Last weekend I saw a bluegrass band called Hot Buttered Rum at Higher Ground. The band is an all string band that plays a mix of traditional and new bluegrass (newgrass). Touring the country tirelessly in their veggie oil bus, they have been part of a larger repopularization of bluegrass music among younger people (and older folks too for that matter). The long and short of it is that they have a really dedicated fan base that loves to see them live (their live performances are high energy musical mastery). However, most fans only were able to catch a live show once or twice a year given the spanning touring schedules that the band maintains. Basically, they couldn't be everywhere at once...until now.
At the show on Saturday, a view dedicated fans did a live simulcast of the show online, streaming high-quality content over the fansite morebutter.com. My friend Colin, who lives in Arizona, listened to the entire show from the comforts of his computer. He later asked me if I thought that the members of another band that sat in for one of the songs were off beat (which they were). While I was impressed by the quality of the broadcast, I really can't imagine listening to a live show on line. Don't get me wrong, I love live music recordings but there's just something that seems boring about listening to a simulcast live show, especially a bluegrass show where half the fun is dancing like a monkey. In this way, the digital radio medium cannot create the energy of being at a concert in a crowd with hundreds of other people dancing to mutually appreciated music. To take this a step further, I believe that the radio remove the ritual context of going to a concert in that you don't wait in line, buy the ticket, get searched by the bouncers, dance with friends, meet strangers, etc. As such, radio carries with it an overtly desocialized message, one that removes direct human interaction as well as ritual context. Jo Tacchi, in his article "Radio Texture: Between Self and Others," clarifies radio's message when he states, "radio sound creates a textured "soundscape"...within which people move around and live their daily lives...these sounds, on both a social and personal level, can be seen to connect with other places and other times. Linked with memories and feelings, either experienced or imagined, they can evoke different states of mind and moods." As Tacchi indicates radio fragments human experience by juxtaposing disparate social places and times while also serving as a component of other experiences within daily life, not the focal point of activity as in live performance. Furthermore, "radio can be used in this pseudo social way to create a self that could, or would like to be, social. This makes listening to the radio a social activity, in that it can act to reinforce sociality and a sense of social self, and at the same time has the potential to fill perceived gaps in one's social life" (Tacchi, 242). Thus, radio is paradoxically, social and unsocial. For instance, my friend Colin, a huge Hot Buttered Rum fan, used the radio to mimick the social experience that he would normally have at a live performance. Accordingly, he confirmed to himself his hardcore fan status (thus constructing the social self) while also filling his social desire for that particular live music experience. Regardless, I still feel that live music ought be lived in context it originates in order to have a truly social experience.