get your kicks from Buster Keaton or war documentaries, from inter-war jazz, Dylan playlists or Non-Stop Yesudas, you바카라re still essentially doing retro, taking something that already existed out of the archives. The millennials, on the other hand, have grown up watching visuals created for YouTube.
My 17-year-old dotter gives me the lowdown. This is a mode unto itself, with its own genres: gaming, beauty and makeup, sketch videos, reaction videos, prank videos (바카라most of them are douchebags바카라), vloggers, quirky science mavens (: 11 million subscribers), niche ones like Their eponymous creators, the YouTubers, are into the second generation! It even boasts a burnout in Kevjumba, a Taiwanese-Yank 바카라who바카라s turned into a Hindu sadhu바카라. Nigahiga, long-time record-holder at 18.5 mn, is the Bob Beamon of YouTube. The Swede pewdiepie (48.8 mn) is the Usain Bolt. Cult K-pop releases tot up hundreds of millions of hits바카라Canetti바카라s 바카라increase pack바카라 right there. And when Zayn Malik, a Brit boy band바카라s Pak-origin singer, said 바카라pyaar바카라 to a fan, the comments section resembled the LoC, with teenage verbal artillery sounding suspiciously familiar (바카라Omgg바카라that바카라s Urdu바카라바카라바카라no, Hindi, your ancestors were Hindu바카라). Plus ca change.
We who lived in our clay-and-wattle adobe huts of music may miss the 바카라sense of owning바카라 in everything being held in a shifting, impermanent commons. But isn바카라t this a more accurate conceit for culture? The comforting thought is, when Drumpfinator finally presses that button, there will be a fully annotated social history of humankind up there in some digi-cloud near Saturn, where Jimi Hendrix can pause and rewind to see just what the heck that young Mexican busker did between 3:01 and 3:07 secs
Sunil Menon is deputy managing editor at Outlook
A shorter, edited version of this appears in print