Never Mind the Sex Pistols, Here's the Surf Police

There's been a lot of discussion over at the TPM Café Book Club about what the Internet is doing to the music scene — not just to the industry, which we can all see is crumbling, but to music itself. Bill Wasik (whose new book And Then There's This was this week's topic) declares himself depressed about "the ecstatic surf from new band to new band, from track to track, from style to style, that serves as the predominant mode of indie-rock fandom today." In the past, Wasik maintains, overnight sensations had "almost always been manufactured by radio, or by big record labels, or by the interplay between the two"; now it's fans on the Web who are responsible. Amanda Marcotte observes that there's nothing new about flash-in-the-pans. She's right on that one: Blues Magoos, anybody? And Nicholas Carr points out that the goal of the major labels "was not to encourage one hit wonders but rather to sustain elephantine franchises like, say, ELO, Yes, and the Eagles." Having endured one too many ELO concerts in my rock-critic years, I can vouch for that as well. But then he goes on: 

The problem with the Web, as I see it, is that it imposes, with its imperialistic iron fist, the "ecstatic surfing" behavior on everything and to the exclusion of other modes of experience (not just for how we listen to music, but for how we interact with all media once they've been digitized). In the pre-Web world, we not only enjoyed the thrill of the overnight sensation - the 45 that became the center of your waking hours for a week only to be replaced by the new song - but also the deeper thrill of the favorite band in whose work we deeply immersed ourselves, often following its progression over many records and many years.... It's the deep, attentive engagement that the Web is draining away, as we fill our iTunes library with tens of thousands of "tracks" at little or no cost. What the Web tells us, over and over again, is that breadth destroys depth. Just hit Shuffle.

To which I have to say, with all due respect, bollocks.

First off, anyone who can coin (or quote) a phrase like "ecstatic surf" and then declare the practice wrong seems a bit conflicted, to say the least. Could Bill and Nick be victims of Catholic school, perhaps? But more importantly, the idea that breadth inevitably destroys depth on the Web strikes me as plainly wrong — and music makes a good case in point.