DIRECT EXPERIENCE IS BEST!

(feel free to listen to me rambling this in lieu of reading)

Almost twenty years ago, my oldest friend called me to tell me about a dream he had. At the time, this friend was deep into dreaming, its personal and archetypal significance, his brain hard-wired in science but with a weird, acid-fried cosmic spirit that has thankfully not been lost as he has moved properly into adulthood. My memory of this dream, passed on via telephone two decades ago, amounts to him holding the skull of a bull and chanting ‘DIRECT EXPERIENCE IS BEST’, almost like a mantra, to himself. I could call said friend and ask him to clarify the details of this, but the important thing isn’t the truth. The important thing is the second-hand memory of this moment, transmuted through time into something I think about often.

I especially think of the power of direct experience when I see people arguing about things on the internet. I’ve never been blessed with the ability to go toe to toe with any ex-debate captain, especially when they are behind the cowl of anonymity. Whether someone posts as themselves or under a pseudonym doesn’t matter. When working behind the Great and Powerful Oz style veil of the digital persona, the stakes are just different. I cannot tell you how many times I have seen someone with strong online opinions cower when faced with talking to the object of their ire in real life. I have seen other people be this guy, and I have been this guy myself.

I know enough not to make this little piece of writing directly about Geese, or Chaotic Good Projects, or whether the company’s controversial bot-farming music campaign of the aforementioned wealthy-ish New York buzz-band constitutes as a psy-op or digital marketing. What I do know is that sixteen years ago I drove with my roommate at the time down to Baltimore in his jeep to see the last Whartscape (an independent summer music festival run by Dan Deacon’s Wham City Collective, from 2005-2010), needing with every fiber of my being to experience the best adventurous noise rock that a summer day in Baltimore had to offer. As much as I appreciate being able to tell people I saw a reformed Arab On Radar pull off a never to be repeated, singular, oppressive, occasionally horrifying spectacle, what really stuck with me was when the singer of Double Dagger, understanding which way the wind would blow in the next decade, made a few comments about Live Nation Entertainment, who had formed earlier that year as an unholy fusion of Clear Channel and Ticketmaster. I remember him saying something to the effect of “It’s important for us to keep doing things like this, independent things. Because if we don’t build an alternative infrastructure, those companies are gonna steamroll us until there’s nothing left.” Again, the quote has been obscured by distance from the moment but I have thought about it time and time again as I, along with most of my peers, marched with consent towards a world of pure digital homogenization, in hopes to find connection, more gigs, and hopefully enough money to not have to get another job.

As a young person, the idea of ‘doing it yourself’ was revelatory, seen at first through the lens of bad ska-punk bands in the basements of churches and youth halls, stumbling valiantly through covers of “Sound System” as the most open-minded youth group chaperones mumbled to themselves ‘at least they’re in the building’, then through post-Dystopia/Dropdead style anarcho-warehouse-punk, feeling the most like a little baby I had ever felt as a generally politically-neutral child who protested the Iraq War and still watched Them do it anyway, now forced to watch friends who were smarter than me talk Kropotkin and Emma Goldman with dudes who were maybe 3-8 years older than us but seemed decades deeper in experience, watching these older guys leer at them and hearing the word “polyamory” for the first time, then discovering The Microphones and Little Wings in my late teens/early twenties and being made aware of a vast network of songwriters moving from house show to house show. The thing that was so exciting about it was how easy it was to jump into the river: there seemed to be a micro-nation of people willing and dedicated to work out an alternative framework in which one could exist, thrive even!

