Gongol.com Archives: January 2025
January 11, 2025
With the Palisades and Eaton fires alone accounting for the incineration of more than 37,000 acres and at least 12,000 structures, the Los Angeles fires are nearly incomprehensible in scope. Yet they seem oddly personal because so many household names have been affected: Anthony Hopkins, Ricki Lake, John Goodman, Paris Hilton, Jeff Bridges, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, and Billy Crystal are all named as having lost their homes to the fires. ■ The high concentration of entertainers in the area means that we will likely hear other stories like what happened to music producer Bob Clearmountain, who lost his home recording studio and who thinks many others have been lost, too. There's a good chance that many original recordings themselves have been irreplaceably lost, just like what happened when some 500,000 master recordings were destroyed in a 2008 fire at Universal Studios in Los Angeles. ■ At first, it seems strange to lament the likely loss of recordings in a time when Taylor Swift grossed $2 billion on ticket sales in one concert tour. For many people, the experience value of a concert can be priced far higher than the ongoing enjoyment value of a recording. ■ Still, great musicians should create gobs of recordings so that posterity can sift through them. Not everything has to be "A" material to still be worth saving! Imagine what a corpus of work we might have gotten from Beethoven or Mozart, had they been armed with modern tools for recording and transcribing music. Each wrote more than 600 pieces when they had to do all composition by hand. By hand! ■ To leave behind an enormous body of work isn't the only thing that matters in art, to be sure. But just like Walter Murphy's "A Fifth of Beethoven" re-imagined Beethoven's original without replacing the original, consider a world in which someone digs through the titanic unreleased archives of hundreds of songs recorded at Paisley Park and finds some random Prince riff that's never been developed before, then turns it into an original (if postmortem) collaboration. That would be a richer world than one in which a fleeting composition had crossed Prince's mind and been lost forever. ■ This need for talented artists to record what comes to their human imaginations will only become more important as AI slop takes up ever more space. The potential for computers in the hands of custodians -- rather than click-hunters and engagement-farmers -- to help enhance and grow our humane cultural footprint is great. But it won't get very far if the recordings are lost or the ideas are never recorded in the first place.
