|
|
Conformity, Process and Deviation: Digital Arts as 'Outsider' |
Adam Harper (University of Oxford)
Voices in the Online Wilderness? The Outsider Musician and the Internet
The 'outsider musician' - music's approximate equivalent to the 'outsider artist' - has been a key figure in folk and countercultural popular musics for several decades at least. Such musicians are positioned at a great distance from prevailing or commercial musical cultures and the aesthetic values thereof, and as such are considered highly valuable, their consequent authenticity routinely emphasised. Outsider musicians have been sought out and appreciated for their perceived 'primitivism,' that is, their distance from norms on account of their rural or racial context, or their amateur status, mental health or disabilities. Before the Internet, outsider musicians were considered ignorant of or otherwise apart from contemporary musical techniques and technologies, such as hearing and being influenced by the radio (Leadbelly) or knowing how to play chords on a guitar (The Shaggs, Half Japanese). With the arrival of online musical cultures and powerful digital music-production technology - both radically accessible in their near-ubiquity - this position of the outsider musician now seems less sustainable. But is it?
I will examine the ways in which some Internet-era musicians, such as Willis Earl Beal, derive their authenticity as outsider musicians from an apparent renunciation of the Internet. But I will also look at 'outsider musicians' and 'primitives' who are intimately involved in the content and form of online music platforms like Soundcloud, Bandcamp, Last FM and Turntable FM. Regularly drawing on the anonymity afforded by such platforms, the digital 'primitive' appears as a bizarre, enigmatic voice deep in an online 'wilderness,' sometimes an uncritical, dated or 'flawed' consumer and recycler of pop-music samples, or even a sub-human digital entity such as a bot or an algorithm. The role of the outsider is often constructed and performed here, as indeed it had been in previous eras. For all its spreading of culture and technology, the digital milieu reframes and reaffirms the figure of the outsider musician and their fascinating contexts, illuminating in the process the hopes and anxieties surrounding the emergence of new technocultural spaces and its occupants.
Biography
Adam Harper is a PhD candidate in twentieth-century and twenty-first century musical aesthetics at the University of Oxford, and recently completed his thesis, 'Lo-Fi Aesthetics in Popular Music Discourse.' He is a music critic for Wire, the FADER, Dummy and Electronic Beats magazines and the author of Infinite Music: Imagining the Next Millennium of Human Music-Making (Zero Books, 2011). He has given talks and seminars on new music and underground popular music at the Darmstadt Summer School of Music, New York University, the Universities of East London, York and Nottingham, London's The Rest is Noise festival and Berlin's music festival CTM.