The standout song from R.E.M.’s Out of Time, back when I first bought the album as a painfully sincere 16-year-old, and still my favorite. While the instrumentation fulfills the role of almost all of the other songs on the album – mostly acoustic, mid-tempo, restrained and utterly pleasant – what always appealed to me about the song was the aching longing in Michael Stipe’s singing, the vibration and voice cracking that lends it some kind of weird emotional authenticity that really appealed to me back then. It was “Losing My Religion” as a single than made me buy the album, but it was this song that made me into an R.E.M. fanatic for years, excitedly watching for their television appearances and hoping that they’d do this one.
366 Songs 197: After Hours
I won’t lie; the shooting in Aurora, Colorado at the end of last week flattened me in a way I wouldn’t have expected. Not just emotionally, although it did that – I felt exhausted by it, just saddened that such a thing could happen and that someone could do it, if that doesn’t sound too pathetic and naive – but practically, too, as it meant an immediate rewrite for some things I had written ahead of deadline that would suddenly seem crass and in poor taste when they eventually appeared (Two things had to be replaced altogether) on a day when I already had too much to do. The reason I tell you that is to explain why the blog essentially went dark of the weekend; I just needed to get offline and get my head straight again.
So, have this song, as I return and begin again. One of my favorites, because Maureen Tucker’s vocals are so artless and honest, you can’t help but be drawn in, and find yourself smiling despite yourself. Such beautifully vulnerable lyrics, too (“Someday I know/Someone will look into my eyes/And say hello/You’re my very special one” always gets me, I admit).
I first heard this song in a significantly different version, years before I heard the Velvet Underground original:
For some reason, Michael Stipe’s performance in this version from the end of R.E.M.’s Tourfilm made me wonder if this was actually a “real song” at all, or just some joke song the band had made up to finish off shows. I remember finding the original and being both surprised and happy that it had an authenticity that the version I knew so well lacked.
The Internet Really Is Bad For You
Questions about the Internet’s deleterious effects on the mind are at least as old as hyperlinks. But even among Web skeptics, the idea that a new technology might influence how we think and feel—let alone contribute to a great American crack-up—was considered silly and naive, like waving a cane at electric light or blaming the television for kids these days. Instead, the Internet was seen as just another medium, a delivery system, not a diabolical machine. It made people happier and more productive. And where was the proof otherwise?
Now, however, the proof is starting to pile up. The first good, peer-reviewed research is emerging, and the picture is much gloomier than the trumpet blasts of Web utopians have allowed. The current incarnation of the Internet—portable, social, accelerated, and all-pervasive—may be making us not just dumber or lonelier but more depressed and anxious, prone to obsessive-compulsive and attention-deficit disorders, even outright psychotic. Our digitized minds can scan like those of drug addicts, and normal people are breaking down in sad and seemingly new ways.
– From “Is The Web Driving Us Mad?,” here. Reading this, I was reminded of this recent study from the UK, which makes the same point; the Internet is/can be bad for us. Depressingly, I’m not surprised; I have found myself having that very described anxiety and “need” to check the Internet and see what’s happening, and I tell myself that I need to for my job, even though I know that’s not exactly what’s going on. It’s why I’ve started to try to remain unplugged during the weekends, or at least as unplugged as possible. Redirecting that desire to read things and learn things, and instead looking for other experiences to fill up that part of me.
Lying Liars, Journalists, Manipulation, etc.
When the news is decided not by what is important but by what readers are clicking; when the cycle is so fast that the news cannot be anything else but consistently and regularly incomplete; when dubious scandals scuttle election bids or knock billions from the market caps of publicly traded companies; when the news frequently covers itself in stories about ‘how the story unfolded’—media manipulation is the status quo. It becomes, as Daniel Boorstin, author The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America, once put it, a “thicket …which stands between us and the facts of life.
Today the media—driven by blogs—is assailed on all sides, by the crushing economics of their business, dishonest sources, inhuman deadlines, pageview quotas, inaccurate information, greedy publishers, poor training, the demands of the audience, and so much more. These incentives are real, whether you’re the Huffington Post or CNN or some tiny blog. They warp everything you read online—and let me tell you, thumbnail-cheating YouTube videos and paid-edit Wikipedia articles are only the beginning.
That’s Ryan Holiday, self-styled “media manipulator,” writing about the reason it’s so easy to detourn the media these days, in Forbes. He’s so skilled at it, he says, he’s even written a book about his experiences, called Trust Me, I’m A Liar – as well as being the subject, two days later, of a profile… in Forbes:
Holiday does it for the attention, the opportunity to point out some of the excesses of the modern blogosphere, and the LOLs. Empires will not fall because he claimed someone once sneezed on him. Still, it gives one reason to stop and think about what the quest for traffic and eyeballs does to news. Depending on how you look at it, stunts like this either erode the trust a reader has in a publication, or point out that it may have been misplaced to begin with. It’s not a big leap to imagine somebody using those same tools for more nefarious purposes.
“A well made article and a poorly made article both do clicks the same way,” says Holiday. “There’s no incentive to do good work. We know that quotas make cops do shitty things, or academic admissions offices do shitty things, and they make bloggers do shitty things too.”
His theory is that, with so much output expected of journalists and writers these days, sources can easily lie and get away with it because the time to fact check is at a minimum, and the need to be “first” is king. There’s definitely something to these criticisms – Look at the Healthcare reporting or, on a far smaller scale, Kate Kotler’s misreporting of a San Diego Comic-Con press conference and then vehement defense of said before reality and an editor forced an awkward apology for proof (The Kotler thing has been in my brain for a few days now; there’s something to be written about it, but I’m not sure what just yet) – but I can’t escape the fact that what is actually happening here is that someone is saying “These people are under pressure so I am breaking trust just to prove that I can, aren’t I a hero?” And the answer, for me, is “No, you’re a dick.”
