Tumblr might seem like a pretty innocuous Web platform—like a more media-rich Twitter, it allows users to share photos, videos, text, links, audio, and quotes, plus follow other users doing the same thing. But it’s already being accused of heinous crimes against culture. On March 20 former Pitchfork editor Scott Plagenhoef wrote a well-argued piece for the A.V. Club explaining what he sees as Tumblr’s negative effects on musicians—including an uptick in faddishness in the indie-rock world, which once imagined itself above such things. His core assertion seems to be that Tumblr is “merely a way of broadcasting things a user finds cool, attractive, unique, or funny without explanation.” Other critics—like, for instance, Drake—jump straight to hand-wringing predictions that Tumblr will rob an entire generation of its ability to express itself creatively, despite the fact that its user base is dwarfed by those of social-networking behemoths like Twitter and Facebook.
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I agree that there can be drawbacks when musicians get heavily into Tumblr—Plagenhoef is spot-on with his concerns about artists becoming mere “content generators,” maintaining a steady stream of output to keep up with the ongoing online conversation and in the process abandoning quality control—but Tumblr is hardly going to kill creative thought. And at any rate, it’s yet to be demonstrated that what I call “Tumblrfication”—the propensity to make constant remixing of material and ideas a part of the creative process—is actually a result of Tumblr, rather than a preexisting phenomenon that explains Tumblr’s popularity (and that of similar sites like Pinterest). Anyone with genuine creative instincts is unlikely to be satisfied with simply reproducing others’ work, and most Tumblr users who post nonoriginal content are media consumers rebroadcasting their intake, not artists wasting their creative energies. Some Tumbloggers who post largely or entirely nonoriginal content (including the enigmatic Alaskan Eyes and Chicago-based weirdos and micro-scale style icons Molly Soda and Clairey Pear) do so in ways that employ guided randomness and serendipity to project themes, trains of thought, and even narratives—that is, they’re making art out of it. And of course collage and assemblage (art forms with very long histories) are already among the dominant creative modes of our time, both online and offline—even if Tumblr had never existed, it wouldn’t change that situation.
But guided randomness and a “remix everything” philosophy aren’t solely employed by bleeding-edge Internet-based acts. As John Seabrook points out in the recent New Yorker piece “The Song Machine,” the cabal of producers and songwriters behind most of the big pop numbers on the charts works in a similar way. The producers, in this case a duo called Stargate, create a selection of beats, then go into a studio with a “top line” songwriter who provides the vocal melodies. The top-line writer’s job involves a lot of improvising—Ester Dean, who’s profiled in “The Song Machine,” is responsible for some of Rihanna’s best hooks, and she writes the same way many rappers polish freestyles into verses. As the raw melodic material is recorded, the producers cut, paste, and rearrange it. In this fashion they might knock out a dozen or more songs, some of them destined to be hits, in a single session. Some fans find this disillusioning—the image of the Dylan-esque auteur sitting down at a piano with nothing and walking away with a finished song is too romantic for them to give up.
