Why archives are worth saving

The deletion of the MTV News website is more than just a sad symptom of the digital age.

View this email online June 29, 2024 by Ann Powers Thinking about the loss of the MTV News website, the challenge of memorializing the work of musicians who die young and the value of reading (and preserving) the comments. Credit: Renata Raksha Dear fellow denizens of the vaults, Summer’s dog days are upon us, and you know what that means — it’s the perfect time for spring cleaning. I don’t know about you but I like to get outdoors in actual April; it’s July (now June, thanks climate) that keeps me inside conserving my energy and confronting the books, records, old magazines and souvenirs shoved into every bookcase and corner of my house. I think to myself as I vow to tackle at least one room: How do I turn these heaps into memory banks? What’s worth saving, in order to tell the story of my life and interests, if only to myself? This may seem like busywork, but in fact it’s a form of archiving. “Archive” is a fancy word, overused these days among smarty-pants writers but actually applicable to every one of our lives. If you’ve kept things because they matter to you beyond daily use, you are an archivist. For music nerds it’s a primary identity — even in the airy atmosphere of streaming platforms, we make playlists not only to share in the moment but to connect music to events that define our lives (“Summer in Italy vibes) or organize our obsessions (“Sad Indie Breakup”). Personal archives offer people a way to solidify the fun and love that, in time, always slips through their hands. Public archives do the same for culture at large.    I’ve been thinking about such precious libraries because just the other day another huge one burned to the ground. Well, metaphorically. Paramount, the struggling entertainment conglomerate, furthered its cost-cutting measures by suddenly deleting the archives on the websites of MTV News, Comedy Central, CMT and several other properties. At some point a button was hit and thousands of interviews and reviews, video documentaries and Daily Show episodes disappeared. Writers found full decades of their work suddenly gone. It was like everyone’s worst nightmare of dropping their laptop in the pool, but somebody else was doing the data drowning.   I noticed, in the outpouring of grief for the MTV News website — losses included writing by award-winning author Hanif Abdurraqib and Summer of Soul producer Joseph Monish Patel alongside Emmy-nominated documentaries and scores of interviews with major artists — that while such in-depth material earned accolades, people were just as upset by the loss of more ephemeral stuff. Think about the boxes full of relics in your own house or on your hard drive. There’s likely not much in there that a museum would accept as a donation. But each concert T-shirt or Radiohead bootleg matters. That’s also true in public archives: Go to the Smithsonian complex to see the Declaration of Independence, walk away thinking about Eddie Van Halen’s Frankenstein guitar.  And it was true at MTV News, where quickly scribbled pieces documented the waxing and waning of boy bands, the rise of K-Pop, and the vaporous impact of indie trends like “lumbersexual” and “crunkcore.” Using the Wayback Machine to seek out some of this material (where it survives, nearly unnavigable, for now), I found everything from reports on festivals like Ozzfest and Rock the Bells to critics’ roundtables on passing phenomena like Zayn Malik’s first “adult” album (that one included my beloved colleague Hazel Cills!). Access to this material lifts history beyond official stories and makes it bigger, wider, much more alive. It’s the ephemera that represents the artist and fans who aren’t necessarily ever going to be acknowledged by music’s power players. No Pulitzer winners, no Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inductees; just actual oddball music lovers, from teenage girls to Southern truckers to salsa dancers in the Bronx. And also: the artists who only made one album or who didn’t chart that high, the cult figures and undersung pioneers. These are the fleeting voices and faces that populate culture’s big picture. It’s important to preserve them, and it takes work. I thought about that necessary work when I heard that the estate of Sophie, the late and much-lamented electronic music producer and artist, has authorized the posthumous release of her second album this fall. Sophie died in an accidental fall in 2021, leaving only a singles compilation and one album, Oil of Every Pearl’s Un-Insides. (There’s also a companion disc of remixes).  Sophie was known for highly designed productions that reached toward the future by using popular synths like the Nord Lead and programs like Ableton in ways that are difficult to replicate. During her lifetime, online communities surfaced to try to determine her techniques; her prime collaborator A.G. Cook has written that near the end of her life she was thinking of abandoning the album form altogether, instead offering fans access to her stems so that they could recompose her music themselves. This fluid attitude toward musical ownership might make Sophie an unlikely candidate for legacy releases: She did not want to be packaged. Yet it’s crucial that her family release this music.  Profoundly influential on electronic music despite her limited output, Sophie is exactly the kind of artist who could eventually fade from history if her legacy is not properly tended. I’m not calling her work ephemeral, exactly, but it could slip away.  Anyone who haunts old newspaper databases knows that an artist can be central during their lifetime and even for a while afterward, only to fade into obscurity if the record of her creative work is sparse. That’s why, despite the fact that the tracks on SOPHIE were apparently mostly unfinished, her family’s decision to enlist collaborators to complete them is the right one. Grow that catalog. Turn something widely considered ephemeral — a draft of a project — into a lasting gift. In many ways Sophie’s impact is shaping up to resemble that of artists like The Velvet Underground, Nick Drake and Aaliyah, whose influence during their lifetimes (the Velvets were active from 1967 to 1973; Drake died at 26 and Alliyah, at 22) varied from zero to considerable, but whose reputations all grew significantly after they were gone. Post-active career releases made a difference for all of these artists. The outtakes album VU gave the Velvets its highest chart debut in 1985; the boxed set Fruit Tree, released three times in slightly different forms, continued to establish Drake’s audience decades after his death in 1974. Aaliyah’s posthumous discography has not necessarily been as directly linked to her continued relevance — fans have questioned the motivations of those behind the releases, which to many ears were not up to the quality of her main output. More relevant to her legacy’s survival are the samples in songs by the likes of Kanye West and the Weekend. Whether in well-packaged retrospectives or cannily featured in others’ songs, the voices of these artists have remained tenaciously present in popular music because someone was paying attention and declaring them important.  