Fingertips

Free and legal MP3: Hollands (thoughtful art pop, w/ extra oomph)

Even when it isn’t quite like anything else you’ve heard it always manages to be at least a little like something else you’ve heard. This is fun and as it should be.

“Great White Shark” – Hollands

With confident cockeyed momentum, “Great White Shark” is a fun-house blend of thoughtful art pop and something bashier and more direct. A dignified violin break collides with a chugging, minimal rhythm section; articulate guitar lines locate clearings between earnest chunks of elusive lyrics; a basic verse melody repeats, with reappearing variations, while something resembling a chorus slips in once or twice; the song, while pushing five minutes, passes in something of a fever dream. Welcome to what has become of rock’n’roll in the mid-’10s, devolving and evolving simultaneously into whatever two people in Brooklyn (it’s almost always two people in Brooklyn) feeling like recording. Even when it isn’t quite like anything else you’ve heard it always manages to be at least a little like something else you’ve heard. This is fun and as it should be.

Anyway, I have listened to this song like a thousand times and I am left with two conflicting impressions: 1) its various complexities (in structure, nuance, texture, rhyme) continue to elude me; 2) its sturdy simplicity is grounded in the relentless recurrence of a basic three-note, ascending melody. And I am guessing that if I can train my brain to hold these two antithetical notions simultaneously, I may achieve some new level of enlightenment. Or, at least, would be better able to explicate a song named “Great White Shark” only, it seems, because the phrase slides quickly by in a lyric two-thirds of the way through the song.

Hollands is the married couple of John-Paul and Jannina Norpoth. John-Paul is the multi-instrumentalist, Jannina, classically trained, plays violin. Both are children of professional musicians. Among their favorite artists, according to the band’s Facebook page, are Igor Stravinsky, Frank Zappa, and Randy Newman—a mighty trio if ever there was. “Great White Shark” is a song from Restless Youth, their full-length debut, which was released last month. You can listen to the whole thing and buy it (vinyl is an option!) via Bandcamp. MP3 courtesy of Magnet Magazine.

I didn’t really know where to go

Eclectic Playlist Series 1.11 – Dec. 2014

While taking its usual romp through the decades, this latest iteration of the Eclectic Playlist Series focuses its 2010s attention largely on the current year, as a way of highlighting songs from three of my favorite albums of 2014. Other than that, we get the usual strange brew of things that somehow go together for largely unknowable reasons. Along the way we find a Radiohead B-side far stronger than most bands’ A-sides, a lost new wave ballad from the downtown NYC scene (from an album, The Shirts’ debut, never put on CD as far as I can see), and a song that, internet at my disposal or not, I could discover no confirmation of year of release—this the completely obscure but oddly satisfying “So Long Sam,” from Barbara Ruskin, a British singer/songwriter of the “swinging London” era. Because she is still alive and potentially reachable online, once I have this playlist posted, I’ll see if I can ask her directly about this song, and maybe I can nail down the year that way. Which would actually be kind of fun. But, thanks to good old-fashioned email, I was able to get the information directly from Ruskin herself, who informs us that “So Long Sam” was written and recorded as a demo in 1967. It never ended up being released until President Records put out a Barbara Ruskin retrospective album in 2004 entitled A Little of This, which is quite a bit of fun.

As for why 1997 alone represents the 1990s this time, I have no explanation. Oh, and the Robert Plant song? Unexpectedly awesome.

“Surrender” – J. Geils Band (Monkey Island, 1977)
“Pearly” – Radiohead (Airbag/How Am I Driving? EP 1997)
“Kristine” – Sky Ferreira (Night Time, My Time, 2013)
“Heart of Stone” – SVT (No Regrets, 1981)
“Sonic Parts” – Khoiba (Nice Traps, 2005)
“Running Through the Night” – The Shirts (The Shirts, 1978)
“No One’s Gonna Love You” – Cee-Lo Green (The Lady Killer, 2010)
“So Long Sam” – Barbara Ruskin (demo, 1967; A Little of This, 2004)
“Long Gone (Buddy)” – ‘Til Tuesday (Everything’s Different Now, 1988)
“Loop De Li” – Brian Ferry (Avonmore, 2014)
“Les Petits Ballons” – France Gall (single, 1972)
“Why Can’t You Fix My Car” – Leo Kottke (My Father’s Face, 1988)
“The Agency Group” – Alvvays (Alvvays, 2014)
“Hide in Your Shell” – Supertramp (Crime of the Century, 1974)
“Everybody Knows (except you)” – The Divine Comedy (A Short Album About Love, 1997)
“House of Love” – Robert Plant (lullaby and… The Ceaseless Roar, 2014)
“Louis Quatorze” – Bow Wow Wow (single, 1982)
“Just One Last Look” – The Temptations (With a Lot O’ Soul, 1967)
“Annan Waters” – Kate Rusby (Hourglass, 1997)
“Parables” – Rebekah Higgs (Rebekah Higgs, 2006)

