I Was a MySpace Celeb Wannabe
Growing up, I don’t think I really understood how money worked. It seemed like celebs were always having a great time, opportunities just fell at their feet. I eventually realized that a maxed out travel rewards card and a TripAdvisor deal can do wonders for your so-called celeb status, especially when you’re doing it for the ‘gram. After all, appearances aren’t everything: excruciating debt can take you quite far in life. Then I learned that celebrities get those cool Oscar bag free but that they have to pay huge taxes on them? So at this point I’m completely confused. Somewhere in the middle however, for quite a while, I wanted to be famous
…it’s kinda weird to want to be famous when you’re a bookish sort of quasi-introvert who has to stop themselves overexplaining technology and science to new acquaintances
A lot of people want to be famous. They want the platform, the recognition, the adoration, but it’s kinda weird to want to be famous when you’re a bookish sort of quasi-introvert who has to stop themselves overexplaining technology and science to new acquaintances. Ask me how I know this.
One of my early attempts at fame was on the new social media platform, MySpace. Friendster had really petered out for me and LiveJournal was just heating up, so MySpace was a great place to get into at that time. MySpace was unique: it was highly vulnerable to code injection — see what I mean about overexplaining? — so you could really modify your page depending on what security they were running at the time.
For a while, I stuck to telling people, “Internet people” who I’d never actually meet, that I’d been cast as “young Wolverine” in the new X-Men film. This was a bit of a riff on the funky muttonchops I used to rock before my wife started calling the shots. It was all in good fun for a bit, nevermind how bad early X-Men movies were, but then MySpace released MySpace music for bands and even worse ideas began to percolate in my mind.
I’m not a composer, by any means. I’ve had a fair amount of musical training, but it’s not something I have kept up with. Still where there’s a will there’s a way. Within my non-existent budget in the mid-2000s that way was Seq-303, a neat bit of shareware that did a fair job replicating an analog step sequencer in Windows 95. Armed with this, much in the way a fictional mouse may be armed with a toothpick sword, I set about creating my first album.
Seq-303 does not create music, let’s get that out of the way. What it does is offer a series of memory banks you can load note sequences into, which can act as parts of a composition. The end result is output as a midi file in all its chiptunes style glory. Seq-303 also has a number of randomization and transposition features, which I willingly admit I made judicious use of. #BROWNIAN #FORCETOKEY
But a midi file does not Daft Punk make, and worse, Myspace music wisely did not accept midi. What I needed were mp3s. Enter a series of shareware, Win XP midi to MP3 converters. The files are lost to history, but if you’ve ever heard elevator musak, just imagine that and lower your standards precipitously.
And so I uploaded my album, with a bunch of weird filenames, and thought that was the end of it. I’ve had thousands of so-called friends through various schemes on several Myspace profiles over time. I’m pretty sure, no one ever put much stock in my cheesy music.
On the other hand, about a decade ago now, I was watching Home Improvement reruns and a Honda commercial came on. About halfway through, this digital new age type music starts playing. No, it wasn’t my song, at least not entirely. But it was a dusty old riff, a riff I’d used quite a bit, way back in my Seq-303 days. Makes you wonder, what are the odds? What are the odds?
