The New Age Archive: Commodification, Identity, and Our Search for Meaning in Great Big Collections of Stuff

The following intervention into the world of digital archiving, which I hope will illuminate the commodification and dissemination of artistic production in the modern era and its role in forming new socializations, requires a historical refresher. Any examination of independent/DIY music cultures in the digital age must begin with the camcorder, the visual-audio capture instrument that enabled so much of the archival work we see today. Grainy videos of live performances started popping up on MySpace and YouTube as early as 2004 or so, and were propagated on various music forums, weaving individuals from across the globe into shared space and experience. 

These uploads of live music archived particular moments in an amorphously historicized digital world and offer initial instances of cultural sourcing and streamlining on the internet. They transmitted lived experiences to thousands of individuals who excitedly consumed the content while simultaneously forging social worlds centered around the consequent appreciation of shared cultural interest. Due to the newness of this digitized cultural exchange and formation, emergent identities began to form. As sites like Napster enabled the rise of streaming, they muddied the waters of artist-listener relations, creating an uncultivated database without a clear cultural power structure. In contrast with institutions of decades past, like fan clubs, radio sourcing, or college charts, a course of difference was charted in the 2000s through both the separation of the artist from control over musical dissemination and the death of dependency on music being physically manifest. Fan clubs provided artists with control over the distribution of various items that produced material and commodified identity, but the digital world disembodied the artist as a physically manifest source and more damningly, as the sole source of their own musical production. Radio and college radio, whose importance largely relied on the fact that the consuming audience could not experience music on-demand in any way other than physical ownership of records they might originally hear over the airwaves, was equally disrupted. With the ascent of Napster and similar offerings, users could find songs and artists they sought out intentionally, but the artist remained centrally located in cultural production through the invisibility of content uploaders. However, the democratization of sourcing such digital streams created led to the beginnings of the disembodiment of the artist as an agent of cultural dissemination.

With the advent of YouTube as a space of cultural accumulation and diffusion in the late 2000s, uploaders’ new roles as sources of post-physical access to artists and their music, whether studio recordings, ripped demos, or live performances, thrust listeners (and guiding algorithms) into an unimaginable new power. While cultural-artistic identification had previously almost entirely depended on physical spaces (venues, homes, record stores), a particularly tangible set of socializations, and collections of music, YouTube particularly reoriented this identification, placing non-artists (listeners, collectors, etc.) as curators and critics of artistic merit, and more broadly, of musical space. For instance, if you look up Underworld’s classic Trainspotting soundtrack inclusion “Born Slippy .NUXX,” the third result is an upload from March 16, 2009, from user “sean7000.” It has almost six times more views than the official music video posted by Underworld a year later, with 24 million and counting as of early 2024. A quick scan of sean7000’s account reveals a user who posted countless 90s electronic cult classics, such as “Tribal Church” by Joe Inferno and “Play With The Voice” by Joe T. Vannelli. In doing so, sean7000 became an archivist of that strain of musical culture and consumption, creating digital space in which participants pursued common cultural identity. That pursuit, taking place through shared cultural interests in a post-physical setting, places music as a social object lacking its previous actionability, which characterized the function of live venues and vinyl; instead, the music becomes a commodity through which an idea of culture is represented, but never truly molded. The uploader, the platform, and the consumers of cultural-musical content all become ingrained in new mythologies of cultural production and identity that lack any physical manifestation, making them digitized commodities socially valued by consumers and curators alike.

