A Little Blurry

By |2022-01-25T14:58:51-05:00March 15th, 2021|Categories: Culture|Tags: , , |

“Blurry’ is not the first documentary to deal with the perils of a rapid ascent to super-stardom. It is the first created by an award-winning filmmaker that deals with fame in the social media age. Paul McCartney was famous, Bono was famous, Kurt Cobain was famous, but none of these icons had 77-million Instagram followers and 40-million YouTube subscribers ready to pounce on everything they said and did.

Music in the Digiverse

By |2020-04-21T07:58:47-04:00April 17th, 2020|Categories: Culture|Tags: , , |

I recently wrote a piece on changes in the music industry brought on by the migration of virtually everything from creation, through promotion to distribution and consumption online. I used the rise of Gen Z phenom Billie Eilish, and the role played by social media in her ascent as an example of the powerful changes that are reshaping the industry. I left one set of observations to treat separately in a short follow-up piece. Although everyone under thirty is familiar with what I will call the web multiplier effect on the popular song, I would like to draw out [...]

Billie Eilish

By |2020-07-22T20:47:01-04:00April 16th, 2020|Categories: Culture, Featured Culture|Tags: , , , , |

Every once in a while this culture vulture finds talent and perhaps more than talent in places where I might never have looked even a few years ago. The ability to discern outcrops in the cultural landscape has been transformed by technology -- we can see so much farther and so much more clearly without ever leaving our computer cockpit.  Since it is an article of faith with me that creativity at the highest levels is an inexplicable enigma and can crop up anywhere at any time, this extended vision is a wonderful thing. Thanks to the [...]