Purchase Event 1: Culture Shock: Computer Shock

There were a number of acts performing at this year’s Culture Shock that featured computers in lieu of actual instruments. Particularly YACHT and Men were laptop-focused. This is a trend I’ve noticed running in live performances by young groups. The focus in the performance was not on musicianship, but either on dancing or the spectacle made by the performers, unrestrained by anything but microphone wires.

YACHT, a due made up of Jona Bechtolt and recently his girlfriend Claire, stood onstage with a Macintosh laptop in the back, hooked up to the P.A. system. While Bechtolt’s electronic compositions buzzed out of his laptop, he and Claire walked around the stage, singing and either doing what could be described as dancing or just making weird gesticulations.
Men, made up of the members of Le Tigre (with the exception of Kathleen Hannah), DJed off of a pair of laptops. The music was essentially remixes of 80s pop and dance hits, not really bearing any similarity to what I had expected knowing about the connection to Le Tigre. There was not really any performance to speak of here, except that it was possible to see JD and her partner bobbing behind their computers, clearly enjoying themselves.

There was easily more of a performance to observe with YACHT than with Men, but it was still not very much. Being a musician, I usually attend music shows hoping to see musicians so that I can either almost studiously observe how they do what they do, simply be impressed by their talent, or both. When the musician is taken completely out of the picture, I’m a bit lost and perplexed. I’m not someone who dances. Actually, the second I make any kind of dancing-type movements beyond jumping up and down, I am overwhelmed by self-consciousness. So, without something to watch, I’m typically either uninterested and bored, or slightly embarrassed and anxious.

While musical performances where the emphasis on the band or musicians is put to the side in favor of focusing on a singer or on dancing is not something new, it’s becoming increasingly popular to dispose of the traditional rock band set-up, even in what have traditionally been rock music-focused circles. I read an interview a few years ago with a member of the band Death From Above 1979, where he claimed that he preferred to go to dance clubs than see bands, and that if he does go to a show where a band is playing, he never looks at the band. At the time this struck me as incredibly obnoxious, that he was expressing his superiority over duller show attendees like myself.

Now it almost looks like a sea change in show-going etiquette. Where it had been expected that one should enjoy themselves however they like, there is a growing pressure to “enjoy yourself” the “right way.” The changing relevance of the musician in new trends of live music “performance” seems to be encouraging this. I don’t believe that the rock band paradigm is totally fading away, but that, even within the subculture of independent music in the U.S., these new trends towards the way music can be made is leading to new dogmatic attitudes toward behavior.