#32 Experiments in participation & communitas
As the world holds its breath, I play around at the ground-level. Gathering friends to talk about music, and facilitating communitas with accidental EDM superstars.
We’re just a few days away from the US election, and if you are reading this and feeling a little extra tension in your body, a little extra fridge-buzz humming in your mind, well, you’re not alone.
I don’t know how many people read this from the US, but I know it’s a few of you.
Please vote. For Harris. At this point I shouldn’t need to tell you why.
But in case hearing it from me somehow is the difference for you - Trump is an autocrat. He’s a bumbling old man, but he’s also a fascist, surrounded by dangerous oligarchs. He’s the most racist person you know, potentially about to be the leader of the free world. All the crazy-sounding sound-bites, that sound like wild things cooked up by left-wing radicals to trash him, are actually true things coming out of his actual mouth: yes he will be a ‘dictator on day one’. Yes he intends to deport millions of Americans. Yes he will cut taxes for the mega-rich. Yes he intends to dismantle America’s health and education systems.
He might be bumbling and confused as an individual, but the people he has surrounded himself with are not. They are clear-minded and dangerous.
Ok breathe …. (then vote, for Harris, and tell your family and friends why they should as well, though tell them you’ll still love them if they don’t - very important detail)
AUTOCRACY BAD? DEMOCRACY GOOD? PROBS
It’s good to zoom out, especially when zooming in is so frightening.
With that in mind, I found this image on the internet a couple of weeks ago.
It would take years to break down this data properly, so take it for the intensely broad zoom-out that it is.
But it shows ( I guess ?) the stalling of the democratic project, internationally, in the 21st century. See how the blue bits get bigger and bigger, and then around the year 2000, just kind of… stop getting bigger? That’s a long time before Trump, but maybe helps to show that the conditions for a Trump emerging were in play for a couple of decades before kicking in. As capitalism enters its so-called “late stage”, the grand 19th/20th century dream of the majority of the world’s human beings having democratic representation in their nation-states … has kinda faltered.
What is a liberal democracy and is our current idealised version of that actually the best way of achieving governance, especially in the context of needing to reframe all of our activity within an ecological/climate context? Guess what buddy, neither do I have the answer to that, nor is this the place to discuss it. But what stats seem to show us, and experts keep telling us, and most of us feel in our guts, is that the systems we’ve built in the last 200 years are running out of steam. They’ve brought us a long way, but they’ve been flawed too. Because all systems are imperfect, and complex, and need to evolve, and end and begin again. We need to do see past fatalism, and embrace change.
I’ve shouted this out once already, but especially for the Australians reading, I can highly recommend Tim Hollo’s Living Democracy as a timely read on how to shift our ideas of democracy towards a more ecological mindset:
Highly recommended - and highly readable!! You don’t need a political science degree to process what Tim is talking about in this book. He’s not the only one. He is part of a global movement of people actively advocating for, and experimenting with, new ways of living - a movement/network that is invisible until you find it. I’m trying to figure out where I plug myself into that movement/network myself. I think I’m probably already doing it.
Join us! Water’s fine etc.
Speaking of which …
MEANWHILE IN THE REAL WORLD
I’ve been continuing my “pivot-to-community” (lol ffs startups) by gently pushing a little further into some of my own experiments.
Last Friday morning, I recorded an episode of my Why Make Music podcast in front of 20 people, in a community hall in North Melbourne (Naarm):
This wasn’t meant to be a “sell tickets to watch me do the podcast” kind of ‘event’, we organised it very mindfully to be a small group of people, in a casual space, where over breakfast pastries and cookies everyone listens to a conversation and then breaks into smaller groups to connect and discuss. The format of the event is based off something my friend Fran has been doing, a thing she calls Breakfast Club - originally started in her home, small groups of musician friends coming together over BYO breakfast bites to talk honestly and openly about the challenges they are facing trying to navigate the music ecosystem.
Felt like a good fit for the podcast and guess what - it was.
We are going to do another one of these in Naarm in November, if you are curious to come along, please register your interest here.