Free and legal MP3: Ward White (art-y & stylish but very approachable)

“Sabbath” is as arch and distinctive as a rock song can hope to be in the year 2014 without sounding fey or contrived.

“Sabbath” – Ward White

With sly hints of the old Hot Chocolate nugget “Every 1’s a Winner,” “Sabbath” chugs off the launch pad with delicious authority, featuring the splendid songwriting trick of beginning your lyric with the word “And.” I’m kind of a sucker for that one. And Ward White’s rounded, art-y tenor, a less adenoidal version of someone like David Byrne, it turns out I’m kind of a sucker for that too.

“Sabbath” is as arch and distinctive as a rock song can hope to be in the year 2014 without sounding fey or contrived. The verses feel like we’re already in the middle of the song, and lead us into a section (0:47) that bridges us without hurry to the chorus, accumulating lyrical lines while not quite coalescing musically; and the chorus, when it arrives (1:02), turns out to be less a chorus than a single sentence, rendered memorable by a vivid chord change in the middle (on the words “in front of my face,” at 1:08). The lyrics, meanwhile, feel rich and involving without easily forming a narrative. But any song that can include these lines—

And what of all these women?
They come and go but mostly go
And when they come believe me I’m the last to know

—is surely doing something right. And then, as word-oriented as White appears to be, he unexpectedly closes the song out with an increasingly scintillating minute-and-a-half of droning guitars and bashing drums. Fun!

The Brooklyn-based White has been releasing stylish, accomplished recordings since the late ’90s, floating around the edges of the NYC music scene without quite breaking through, even to the blogosphere. Which may also mean the man is doing something right. “Sabbath” is a song from his eighth solo album, Ward White is the Matador, released earlier this month. MP3 via Magnet Magazine.

Free and legal MP3: Julius (indie pop, w/ graceful nuance)

“Oh Baby” – Julius

I have many issues with what passes for pop music in the year 2014: the brazen artifice of it, the lack of lyrical and melodic imagination typically on display, and the shrunken aural context (pop music in the ’10s more or less refuses to mix well with anything but other pop music from the ’10s), to name a few pet peeves. On top of this, I remain gobsmacked by the unironic embrace of pop sheen and flow by a significant segment of ’10s hipsters. Perhaps this is the ultimate consequence of shifting from ownership to (mostly) free access: the audience is so little invested in the end product that the impetus for listening becomes merely to locate something familiar and diverting, for just those three or four minutes, rather than something to stake the depth of your identity on.

Well, there’s no settling any of this while we’re still in the middle of our grand digital transition. But, in the meantime, here: “Oh Baby” is unabashed pop. It even, I think, features, albeit briefly, some Auto-Tune. And yet there is something in here, musically, that I don’t think you hear in standard-issue 2014 pop music. On the one hand it’s a texture thing—the way the musician who calls himself Julius lets his song unspool with a rich sense of space and time. Rather than the flat, compressed sound of music that’s been processed and layered within inches of its life, “Oh Baby” offers up something that appears, aurally, to straddle the digital and analog worlds. The unhurried drumbeats that provide the song’s backbone may be electronic, may be organic, may be a mix of both, but in any case they feel musical rather than logistical, with a sense of three-dimensional space rather than manipulated puzzle pieces. Likewise the backing vocals that press into the mix at 1:40: regardless of how manipulated, or not, they feel fueled by breath, they too seem to be taking up organic space.

