She turns to look at his moonlit profile. “I think I want to live in a world that doesn’t really exist anymore. I want to be back in a time where art isn’t all mixed up with money. Money poisons art.”
“Money and art have always been inextricably mixed,” Dmitrovitch says. “Look at the music of the classical age—all of that stuff was written for rich patrons. Artists have always curried the favor of the rich. What you have to realize is that if you want to live in that kind of a world you shouldn’t look backwards, you should look forwards. You should look around you right now. Now we’ve got computers. Computers enable artists to draw new networks, independent of finance, to create and disseminate art through new channels. Wavelengths vibrating with samizdat. Great electrical webs of illegal art.”
“Folk music,” says Samantha. “That’s what I want to see come back. Real folk music. The music that people in a region play to one another. A music that’s specific to the place where you live. Free of the influence of money. You play for me; I play for you.”
“Folk music has always been tied up with work,” Dmitrovitch says. “Slave songs. Mining ballads. Cowboy songs. Folk music is inextricably linked to commerce. If folk music still existed today it would be people in offices singing songs about paperwork. It would be clerks writing songs about being clerks. People listen to the radio at work now. The radio is what killed folk music. It was a good thing. It freed artists. There was an explosion of new art right when electricity was invented. Electricity freed all these people, allowed them to think beyond just what’s in front of them or around them. It started them thinking that someone else across the country might hear what they’d written. It to be better, more complex, more abstract than the regional. That’s why jazz happened. Jazz was the music of artists beginning to explore beyond their boundaries.”
“Sending a band on tour might once have made sense,” Samantha says. “Different towns, different cities, different music. You hit the road with your guitar and show ‘em in the next town over how it’s done in your town. That’s what I want. That’s what I miss. Now it’s all just celebrity-worship. People go to see bands that they’ve already heard; they’ve got every note memorized; they want to hear the songs just like they’re performed on the CD and they feel gypped if that doesn’t happen. Electricity homogenized this country. No matter where you go you hear the same bands on the radio; no matter where you go you see the same things on TV. There’s no identity of place anymore. What kind of folk music would this town produce? What kind of folk music could this town produce? With our Barnes and Noble and our Starbucks and our mall music stores?”