My guest for this one was Ed Service, who is possibly the only person currently alive who can claim to be both a grassroots-level community music organiser in Naarm and “mates with David Guetta.” We talked a lot about community-level arts infrastructure, and about the concept of communitas - a term that was used by husband-and-wife anthropologists Victor & Edith Turner to describe the state of collective joy.
This, from the back of Edith’s book, Communitas: The Anthropology of Collective Joy (which I had to search pretty hard to find a paperback copy of):
Communitas is inspired fellowship, a group’s unexpected joy in sharing common experiences, the sense felt by a group when their life together takes on full meaning.
The book summarises decades of the couple’s research, identifying how groups of popel feel ‘communitas’ in different settings - in the workplace, in revolution, in the aftermath of disaster, at sporting events, at music performances, at carnivals and gatherings big and small.
Still having trouble imagining ‘communitas’ ? Think about the last time you felt so immersed in a collective experience - with a group of people - that you kind of ‘lost yourself.’ That you felt intensely connected & energised, but also that you felt completely part of a group, part of a gang, part of a species, part of a planet.
Here’s a bit more, taken from the book’s introduction:
Communitas often appears unexpectedly. It has to do with the sense felt by a group of people when their life together takes on full meaning. […]
Communitas occurs through the readiness of the people - perhaps from necessity - to rid themselves of their concern for status and dependence on structures, and see their fellows as they are. […] When communitas appears, one is conscious that it overrides psychological and sociological constructs. Its provenance appears to be the whole universe.
In concrete circumstances, communitas may be found when people engage in a collective task with full attention - often a matter of ordinary work. They may find themselves “in flow.” That is, they experience a full merging of action and awareness, a crucial component of enjoyment.
In communitas there is a loss of ego. One’s pride in oneself becomes irrelevant. In the group, all are in unity, seamless unity, so that even joshing is cause for delight and there is a lot of laughter.
The benefits of communitas are quick understanding, easy mutual help, and long-term ties with others.
Sound familiar? Sound like something you’d want to be part of, right, that you’d want to see more of in the world? Yarrr?
Finding the concept of communitas feels a bit like rediscovering a long-lost (and very very human) framework in which suddenly a lot of work we do in music begins to make sense. Like, make human sense, more sense than it does within the context of Spotify and TikTok and selling tickets and building social media profiles, tech and ego and money and popularity and achievement and success. Communitas is, dare I say, a crucial part of a richer, more complex, more human framework for understanding music practice that has the potential to restore dignity, and a sense of noble purpose, for musicians. (Spoiler alert: my podcast is actually about trying to explore and document that very framework, at a time when it feels urgently necessary)
My chat with Ed will be in the podcast feed soon. I can see, talking to him, how internalising this concept of communitas early in your practice as a musician could drastically change your mindset and your attitude around what you are doing, and put you in some right alignment with the world and your fellow humans as you toddle off. It was interesting hearing how having some of these intellectual frameworks in place before having a global EDM #1 smash hit, essentially calibrated them to process that experience as empathetic humans, not as emerging superstars. We talked a bit about how it possibly ‘inoculated’ them against some of the excesses or delusions that having sudden access to fame and wealth (in the context of music, at least, where money is usually so tight) can bring.
While waiting for that episode to drop in the feed, you can read this piece in the Sydney Review of Books from Jack Madin, Ed’s partner in the SHOUSE project, where he explains how the concepts of ‘communitas’ and ‘musicking’ have informed the work from even before they were releasing singles with Jason Derulo (!?):
Something is missing from our networked, commodified, consumerist lives. The stoic working week supplemented by Netflix and Instagram, followed by the hedonism of the weekend. Our thought patterns have been automatised by the passive consumption of dopamine-targeting entertainment, creating our own personalised ‘society of the spectacle’, what Guy Debord called ‘the decline of being into having, and having into merely appearing’. Social life has been replaced by its representation. This leaves a gaping hole in our existence, an absence of collective joy and authentic social relations.
Communitas is an interruption of this flow. The creation of collective joy and love. A break from the roil of everyday, individualised, capitalist life. A moment to fully feel and embody our shared experience. A breaking down of the boundaries, rules and roles of daily existence. Communitas is the time we are excited to be alive with our community.
