Thirty years ago, music lovers existed in clans and tribes. Punks spat on hippies. A goth rarely spoke to a metal-loving grebo (except about black hair dye). Indie rock fans shunned New Romantics. Jazz fiends shunned everyone else. Even world music had a tribe, even if it was just six people in West London, stroking chins and thinking about doing a Linguaphone course in Zulu.

Today, everybody can be everything. Digital opened up the entire past at the touch of a return key. Its nifty algorithms, designed primarily to keep the web-surfer atop the rolling wave, segue from artist to artist, micro-genre to sub-micro-genre, near-drowning us in a sea of choices. Music is dirt cheap, or free with ads. The social stuff like saving up, talking for hours about your dreamed-of purchase, and going to record shops to discover that, actually, you need a different album after all, is all lost because you can get what you think you want – here, now, in the middle of the night. It didn’t take a pandemic to turn music addicts into hermits.

“CAN you appreciate anything that is free?”

As for the haircuts, threads, slang and attitudes that used to come with a scene, well, they’re all a bit pointless if you like so much music you don’t love any of it. What would be the fashion statement of the 21st-century eclecticist? Hard to say, but it would probably be brown, shapeless and not very sexy at all.

Some years ago (Aug/Sept 2017, #130), I surveyed the global local radio scene and enjoyed digging around online and tuning into foreign stations, listening to music and hearing the DJs, ads and jingles. During lockdown, unable to travel or even go out, I recalled this research and went to revisit some of the platforms. When I stumbled on the stylishly simple-looking radio.garden app (essentially a Google Earth for local broadcasters) I thought I had arrived in aural nirvana. No more horrid aggregators and signposters. No more garish websites run by commercial FM operators. I could simply fly around the world on a magic carpet – with my trackpad for steering – and lend an ear to Russian rock, Chilean folk, Nashville country or Malian blues.

I really was impressed, almost stupidly so, and advised friends and colleagues to join me in this paradisiacal garden of grooves. Three days later I had forgotten all about it. Why? Well, because of that opening paragraph. Music is so much more than the sound of voices and instruments. We are drawn to it for a great host of reasons, ranging across social class, place of birth, education and formative growth, intellect, artistic leaning, friends, family, style of dress (deeply related to body image and identity), gender, sexuality, chance and – until now – the historic periods of our childhood, youth and adult years.

“Music-listening as a Tinder-style mindwank: is that where you want to take your head, and your heart?”

The digital phenomenon mashes and swirls all this up into a real mess, making everything, in a quite violent manner, into a postmodern, asynchronous, rootless collage of sound effects – the crap spliced up with the great, the ancient with the modern, the home music with the foreign music. At its worst, it turns art into content, music into background noise – and this worst is never far away, because the technology is designed to make you obsess, consume, explore endlessly, and not to value or reflect.

I’ve never wondered why Radiohead called themselves that, but it’s such a neat metaphor for the current state of our ears: we are being turned into receivers, and absolutely anything can get in there, amid the crackle and fizz, and take over. This is not so far from psychosis. Music-listening as a Tinder-style mindwank: is that where you want to take your head, and your heart?

But, is drifting aimlessly and mindlessly around the planet’s radio channels any worse than an average evening on Spotify or some other service that pays artists about 0.00000000001 per song? I’m increasingly wary of these tools now. The very ease of access to anything, combined with intangibility and the fact you are investing not a dime in the art raises a viral blizzard of questions. Can you appreciate anything that is free? Does the creative side of the brain benefit when you skip from Mongolia to Colombia to Switzerland over three songs, or from 1943 to 1976 to 2019? Does the sudden inrush of five Carlos Gardel albums move me as much as one fragile shellac, held in gloved hands, and placed respectfully on a gramophone? No, señorxs, it doesn’t. I’ve done the experiment.

Because listening to music that is utterly deracinated and disconnected from its makers, historical context and geography is doomed to feel superficial and meaningless. Spotify gives up almost no information. You can’t see the back of the album covers. You can’t read the credits and make connections with other artists or works of art you own. You get no sense of the story of how an album evolved or was put together. Playlists by chancers after likes and friends are all mixed up with albums artfully produced by studious engineers, geeks and arrangers.

I know, by the way, that a) this all sounds fogeyish and b) it’s a bit late in the day for seeing my backside over the ongoing digital music revolution. But, then again, it’s all about choices, innit? That’s what the digital evangelists are always preaching: that there is nothing as thrilling or inspiring as endless choices. Well, I am making my choice and backing off and bowing out from this junkshop of jiveless, joyless musical digi-touring for a while. Algorithm don’t got no rhythm as I see it, and no boffinous teen in Silicon Valley is going to get inside the skull of a Lancashire-born working class theology-grad former punk-goth-turned-tangophiliac jazz appreciator.

Those few locked-down hours on radio.garden were my musical Gethsemane. I saw – O, Lord! I heard – that we were all being betrayed by the coders and programmers, the Judases of art and truth. I got out just in time before I was crucified.

This article originally appeared in the May 2021 issue of Songlines. Never miss an issue – subscribe today