Some of you are already right there with me, eyes wide, mouths breaking into a smile of recognition. “Hey, I know that song!” you’re saying. “I’ve heard all that stuff before! We used to hear it all the time! I know it almost as well as I know ‘Old McDonald Had a Farm!’ That’s not digital -- that’s the 80’s!” And of course you are dead right. The 80’s asserted itself most brashly in its championing of form over content, of currency over quality, and of its own unprecedented suchness. To compare anybody’s efforts to this or that precursor was to commit a social faux pas that earned you a dinosaur rating from whose stigma you would likely never free yourself. The new technology! The end of history! We had all arrived in the brave new world and incinerated our shared past in the furnace of our own becoming! There was a lot of big hair and all songs had videos. The beginnings of the next decade seemed to be developing a healthy skepticism about all this, but the subsequent rapid growth of digital technology and of the internet spawned a breed who are utterly convinced that since they haven’t run across their ideas in their limited studies, their ideas must therefore be entirely new.






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