We live a karaoke culture. The Japanese word means "empty orchestra" - a lifeless musical form unencumbered by creativity and free of responsibility. Simple, clean fun for the millennial nuclear family. You can't fail in a karaoke world. It's life by proxy, liberated by hindsight. Authenticity, on the other hand, believes in the messy process of creativity. It's unpopular and out of fashion. It worships failure, regarding it as a romantic and noble pursuit - better to be a flamboyant failure than any kind of benign success. Karaoke and authenticity can sit well together, but it takes artistry to make that happen. When it does, the results can be explosive. Like when punk rock reclaimed rock and roll, blowing the doors off the recording industry in the process. Or when hip hop transformed turntables and records into the instruments of a revolution. Now it's happening again. In dance clubs across Europe and America, young people are seizing the automated stuff of their world - handheld game machines, obsolete computers, anything with a sound chip - and forging a new kind of folk music for the digital age.
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