october second

I was hoping to start today off with a run, but it is pouring rain outside so here we are!

One of my favourite albums of all time came out in 2018. Arctic Monkey’s sixth studio album, Tranquility Base Hotel and Casino. It’s a science fiction concept album, a bit of a departure from their fifth studio album, AM, and maybe a musical foreshadowing of their seventh, The Car. It is also fantastic.

I had a friend when I was in Montreal who I used to argue with about everything, but the one thing he was definitely right about is that music is best appreciated by the album, not by the song. And Tranquility Base is one of my favourites end-to-end. To start, the first lyric on Star Treatment, the album opener, is

I just wanted to be one of the Strokes

Which obviously resonated with me big time. The album is centered around this resort on the moon, but it has a lot of really interesting technological critique. There’s a house band called the Martini Police (also in Star Treatment), and a taqueria on the roof called the Information-Action Ratio (Four Out of Five) which is a very cool shout to a Neil Postman concept. Read Amusing Ourselves to Death, it’s a good read!

Anyway, the album is all hits, the lyrics are phenomenal, the music is incredible, but the reason I’m thinking about it this morning is because of a lyric that’s been in my head a lot lately

Everybody’s on a barge
Floating down the endless stream of great tv

And I guess the reason this resonates with me is that

a. there is so much great tv available right now
b. it does feel like I’m floating down an endless stream of it

I’m trying to think of a smart way to talk about this, but simply put, doesn’t it feel like we’re floating down an endless stream of great tv?

But what does that actually mean? I think if we compare how we used to “consume” television content (on cable, with episodes generally released once a week) with how we predominantly consume it now (multiple episodes at a time, sometimes an entire season or more) the metaphor is pretty clear. It’s also more than just bingeing, because that was also possible when they started putting tv shows into dvd boxsets. But it wasn’t endless! You’d watch a bunch of episodes of Friends in a row, but without the access to countless other shows in an endless stream.

Okay, and stick with me for a second. Remember Marshall McLuhan, famous Canadian media scholar? Well he argued that the form of media shapes society more than the content of media. You’re probably familiar with his saying, the medium is the message. It’s almost like the form a medium takes is more important, at the macro level, than the content it disseminates.

Now, McLuhan lived in the era of broadcast television (he passed away in 1980) and had grand visions for what tv would accomplish. I don’t know that his predictions necessarily came true, but I really like his analysis of the media of his time.

Neil Postman, who also lived in the era of broadcast television (he passed away in 2003), wrote about the “Typographic Mind” or basically what people were like when the dominant medium of the day was the printed word. As he put it, the written word is logical and linear, so people thought in more logical and linear ways. The Typographic Mind was more rational.

Of course, the way we could jump around network television changed that. And streaming has certainly changed that further, right?

Take all this with a grain of salt though. I once had a professor tell me that I had “severely misunderstood McLuhan” in a paper I submitted, but I was never really clear on what I got wrong. Oh well.

This last one is from American Sports

I lost the money, lost the keys but
I’m still handcuffed to the briefcase

Pitchfork gave it an 8.1 (I read their review after writing this!).