This whole subject is a hot topic right now, thanks to Greenpeace’s ArcticReady campaign, in which they have created social media accounts and websites pretending to be Shell oil, and gone about pretending to be inept, mean and generally pathetic. As a prank, it’s working; lots and lots of people are sharing links about how terrible Shell is, and ha ha they don’t get how Twitter works. But, thing is, none of those people know they’re being lied to. Maybe I’m just old-fashioned, but my reaction to this isn’t “Yay, you’re proving a point!” but “You are lying to people for your own amusement, and that’s not actually okay.” Martin Robins at the New Statesman put it best for me:
The real villain here is Greenpeace. This is an NGO that thinks it is acceptable to lie to the public, to lie to bloggers and journalists, and to then intimidate writers with threatening emails warning of legal action. This absolutely is not okay. I don’t care if you’re saving the Arctic, rescuing kittens from YouTube’s vicious pet-celebrity training camps, or training pandas to pull famine-ridden children out of earthquake debris; to behave in this deceitful way demonstrates an astonishing amount of contempt for the public – not least for environmentalist supporters who spread their message in good faith only to find themselves forced into embarrassing retractions.
And for what? It’s not like there’s any shortage of real scandals to draw attention to. As I write this, Reuters have just reported that Shell could face a US$5 billion fine for a major oil spill off the Nigerian coast that affected 950 square kilometres of water and caused serious harm to local communities. An analysis published last year by the United Nation’s Environment Programme estimated that it could take thirty years to clean up damage to the Ogonil and region in the Niger Delta, pollution caused in part by Shell’s activities in the area. With real scandals like this to cover, inventing fake ones isn’t just unnecessary but actually quite crass.
The defense of “The media are lazy” doesn’t actually hold water here; the media are covering that the Arctic Ready campaign is a lie – I wrote about it for Digital Trends on Monday – but “the media” is outpaced by social media, and the fact that people want to believe the Arctic Ready campaign… which, for me, brings it back to the fact that those whole think they’re lying to expose something are really just exposing the bad sides of themselves and those who listen to them.
366 Songs 196: Fender Roads
It’s one of those days when David Holmes’ Oceans soundtracks seem like the best thing to listen to; the retro funk, the seeming ease of the whole thing as it swings along, the almost architectural balance between all of the different instruments, all suggesting a world where we’re all more stylish, with more swagger and more likelihood of getting through the day not only in one piece, but with everyone else looking at us in jealousy and barely-contained lust. Oh, to dream of such a life…
Look At Me, Leading Time.com Again (I Am Freaking Out Over Here)
The Invisible Man
Hey, remember I was talking about ownership of what you work on, and the fact that I get depressed when I think about my lack of ownership/control about what I wrote for io9 the other day?
It may be difficult to tell from that screenshot, but that’s what happens if you click on my name on any story I’ve written for that site now. Instead of a profile that lists all of my stories, you get a “Profile not found” page. I found that out yesterday, finding an old story of mine while Googling for information on something, and then clicking through to have what I expected would be a bittersweet moment of nostalgia.
There’s no malice behind it, I don’t think; the site has been updated and overhauled at least twice since I left, and it’s more than likely no-one bothered to update profiles for writers who weren’t with the company any more when such updates were being made. But still, it’s a funny/sad full stop to that whole period of my life, I guess, and an illustration of what I was talking about before.
At least you can still find me on Techland.
366 Songs 195: Cheese and Onions
Aside from the fact that this is a perfect parody of the Beatles’ psychedelic period output – Seriously, the arrangement and production on this are ideal; if you took off the vocal, you could probably convince many that this was some unfinished Beatles track with George Martin working on it behind the scenes – what makes me love this song above all other Rutles tracks is the horrendous pun at the center of it: “Do I have to spell it out?” Neil Innes sings, before going on to spell out the words “cheese and onions.” That he ends that spelling bee recitation with “Oh no” (Making it finish “Oh En Eye Oh En Ess Oh No”) is just the icing on a particularly enjoyable cake.
In another world, Oasis would’ve grabbed Innes to produce one of their albums.
366 Songs 194: Every Single Night
If ever a song made me want to give the artist a hug, this would be a strong contender for the that title. There’s such a vulnerability here, not only in the obvious moments (The fluttering “I just want to feel everything,” sung in such weightless tones, you worry that Fiona Apple is about to disappear before you), but the force behind the “Every single night is a fight with my brain,” with that last word drawn out with aggression and restrained anger. Add in the visualization of creativity as not only pregnancy (“These ideas of mine/Percolate the mind/Trickle down the spine/Swarm the belly, swelling to a blaze”) but a painful, difficult birth (“Brother, get back/Cause my breast’s gonna bust open/The rib is the shell and the heart is the yolk yoke/And I just made a meal for us both to choke on”), and there’re layers to pick through here, and all of this something to recognize with, empathize with and wish you could make it easier for her.
(That the instrumentation in the opening and closing so closely resembles something like a music box or child’s toy just underscores the intent of vulnerability; it’s sentimental and cheap, but it definitely works…)
366 Songs 193: Werewolf
There’s something consistently alluring about the way in which Fiona Apple’s vocals throw themselves around in a similar way to her lyrics. Listen to the swoop and the dive of her here, as she condemns a former lover and takes responsibility for her own culpability all at once (“I could liken you to a werewolf/The way you left me for dead/But I admit/That I provided a full moon”), or the sweep of her voice as she reaches “One thing leads to another…” and the note changes, weirdly comfortably as the piano drives beneath her. In many ways, this feels like the archetypal Apple song, smart, blunt, complex and just a little scattered. It’s honest, and yet disguised enough to keep the innocent unnamed. If only more confessional artists had such skill.