Dead Again
We’ve survived yet another year of Black Friday and Cyber Monday, purported to be the nation’s two biggest shopping days. On Friday, I avoided all stores—and everything else for that matter—since I stayed home all day, and yesterday I did not order a single thing online.
But, despite the potential to be inspired by the anti-authoritarian diatribes that followed in the wake of my reaction to “No Music Day” last week, this was no conscious anti-consumerist effort on my part. In fact, on Saturday I made my seventh pilgrimage to the soon-to-be-no-longer Tower Records where I have now racked up a total payout approaching quadruple digits to the liquidators who now reap whatever ends up in the cash registers. And I was hardly alone. Both New York City branches of the place continue to be mobbed every time I walk in the door.
The media keeps running stories about the death of the compact disc. These are the same sages who killed off the LP, as well as all of classical music, a few years back. Of course, a handful of manufacturers continue to press LPs—and LP sales have even gone up in the past year—while classical music is still very much alive and well to millions of people around the world. However, the media can proudly claim that their version of reality is the truth since neither the LP nor classical music is of interest to the majority of people and is therefore outside the mainstream, hence dead.
But the rules are somewhat different now in a post-mainstream world. At this point there is almost no aspect of culture (high, low, or whatever prefix-du-jour you care to affix to it) that can garner the interest of a majority in our demographically ghettoized consumer market. So then how can anything die? Pundits boast that digital downloads are garnering close to 20 percent of the market share in some quarters of the music business. Even if Ross Perot had managed to get 20 percent of the vote, he still wouldn’t have gotten elected President.
Of course, if you drum an idea into people’s heads long enough, they’ll start to agree with you. The authoritarians whom last week’s posters railed against knew such methods better than anyone else. In a world where alternative viewpoints grow more difficult to hear, and where at the same time almost everyone seems to be suffering to some degree from attention deficit order, it’s difficult to elicit constructive debates let alone multiple viewpoints that can be mutually respected even if they are not shared. Yet, amidst the sadness at seeing the classical section of Tower almost completely decimated at this point, it was simultaneously extremely gratifying to see that enough people were still buying classical CDs—which even at 40 percent off still aren’t all that cheap—to cause that decimation.