In 50 minutes, keep T-Bone Burnett-a glödgande speeches about what he sees as the digital meltdown. About how the internet has failed and needs to be broken up and restarted from the beginning. About how the global it giants has created a övervakningsekonomi and a market dominance that devastated the personal integrity and the shattering of the artists and performers the opportunity to work in a functioning market.
He stops, smiles awry, take a break and say ”thank you”.
Then it crashes the internet.
Directly after the number, it is not possible to share the content on either Facebook or Instagram. The interruption lasts more than eight hours – and for many users it will take up to a day before the services are working normally. It is the largest interference, the two companies have been affected by the ever.
When I meet him later the same evening, T-Bone just got to know what happened – and can’t stop smiling.
” Haha, of course it is. I can be a part of it there, you know.
He was noticeably nervous prior to his speech. It was not the first time he talked about these issues (”this is something I have been involved in during the 10-15 years”), but it was especially to do it at the tech industry’s home turf in Austin. However, he feels that it is a battle that is in time.
” We are a resistance movement now. We are many who had enough of the arrogance. We heard and noticed.
He lists the giants as Tim Berners-Lee (who created the world wide web 30 years ago), Roger McNamee ( r iskkapitalisten gone from being a mentor to Mark Zuckerberg to require his company to cut), Jon Taplin (who wrote the book ”The irresponsible” if it giants) and Shosanna Zuboff (Harvard professor who wrote praktverket ”The age of surveillance capitalism”).
T-Bone Burnett, during his speech in Austin. Photo: Chris Maluszynski
Joseph Henry ”T-Bone” Burnett is seen may not be normal as a giant teknologidebattör, but musically, just over two metres tall Texas gentleman is so big it can be in the industry’s eyes. With ten Grammys and an Oscar in the belt is he so respected man can be: he has the role of the rotbaserade american musikscenens Don – unrivalled as a producer, an unquestioned innovator within film – and tv-music (from ”O Brother, where art thou” to ”True detective”) and as a musician and artist with many years of collaborations with everyone from Bob Dylan, Robert Plant and Alison Krauss to Elvis Costello to – and a private skivkatalog that never crossed wide, but that konnässörerna care for tenderly.
He is 71 years old today. It has been just over a half-century ago, he kept asking for his first moonlighting in a Texas studio, and just over four decades ago he was one of the mainstays of Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue. He has had all the success he could dream of, from an artistic perspective and it is clearly evident that he has arrived at a kind of financial statements.
” I know what I want to do with the time I have left.
the Answer is not so simple as to mess with Facebook and Google. Above all, it is about standing up for art terms, bringing their message – and to make the music he wants to, regardless of what the market thinks.
Burnetts speech at SXSW which started with a Marshall McLuhan quote and ended with a Czeslaw Milosz-poem, was an exercise in intellectual rhetoric; a brandfackla, but so stylistically elegant that it would be easy to see it as a spoken word performance, music with muffled rhythms and hypnotic electronics. When he talked about the technological ”philistines”, a concept well-known from his own poetry, it was a deliberate and well-aimed giftpil.
” I know how they hate being portrayed as. But it is not possible to describe them in other ways. They have no conscience. With art it is the opposite: it creates a conscience. That is why it is so serious when they have taken over.
the T-Bones, the message is clear: it is about humanity and art terms. In order to remain human and survive as a sentient and thinking beings, we must break out of the control teknikjättarna taken over all the creativity and skapandemöjlighet.
– We must destroy their maktlust, their hubris, their enkelspårighet, their övervakningsmani. We must stand up for the art. Technology companies seek only efficiency. it is art’s opposite. Art is integrity, not efficiency. This battle is, really, a question of our survival.
” We have to start all over. Stop using these services: there are alternatives. And start talking more about the performers, the arts and significance for the society we need, without them we have nothing.
For its part, the involvement in what he calls ”the resistance” also led to a greater artistic freedom. It has two things played a big role. One is the role of musikansvarig for the tv series ”True detective”, where the music for all three seasons is soon to be released: where has T-Bone together with writer Nic Pizzolatto found a unique expression, where each scene has got T-Bone to find a kongenial tonnes, which lifted the series to new levels. The second is the work of an upcoming Broadway musical about the ”singing cowboy” Roy Rogers, of Marshall Brickman, where T-Bone was forced to find a new way to work.
” I went up four in the morning and wrote the music, it is a very strictly structured form of music, which was new for me. Then when I was done I could not sleep in the mornings, so I continued to write for myself.
than three new album 2019, under the name ”The invisible light”. The first (”Acoustic”) is released on 12 april and is a stripped-down, highly trumbaserat and experimental album, with elements of spoken word (”I love the Gil Scott-Heron, here, I drop it more than usual”). The second he describes as a blend of ”punk, Massive Attack and Public Enemy” and the third as more ”crazy Sun Ra-jazzy”. All is based lyrically on the same themes as in the century in Austin: if the technologically created dystopin and how we need to break it. The first sentence in ”A man without a country” is significant: ”Dying by binary codes, as we travel down these lonesome roads.”
He can’t hide his enthusiasm for the new focus on their own songwriting.
I pressed the back of it for so many years when I was with the other. However, along with musicians such as Jay Bellerose, and Keefus Ciancia, I found a new expression. Now I have hundreds of songs and a way of working that gives me total freedom. Now I feel that there is something that limits me.
as a result of newfound energy, on all levels.
– Now it is the fight for humanity that is my task. The art is dödshotad, really. We must stand up for it and for our ability to create freely and independently, I’m not going to do anything else.
Read more texts by Martin Jönsson. For example, if medietrenderna that dominated this year’s SXSW festival.