But the thing that really won me over are the chords. However many times I listen I am in thrall to the grace of the flowing chord pattern that Julius introduces when the song first moves beyond the percussive accompaniment (beginning at 0:44). These are not showy, anthemic chords, but the elusive progression from 0:44 to 0:47 to 0:49 moves with a quiet grandeur one might usefully describe as orchestral. And here is where it merits mention that Julius is himself a refugee from the classical academy, a self-professed “weirdo classical prodigy” who only recently began listening to pop music. Once upon a time, pop stars veered into classical music to give their careers cultural heft; nowadays we may be seeing the opposite. Yes, Julius now chooses to operate in the seemingly constrained world of fluffy pop (could there be a title with any less contextual weight than “Oh Baby”?), but the song seems also, somehow, to be straining at a new way of mining depth in the musical language many if not most coming-of-age adults prefer to be speaking right now. Even lyrically the song may be presenting a bit more than it lets on; the recurring line “I’d give the world/To believe what I thought I felt” is no mere throwaway, as one example.

Released last month, “Oh Baby” is the second song Julius has recorded; it was produced by Benny Cassette, who has worked with Kanye West. You can download above, as usual, or visit his SoundCloud page, where you can also hear his first song, along with a more recently posted remix/mashup.

Free and legal MP3: Alvvays (sweet, jangly, off-kilter)

“Archie, Marry Me” has a sweet, sweeping relentlessness about it, and if the whole thing is partially buried in mud and fuzz, this somehow makes its insistence all the more poignant

“Archie, Marry Me” – Alvvays

“Archie, Marry Me” has a sweet, sweeping relentlessness about it, and if the whole thing is partially buried in mud and fuzz, this somehow makes its insistence all the more poignant, makes its gorgeousness all the more down to earth. This is a song that rhymes “matrimony” and “alimony,” not to mention “Atlantic” and “panic,” “papers” and “makers.” This is a song with a woman singing to a character named Archie. This is a band called Always that spells their name Alvvays. The off-kilter appears to be their territory.

At the seeming center of this eddy of off-center goodness is front woman Molly Rankin, who sings with an enticing blend of composed abandon. Her voice veers now too close, now too far. As the band pounds and jangles along, Rankin sounds like someone at once assured and bewildered; her repeated “Hey hey”s resonate off imaginary canyons of hope and despair. But at the true center of the proceedings is the song itself, which etches melodic glory from the simplest of components, and burrows into a listener’s warmest places through the timeless, heartfelt force of guitars and drums. If you don’t concentrate you’ll miss the guitars’ wild, second-verse excursion, buried nearly beyond earshot, but all the wilder for its lack of neediness. In much the way the singer’s simple plea seems almost necessarily concealing some thornier reality, so too does the music’s apparent plainness appear to couch some more complicated sentiment. Remember, they could merely have spelled their name the way it sounds.

Alvvays is a quintet based in Toronto. Molly Rankin is the daughter of the late John Morris Rankin, of the popular and (in Canada) well-known Celtic/folk group The Rankin Family. Among band members is guitarist Alec O’Hanley, formerly of the Charlottetown-based band Two Hours Traffic, who were featured here back in 2010. “Archie, Marry Me” is from the debut, self-titled Alvvays album, released on Polyvinyl Records back in July. The song has been floating around the internet even longer than that, but only last month emerged in free and legal MP3 form over on the long-standing free and legal MP3 blog 3hive. So thanks, very much, to the 3hivers for this one. And note that you can listen to the album and buy it in various formats via the Polyvinyl web site. I encourage it.

I get mixed signals

Eclectic Playlist Series 1.10 – Nov. 2014

As regular visitors realize by now, the Eclectic Playlist Series exists to counter the internet’s discouraging tendency to group music strictly together by genre and/or decade. I’ve been hoping that there are at least a handful of recalcitrant 21st-century listeners who might find some delight in this kind of eclecticism.

Recently what has been further occurring to me is the cultural price we pay for the internet’s reductive organizational habits. Not only are we as listeners short-changed by being denied a larger context for our listening, but the musicians are as well, which may in turn have a subtly adverse effect on the music they will go on to create. Think of all the artists who have come of age here in the 21st century who never find their music presented in any kind of broader historical context. The whole system is becoming a kind of closed feedback loop, to the detriment of musicians and listeners alike.

But: here I am again, with 20 songs, representing six decades and a variety of rock’n’roll-related genres, melded into one 80-minute-or-so listening experience. Radioing heaven, getting mixed signals, ending up in some kind of weird but inspirational church, with idiosyncratic stops along the way to ponder the state of human relationships. It’s all right to feel a little fear, to be sexy with a belly like Jack Nicholson, running around in circles all day long. With a hell of a guitar solo. Many problems are solved by a hell of a guitar solo, or maybe just a tube of cherry chapstick.