This same archival-curatorial gesture and result is visible in uploads of other uploads of music to the internet. Looking up “my bloody valentine live,” for instance, offers a first video with 123k views that reads “My Bloody Valentine - Live in Austin (1992),” posted on September 9, 2012 by the account “monsmartyrium.” As with sean7000, a deeper look into monsmartyrium’s account reveals archival-curatorial production. Unlike sean7000, however, whose last contribution to YouTube under that username was seven years ago, monsmartyrium’s most recent was four months ago. Their uploads include plenty of live video or audio recordings as well as various demos, tracks, and the occasional movie scene or interview. The accumulation of accessible yet intangible documents of moments in musical and thereby cultural history (in this case, shoegaze, noise rock, etc) installs the listener, who is interacting with an amorphous commodity in YouTube video form, as positioned to write or rewrite a scene’s history and, crucially, to contribute to the creation of a canon. The cultural curation that canonization represents makes it the iron upon which cycles of cultural-musical commodification are forged, as it makes meaning of the infinite possibilities of digitality, enforcing perceived exclusivity while also not presenting any accordant physical manifestation. It might seem harsh to imply the falseness of digital exclusivity, but under surveillance capitalism, we often instinctively rely on physical intimacy as a confirmation of reality. Objects that can be rendered in a physical sphere hold a definite power that pushes against the malleability of their digital counterparts. It is, then, an invaluable path to understanding the new world of artist-listener relations and the role of archival-curatorial actors in creating post-physical cultural-musical space. When users like monsmartyrium preserve specific shows, demos, and songs in a singularly accessible archive easily reached by participants in online branches of cultural dissemination, the physical canon is disrupted. In the unmaking of its set of socialities and occupation of space, a new digital canon is forged in its place. Some artists are included, others are left behind, and the production of music, and subsequently the production of its cultural canon, becomes subject to the commodification inherent to digital archival-curatorial practice.

With that framing, I hope to examine a world I know all too well—the modern lofi-indie (rock?) music scene (ugh, trying to put it into words is so useless), and more specifically, its slowcore and shoegaze components. I am looking to the archival-curatorial actors on YouTube who have simultaneously been so essential to its preservation and propagation, while equally heralding a set of socializations that have greatly wounded its true cultural prospects. This examination is an attempt to emphasize the experienced application of my preceding theoretical groundwork on the digitization of cultural-musical communities and “the scene,” as I try to unpack their role in enabling commodity-based cultural formation/reformation. 

Digitality is a uniquely spatiotemporally situated medium for cultural exchange that affords a search for meaning within cultural-musical infinity, an infinity which shrouds active engagement and expansion of music and culture and instead favors passive, commodity-consumption relationships. In this digital medium, there is no room to build upon cultural offerings; rather, they operate as commodities to identify with, as places of affinity, as occupiers of a hierarchy of cultural value determined by the new canonizers. It is notable, then, that for the lo-fi “scene”, its connected cultural communities, and participant-observers, the digital landscape of YouTube offered a place for cultural formation, preservation, and the curation of a canon through archival-curatorial practices. Since the rise of the scene came largely in the transition to or the aftermath of post-physicality in music, the internet became a necessary gathering space at which the scene could be organized. Artists integrated their processes of distribution into the new environment of cultural exchange and formation that YouTube and its auxiliary outlets provided, validating the uncertain frontier by adding their work to the new digitized culture. This saw excited teens and nostalgic adults (among other ecosystem participants) upload live recordings, unearthed demos, and entire albums, reproducing decades of cultural-musical output as entries into a new canon, an act which forged correspondent new socializations.

YouTube’s digital frontier constituted an unfamiliar world of cultural production, with many of its initial contributors veterans of the blogosphere and active in the production of music, live or recorded, in various, physically manifested scenes. The tangibility of their experiences provided a point of authenticity that would be appropriated by their successors to validate their actions, whether canonization or commodification. These claims worked to obscure the reality that the post-physicality of digital musical cultures had turned the actual cultural production on which they relied into an imitative commodity in their relationships with it, a simulacra of sorts. YouTube provided a streamlined platform of access in which cultural-musical output was subjugated into a category of the physically removed act of viewing. This was a significant departure from its experienced possibilities as an infinitely realized artform, what I would optimistically contend is its true nature. Consequently, the homogenizing perspective that characterized the treatment of cultural-musical output flooding YouTube reimagined the “scene” as a contained object tied to perceived yet unactualized cultural identity. In this confluence of socio-cultural identity production, cultural output, and the origins of modern “content creation,” meaningful, tangible musical production was subsumed by its propagation as a commodity in an ecosystem of cultural value, ascribed through archival-curatorial practices. 

