Well lets see what happens. and whatever it will be it will be one day at a time, one hour at a time, probably one tweet at a time. The future has never been so unknown.
Are there at least past patterns we can look to to give us some semblance of a path forward?
What about in music? In the history of popular music the seventh year of the decade seems to be a game changer.
We just went through 2017 so what changed? What will we look back on as the aha! moment?
I would suggest the most remarkable thing in '17 for us in the D-Rock is the Durham diaspora and its success. On a club level there has been a gelling around the popular rock and punk sound which works so well here but there have been many from the D-Rock trying new things, new sounds, albeit it making that music elsewhere; Toronto, Montreal, Ottawa, Nashville among them.
Some of the music makers are Daniel Caesar, Dizzy, Mappe Of, Timber Timbre, Rory Taillon, Annie Sumi, Lennon & Maisy, Linda Ortega, Meghan Patrick, Strumbellas and Jaunt, - its been a good year for them. Its been a huge year for Meghan and Caesar.
We do have some cool new bands based in the area, Crown Lands, Lush Buffalo, Tijuana Jesus and shout-out to the Cameron Brown/ Blaster/ Mary + Adelaide crew. I'm loving The Buttercups too.
The music is being made but where do we hear it on a local level? Are we just disconnected from it all? Is the music being made in basements and uploaded online? Is there, like in many other things, an insularity, a fragmentation? Are we locked in to our channels so deeply we miss out on the content of the others, and I make it my business to cross channels but well, there are so many now, almost 7 billion. Who can cover them all?
In 2018 I think those of us who dwell mainly in the non-digital side of this new world, those of us in newspapers, municipalities, art galleries, bars, restaurants, I think what we can do is to provide opportunities for those music makers to connect.
We draw them out of the basement, off the online and introduce them all to them all. Connection, collaboration, creativity is the fuel for the new economy and artists will be the basis of the new economy. The artists need to know each other and we need them.
It may be that in 2017 what we call the D-Rock scene, like every other "scene" at this time, became so fragmented it dissolved into the online stream and there is nothing to point to and say this is us anymore.
And it may be in 2018 we will begin to gather up the very bare base elements of what makes a "scene", a "culture" and create a something completely new, something we have never heard or seen before, a new culture fired by the fuel of connectivity, and one built not one one tweet at a time, but one handshake at a time. In 2018 lets meet more.