This week Jack and Bob discuss how technology is making witches and warlocks of us all. The sheer act of listening to music the way we do it today would have gotten us burned at the stake just a short 500 years ago.
This week Jack and Bob discuss how technology is making witches and warlocks of us all. The sheer act of listening to music the way we do it today would have gotten us burned at the stake just a short 500 years ago.
So I have to set this episode up with a little non-musical story.
I did my family tree a few years ago and got my mother’s side of the family back – way back. In fact, one of my ancestors had to skip town when he was accused of witchcraft in Salem, Massachusetts by a trio of teenaged girls. It was the start of my family’s migration from Massachusetts Bay to the Hudson Valley in the 17th Century. No one really knows why there was a witch hysteria in Salem in the 1600s but there was. Salem is a prime example of what happens when we listen to teenagers. Seriously, as a former teenager I can confidently say that no one should ever listen to teenagers, in a broad cultural sense.
Human history is full of people getting burned at the stake (worst case) or their fingernails torn out (best case?) because they were supposed witches or heretics. Some of history’s best torture devices are the result of trying to rid the world of witches. Personally, I’ve known a witch or two in my life and I can see why people have adverse reactions to them, but I digress.
The other night I was using my iPad to look for a song to play in my listening room. Almost no vinyl or CD for me anymore, I’m all about high-resolution streaming. TIDAL, Qobuz and the library I have stored on my local server give me access to the entire world’s library of music. Through my control program on my iPad to my stereo and to my waiting ears, with very little effort, now that I’ve got my network working properly. All wireless. All practically instantaneous. None of that low quality Spotify when I really want to listen to music.
Anyway, I had a fragment of a song floating around in my head that I wanted to hear. I couldn’t think of the title, or the artist, but I had the melody line and one line from the chorus. After a few searches I was able to find it and hear it. This is gobsmackingly amazing. By the way, the song was Patches by Clarence Carter.
I can call out any song from any time or place I can imagine, even if I don’t know the title, the artist or even most of the lyric, and with a quick search I can listen to it. My brain thinks of a song, or even a fragment of a song and I can find ways to search for it and within a few seconds, it’s coming out of my speakers. It’s really quite a spectacular thing to be able to do. And it’s something that would have gotten you laughed at for proposing even 20 years ago. Four hundred years ago this kind of thing would’ve gotten my thumbs twisted in a thumb screw – at the very least.
In essence, I have become a conjurer – and so have you. I don’t need a physical item to enjoy one of the great joys of my life. For most of the world one hundred years ago, music was qa transient performance that was played once and then only existed in our fragile memories. Now it just floats around on the cloud waiting for someone to go fetch it. I simply think of it, use my interface to the physical world – my iPad – and off I go.
My tablet is the Eye of Newt, my Roon interface the boiling cauldron of magical potions and my cranial Rolodex of songs (there’s a reference for ya) are the spells I come up with. Snape and Dumbledore have nothing on me when it comes to musical enchantment. If I were to bring an ancestor to the present, I feel this would be the singular thing that would make their head explode. It’s pure magic. Which also might mean it’s pure evil to some, but there are always two sides to change.
What was once magic, and Black Magic at that, is now commonplace. It’s something most of us don’t even think about anymore – we just think of something, engage a few keystrokes and the potion works. The modern age and the technology we invented have made us all conjurers. Alchemists. Merlins. Genies. The Jetsons. The benign power is awesome to behold.
Sure, listening to physical mediums, especially vinyl, have their very own unique and precious rituals and joys, but it’s not physically possible to own and catalog every song ever recorded and released in a physical medium. But in essence today, we can all own any song we can possibly imagine – but we’re not limited by our imaginations, so yeah, that’s something far too powerful to just take for granted.