srsly

i watched “24 Hour Party People” again last night. the first time i watched it was such a revalation about the music i like. i had no idea that the british punk scene had given rise/way to new wave which somehow spawned the modern rave scene (to put it very simply). it’s hard to believe that this thing got started twenty years ago. when people in manchester were first getting going to clubs with a new kind of beat i was allowing my mother to dress me as a clown for halloween. not that i would have liked to be there at the start. for this kind of thing, for me, being a part of the history wouldn’t have been so cool as being apart of it while it was in full swing; say about 1993. all those famous DJs that EVERYONE knows about now were just getting started, just beginnning to make sounds nobody had ever heard before that would launch a 10+ year sub-culture that never grew up.
this is what gets me the most though: the DJ. now music has been abstracted from a person or group of people standing on a stage making music happen to some random guy in front of some archaic machine that serves no other purpose than to play back music. people are paying good money to go somewhere and have some person deliver their music to them roughly the same way they consume it in their own homes. this is huge. but then all of the sudden it’s not just about the music anymore. it’s about the culture. i’m not really sure where i’m going with this, but it’s something you just have to experience to fully appreciate. i wish we could have been there for a while when it was really kicking; we kinda got in when it was on the way out. but still, it has irrevocably shaped how people digest their music.