Comment by rufus_foreman
Comment by rufus_foreman a day ago
I listened to punk in the 70's and hardcore from 80 to 84, nothing was curated by some authoritative source. It was all word of mouth.
Hardcore wasn't on the radio, it wasn't on TV (OK, "TV Party" and "Institutionalized" were on MTV, both of which were "joke" hardcore songs), you couldn't buy the records in the record stores in my town until the mid-80s, you couldn't buy the zines in my town.
There was a tiny amount of it played on college radio, but it would be something like one show a week from 2 AM to 3 AM on Sunday morning. Kids would drive from where I lived to the "city" and drive around in their cars taping that show from the car radio to a boombox and then pass those tapes around to get copied. It was samizdat. And most hardcore they couldn't even play on those radio shows anyway. "We don't care what you say, fuck you. Fuck you. Fuck you! FUCK YOU!!!" Great song, can't hear it on the radio. Can't hear it anywhere you go.
We found things. You had to really dig, but we found things. No one curated it for us. I hate the very idea of it. I mean my friend Joe "curated" music for me when he made me a tape of the Circle Jerks, Dead Kennedys, Black Flag, and DOA in 6th grade in 1981, but I don't think that is the meaning of curation that the title is referring to. If a kid got a record, it got passed around and taped. Then those tapes got passed around and taped. Etc.
No one tells me what music I should listen to, we told the musicians what kind of music we wanted to hear when we were in the pit. Many of them noped out from that. They were artists, not enablers of the violent tendencies of poorly parented 14 year olds. Fair enough. But we were finding things out.
> There was a tiny amount of it played on college radio, but it would be something like one show a week from 2 AM to 3 AM on Sunday morning
> We found things. ... No one curated it for us.
I think you're getting to the essence of good curation.
That college radio show is exactly curation. The record label that put out the hardcore 7"s is curation. The record store is curation. The kid who bought a record and made copies for friends is a curator.
Word of mouth is the strongest curation.
What's missing today is the human. The college radio DJ is a human curator, and is much more idiosyncratic and humanely engaging than an optimized-for-content-or-cost algorithmic curator.
Algorithms might work for very mainstream (or nonspecific) tastes -- and actually it is self-reinforcing on that level. But it fails badly for nichier stuff. And it is in direct opposition to those of us for whom "different" is/was part of our personal or group identity. :)