Whose reality is it?

Television is rapidly going the way of the dinosaurs. If there is an urgent climate crisis to attend to, it most immediately sits in how mass entertainment is delivered. There is a sea change happening there for sure. Back in the dark ages (ie the 20^th Century) when digital technology was still a dream in most places, mass visual entertainment was governed by TV producers who essentially had the power to dictate how culture looked and felt. Musicians careers could be made overnight by an appearance on a high rating, prime time pop show. It was their shot at the big time and you only got one if you were lucky. Sounds unfair and it was. People talk about #metoo in the movies, and true enough, but it was the same in the music biz too. Power corrupts and all that. You want it, here’s what you gotta do.

This description of the bad old days is not meant to justify or glorify it. It sucked for sure. Good riddance in fact. People are leaving in their droves to go with entertainment tailored to their lives. Yay for freedom of choice and consumer control. 'Say what?' to the cost of it … but that’s another post. 

So what now for TV? In the absence of a mass audience, it is faced with an increasingly desperate struggle for survival against them on-demand streaming services. It’s leading to a significant dumbing down of freely accessible culture as we know it. Anything with high quality production values is being canned as uneconomical. Sport is too expensive to get the rights to. Documentaries that need academic input and deep research are unfeasible. What’s left is endless, syndicated, deep-as-a-puddle news programmes and, most dread of all, reality TV.

Reality TV is cheap to produce because there are still endless lines of folks who want to appear “on the box” as their entry to celebritihood (is that a word?). You don’t even have to pay them, except for the occasional prize that your low-rent sponsor will pony up anyway. Finding a new concept for each one is the hard part, and that’s what raises the question – whose reality are we talking about? There is nothing real about it. You place people in an artificial situation with no parallel in the outside world and watch them struggle with it. The only thing that is real is the stress and desperation of the participants. Each new concept gets more and more absurd. There was recently a show that started in Britain where volunteers had sex in a big box in front of a live audience, then came out and talked about how good or otherwise it was. Then there are the shows with the plastic surgery disaster fixes in front of your very eyes. This isn’t reality, it’s closer to old Victorian freak shows than anything else.

Taking it to its logical extreme, you have to wonder how long it will be before Running Man or the Hunger Games become a thing. Maybe not with the death of the participants, but something hideous and damaging nonetheless. If the victims signed a disclaimer, the producers can’t be prosecuted. And the audience will love it. Surely not you say? Hey, we are the same species that watched Christians get eaten by lions in front of a live audience aren’t we?

It may not come to that, but when an industry gets desperate for survival, things can definitely get ugly and farcical before they are finally snuffed out.

The alternative to a desperate and random independent TV industry is a tightly controlled, state sponsored one. Like Fox News. Enough said.

What does this have to do with music I hear my gentle readers ask. Apart from the fact that there are likely to be ugly talent shows continuing on to the end of TV, not much I guess. Everyone is promoting themselves online now, so there won’t be any more overnight Top of the Pops stars. Even MTV doesn’t care about promoting new talent any more. Nope, what fascinates me is that this was all foreseen donkey’s years ago at a time when there was no digital technology whatsoever. Back then it was tied up with the approach of the Orwellian year 1984, but it is incredible how those nightmares expressed in songs have come true. The lesson being that as a creative artist you should never stop looking to the future and expressing your hopes, fears and apprehensions. Fore-warned is fore-armed and all that – if people are willing to listen that is.

Two of the best examples of this musical clairvoyance, for you to marvel at, are these:

Monitor – Siouxsie and the Banshees.

Written in 1981 and included on the awesome Juju album, this was aiming at 1984, but they missed and hit the year 2000 instead. Siouxsie and co-Banshee Steve Severin were big on committing Orwellian nightmares to wax, but this is so dead-on it’s scary. Think about the Big Brother TV show and 100 Survivor episodes since. “The victim looked up, looked strangely at the screen as if her pain was our fault, but that’s entertainment”. It’s almost like they had written it with their tea and toast while watching the ‘drama’ unfold.

Baby’s on Fire – Brian Eno

Going even further back, this one dates from 1973 and is from the essential Here Come the Warm Jets album. Eno here is writing about the paparazzi exploiting a celebrity sucker before such things really existed. “Photographers snip-snap, take your time she’s only burning”. Prescient and, again, dead-on. This track also features Robert Fripp’s finest ever guitar solo. So intense it will give you goose bumps, guaranteed.

And our stuff? Yep we do a bit of this, but not with the same level of crystal ball gazing. My little guys are mainly focussed on the here and now as the driver of the future. But feel free to check these out for accuracy:

 The future is a scary place if you let it be. It’s not too late for it to still be a choice.