As archives grow more decentralized within cyperspace’s vast environment, less sanctioned or completely rogue acts of reclaiming sounds may be the most effective in preventing their vaporization. I like a podcast by this guy Joshua Citarella; he’s an artist and kind of a weirdo, and his research into underground internet communities is illuminating. A recent episode featuring the scholar Ruby Thelot tackled the subject of online DIY archives — repositories assembled by individuals or small communities to counter disasters like the corporate wiping of websites. Citarella pointed out that some musical micro-genres survive online mostly through the efforts of fans who’ve preserved playlists and even digitized tracks themselves when streaming services have buried or deleted them. Equally important in these rogue archives are fans’ comments and discussions, saved to lend context to past scenes that otherwise might be indecipherable to newcomers.  It’s your choice and mine to seek out these obscurities or not. The average music fan is probably happy idly tuning in to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony every year or clicking on the generic “jazz” playlist an app might offer. But others find great meaning in material others never even notice. To make that possible, individuals or small alliances take it upon themselves to become archivists and curators: editing, choosing, confronting the heap. On his gorgeous, quietly monumental new album God Said No, the R&B artist Omar Apollo offers a lament over lost love that also serves as a love song for ephemeral things. “You’re a handprint on my heart I just can’t possess,” the crooner sings of his absent lover, his vocals floating over a foggy swell of horns and strings. That image of something both permanently affecting and ungraspable colors the song’s chorus, which blurs the phrase “25 days, 25 months, 25 years”; this connection may have been brief or enduring, the separation new or long-suffered. The main thing, Apollo insists, is that this love live on, even through separation. “We’ve got too much history, so don’t just dispose of me,” he wails to that tangible ghost, even as he leaves the actual terms of their life together unclear. Heavy on reverb, swinging like a doo-wop song, “Dispose of Me” floats through time like a memory building on itself. Some things, it seems, can’t be thrown away. Newsletter continues after sponsor message The week at NPR Music Lanna Apisukh for NPR Sidney Madden and the photographer Lanna Apisukh created a beautiful photo essay documenting the Bayo Festival, a joyful gathering of New York’s Haitian diaspora. This piece made me think about how live performances can also do archival work, as music’s rhythms inscribe themselves in people’s body, solidifying sense memories. Questlove is one of our era’s great popular historians, and Rodney Carmichael went deep with him on his new book Hip Hop is History, his work on a new Sly Stone documentary and his views of hip hop’s “high” and “low” roads. Hank Shteamer chronicled the storied career of instrumental rock trio Dirty Three, back with its first new album in more than 10 years.  There’s nobody I’d rather read on Mexican regional music phenom Peso Pluma than Suzy Exposito. Here’s her review of his new album.  For Alt.Latino, Felix Contreras and Anamaria Sayre had a lively chat with songwriter and producer, Edgar Barrera, the power behind many current pan-Latin hits.  On Amplify, Lara Downes spent time with countertenor John Holiday, whose “inheritance of otherness” is a “superpower.” New Music Friday has Stephen Thompson and Ana Sayre backing up my feeling that Omar Apollo just released a groundbreaking album; they also discuss releases by Hiatus Kaiyote and Lil Yachty & James Blake. On All Songs Considered, Robin Hilton welcomes Sayre and Tom Huizenga to continue the discussion about the best songs of 2024. And if you want to think more about archives, check out this week's great episode of Throughline on the original Black American pop stars — from the dawn of the 20th century — with two of my very favorite thinkers, Daphne A. Brooks and Matthew Morrison, among the guests.  NPR Classical Brass on the rocks ...   Here are some other things I think are worthy of preserving in your memory this week: The dynamic Memphis soul artist Talibah Safiya’s new album Black Magic shows how preservation can happen through metaphorical fermentation as an artist grows something new from historical sources, as she creates a new sound by blending samples of songs from Memphis’s blues past with up-to-the-moment collabs with her city’s hottest talents.  A.G. Cook’s elegy for Sophie, written soon after she died in 2021, is worth revisiting.  This Lithub essay on child stars, autofiction and so much more by Jess Row starts out like a jeremiad against social media and goes to many more complicated and interesting places. Here’s more info on what was lost with the shuttering of MTV News and the other Paramount sites. And here’s Joshua Citarella’s pod.  This live video of Omar Apollo and his band performing “Dispose of Me” is just gorgeous.  RIP, Kinky Friedman and dear Jeremy Tepper.  Introducing NPR Music+, a new way to support what you love and explore new music and conversations sponsor-free. NPR Music+ includes two podcasts with one convenient subscription: All Songs Considered and Alt.Latino, both sponsor-free. Learn more and support us at plus.npr.org/NPRmusic Get NPR Music+ Listen to your local NPR station. Visit NPR.org to hear live radio from Central Florida Public Media (edit station). Need a new playlist? 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