I HAD my first live band gig of the year last Saturday at Merdekarya playing all the songs from my recent album John Bangi Blues, finally!

It’s been a long, long wait since I launched the album back on Malaysia Day in 2020 when the nationwide lockdown was lifted in the midst of the epidemic.

Leading up to that, I had to game up my online presence and promotion – tasks I do myself since as an underground musician I am an all-in-one artist, producer, manager, roadie, media relations coordinator, etc.

Although I have been using social media regularly since around the early 2010s, it took my Generation X-er self awhile to really get comfortable with the idea of blasting something online seemingly compulsively to keep the evil algorithms active.

If you didn’t already know, all the different social media apps have different ways and methods of keeping their particular algorithms running and I find that very annoying.

But I have relented and used social media because traditional media has ceased to be a reliable source of promotion and publicity, unlike the good old days.

Ahhh… the good old days when an article came out on you in the newspapers, relatives far and away would text to tell you that they read the piece about you and kept the clipping.

Nowadays, all you have are web links or attachments “viralled” to your WhatsApp from your musician friend (I’m guilty as charged on this) to check it out.

I bet my bottom ringgit none of you ever click to open that link but hey, at least you know your friend is still alive and kicking, and promise them that you’ll come to the “next show”, whether you sincerely mean it or not.

Social media (and the internet as a whole) has ceased to be an escape or space we go to wind down but instead it’s become an endless rabbit hole of simulacra of the real world (whatever that is anymore) and endless self-promotion.

Most will say, well, it’s great that now artists have the autonomy and freedom to promote themselves how they would want (compared to some record label executives making the calls) but this is a false promise.

Social media is a noisy place where not only artists who genuinely have works to offer you are trying to promote themselves but also debutantes and wannabes who self-promote, well, whatever.

We’ve become a species of walking promotion, not really caring about what we promote and what is revealed is that at our very core as a species, we are nihilistic and self-obsessed.

While some of you might think that’s a bad thing, let’s look at nature and how “survival of the fittest” rules.

Take your cat, for example: they don’t really care about you. I mean “care” in the way we humans perceive “care” – the attachment of emotions and the divine to our actions upon others.

A cat is only concerned with itself and its survival. I know, I have five cats at home (the oldest matriarch Breeze adorns my John Bangi Blues album cover) and aside from them fending off other intruder cats (they are all female, spayed, and never in heat), they sleep all day, groom themselves, and come to us when they are hungry.

Sometimes the younger ones defecate on our carpet but what else is new.

Now, if cats had some form of social media introduced to their species (use your imagination), I’m sure it would mirror our own species-wide use of it: photos of ourselves, what we do, what we did, what we’re going to do and such. Oh yes, and of course with our faces and likeness in it of course.

Okay, enough about the bane of social media – I think we all can go on for days about it.

Let me now get to the boon of it for there is always an opportunity cost in any human endeavour or choices we make.

As someone who witnessed the media landscape change in my lifetime, I admit that the smartphone is a brilliant invention since sliced bread: to me, it’s the television in my hand that I had fantasised about as a kid growing up in the ’80s.

What social media has changed is how citizenry has flourished in a public space (albeit a digital one) and keeps those in power in check. Of course, unless they decide to cut off the internet to cover up something.

The Arab Spring 10 years ago was enabled by social media (although one may debate whether such revolutions were productive or counterproductive to the region) and was noted by most media experts and academics as an important enabler of free speech.

We have our various local examples of this, of course (chief among them Fahmi Reza’s brushes with authorities) but the use of social media is not static like how you operate a television: you need to be constantly engaged with its use to really exploit it to your advantage.

This is part of how those algorithms work and it might be tricky to explain to Boomers although some are pretty adept at adapting.

While my own social media presence can be described as “active”, it’s relative to those in my age group because what social media means to you and how you use it is very generational, and because youth of today are born into the social media world, they are the most naturally attuned to it – both for its positive and negative effects, of course.

But in the context of citizenry, free speech and political activism, their landscape is literally in their palms and the old people in power don’t like this (so they hire youths to maintain their own social media presence – I’m sure they pay well).

So, whether you like it or not, artists still need to use social media to promote and publicise their works and I say this with great reluctance while gazing out at the digital wilderness.

I don’t think I’m really good at it but at the same time I’m not really trying to improve my skills – I’m a reluctant user whose hands were equally forced to scroll the screens while also benefiting to some degree from online publicity.

But the question we must ask is: does reality look and feel better than the real thing?

From what I’ve observed, the Malay proverb “indah khabar daripada rupa” is the most apt conclusion for our app-surd world. – January 21, 2022.

* Azmyl Yunor is a touring underground recording artiste, and an academic in media and cultural studies. He has published articles on pop culture, subcultures and Malaysian cultural politics. He adheres to the three-chords-and-the-truth school of songwriting, and Woody Guthrie’s maxim “All you can write is what you see”. He is @azmyl on Twitter.