Oh, and this: as the first year of the Eclectic Playlist Series draws nearer to a close, I figured it was time to alert you guys to a larger-scale intention of this wide-ranging enterprise. As a way of enforcing variety and surprise, I decided from the start (but forgot to tell you; oops) that no one artist would be featured here more than once in a calendar year. So far so good (although I did feature Rilo Kiley in one playlist and Jenny Lewis in another), and I will happily finish the playlist year next month with that intention intact. But with this overall structure in mind, I realized kind of after the fact that rather than simply identifying each month’s list as “Volume 1,” “Volume 2,” and so forth, it might be better to label them in such a way as to make entire years more readily identifiable. And so with this month’s playlist, I’m introducing a slightly new ID system: rather than calling this one “Volume 10,” I am labeling it “1.10.” When the new year of playlists starts in January, it will be “2.01.” Etc. Once we get to the playlists beginning with “2,” you may begin to see certain artists from the first year’s playlists slide back in, even as new artists continue to arrive.

“Remember” – Greg Kihn Band (Next of Kihn, 1978)
“Everything Passed Me By” – James Irwin (single, 2014)
“I Radio Heaven” – Over the Rhine (Films for Radio, 2001)
“Can’t Be Sure” – The Sundays (Reading, Writing and Arithmetic, 1990)
“Too Late to Turn Back Now” – Cornelius Brothers and Sister Rose (single, 1972)
“Damn, Wish I Was a Man” – Cindy Lee Berryhill (Who’s Gonna Save The World?, 1987)
“Raphaël” – Carla Bruni (Quelqu’un m’a dit, 2003)
“Make Me Smile (Come Up and See Me)” – Steve Harley & Cockney Rebel (The Best Years of Our Lives, 1975)
“Cherry Chapstick” – Yo La Tengo (And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside Out, 2000)
“The Touch of Venus” – Sandy Wynns (single, 1965)
“White Mice” – The Mo-Dettes (single, 1979)
“Sleepless” – King Crimson (Three of a Perfect Pair, 1984)
“Axes” – Low Frequency in Stereo (The Last Temptation Of…, 2006)
“Bitter” – Jill Sobule (Happy Town, 1997)
“These Eyes” – The Guess Who (Wheatfield Soul, 1969)
“{Explain}” – Sarah Blasko (What the Sea Wants, the Sea Will Have, 2006)
“Charm” – The Wild Colonials (This Can’t Be Life, 1996)
“Maid in Heaven” – Be Bop Deluxe (Futurama, 1975)
“Take Me to Church” – Sinéad O’Connor (I’m Not Bossy, I’m the Boss, 2014)
“Mercy Street” – Peter Gabiel (So, 1986)

Free and legal MP3: The Rebel Light (astute, catchy, and assured)

“Strangers” opens with a burst of happy wordless vocals (choosing the especially giddy “ba-ba-ba” over the more noncommittal “la-la-la”), right away informing us of its good-natured intentions.

“Strangers” – The Rebel Light

Year by 21st-century year I am increasingly discouraged by our collective inability to discern good-catchy (based on effective/surprising melody) from bad-catchy (based on annoying, often shout-y repetition)—and, I suppose the greater affliction, our apparent preference for the bad-catchy. I do understand that bad-catchy is far easier to concoct and that today’s pop-oriented songwriters and producers, perceiving that virality is unrelated to quality, find bad-catchy better suited to their purposes.

Well, boo to all of them, but hooray for the astutely good-catchy “Strangers,” from the Los Angeles-based trio The Rebel Light. While sounding entirely of the 2014 moment, “Strangers” thrums with warmth and joy in a way that far too much of today’s indie pop has abandoned in favor of technology and analytics. As such, I’ll wager that this song will sound as fresh to future ears as most of 2014’s YouTube fodder will sound stale and uninteresting not that many years from now.

