Welcome to The B-Side
A thesis document of sorts
There is more of everything than ever, and none of it makes any sense. Do you ever feel this way? Like there are a thousand bands that all sound the same, movies with identical plots, books with near-identical jackets? So do I.
Only my earliest memories are free of technology. The iPhone came out when I was 5 years old, and I’ve had one since I was 12. This was (thankfully) before the absolute supremacy of social media — my earliest and most fond memories of the Net are the evenings after school, where, during my alloted “computer break,” I would spend between 15 and 30 minutes diving down Wikipedia rabbit holes, visiting forums, searching for answers to questions I didn’t even know I had. It was here that I first watched porn, at too young of an age to know what was happening. It was here (and only here, Thank God) that I witnessed murder. It was also here that I discovered Animal Collective, and Imogen Heap, and Songs: Ohia, and Felt, and Fishmans, and Boredoms, and...
My point is not that I’m niche. My point is that someone, at some point, decided to rip a Muslimgauze CD and upload it to YouTube (or bittorrent, or whatever), and I got to find it, see what other people thought of it, and make up my own mind. I got in right as the archaeological dimension of the Internet was moving into the background, when everybody was still digitizing their CDs and DVDs, when the spirit of collaboration and community was still (somewhat) alive. Those places still exist, but they’ve moved underground — instead of asking Reddit what that strange bump near your unmentionables is, you ask ChatGPT (or, better yet, Claude). And instead of spending an hour on Discogs or IMDb message boards searching for our next album or movie, we listen to our Daylists and have Netflix tell us What To Watch Next.
The result of such an infantilizing circuit of digital exchange, for the consumer, is an intensification of the borders of one’s own milieu and a progressive defamiliarisation of anything that isn’t Peso Pluma or bbno$. On the creative side, artists chase trends and attempt to appeal to ever more specific niches that are entirely algorithmically determined and based on clicks rather than taste or discernment. In short, complete typification, both of the listener and the artist. Everything looks and sounds the same, and everybody looks at, listens to, and reads the same things. Difference is obliterated, and history along with it.
A lack of historical structure might sound like the perfect environment for novelty — if we are no longer burdened with the weight of the past, how much more can we do? This intuition rests on a faulty understanding of culture — every Great Work is always situated in time, responding to its own past and present while opening up new and exciting possibilities for the future. Even the Italian Futurists were responding to a definite historical situation and its accompanying material forms.1 It is only with knowledge of the past that you can imagine a new future.
If you’ve ever taken an art history class, you know that this is how we are taught to think of past cultural movements. But for whatever reason we are unable to do the same for our present moment, which leads to a fundamentally conservative approach to artistic practice — music rests on the most conservative foundations of tonal/modal harmony, art offers a patina of radicalism while actual experimentation has all but ceased, and everyone writes like Sally Rooney (or worse, Ottessa Moshfegh).2 Is it any wonder that we’re so worried about AI replacing us?
The Internet-as-archive is something we are all passively aware of, and almost everyone openly hates the inhumanity of cultural production + circulation. But we’re too deep into the convenience paradox. It’s become much easier to convince ourselves that what we get is what we want, rather than forcing ourselves to consciously seek out new cultural forums or revive old ones (such as, ahem, the blog) that better suit our purposes.
The B-Side is founded on the premise that what is interesting must be discovered and understood. Frictionless also means contextless, and to create anything new and interesting, you must be able to refer to a history, not an endless present.
This is not a new idea — publications like The Wire have been doing serious work in this direction for decades. But curation is a well-worn path. What has never really existed is the infrastructure for self-directed discovery — a way for you to develop your own taste through personal encounter.
In addition to writing about interesting, obscure, and innovative aspects of present (and past) culture, I want to give people the tools to really surf the web again, as we used to be able to so easily do. I have admittedly focused much more on music in this first post — this is because I have already built Crate Digger, a music discovery tool that lets you comb through various archival sites and find things you would never come across otherwise (sort of like going to a record store!). I plan to build out other tools aimed at different aspects of media as the site gains momentum. For now, though, expect interviews, deep dives, and weekly writings centered around cultural discovery.
The communities organized around this kind of work exist — Kim’s Video, Vintage Obscura, Discogs, Cinemageddon, Karagarga — but they are insular by nature. There is no reason this sensibility should be available only to forum lurkers and the cognoscenti. I want to make this kind of digging easier for everyone.
I do not pretend to have privileged access to objective standards of quality — the main point of this project for me is the tools that I have built and will continue to build. The blog is meant to be a communal space in the vein of early BBS sites/forums where people can gab about what they’ve been finding and hear from me (and others) about the same. Because taste is ultimately social.
So let’s get started. I’ve been digging my whole life, and I suspect that if you’re reading this, you have been as well. There’s a lot down there.
From Marinetti: “That one should make an annual pilgrimage [to the museum] just as one goes to the graveyard on All Souls’ Day—that I grant. That once a year one should leave a floral tribute beneath the Gioconda, I grant you that… But I don’t admit that our sorrows, our fragile courage, our morbid restlessness should be given a daily conducted tour through the museums. Why poison ourselves? Why rot?”
Nothing against either of them — but the concentration of literature towards a needlepoint of mere style is its death knell. If every sad young woman can write like Ottessa Moshfegh, so can Claude.