Communitas, my friends! Get around it.
PODCAST PODCAST PODCAST
Yes yes the podcast. Currently, the podcast is the thing.
I’ve now released eight chats, recently with artists Tiana Khasi and Noelani (aka MONRXE), and live music researcher Dr Sam Whiting. Coming up soon, chats with Montaigne and my ye olde friend Ben Abraham.
Tiana’s comments on “restoring dignity” to musicians who work day jobs have been resonating on Instagram and travelling pretty far. Just one snippet out of what was a(nother) really warm and rich conversation with an excellent person.
Recording these podcast chats as videos, and editing out little snippets to post as IG, well ... speaking as someone with a stated aversion to social media, someone who has in recent years very much chosen the negative impact of social media as a hill to die on somewhat, it is taking a little bit of cognitive dissonance on my part to even post anything about the podcast on Instagram. Like, I’ve gone from deleting Twitter and not having Instagram on my phone, to being (again) a dedicated IG poster who is dropping reels in the feed 2-3 times a week and trying earnestly to respond to DMs and comments where possible.
It’s taking a bit of a toll, I won’t lie. I don’t have a good answer as to whether it is the right thing to do to be on these platforms at all. The rationale becomes .. if a one-minute snippet can reach 10,000 people, and knock them out of their orbits even just for those sixty seconds, then maybe I’m doing my part towards helping people find new ways of thinking, or helping people feel like they aren’t alone in their experiences.
On the flip side - am I now just participating in the ongoing training of the public to no longer desire or feel a need to dive into long-form dialogue, to spend an hour listening to someone unpack the (always) complex and complicated ideas that 60-second snippets can only ever hint at, only ever inevitably reduce and distill down to chicken nugget size? Not sure how I feel yet.
The podcast itself now has about 200 regular listeners - about 150 people are listening via Apple Podcasts & Spotify, and about 50-100 each week watch it on YouTube. So I’m, like, double the only target I had when I started (100 people). Which means I’m good.
For anyone curious - I reckon it takes me about 6-8 hours each week to make an episode. I’m doing it all for free. I’m loving it. Whether or not it is sustainable, I’m not sure yet, it all depends on how much longer it makes sense for my family, for me to be devoting a lot of my time towards things for which I don’t get paid. But, while it continues to make sense, I am actually determined to spend most of my time on things for which I don’t get paid, activities that are not financially “viable” or conventionally valued - because these things are useful and maybe even required.
i.e. Because I can, therefore I should. Does this make sense? Ask me in six months.
To the many publicists, artist managers, other industry folk, who are all telling me how much “they are listening to the podcast and loving it”, I do want you to know that I’m counting how many of you there are, and once that number inevitably reaches more than the number I see in my actual listener stats (currently 200ish) .. well, then I will know for sure what I already suspect, which is that most of you have just seen something pop up on Instagram and quickly flicked past it, but have decided to tell me you are listening because of, I don’t know, whatever reason you have to do that, whether its reflexive or more surreptitious.
Then I’m going to use some kind of deep surveillance tech to figure out exactly who is lying to me and hold a grudge against you forever.
Look, I can’t be all joy and peace and communitas and moonbeams! I gotta get my vindictive bitchy kicks somehow.
OK WRAP IT UP MATE
As always, there’s way more to talk about than I have time for right now, but I hope you are ok wherever you are, hope something in this ramble gives you something to think about, something to read, something to listen to.
Again, if you are interested in coming to our November event in Naarm, please register your interest here.
Again, if you want to listen to the podcast you can do so on YouTube, Apple Podcasts or Spotify - it’s called Why Make Music.
And again, yes I still intend to do a live stream! And play all of my unreleased music and just shoot the shit with you on the internet for a bit. I promise the next email you get from me will be about that. Promise.
See you next Tim,
Tim
ps. I’m really not proof-reading these properly now so apols for typos or any kind of confusing things !! Embrace chaos ?? But also, please don’t respect my work here as much as you should the real journalists and writers who take care to cite their sources, fact-check their claims, articulate their perspectives with poise and courage.
US-based reader here. I followed your instructions and voted for Kamala Harris.