The arena in which new digitized canons and commodifications were most extensively enacted was the world of Alex G deep cuts, demos, live performances, and other bits of content. Well worth analyzing merely for the influence it has had on cultural-musical curation, its greatest legacy comes as it pertains to canonization within the world of “lo-fi indie.” The treatment and present-moment appraisals of Alex G’s work coalesced a broad expanse of post-physical musical contributions into a defined ground. on which eager participants could prove their place in the in-groups of new socializations and as purveyors of the hottest cultural commodity around: the works of the Philadelphia indie star. Digital identity is forged in commodity-making, and represents the transition that cultural output experiences. That shift moves it from amorphously situated artistic expression, confined by the experiences and desires of the creator, to conformity within hegemonies of digital cultural formation and to the commodification that diminishes the tangibility of its presence and makes the artistic output solely social object. Archival-curatorial practices make this possible by instituting a regime of availability, keeping some works readily accessible while resigning others to the depths of the unknown. At the same time, any efforts at exclusivity are made in vain; the internet is inherently at the whims of infinite reproduction, and no cultural object can ever remain permanently hidden in its bounds. While archival-curatorial actors imitate surveillance, that surveillance is actualized by the capital and colonial processes that play out in a terror-regime internet age. With those foundational ideas in mind, let us fully confront the legacy of the Alex G archival-curatorial project. 

There are a number of key actors in the Alex G YouTube ecosystem. As far as I’m aware, there are two uploaders who have contributed most to the production of cultural streamlining in the “lo-fi indie” sphere: the “block perce” channel offers an unbelievably vast collection of Alex G and Alex G-adjacent tracks, demos, and live performances, and “Keyan28” uploads veer exclusively Alex G (save for a full-length version of Sufjan Stevens’ Michigan). While Keyan28’s prime posting years were in 2013-2014, block perce burst onto the scene in 2017, and while their Alex G posts died down within a couple years, they uploaded the work of various other lo-fi indie musicians. The uploading styles of both individuals represent an attempt at rigid documentation, both in charting live performances and the many demos, unreleased/disappeared tracks, and other rarities they dug up as they helped forge the Alex G archive. The historicization they offered hungry audiences was crucial in providing the cultural commodities on which identity formation around Alex G’s music and the general brand of downtrodden, washed-out, guitar-centric style he and others forged was founded. Demos and barely audible live videos were scattered around the web like collector’s items, yet no restraint could be placed on access to them; consequently, it was easy to identify oneself within the commodity-socializations of the Alex G ecosystem, and his role as the keystone of lo-fi indie in the earlier 2010s only enhanced the attached value.

The imprint of a culturally formative archival-curatorial practices like those enacted by Keyan28 and block perce was essential in defining a perceived canonical realm that solidified the destruction of the physical canon in favor of a digital one. As I discussed earlier, these malleable new spaces of cultural exchange and musical dissemination held the artistic products they filtered through as social signifiers as much as cultural meaning. This led to the reification of socialized systems of value that were, unlike those of previous decades, forged in great distance from the artists whose work was being actively appraised by archival-curatorial actors. At the same time, this all took place in a fresh, infinitely possible space that enabled the replacement of previous mythologies for the sake of their incorporation into an entirely new one. It is significant, then, that millions of views accumulated on their pages while a ripped copy of “Pretend” and a live video of a house show in Brooklyn became centerpieces of the Alex G digital commodity-shrine. Each account, as a consequence of their prominence within the Alex G and indie communities, garnered prominence as beyond their content, in that as commodity-producers, they were beneficiaries of the amorphousness of modern digital culture, and offered formative knowledge for those new to the world of Alex G and lo-fi/indie music. This was especially the case with block perce, who uploaded (and on rare occasions, still uploads) tracks/full-lengths from artists like Melaina Kol, Dearly Somber, and Fog Lake, all of whom were elevated to name-recognition within the lo-fi scene. The kingmaker positions Keyan28, block perce, and the like positioned them to take on a defining act of mythmaking. As they cast aside previous hierarchies of value in the lo-fi indie community, reinforcing post-physical frontier and its high-consumption, commodity-prioritizing relations with cultural-musical output as hegemonic behavior. The rehistoricization the vaguely-linked scenes endured allowed them to be conceptualized as a completely new, unified item. Accordingly, they were subjugated by new, digital socializations that extended their purpose to the role of identity signifiers. The extensive archives then provided a basis on which engagement with artists might begin and remain distant, streamlined, and determined by the curational proceedings of a number of individuals who acted as the creators of a canon. Those individuals, in turn, were subject to the irrepressible nature of digital culture, and saw their archival attempts fuel a digital sociality that depended on commodifying infrastructures of knowledge.

