What is our bebop?
An odd sounding question that only really makes sense once you have listened to The Day The Music Stopped an episode from the podcast One Year, that I heard in my 99% Invisible feed.
It goes deep into a story of musicians dealing with technological changes that they felt would threaten their way of life. And, in using collective action, resulting in a reduction of venues where they could perform, constricting their ability to live by making their art, a new art form was born.
Of course the reason this podcast stuck in my mind is that I am in an industry facing something quite similar at the moment. And, the incursion of AI generated narration will likely result in a reduction of opportunities for work. At least for a while.
I don’t think AI supported speech-to-text, which is really what it is, is going to replace the art of narration. But, I do think that there will be enough corporate bottom line thinking that the industry will likely face a contraction that will look a lot like the explosion around 2013, but in reverse. And, that reduction of opportunity will leave a bunch of artists, this time actors/storytellers, with less of a way to make their living through their art.
So, what is our bebop? What is our innovative twist induced into being by the pressure that the contraction in opportunity will birth? I don’t know. I doubt that people saw bebop coming. From what I understand, it was a slow evolution so that the people there would have had a hard time drawing a bright line between the end of swing and the start of bebop. I find that point so hard to imagine. I know both Swing and Bebop as two very different things. I have a hard time imagining the midpoint between the two. If I could travel back in time to hear it, I absolutely would.
Bebop has speed, virtuosity, depth, ego, id, and intelligence. I can totally see how the lack of access to work could lead to an explosion of self, expressed loudly without reservation or regret. The beauty of bebop is in opposition to the beauty of swing, with its lush sweeping waves of texture and its predecessor to the later wall of sound, where the instruments blend together, each orchestra with its own special recipe, each with its own flavor, but with no ingredient foremost on the palette. In swing, you are there to appreciate the whole, the blend.
This is the conversation that I want to have with other storytellers. What is our bebop? How does the storytelling landscape evolve? What will the new forms be? As the environment becomes restrictive, where will our creativity lead us?