Eventually, a judgemental voice inside me told me I needed to grow up and get serious, and I forsook the purity of what I imagined ‘doing it yourself’ to be in favor of trying to find a CAREER IN MUSIC, with varying levels of success. At the time, I remember feeling an immense jealousy looking at the music world I believed I left behind, especially as the Philadelphia DIY scene exploded. I was a spectator, and in my mind I had given up my place in the punk house in favor of trying to play guitar on other people’s records, hoping that one of these songs would hit and I would win the musical lottery. Looking back, the main regret is that I held myself to such a strong binary, a definitive either/or, and didn’t work harder to spread the simple joy, discovery, and egalitarianism I experienced in DIY punk to all of the different music spheres I inhabited. While I’m aware that the spirit of doing it yourself is still very much alive (more on that later), I’m afraid that the opposite has occurred. The cold grip of the free-market infiltrated its way into independent music, promising a leveling of the playing field via Internet virality. As the NFT scammers of a few years ago said (remember that?): “Join our community!!”

Now, in 2026, I understand that the strong separation between DIY and the rest of the larger music world was meant to be a protective force against the corrosive nature of capital and Selling Your Songs Back To You. All popular music today is a descendant of folk songs. Songs sung to communicate, funny songs about farting and being broke and having sex, songs about labor, songs about dying. Our songs, songs that have been sung as part of daily life for as long as there was language. Divorcing these songs from the communities that birthed them, making us believe in the genius of the individual, then packaging the individual and selling it to the world, has become big business in the past hundred years or so. As we shuffle further into our hyper-digital lives, this project has gone into overdrive, and has taken an unsettling post-human turn with the dawn of AI music. Maybe because of this, in the past few months I’ve seen multiple TikToks/Reels that espouse the importance of buffing up your digital presence in lieu of playing live. Insert your Baudrillard quotes here, or some misunderstood passage from Psychopolitics. Hyper-individualism, selling yourself as a brand, maximizing productivity. Laura Jane Grace of Against Me!, once the champion of creating another world for us to exist and be free of capitalist expectation, now complaining on Threads about razor-thin tour profit margins. Laura, this is not the other world we thought we’d be in!

(Lest you think I am some kind of boomer luddite, I would like to state here that I don’t think the problem is the internet itself, but the wholesale corporate conquest of the digital space. How ironic that the hippies who thought they were saving the planet with their art were duped into thinking the Internet would be a brave new world of communication and expression, only to have companies and governments move in to re-colonize. Ok let’s get back to it:)

What, you may ask, is the answer here? Do we wake up every morning and remind ourselves we live in hell, knowing that the same technology used to turn our cousins and grandparents and neighbors and peers and selves into unrepentant race scientists is also being used to manipulate us into liking cool bands? If I told you I had the answer, I would be lying. It sucks to see people get the golden ring when you don’t have it, and no one holds onto it forever. Most people who make music or art were trained to respond to the dopamine boost of positive attention, so in a way we have been primed to operate in this modern attention economy.

All I know is that almost every single time that I have had to film content, I have had the thought that maybe I hate myself. I have never had that thought playing a song for someone in a real room with air and space and sound waves. It may not feel like it but there are real people in the places you live that want to make art, to put on events, and there are people who want to go to these events. A lot of people have been trained to believe the only thing that gives a work value is monetary success, but we all know that is not true. How many silly jokes, songs, stories have you come up with while hanging out with friends, partners, family? Do they resonate through time, changing, making you laugh with remembrance? Almost like a real life meme, right? Or like a quote from The Office, or Mulholland Drive?? It is in the interests of massive companies and the governments that pay tribute to them to make us believe that the only world that matters is the digital one, but they know what we know in our blood: that none of this is real. However, it is real to go out into the world and experience something. So go to the function, play for people who want to listen, go see a show. Even if it sucks, just tell yourself you’re watching Catatonic Youths in real life. There are Sean Stephens everywhere for those with eyes to see.

One last thing: the defining musical memory of my life is not seeing Prince, or getting arrested in Russia with mewithoutYou, or learning that if you can do a barre chord, you don’t need a capo. It was when my other oldest friend (not the dream guy) took me to a room above a vintage clothing store in Towson, MD where I saw Mike Appichella of the Charm City Suicides draw a massive monster face on his chest and close their chaotic set with a song called “Heroin Sucks”. Decades on, that moment strikes me as when I realized the only path for me was one in service of music, to live a life of immersion and obsession, one where direct experience is best.