Frank Kogan

Still, reading over the recombinant dub piece again, a few points stick out:

So the shifts don't mean much and don't put the band interestingly at odds with itself. If the band had done a Celine Dion torch song followed by growling, darkness-drenched goth metal followed by Trick Daddy thug hip-hop, now those would be changes in identity.

This is maybe the "I like my center" argument, in which easy signifiers of sound and genre may recombine without challenging the underlying social arrangement -- i.e. there's "no meaningful genre distinction," but Person X has nothing to say to Person Y, even as they listen to essentially the same music. They're standing right next to each other but have nothing to say. This is why the Big Problem in internet communication, say, isn't necessarily that no one can agree on anything, but that people don't really know how to talk to one another regardless of what they agree on (what they need to agree on are the terms in which they might agree or disagree, the agreement and disagreement of content not being nearly as important as the agreement and disagreement of how the conversation happens).

One thing that centralization has going for it is an ability to guide a conversation to a particular subject -- when the actors are centered in the frame, it's much harder to talk about the elm tree instead. (Or, to drop the metaphor, if I'm put into contact with X in a generalist publication because I happen to like Y, I am in more conversation with Y in that moment than I would be if I had to look for Y myself to find it, something I would never actively do.) But even if you're guided to a center more forcibly, this doesn't ensure that you'll have anything interesting to say about it. (There's a metaphor in here somewhere for the year-end Slate convos, in which the para-center of pop-friendly thought is just as dry and unenlightening as the para-center of indie thought.)

the Recombinant Dubsters—particularly in hip-hop and techno—have usurped the official role of Conveyors of the Future, this frees rockers to evolve in all sorts of directions without worrying about which way is "forward." The forward spot is already occupied.

And this is probably as true to the then-Conveyors-of-Future categories now as it was for rock then, which means that the wide-open future is wide-open, or at least more so, for everyone. But I'm similarly ambivalent about this -- it's not music I'm worried about, it's people's ability or desire to talk about music in a certain way.

Nowadays more people from all over are able to find themselves in any old movie, including the main one(s), but the movies themselves have less of a central focus, so the feeling is of more diffusion or diversity or fragmentation, even though the feeling is wrong in regard to the general culture(s), which is more connected not more fragmented.

I think this is right, but I also think ultimately it's neither here nor there, merely a field on which we find ourselves. The problem with this feeling of diffusion and diversity is that such diffusion and diversity feels irreconcilable, when in fact it isn't. When there are more perceived "others," there are more people with whom it's not acceptable for you to speak, so you retreat. But though there's nothing inherently wrong with clusters and quasi-tribal formation around a larger number of cultural "centers," there is something wrong with the retreat part, even though it seems to follow naturally.