There are, I suppose, plenty of reasons to hate the internet phenomenon MySpace: its hideously ugly and un-user-friendly design, the great boon it is to sexual predators, and it’s being owned by Rupert Murdoch. But I’ll say this: MySpace made it possible for me to be in a band with members in nearly every corner of this country, and for people to hear our music, all via computers. In fact, without computers, the band I’m in couldn’t exist: we each play songs on keyboards or guitars that are plugged into laptops, send sound files to each other, e-mail ideas for lyrics, and post the final product on the web. Or we used to, anyway, because I deleted our MySpace account yesterday.
MySpace offers an ideal networking tool for musicians – it’s one place you can go to find similar bands and potential fans, and keep in touch with all of them. It’s also, apparently, an ideal market for hackers, who were able to log into our account (and thousands of others’) this week, changing our band picture to a pornographic photo and redirecting our page to an anti-MySpace website. I logged in to delete the picture, but the next day they’d fought back with gusto, causing roughly 50 windows of porn to open when someone tried to visit our page.
I don’t have a problem with letting the hackers “win” – we rarely used MySpace for anything important, and it’s not like there was any vendetta against us in particular. Our profile was chosen nearly at random out of 78 million users, and if petty-minded computer nerds think they can change the world by messing with a few people’s websites, I’m content to let them believe it.
The hackers’ motivation was hatred of MySpace, and so to post a pornographic picture – a violent sexual image, as most porn is by its nature violent – acted as almost a literal “f*** you” to users of the website. As anyone with an internet connection knows, the pornography widely available all across the internet is hardly sexy or sensual at all; one makes an errant click or mistypes a URL and is confronted by explicit images of electronically modified images of genetically modified humans performing “sex” acts that are anything but sexy. Internet porn offers the clinical idea of sex, stripped of meaningful context.
It’s easy to see the problem with the proliferation of internet pornography, but it may seem a stretch to see a similar one about mp3 downloading.
Strangely enough, internet culture has almost turned music into something akin to pornography: files to be downloaded, possessed, consumed, and deleted when we’re through. On his otherwise forgettable release this April, rapper MC Lars made the relevant observation: “Music was a product/now it is a service.” Sex, it seems, has taken nearly the opposite path. It used to be something you do; now it’s something you download.
I remember almost to the day when I decided to stop illegally downloading music: it was the first time I saw one of my favorite bands, a duo called Mates of State. They play an exuberant style of pop, making one hell of a joyful noise with only a vintage Yahama organ, a drum set, and their voices. After their performance, I walked to their merchandise table to peruse it. I told Jason Hammel, the drummer, that I’d enjoyed their performance. He looked exhausted. Sweaty, tired, busy trying to take people’s orders and count cash. His bandmate Kori Gardner was nearby doing the same thing.
I’m sure that the band doesn’t have an ideological problem with the idea of downloading. Most independent musicians are smart enough to realize that file-sharing expands their audience. But when I saw how hard they were working, I felt ashamed of the fact that I had pulled their debut album off Napster. I bought a t-shirt and made sure to do so every other time I saw the band.
I should mention another thing: Mates of State are a young married couple. “This could be me and my wife,” I thought, struggling to make ends meet, living out our artistic dreams on a shoestring budget. And I can’t pay ten bucks for the CD?
As I argue against the commoditization of sex, am I arguing in favor of keeping music commercial? Shouldn’t music, like sex, be a free and joyful exchange of intimacy (albeit in a different setting)? Perhaps. But what I’m really arguing for is a life lived in community, for a vision of music and sex that is grounded in honest-to-goodness, sweaty, energetic human contact. We can’t get a meaningful music scene from downloading onto our self-absorbed iPods any more than we can get meaningful sex from the internet.
You can still find Mates of State songs on the internet, of course. But they tour non-stop, making music in front of people, selling albums, supporting themselves, meeting people, making a living. And having sex backstage, which is how their daughter was conceived. Actually, I think that is beautiful. I will take that over MySpace any day.