Mind Your Own God Damn Business

The other day, Anthony introduced me to yooouuutuuube.com. It’s a goofy little gimmick, but I’m kind of in love with it. After seeing it, I did what I always do, and leeched it off of him, claiming it as my own discovery and putting the link up on Facebook. The song I picked for it was “Natural One” by Folk Implosion, because the video is weird, and because that’s one of those songs that I constantly forget that I love until I hear it on an old mixtape or the radio.

Anthony is also apparently a fan of the song, and recalled how he used to sit around and wait for videos to show up on MTV, and then pointed out that the kids these days don’t know what it’s like to wait for a video to come on the air.

This is true. One of the things that I find strange about the students I work with is that none of them really remember a time before the Internet. A typical high school senior was born in the early 90′s, so by the time they were eight years old, the Internet was in most households. There’s always been a gigantic assload of information waiting at their fingertips, 24 hours a day. No fact is too stupid or too small, no song is too shitty or esoteric, no object is too worthless or obscure. It’s all out there and relatively easy to find.

This line of thought sent me spiraling into old man mode – I started thinking about how it was fucking up our nation’s youth that they didn’t know what it was like to have to wait for anything or deal with any sort of delayed gratification. I have to steal at least one cell phone per class because kids can’t wait until they see their friend in the hall to tell them what a whore the girl in front of them was dressed like, they have to twitter it anytime they cough or have a solid BM, and three days before an album is out they already have a copy and are bitching about how they’ve “sold out”.

Then I realized something: I don’t really remember life before the Internet either. I’m exactly like the students.

Remember these badboys? I call this one "Boner Jams '96". I'm just kidding. I never could have come up with something that clever in 1996.

I thought back to highschool. There was a remix of “Hey Man Nice Shot” by Filter that I wanted really, REALLY bad. I would wait and hope that they would play it on the radio, and occasionally they would, but it seemed like I would never have a cassette tape cued up and ready to record when it was time. I went to record stores looking for it, but it was nowhere to be found. I wasn’t really even too sure who did the remix or what album I could find it on; there was no fucking Internet to look it up on, remember?

Finally, one day when my friend Kevin and I were at a used record sale at The Finest in Ft. Collins, I stumbled on the single, bought it for a few dollars, and then breathed a sigh of relief. From when I heard it on the radio the first time to when I finally had a copy that I could listen to whenever I wanted, my search took about a year and a half.

Lock up your daughters, gentleman. The Scatman is in town. Did I say "daughters"? I meant "young boys and barnyard animals".

I did a little experiment just now, and in two minutes and thirty seven seconds, I was able to find a page streaming the remix and telling me who it was by, a video on youtube, three torrents that I could download it from and a link on iTunes I could use to purchase it. It even has it’s own fucking wikipedia page. It’s a 14 year old single, and in less than five minutes I can have it playing on my stereo while I’m reading two pages of information about it. You would think from the level of information available about it that it was one of the most influential songs of 1995 (narrowly beating out “Gangsta’s Paradise”, “Big Poppa”, “Bulls on Parade” and “The Scatman”).

Everything else is this way now, too. If I want to know the name of that guy who played “Middle Age Man” on SNL twenty years ago, I can find the actor’s name, a short clip of the skit and a page listing every date and channel that it has been shown on since it was first aired.

There was a time when your chance to see an episode of a television show was when it aired. Once it was over, you might get lucky and catch a rerun during the summer, but that was it. Now, I think more people watch tv on hulu, tivo and media PCs than when it actually airs.

The only thing that I found more interesting than boobs at the age of 13 was Street Fighter II, and I can purchase a full arcade cabinet on ebay for $75.

These are all just things that I was interested in that are fifteen years old. It’s even easier to get my hands on things that were produced in this decade.

And I think, for the most part, that this is a good thing. I certainly take advantage of it.

But I’ve gotten a little bit de-sensitized to it, and that makes me sad.

I remember when I first got a copy of Napster running on my computer. I think that was when I really figured out that the Internet was going to change the way things worked. Instead of spending a lot of time and energy staying on top of who was making music that I liked and when their album was coming out, digging through bins at record stores, waiting for special orders and shelling out $15, I typed a band name into a little search field, and if anyone else had a copy of it, not only could I get it for free, I didn’t have to wait. I remember sitting there, tenting in my pants as I slowly realized what the implications were for my free time and my wallet.

Anytime I see this image, I'm hit by equally powerfull waves of nostalgia and embarrassment. What the hell? Whatchu want me to say? I won't lie, and I can't deny....Jesus, what's wrong with me?

Unfortunately, as time has passed, I no longer find the Internet a magical luxury, and instead just expect it to do shit for me. I’m vaguely irritated if I have to wait more than ten minutes after an album is out to get a copy of it, and if I can’t find what I want anywhere and realize that I may have to purchase the actual, physical CD, I’m completely perplexed.

It’s also changed the way that I listen to music. I have more trouble than I used to putting an album in and listening to it from start to finish. I didn’t always love all of the songs on an album(I almost never did, actually), but there was something kind of satisfying about listening to a new CD all the way through.

Furthermore, even though it’s nice that the work of getting music has largely been eliminated, I think the treasure hunt respect of it added value to the music in my brain. Let me share a shameful memory with you: I nearly shit my pants waiting for Limp Bizkit’s second album to come out. In the weeks before its release, I eagerly waited for “Nookie” to play on the radio or MTV so I could get a little taste of Fred Durst’s weepy, awkward rapping about how mean girls were. When it finally came out, and I spent my fifteen dollars on the album, my nipples were hard for six weeks; After scraping and scrounging for a few minutes of radio play here and there all summer, my brain had elevated the value of that album somewhere between gold and oxygen, and now I could listen to Fred Durst tell me that he was a sucker like he said, fucked up in the head, not, WHENEVER THE FUCK I WANTED TO.

I’ve complained several times since then that even though I’m still a fan, music doesn’t pump me up like it did as a teenager. Some of it is that I’m not 19 anymore, but I think some of it is also that there’s no delayed gratification involved anymore either. Not just with music. With books, movies, television – it’s all there, all the time.

Do I think that it’s a bad thing? Not at all. I love having access to all of this information, and there are books that I wouldn’t read, movies I wouldn’t see, and Street Fighter II arcade cabinets that I wouldn’t buy if it wasn’t all sitting at my fingertips.

But I do remember the feeling that I got whenever I got my hands on an album that I’d special ordered, or figured out the name of a song I loved on the radio that had eluded me, or the week that I spent listening to The Prodigy’s “The Fat of the Land” from start to finish when it finally came out, and it makes me a little bit sad that the little part of my brain that is stimulated by delayed gratification just sits there and atrophies now, next to the parts that filter what I say and the one that keeps my scrotum youthful and elastic.

Lately, I’ve been listening to streaming Internet radio while I do my homework and a few days ago a song came on that I really liked. I checked the playlist, but the station didn’t have the name of the song listed.

After an initial wave of irritation and worry that I wouldn’t be able to immediately download the song and have it forever, I took a deep breath, went back to my books, and decided to just enjoy the song, whatever it was, until it ended and disappeared into the ether, without me ever knowing what it was called.