Bros drinking beer, bro-honeys sipping on rum and coke; Avicii is blasting from somebody’s party playlist. It’s a typical Thursday night on Frat Row. Believe it or not, this is not always how it went down in the old college town.
Today we have iPods, iPhones, laptops, stereos, and a billion other forms of technology. It can take less than a minute to download a song off the Internet and get the party started. But for Rutgers students fifty years ago, this was not the case.
Since recorded music wasn’t as accessible as it is today, students jammed out to live music. Even vinyl, which seems so dated to us 21st century citizens, was only introduced in the 1940s.
Not to mention the rise and fall of cassettes, which seem like products of the Stone Age when compared to the slick layout of your iTunes library.
In fact, Thomas Edison invented the first recording and reproduction device in 1877. Although this device, called the mechanical phonograph cylinder, gave rise to a new and quickly growing industry, it wasn’t as common and widely used as our technologies are today.
And recorded music wasn’t nearly as accessible to the general public as it is today. However, partying in the previous century was far from muted. In fact, it was arguably the most rockin’, boppin’, and hoppin’ time of all.
So what was it that got folks grooving before the age of Apple?
Live music was common, and for most of human history, the only form by which music could actually be heard. Many cultures are strongly connected to music and its performance because of its universally spiritual and metaphysical aspects.
It seems that the obvious direction is forward. Apple says it best in their 1993 ad campaign: “It does more. It costs less. It’s that simple.”
But is it that simple? Perhaps in our eagerness to push technology to the brink, we are losing a key aspect of music that transcends our simply listening to it. There is something that occurs in the moment of the performance that cannot be recaptured and processed later.
For as long as people have been experiencing this “in the moment”, spiritual aspect of live music, they’ve also had quite a tough time describing it. However, it is actually not as abstract as it sounds. There are certain things that occur in the moment, certain things that one hears, certain urges to move, certain awareness of the environment and of other people that all contribute to how people experience live music.
The music is in a context; it encapsulates everything around you and demands your full attention. Your experience is reliant on everything in that moment, not just what you are hearing.
Around this time last year, I was forced to listen to the Disco Biscuits’ Trance Fusion Radio Broadcast Vol 3—I hated it. Soon after, I went to my first Biscuits concert and I remember it now as one of the most amazing concerts of my life. Dancing like crazy surrounded by friends, listening to Barber shred the guitar; I was in a state of ecstasy.
My original reaction to the Disco Biscuits recording was so different from the live experience that my opinion of the two were at the complete opposite sides of the spectrum.
Not only is a recording unable to capture the essence of music, but recordings are constantly changing with technology. This is why many people prefer studio albums or soundboards to live recordings—it just sounds better.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for iTunes and I have no doubt the world would end if my computer ever crashed and my music was lost. Still, going to a live performance is a much more satisfying and lasting experience than any guarantee of infinite access to a playlist.
Sophia de Baun