With a thumpy, head-bobbing core, “Strangers” opens with a burst of happy wordless vocals (choosing the especially giddy “ba-ba-ba” over the more noncommittal “la-la-la”), right away informing us of its good-natured intentions. While displaying moments of near-minimal accompaniment, the song works almost surreptitiously to add layers of aural interest as things unfold—squally electronics, hand-claps, an undercover disco beat, cowbell, acoustic guitar, a capella break, we get a little bit of everything stitched ably together into a pop-perfect 3:25 length. And at the heart of this catchy song is (of course) a super catchy chorus, featuring one of those great, inevitable-sounding melodies that good-catchy songs so often have. While easy to learn and sing along with, the chorus’s melody delivers extra oomph via the way it slides seamlessly off and on the beat. Specifically, note how each line in the chorus starts off the beat (i.e., the words “you,” “standing,” “waving,” etc.) aligns onto the beat for the middle of the line, then slips back between the beat for its three emphatic closing syllables (for instance, on the words “live this way” beginning at 0:46). I especially like when seemingly straightforward songs give us subtle little treats like that along the way.

“Strangers” is a single released by the band last month. You can download as usual via the title above, or directly from the band via SoundCloud. The band has previously released one three-song EP and one other single, both in 2013.

Free and legal MP3: The Woodlands (gentle, but brisk and involved)

“Bronze” introduces a surprising amount of instrumental variety into a song that begins as unassumingly as possible.

“Bronze” – The Woodlands

Not unlike “Strangers,” above, “Bronze” introduces a surprising amount of instrumental variety into, in this case, a song that begins as unassumingly as possible: voice only for 16 seconds, then a strummed acoustic guitar for another little while. A bass joins in, and some backing vocals, and a bit of well-placed percussion. The overall feeling is gentle and uncluttered, even as the texture gradually expands to encompass horns, a violin, hand-claps, and some seriously interesting vocal harmony intervals. While this might not always be my preference, I like how the wife and husband duo of Hannah and Samuel Robertson here manage to use sounds almost more as individual tools than aggregatable components. (You wouldn’t, after all, use both a hammer and a screwdriver at the same time.) The chorus’s recurring lyric is “Don’t quite know where we will go,” and the feel of the song backs that up in the way instruments wander in and out, each with their own little offerings, creating a subtle sense of surprise even as the song moves through its grounding verse and chorus structure.

The way “Bronze” seems almost serially built may be why it can come to a near standstill two-thirds of the way through (2:35) and the halt feels organic and engaging; this interlude of voice and violin is not an interruption, it is simply what happens next. And then what happens next is Hannah singing, “We we we we proceed,” and they do.

Another important part of this song’s charm is in fact Hannah’s voice, which has a Laura Veirs-like mixture of groundedness and breathlessness to it—a child-like adultness, if you will. And her engaging capacity for backing vocals of various timbres and unexpected harmonic positions is an ongoing source of pleasure; her voice, truly, becomes another instrument in The Woodlands’ idiosyncratic but heartwarming toolbox. (Although, for the record, it should be noted that the “oo-oos” in the verses are actually Samuel’s falsetto vocals.)

“Bronze” is the opening track on the album Gems and Bones, which was released last month. You can listen to the whole thing and buy it via Bandcamp. The Woodlands released one previous album back in 2009, also available via Bandcamp. The Robertsons are based in San Luis Obispo, California.

Free and legal MP3: Centimeter (soaring power pop)

“Push Me Over” is a particular kind of power pop, which might be usefully labeled power power pop for its husky edge and determined drive

“Push Me Over” – Centimeter

A magical pseudo-genre that has never quite arrived nor disappeared, power pop exists through sheer force of will. At least since the Records assured us that the writ has hit the fan, if not before, there have been musicians who want to write songs that do this, whatever “this” exactly is. I’ve opined intermittently on the elusive charm of power pop (see in particular the post accompanying the Power Pop, Vol. 1 playlist), but every time a band rouses itself into full power pop mode, even now, at this disconcertingly late date, I feel energized and ready to wave the happy flag yet again. I mean, it was one thing for bands to offer up neo-power pop in the ’90s and early ’00s, but now that rock’n’roll has (who saw this coming?) been tickled to death by the cotton-ball assault of indie pop, bands that have the chutzpah to write melodic through-lines and play instruments (not to mention percussion) in three-dimensional space should be protected by the World Wildlife Fund.

Anyway: “Push Me Over” is a particular kind of power pop, which might be usefully labeled power power pop for its husky edge and determined drive; classic power pop often presents with a more obvious layer of sweetness. Yet sweetness is in the mix here too—in the background “oo-oos,” in the determined if not poignant piano line, in a chorus melody as plaintive as it is rousing, and perhaps most centrally (albeit also intangibly), in that lyrical lagniappe at the end of the verse, featuring the recurring phrase “if only for a while.” Through it all, singer Johan Landin proves once and for all that power pop is not merely an exercise for honey-toned tenors, as his expressive but controlled baritone delivers with its own kind of “what is the world coming to?” ache.

