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Conversations with Tyler

Ted Gioia on Music as Cultural Cloud Storage

Conversations with Tyler

Conversations with Tyler

Society & Culture, Education

4.8 • 2.4K Ratings

🗓️ 6 November 2019

⏱️ 63 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

To Ted Gioia, music is a form of cloud storage for preserving human culture. And the real cultural conflict, he insists, is not between “high brow” and “low brow” music, but between the innovative and the formulaic. Imitation and repetition deaden musical culture—and he should know, since he listens to 3 hours of new music per day and over 1,000 newly released recordings in a year. His latest book covers the evolution of music from its origins in hunter-gatherer societies, to ancient Greece, to jazz, to its role in modern-day political protests such as those in Hong Kong.

He joined Tyler to discuss the history and industry of music, including the reasons AI will never create the perfect songs, the strange relationship between outbreaks of disease and innovation, how the shift from record companies to Silicon Valley transformed incentive structures within the industry–and why that’s cause for concern, the vocal polyphony of Pygmy music, Bob Dylan’s Nobel prize, why input is underrated, his advice to aspiring music writers, the unsung female innovators of music history, how the Blues anticipated the sexual revolution, what Rene Girard’s mimetic theory can tell us about noisy restaurants, the reason he calls Sinatra the “Derrida of pop singing,” how to cultivate an excellent music taste, and why he loves Side B of Abbey Road.

Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links.

Recorded October 23rd, 2019

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Transcript

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0:00.0

Conversations with Tyler is produced by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University,

0:08.3

bridging the gap between academic ideas and real-world problems.

0:12.5

Learn more at mercatis.org.

0:15.2

And for more conversations, including videos, transcripts, and upcoming dates, visit

0:20.4

ConversationsWithT Tyler.com.

0:28.1

Hello, I'm very honored today to be here with Ted Joya.

0:31.6

Ted is probably my favorite writer on music, and also my favorite person to read and follow

0:36.5

on Twitter.

0:37.5

And he has a new book out which has been made a big splash called Music, A Subversive History.

0:42.6

Ted, welcome.

0:43.6

Well, thank you for having me.

0:44.8

So let's start with some questions about music.

0:47.0

Do you think our collective memory from music is decaying more rapidly?

0:51.0

Because communications, technologies move so much faster and preserve things so much better?

0:55.5

What people don't understand is that for most of history, music was a kind of cloud storage

1:02.1

for societies.

1:03.8

I like to tell people that music is a technology for societies that don't have semiconductors

1:09.2

or spaceships.

1:11.2

And if you go to any traditional community and you try to find the historian, generally,

1:14.3

it's a singer.

1:16.0

And music would preserve culture, it would preserve folklore.

1:19.6

Well, nowadays, we rely on cloud storage to be the preserver of these same things.

...

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