The Alex G proceedings provide a pertinent example, but there are other routes to understanding similar socio-temporalities. Accounts like “thesingerforthedeaf,” “Modern-Ringtones Archive Steven C,” and “George Hayduke” were all formative in my engagement with the musical possibilities of independent and DIY scenes. Furthermore, they brought me a sense of intimacy to unknowable artists and places—a highschooler whose obsessive tendencies led him to spend hours digging through radio sessions Attic Abasement did back in 2010, a bedbug cover of “1995” by The Radio Dept., or this INSANELY rare copy of “The Weight and the Sea” performed live by Bluetile Lounge in 1996. Looking back, it’s precisely that sense of closeness the obscured production of collective cultural space creates. Through it, the commodification of such personal artist-listener relations and associated musical output is enabled at an individual level. Furthermore, maintaining an involved presence in archival-curatorial practice places its participants in the distinct position of not only actively (re)shaping a canon, but homogenizing the same cultural production they themselves revere. 

That wrinkle in the story complicates the ease with which we might condemn this whole process. While the digital scene that was forged led to the art it depended on being treated as secondary to the development of an identity-commodity, it also enabled a powerful and long-lasting cultural expansion. That helped preserve the works of key inspirations, archived legendary demos, live performances, and unreleased tracks/albums, and allowed up-and-coming artists within a historically unrecognized musical movement to find a tangible audience. Simply put: Alex G doesn’t have sold-out European tours, worldwide recognition, and an astronomical rise without the admiration and affection of the archival-curatorial actors who so extensively propagated the seeds of his musical output. It’s hard to emphasize just how crucial accounts like those I’ve referenced here have been in ensuring the survival and allowing for the propagation of the lo-fi indie scene. They, adoring listeners that they are, somehow disseminate its wares to a wider audience than any of the artists involved could have ever imagined. Bedroom recording setups were broadcast far beyond the confines of their creators’ wildest dreams. 

This confusing, impossible digital world instilled in me the feeling of being part of something intangible, something which required of its participants a full commitment to the act of preservation, of archival work, of folding more and more 4-tracks run over drum presets into an endless river of warmth, the warmth of this familiarity, the gentleness of vocals drowned in fuzz, secondhand sound, in the vein of early Sparklehorse and Codeine demos, you’ve got to believe in every moment of it. I could write forever about this collision of individual solitudes into a collective wholeness, and I’d never reach the end, I’d never be able to conclusively understand why I listened to “Seven Hundred” by Hello Shark over and over again, or this live cover of “The Dark Ages” by the New Year, or this copy of 22° Halo live at Small World Books, but they hold such meaning, such truth. I’d like to imagine that in spite of the commodification and identity-formation, in spite of the homogenizing influence of certain voices in forging a cultural canon in lo-fi indie, or whatever you’d like to call it, there’s still a lucid beauty hovering over all of it. That alluring light certainly captured me.