Repetitive Work And Music

This is a bit of a strange observation that I had while playing Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag some time back. Some context, this game is about pirates in the West Indies set in the 18th Century.

It’s a quiet game at times, where it becomes just you and the sea, the water splashing away from your humble ship as you carve your path towards your next objective. It’s at times like these that your crew members decide to start singing sea shanties, belting out tune after tune as they do their work.

There’s something so painfully human about this moment. The crew members singing sea shanties, a mutual shared communion as their voices soar above the quiet and dangerous seas, almost as if in challenge towards the treacherous waters. This happens often when you’re out at sea in the game and it’s magnificent every single time.

For most of our lifespan as a species, art wasn’t something you merely enjoyed. It was something you actively participated in it.

The lack of recorded music also meant that the only way to preserve a piece of art is to share it as freely as possible. A long lineage of oral tradition exists behind most of the folk songs that still exist today, a communal effort that spans centuries upon centuries of passing down songs.

The key here is participation. In these communities, it was never the artists that made art, it was the members of the community. There were no artists.

Songs were freely shared, stories were told over the campfire, paintings were smeared over every cave one could find. The notion of ownership did not exist. Anything was free game. You wanted to change a lyric? Go ahead. Didn’t like the ending? Tell your children the one you wanted.

Why are things so different now? Everything needs a box. Copyright lawsuits flood the courts. It’s a real crime that the only people we allow to participate in art are artists, instead of treating it as something inherent to the way we are as humans.

It’s quite tragic that we’ve lost all this. What happens to most of our songs a century from now when the world succumbs to the slow erosion of digital rot?

Who will pass down our songs?