Anti-Climacus

Another book to read at some point:

It’s not so much the selling-­out that saddens Reynolds. Rather, it’s our ready acceptance that the past is our only future: that after postmodernism, with its weary, overinformed view that there is nothing new to say, comes something called “superhybridity.” Superhybridity, a concept borrowed from an art magazine, exists because the Internet can bring whatever we want into our hard drives, so that we can sample it or mash it up: no culture, from any time or place, can be remote from us. Or, as Sandi Thom puts it, we no longer live in an age when “computers were still scary and we didn’t know everything.”

So do we know everything now? Reynolds makes excellent fun both of those who know lots of things superficially and of the specialists. The generalists can cram their bandwidth with MP3 files that were rare until moments ago, and load them onto their iPods in order to listen to each track for just a few seconds. The specialists, on the other hand, need to record music on the same equipment that their idols used, showing the same impulse that seems to lie behind the period-­performance movement of classical music. An aside from Reynolds reveals how messed up the whole situation is. Ciccone Youth produced a range of covers on “The Whitey Album,” including “a cover of John Cage retitled ‘(silence)’ (a sped-up version of his ‘4’ 33”,’ i.e., a couple of minutes of silence).”