The Third Eye

I was watching a recent documentary about The Velvet Underground when a thought popped into my head. The beginning parts of the film documented Loud Reed’s early artistic life and discussed some of his influences, particularly his literary influences, such as Allen Ginsberg and some of those wild Beat poets of yesteryear.

Something was exciting about those influences—the old footage of Ginsburg reading Howl and the stories of Loud Reed and his subversive instincts—which got me thinking about our current era.

It prompted me to think of that verse from Ecclesiastes in the Hebrew bible: “What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun.”

In short, it had me thinking about our post-everything culture. In a culture saturated with social media and endless “content,” it often feels that there is nothing new under the sun. There’s a ton of great new music we cover at The Third Eye, and plenty of exciting things are happening in the underground culture.

But is it truly new?

The categorization of music, art, or cultural trends into neatly defined movements or styles no longer feels relevant. In a streaming age where anything is accessible at any time, traditional genre boundaries, structures, and ideologies have been smashed to pieces, but I wonder what we’re left with.

Many of us – and even younger generations – look back to earlier eras with awe, especially the titans of culture from the cultural explosion of the Sixties and Seventies. This applies to Americans like Dylan and Hendrix, but also cultural icons from other countries (maybe CAN in Germany, for example).

All of that has been subsumed into our internet culture and taken by creators (including me) who mix and match elements from these influences, rejecting any adherence to any genre or movement.

It’s funny because I’ve come across a Spotify-curated playlist before that even has the title “Genreless.” I’ve also come across a band I’ve grown to love, Alien Eyelid, whose tagline is “burned out from the post-everything era.”

I think of this often as my site, The Third Eye, pumps out content. It’s an existential question for anyone doing anything creative today.

Why write? Why post anything? The culture is flattened when it falls into the sea of content swimming around the internet. I fall for this, too, and I am not excusing myself. The algorithms are designed to keep us hooked.

In music, post-everything can create incredible genre fluidity. Everything becomes a hybrid that resists easy classification. Many times, this doesn’t matter to me.

Great art is still being made, and the combinations between genres create intriguing and refreshing music. For example, I think about the “ambient country” of bands and artists like Suss and Prairiewolf. Or the many interesting tapes and releases from labels like Island House and Centripetal Force.

Still, there’s that gnawing feeling, and I wonder if anyone else has it (which is really why I wrote this—to send a message to the creative world).

Post-everything may be the final chapter -r maybe not. It’s a natural extension of post-modernism, one of those highly intellectual philosophical terms that’s hard to define. In a world without digital borders that’s increasingly globalized, the blending of high and low art, mainstream and underground, creates the type of odd complexity that’s hard to pin down.

One of the best TV shows to capture these themes is Black Mirror, like The Twilight Zone for the 21st century. This is also why I’ve resisted using TikTok. All social media can be disorienting, but TikTok, in my opinion, presents the most bizarre form of digital carnival-house hall-of-mirrors experience.

Postmodernism is defined as “a broad cultural, intellectual, and artistic movement that emerged in the mid-20th century as a reaction to modernism. It is characterized by skepticism toward grand narratives, rigid structures, and the idea of objective truth.

Postmodernism emphasizes plurality, fragmentation, irony, and questioning established ideologies. It has influenced literature, art, architecture, philosophy, and even everyday culture.”

If that’s how we define postmodernism, then what about post-everything?

I think we’re past post-modernism now into something entirely different. A cultural moment where we have everything all at once, and maybe we don’t know what to do about it. A sensory overload.

I feel guilty about clogging up the internet airwaves with too many posts, so I sometimes consider stopping the blog altogether. Alas, it gives me some joy, so I continue, and I usually just take a break to regroup and reconsider why I do this in the first place. And I go outside and interact with the world, instead of holing myself up in the bedroom and obsessively writing like a madman.

But I’m interested in the idea of making art in this cultural moment.

I’m not talking about the existential dread of our politics – both in the U.S. and worldwide. I’m not even talking about climate change, though that’s something that our infinite growth mindset has surely caused.

I’m talking more about the deluge of content, the content farms, and the graveyards of digital debris scattered throughout the internet—the influencer culture, the 30-second videos, the AI-generated everything.

Artificial intelligence is the most interesting aspect of this. It is a system incapable of original thought, but it’s more than capable of taking things from the past and re-organizing them into something different. It is a plagiarism machine (in the words of Noam Chomsky). When viewed in terms of art and culture, it cannot be created but can merely reproduce, whether that’s writing, journalism, graphics, or video.

In the post-everything age, AI is the engine that drives everything. It is a dehumanizing force that powers the recommendation algorithms. It is now everywhere at once without many of us noticing the subtle effects or what’s inside the ‘black box’ that makes it run.

ChatGPT takes the verse from Ecclesiastes (“What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun”), subsumes the content, and spits out different versions. You can ask for whatever version you want, and it will give it to you.

In the Post-Everything Age, music and culture can undoubtedly survive, but we must remain human in the dehumanizing deluge of content. I’m not sure how we do that, but we keep trying. More than anything, I want to hear what other people think of this, so please leave comments.

Mostly, this is just me going through one of my typical spending-way-too-much-time-online phases. However, it’s something I need to be mindful of. And it’s something that I think I’m not alone in struggling with. Where’s the balance?

One site that has helped me pause recently is a project called Meta Well. I will let them describe their mission if you check out the site, but it’s mainly about being mindful of the obsessive-addictive tendencies of internet culture and how social media companies and others have a way of preying on the likes of us who are prone to it.

My observations about music and culture in a ‘post-everything’ era stand, though. What happens to art, music, and everything else in a time like this? Sometimes, it may mostly mean creating stuff for the hell of it, and not posting it. Simply unplugging for a while, and not becoming one with the machine, as some may like us to.