My Big, Gigantic Drum Kit

andrewtsks:

screwrocknroll:

jonathanbogart:

austinkleon:

My brilliant friend Julien Devereux responds to the “Who is Paul McCartney?” thing.

A++++

So much truth.

I’ve been thinking about this, and while I agree with it for the most part, there’s a slight flaw to the whole “48 years ago” argument—Paul McCartney last had a single in the US charts in 1989 (“My Brave Face,” from Flowers In The Dirt, the chorus of which I still remember distinctly). So he’s less comparable to Scott Joplin than he is to, say, Glenn Miller. Did kids jamming on “I Wanna Hold Your Hand” in 1963 know who Glenn Miller was? Seriously, I’m asking.

No idea, but kids in 1963 weren’t publicly proclaiming their ignorance of Glenn Miller using Internet technology that provides the means to find out who Glenn Miller is by typing his name into Google.

It’s not shameful to be ignorant of something or to admit to being ignorant of something—it’s a necessary step in learning and the information searching process. It’s admirable. I consider myself largely ignorant about a subject every time I start the research process (or simply when I hear a song by some long-established artist for the first time).

But, as I mentioned in the post I linked above, tweeting about your ignorance on Twitter is not even close to a naive admission of ignorance—it’s deliberately provocative. And while I suppose you could applaud that as cultural resistance a la Johnny Rotten and his “I Hate Pink Floyd” shirt, at least Rotten knew the history he was denying. And if he didn’t, he probably would have at least Googled it.