All Media is Social Media
All Media is Social Media
Advice on making friends with Web0, plus examples of songs that helped me connect with strangers while traveling abroad.
In May 2019, I set out to travel the world and spent the majority of that year in cities where I knew few if any people. My “hack” to meet people was to discover and learn local pop songs. I wanted to show that I was more than just a passing tourist; I was a fan. I could talk about what I liked, we could exchange favorite songs, and I could also make conversation asking for insight on lines that weren’t intelligibly translated by my automated tools.
One of my goals for Around The World In 80 Plays is to help others make connections like the ones I was able to make, so this week I’m going to share three songs that helped me create common ground across lines of difference!
Web0: A Pre-History
Web3 dominates tech conversations due to its novelty, but fundamental early technologies are often taken for granted and underappreciated. Art has been helping people make connections as long as humans have been around, and it is indeed the underlying tech behind all other media tech. To give “art-as-tech” its own buzzword, let’s think of it as “Web0”.
In the earliest days of Web0, there was only one thing to watch: the big screen in the sky. But from all the narratives that have withstood the millennia, we can tell viewership was highly engaged. With roughly 5k pixel-stars visible in the vastness above, the constellation aesthetic was minimalist, and observers breathed their own hopes and dreams into it. The charismatic dragon, the intellectual archer, spoons of various sizes — the plot possibilities were boundless. Thus, there was lots of space for fan theories, shared in songs and stories around campfires.
Eventually, systems of writing would supplant some of what was once only spoken or sung. And then printing innovations would allow the written word to be distributed more quickly. And later images and video would enhance media further. But humanity was organized into a cultural web long before the world wide web uttered its first “hello world”.
Songs and stories have long been a critical component this web. And by sharing songs, I hope to help you connect with others. I’ll open with a few personal examples of mine where this has taken place. Hopefully this helps to answer some basic questions around why this is a project that is motivating to me.
Music As Social Technology: Tracks 1-3
The first three songs on the playlist are real examples of how music can connect you to new people! Knowing a few popular songs in a new place creates a foundation upon which you can build relationships.
If you haven’t already, you can follow the playlist on Spotify here!
“月亮代表我的心” by Teresa Teng
A good place to kick off this list, then, is with a song that so seamlessly integrates “the big screen in the sky”. The moon plays a starring role in this song, the title of which translates to roughly “the moon represents my heart”. Most songs on this playlist will necessarily be an all-time classic, but this song by Teresa Teng most certainly is.
Part of what makes this song so phenomenal is how it succeeds as a modern pop love song while also fitting seamlessly into a broader Chinese history. Early in its multi-millennial history, China already was spanning vast territory, and poets would invoke the moon to emphasize shared experience broadcast in the night sky. (“Moonoculture”, if you will.) One of my favorite poems of this type is “Shuidiao Getou” by Su Shi.
This is a song I’ve sung in different settings. I once sang it with an Uber driver in DC and it really livened up our conversation. My favorite time singing this, though, was in a hostel hosting a karaoke night in Taiwan. It was during Lunar New Year celebrations, and I was hiking up the Southeast Coast of Taiwan, and I had passed by many evening family karaoke get-togethers. Karaoke is a great place to sing songs that have broad awareness like this one! If I could find more songs for the playlist that have the same level of awareness as this song, I will be very happy indeed.
See also: the cover by Khalil Fong, who adapts this song as a sort of jazz standard very effectively. It’s not available on Spotify, but you can listen to it on YouTube.
“Wpuść Mnie” by Happysad
On the evening Friday, November 15th, 2019, I walked into Ritmo Music Bar Warszawa to grab a drink. I spoke some with the bartender, a big and burly Polish man, but he seemed largely disinterested in tourists like me. That said, I still was looking to make conversation, and when I brought up that my favorite Polish band was Happysad, his face lit up and he immediately moved to his sound system to play “Mów Mi Dobrze”. It was one of the first experiences I had seeing how music can create a space to connect where a barrier once stood.
“Mów Mi Dobrze” is an amazing song, and I particularly enjoy Happysad’s live rendition of this song which shows a stronger influence from dance music and disco. While their music isn’t easily classified to me, I describe them as sort of Cake meets Taking Back Sunday. The use of trumpet in an alt-punk-emo aesthetic is really interesting and exciting, and I think of them as not just my favorite Polish band but also one of my favorite bands generally!
Instead of “Mów Mi Dobrze”, though, I picked “Wpuść Mnie” because it’s a tune I’m slightly partial to and also I found it to be especially good for feeling connecting to others. At 1:20 in the recording, you hear the line “nie bardzo mogę, nie bardzo się da”, which translates to something along the lines of “I really can’t, I really can’t even”. What’s especially fun about the line, though, is that the dramatic musical pause before they shout “się da”, and when I saw them live in Wrocław I got to shout “się da” with what I expect were a few hundred Polish fans of the band. And shouting with hundreds of people is just good connecting in my book.
“Happy Ajulah” by SMVLL
I took a train across the island of Java the week of my 31st birthday, and on that trip I made an effort to consume a wide range of Indonesian pop music. This song is kind of an Indonesian “Don’t Worry, Be Happy”, and it’s hard to get out of your head once you get it in there!
On the last night in Indonesia, I was doing some quick laundry at a laundromat which happened to have a keyboard and guitar just laying around. A couple of the attendants knew how to play, and so of course I had to ask if they were familiar with some of the songs I knew. We had a small jam session, and this song was such a delight to sing and play despite the fact that I’d only been exposing myself to the Indonesian language for a few days.
The chorus is literally just five words, and one (happy) is English and one (sialalala) is onomatopoetic. The other three are “ajalah”, “cuek”, “bernyanyi”. “Happy ajalah” basically means “be happy”; “cuek ajalah” basically means “be relaxed/cool”; and “bernyanyi sialalala” basically means “singing sha la la la”. The song uses the four chord progression famously acknowledged by Axis of Awesome, which makes it very friendly to guitar accompaniment if you’re so inclined!
The remix by DJ Quelfin is also worth listening to, as it features some fun vocoder/autotune effects on the vocals. Both versions are a great mood booster, reminding us to relax and feel grateful for life.
A Note on Goals
The success of this newsletter won’t simply be measured in the number of subscribers I can take on, but in the number of new connections and relationships my subscribers make in new parts of the world. Hopefully these three songs can serve as strong examples, and I’ll identify more that help readers connect with fellow music fans rapidly and effectively. I strongly believe you can use music to make friends around the world. And I’d like to help you get there.
Please don’t hesitate to forward this email to others that might be interested in this project! And because these are still early days, I’m very open to (and interested in) any feedback you might have.
Happy Listening,
~H
Thanks for sharing. Curious to see what comes next. Let me know if you need some inspiration from Zambia!