so i listened to the Dubmood episode a couple days ago and have a lot of thoughts about it.
i guess there’s a disconnect to me in the idea that you think chiptune is the best thing ever to happen to music - it’s very serious, and you want it to be taken very seriously and not taken as a joke. but you also don’t want it to grow beyond its insular internet roots. you don’t really want to have it exist in a space outside of your own control or influence. you don’t want to have someone you can scapegoat as “ruining” it. it’s a bit of wanting to have your cake and eat it too to me. part of the growth of culture is that if it goes beyond that, it has to become something else.
i know Dubmood is reflective and self-aware about that to some extent, but like… it’s also the narcissism of internet posting communities and their smug claims of ownership over specific things that i have a problem with. also i think it’s a bit cognitive dissonance to ignore that while chiptune may have not “blown up” it is still overwhelmingly associated with videogame music - to the point where the kitschy videogame nostalgia industry fully absorbed them. which definitely seems to be not what he wants (and i also agree has hamstrung the genre overall from developing its own kind of identity). there may not be a Skrillex, but there is a lot of kitschy shallow shit out there using those sounds. whether or not you want to ignore that or not, that is the lasting legacy of it right now. and it is probably important to acknowledge that instead of pretending only real chiptune exists elsewhere.
a famous video essay you might have seen about dubstep called All My Homies Hate Skrillex i think does a good job exploring this exact dynamic, because the creator (Timbah.on.Toast) does a good job breaking apart that narrative that Skrillex ruined dubstep by both saying why him and his friends felt that way at the time… but also sort of challenging the complicity/narcissism of a lot of the people in the scene, along with the material factors of DJing and having to make a career, that helped push it in that direction. a lot of people who view themselves as having 100% integrity often are unwilling to examine their own complicity in pushing scenes to a direction that ultimately destroys them. i know from experience that intense policing of people in a scene to stick to a very particular mindset/script and attacking anyone who breaks the mold too much usually ends up destroying communities and making them have less larger lasting influence. which maybe for the narcissistic satisfaction of the few who get to claim ownership it’s fine for them, but it ruins it for everyone else.
i guess i say that because i think me and Dubmood are pretty similar in some ways. i also did not tell my friends in high school or college that i made arrangements of videogame music because i was deeply ashamed of what they’d think about me, and i also was interested in trying to pursue a music career in general outside of games stuff (even tho it ended up with me getting into indie games). i also took what i was doing VERY seriously, and thought the idea of people selling arrangements of game music (which had started happening around then in the form of Project Majestic Mix and SQUAREDANCE) kinda sucked. to me it was just music, along with everything else, and to this day i find all the kitschy Nintendo/fangamery merchandisey side of it incredibly alienating and not at all what the space was or is about, to me. all the identity has basically been scrubbed out of it - but the whole game music arrangement space doesn’t even get to have the big artists associated with its heyday celebrated like dubstep. there’s no Burial or James Blake there. it is so inherently disposable and unworthy of respect to people outside. it sucks ass.
growing up isolated in a fairly rural college town, i also found frustrating how much IRL spaces seemed to matter more than anything else. i didn’t know how to translate my music live, and there weren’t places to play around there anyway. the 2000’s was the era of indie sleaze and i thought a lot of people in places like NYC were way interested in looking cool and being scenesters and hitting the right signifiers than any of the art that was produced. it was just anathema to how i felt about music. i feel like there was a lot of cognitive dissonance (esp in those indie sleaze-type music scenes i followed) about just ignoring internet culture in general as this lesser cesspool while being totally transfixed with resurrecting this idea of 70’s authentic cool or whatever. which ensured that if you ever worked in those spaces, being a serious participant in something from an internet subculture was way more of a liability that you’d try to hide than something that would help you. which i have found out at various points. definitely had a guy from UMAW i talked to here a couple years ago’s eyes instantly glaze over and visibly tune out to me the second i said i did videogame music-adjacent stuff. that’s part of why i’m so loud about OC ReMix now - it’s unfair to have artists and artistry be ignored as this totally kitschy and irrelevant thing.
but think the problem with being on the internet is it’s just easy for toxic personalities to dominate everything and shape entire communities and artistic spaces in their image. there’s a degree of self-flagellating “we’re all losers who don’t deserve anything good in life because we can’t have a real life” to any kind of internet posting culture. any efforts to counteract that are invariably drowned out in a sea of bad faith reaction that doesn’t even attempt to engage with the substance of a thing. that kind of rhetoric was, and still is… very violent too. a lot of people are, quite frankly, very jealous and lashing out and anyone and everyone. in a way i think is really sinister. and if we can’t reckon with that, i think a lot of great art is going to be lost forever (if it isn’t already) in a sea of Content.
when something moves into a live space, it becomes more “real” - it becomes less easy to sit behind your perch and attack people because collective effort and goodwill is necessary to keep spaces going. i think this is why live music - and in person art in general - is really crucial… especially in an increasingly paranoid and isolated world cuz like - sorry. internet culture fucking sucks and is reactionary! the internet may have produced plenty of good art, but internet culture is an evil cesspool of misery. but we live in a world where non Big Money live spaces are vanishing due to rent costs and post-pandemic fears - so i don’t know the answer to this. but whatever it is doesn’t lie primarily on the internet IMHO.
but yeah, anyway. i really relate to Dubmood probably the most of any of the interviewees because this is the closest to my own experiences. i similarly have been pretty smug about my art, especially in my late teens. but i also think he’s wrong about several things and there’s a bit of internet poster’s narcissism going on there too, at some level.