And maybe that’s the as-yet-undiscussed key to the mystery that power pop remains—that, at their best, power pop songs consistently exhibit this “I can’t go on, I’ll go on” pluck that, if not fully Beckettian, still pushes them deeper into the psyche than one might initially suspect they would go.

Centimeter, from Stockholm, were a quartet when first featured here on Fingertips in 2012, for the song “Motorhead”. They are now a trio. “Push Me Over” is a single that was released this summer, and it is the band’s first recording since their 2013 album 70.

Web Comments: Can We Cut the Crap Already?

How did we get to a place where we accept this level of vicious, assaultive ignorance staring at us, day after day?

Because of how overstuffed my email inbox got while I was away for half of August, I spent the better part of September sorting through it all and therefore only recently noticed an email containing clips from Sharon Van Etten’s Labor Day weekend performance on the Jimmy Kimmel show. I have an unabashed soft spot for Ms. Van Etten, so on went the video. As the song, “Tarifa,” was playing, I began to scroll through the comments. There were only 14 of them, and as dedicated a comment-avoider as I try to be, it seems only human nature to be curious about what other people are saying about something or someone you like. Especially something as theoretically non-controversial as a late-night musical performance.

I should have known better. Down near the bottom I came across a comment that made me gasp, not out of surprise (alas, nothing really surprises me when it comes to barbaric comments on YouTube) but out of feeling viscerally attacked myself by these savage words. I am pasting the comment in here not to be sensational (I warn you it’s not pretty) but to stare it down with stouthearted determination. We have too easily learned to ignore this kind of thing, which is its own kind of awful. This is a brutish verbal attack on an unsuspecting human being, based largely, it seems, on her being a woman. And it just sits there like another part of a normal conversation:

On the one hand this is just a passing, all-too-common moment on YouTube. On the other hand, how on earth did we get here? How did we get to a place where we accept this level of vicious, assaultive ignorance staring at us, day after day, even on media outlets from large and respectable companies? The Jimmy Kimmel Live show posted the Sharon Van Etten clip on its official YouTube page, which is where this comment was posted and where, more than one month later, it remains.

It doesn’t have to be like this

I am well aware people have been complaining about comments on the web for as long as there have been comments on the web. By 2014, the more enlightened web denizens do their best not to read comments at all. But here’s the thing. It doesn’t have to be like this. There is no law of nature or country requiring web sites to allow people who cannot be civil to participate. With any will at all, any web site could be operated in such a way as to prevent first and foremost the lllSparta x’s of the world from sullying public discourse with words as hateful, violent, and insanely stupid as those he posted under the SVE video. But web comments could also be far more generally open-minded and supportive and interested in informed oppositional views than they commonly tend to be. That we have somehow accepted the guiding principle of belligerence and obnoxiousness is a failure of will on our part, not the way it has to be.

This is not a “freedom of speech” issue, but boy does this get confused pretty much all the time. No one is restraining lllSparta x from saying whatever pops in his head either to any friends he may have (?) or on a web site of his own construction. Neither is anyone preventing all the needlessly hostile other folks who clog up comment boards everywhere from being as hostile as they want, somewhere of their own making. That’s all free speech really means, you see—that our government can’t take action to prohibit people from expressing themselves. Collective entities of all kinds, whether corporations or sports teams or non-profits or what have you, remain empowered to decide that they don’t like what you’ve said and to create consequences for you—anything from removing what you’ve said from a web site to terminating any economic relationship they might have with you (see Schneider, Rob). The point being that neither YouTube nor Jimmy Kimmel is required by the Constitution to allow the likes of lllSparta x to speak his mind on their watch.

What it comes down is this: do we want to be civilized together or not? And if so, we might surely decide that repulsive, inappropriate, and/or disrespectful remarks need not be tolerated in a public forum.

So this is not a free speech issue but I am sorry to report that it is a free market issue, in that the reason that companies running web sites routinely do not police their comment sections has little to do with misguided application of the First Amendment and a whole lot to do with the fact that an unfettered comment section is a sure-fire way to drive page views up. First of all, goes the theory, people love to be able to leave comments, so allowing unhindered comments is a traffic booster. With web sites only ever concerned about quantity, anything that might reduce participation—such as requiring people to use their real names, or alerting people that all comments will require approval before being posted—is a negative thing. Because page views.

