Last week was a little heavy, so let’s talk about something a little lighter this week!
Earlier this week, Gerri Miller passed away and that hit me pretty hard (no, honestly it does get lighter). For those who don’t know, Gerri Miller was the editor of Metal Edge magazine in the 1980’s and 1990’s, something I read religiously every month. Growing up in a small town in southern Ontario, there wasn’t a lot of entertainment news coming my way. If I was SUPER lucky the news might feature one of the superstar artists of the day in a little entertainment blurb but that’s only if they did something really bad or were coming to one of the ‘local’ big cities (and by that I mean Buffalo or Toronto which were pretty out of reach for me in my early teens).It was magazines like Metal Edge that brought me the information about what bands were recording new albums, who the ‘hot’ new bands were, who had broken up, what bands they were in now, etc. Oh, and most of the time, this information was a LEAST a month or two out of date. You know, the downside of having to write, edit, layout and publish a monthly magazine. Metal Edge, and magazines like it, introduced me to Guns N’ Roses, Poison, Little Caesar, The Dogs D’Amour, Skid Row and many others that were NOT getting airplay on local or Toronto radio, and this was before MuchMusic was playing their videos on rotation regularly. It was a time when you had to take it on faith that if a band LOOKED kind of like something you’d be into, that it was worth your hard earned money to try and find their album and give it a listen.
Now whenever Joe Elliot of Def Leppard has a poop, someone has posted it on Instagram within minutes, bands are giving us snippets of new music as it’s created and we only have to check our phones to take a listen to a song or two from a new band to see if they are worth our time. Heck, just this morning I whipped through my ‘New Music For You’ recommended playlist on Spotify while I was writing this. Any band that caught my ear, I immediately went and looked up to see what I could find out about them…which made this piece really hard to write, too distracted! The internet has definitely taken the mystery out of music. A band like Kiss could never exist in the internet age. Want to know who ‘The Demon’ is under that make up? Gimme a minute, I’ll Google images. In a lot of ways the internet has become an equalizer of sorts: artists aren’t larger than life figures, they’re regular people who either have a crap load of talent or got REALLY lucky and met the right person at the right time. Or both. But that is also a bit of a curse since we have those HUGE figures to look up to.
And it’s not just music that has lost its mystery, it’s pretty much everything. You can watch ‘How To Write Like Margaret Atwood’ videos on YouTube or follow Matt Fraser (former multiple time Crossfit Champion) on Instagram to see his training and nutrition regime. You can download and try out books before you decide if you want to try to read the entire thing. Now, any time something happens with anyone of note, it’s pretty much guaranteed to be on the internet within minutes. For better or worse.
Actually one of the worst things for me lately has been movies. Not just the spoilers that you get to see by watching ‘reviews’ that essentially give everything away, but the behind the scenes and ‘how we did it’ videos. When I was a kid, not only was I amazed and enamored with Star Wars, but when they did eventually run a ‘The Magic of Star Wars’ special on TV years later, it didn’t spoil it all for me because it came out AFTER. My kids, on the other hand, have actually started to lose that ‘suspension of disbelief’ that many of us grew up with. My oldest and I were watching an Avengers movie the other day and there is a pretty poignant scene where Iron Man shuts off. It would have been tear jerking had my 11 year old not said, ‘Hey Dad, this is the part where they had a guy sitting beside the camera guy counting down and then pushing a button on a little control panel to turn off the LED’s in Iron Man’s suit. They were all remote controlled.’ Thanks for ruining that kid!
I’m not complaining, really. I wouldn’t change my memories of having to wait ‘forever’ to find out scraps of information about new bands any more than I would change the ability to go and listen to brand new music immediately if I want to. I do miss the mystery though. I worry that my kids are going to become jaded and lose their sense of wonder, the ability to get absolutely lost in a movie or album because long before they spend any time with it, they’ve already seen a video on YouTube showing them exactly how it was all done, or listened to 20 seconds of a song for free on Spotify and decided it wasn’t for them.
