I Offer Subversive Opinions

Here are some highlights of my in-depth interview with Image Journal

I do so few interviews nowadays. But I did answer questions recently from Joshua Stamper for Image Journal—and the interview got published this week.

This turned into quite a dialogue. The full transcription was more than 5,000 words.

They described me, in the headline, as “subversively human.” That feels about right.

Below are a few highlights. You can find the entire interview here.

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Image: Where do we find silence? In an era of twenty-four-hour news cycles, doom-scrolling, predictive text, and entire industries built on a business model of distraction and noise, how do we protect it?

TG: I have a musician friend who wrote a song called “Hermitage.” I heard him introduce it on the bandstand one night, and he felt obliged to explain what a hermitage was. After all, it’s not a word you hear often nowadays. He told the audience: “I should tell you what a hermitage is. It’s a place where people go to chill out.”

I laughed at that, but I like his definition.

We need places to chill out nowadays more than ever before. I’d even speculate that there’s a business opportunity here. Somebody should start a chain of hermitages—call them chillout centers or retreats or whatever. Demand will soon be off the charts.

It’s already happening. I hear from people every day who are fed up with their digitally driven lives. Just yesterday I was told that 40 percent of the public now tries to avoid hearing the news. Social media is no better. I’ve cut back sharply, and judging by the metrics many others have done the same. This movement will spread.

That is how silence will get reclaimed in our society. It will happen at the grass-roots level. People like you and me will find our own ways of chilling out. We don’t need to wait for permission from Silicon Valley.

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Image: In your incisive 2020 piece for Image, “Gratuity: Who Gets Paid When Art Is Free,” you warn that established principles of gift exchange are being hijacked and redefined by economic structures increasingly in thrall to the tech titans that colonize our attention and mediate commerce at colossal scales. With this in view, how to course correct?

TG: There’s a hidden economy in the creative world that doesn’t involve money. It’s all built on gifts and giving. That’s why we say artists are gifted. If you ask them about the sources of their creativity, they will admit that they are mysterious and outside their control. They understand that they cannot purchase moments of inspiration with money—it’s a transaction without price tags.

For this same reason, artists are often happiest when they give back to their audiences. I know so many musicians who will perform for free, just because they want this experience of giving their music to others.

Even more, they understand that music is a gift that increases in value the more it is given. A song is not exhausted when it is played for a thousand—or a million—people. It gets stronger each time. We don’t have the right words to describe these things. Even worse, we try to explain them in the language of economics, when creativity resists such ways of thinking.

The sad result is that artists are often exploited, sometimes by their own managers or record labels or some other intermediary they have trusted too much. I get upset when I see companies play dirty tricks on artists. Often it’s not much different from tricking children.

I don’t think there are easy solutions. Artists will always be easy to exploit. But I will issue a warning to anybody who works in businesses that depend on creativity. They have a moral obligation to deal fairly with the people who do the creating. If they fail to do so, they should earn our distrust and scorn.

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Image: Your book Music: A Subversive History is a remarkably comprehensive survey that speaks to the ways music is a technology of subversion, a necessary dissidence. What does dissident music sound like today?

TG: It’s actually getting easier to create subversive music. Just being a human being is a radical move at this moment in history.

There are so many things that AI can never do. It can’t fall in love. It can’t feel a family tie or know what it’s like to be a parent or a child—or even a friend or citizen. It can’t sacrifice itself in a higher cause. It can’t even know what it’s like to contemplate the cosmos or mourn the death of a loved one.

Just by putting these experiences into songs we make a powerful statement. Of course, I fully expect AI to imitate these true songs with its fakery, but it can only do so through pretending and plagiarizing. I have complete trust that a discerning audience will be able to tell the difference.

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You can read more here.