Second of all, continues the theory, rude or controversial or hostile comments, while not actively encouraged, are seen not merely as a necessary, traffic-boosting evil but maybe even as a valued if rowdy part of the web site’s operational center. It’s like a car wreck on the highway: people can’t help but stop and look. And perhaps engage in their own reaction to it. Because page views.

Further arguments are often made that excuse uncivilized web comments on the grounds that it would be too labor-intensive, and therefore too expensive, to expect huge companies with tons of online content to be able to effectively police all the comments being made minute to minute and hour to hour. To which I say: if it’s too expensive to police, then the only responsible answer is to remove the comment section entirely. Otherwise it’s like saying well, it’s too expensive to make sure our toys are safe, so we’ll just manufacture them without designing them or testing them properly. The fact that we collectively have allowed unmonitored comments to poison our online public spaces for the better part of the last 20 years is no excuse. This is all still early in the life of this new technology. We simply made a mistake in our first approach. We are entitled to correct it.

The limits of self-policing

I understand that we live in a world in which a certain benighted percentage of the human population is going to think thoughts like what lllSparta x posted on the Jimmy Kimmel YouTube page and will no doubt say things like this to their similarly debilitated buddies, and that’s the way the world has always been and alas may always be. But what far-fetched societal logic accepts sociopathic declarations as some kind of new public-behavior norm? How is it that lllSparta x could not only write what he wrote on a Google-owned, ABC-sanctioned web page but that the comment remains there, week after week after week?

And yes any YouTube user could “report” the comment as “spam or abuse” and maybe it would be taken down, at some point. Or maybe not. While repugnant, this comment might not, after all, be deemed literally “abusive.” But anyway: is being “spam” or being “abuse” the only two categories a comment can fall into to merit removal, or even consideration for removal?

And more to the point: why is it up to the people who visit YouTube to monitor such things? To assume a community of millions can self-police is disingenuous at best; the act of policing each other becomes just as liable to be abused as the original area being policed.

What the situation reveals is the lie at the heart of the democratization myth that has marred digital-based culture since the birth of the web itself. And the lie is this: that interactions involving millions of strangers can somehow mimic the interactions of small groups of known friends and acquaintances—that, in other words, the rules that govern the latter can in any effective way be employed to inform the former.

As it turns out, how people behave among friends cannot be scaled up to multiple thousands of strangers.

This is why, as one example, the personal act of letting a friend borrow and rip a CD is not in any way related to the impersonal act of uploading a CD so millions of strangers can download it. More to the point at hand, this is why three friends living together will easily enough make arrangements to keep their common living room acceptably clean but why three million people visiting a web site have no mutual understanding about keeping their common digital space acceptably clean, and should not be expected to.

Supervision and long-term self-interest

Yes, digital technology has widened the scope of our personal lives, giving us the capacity to interact with a wider and more far-ranging flock of contacts than was possible in our analog past. But there remains a relatively low threshold beyond which some (many? most?) individuals quite literally cannot extend their direct empathy, and therefore beyond which we collectively cannot be relied upon to be good to one another.

Once the number of people are gathered in a place, digital or otherwise, exceeds the possibility of personal relationships between all who are gathered, their interactions can no longer be left to operate without clear and present guidance. The loudest voices, expressing the most disheartening sentiments, are rarely if ever representative of the majority, but left to romp in digital space without supervision these are the voices that often appear to dominate and, over time, will ruin whatever the reasonable majority might otherwise be hoping to create together.

What may be most disheartening of all in this mess is that we have arrived at a stage of capitalism in which short-term self-interest has blinded the ability of all but the most enlightened of business leaders to understand that long-term consequences are by far more important. The fact that unsupervised public spaces online are destined to be destroyed from within seems both tragically irrelevant to managers who care only about quantitative metrics and sadly par for the course in our corporation-guided 21st-century culture. (In much the same way our human environment is being destroyed from within while corporations refuse to consider this long-term truth in pursuit of their short-term profits, but never mind.)

If the only people in a position to supervise refuse to do so, what then? Do we sit back and take it? Do we convince ourselves that this is an unavoidable by-product of our technology, which of course we can’t ever fiddle with because we might “break the internet”?

Or do we rouse ourselves out of our technophilia to begin to understand that if we can’t, after all, get civilized together, we may at some point find ourselves without much of a civilization?