I always loved the smell of used bookstores.  There is something undeniably relaxing about walking between stacks of aged, dying paper, upon which is written the wisdom and stupidity of the ages.  You'd wander past the gardening and how-to books, toward the poetry and fiction, hoping to find something you've never read by Hermann Hesse, Kurt Vonnegut, or Gabriel García Márquez.  Most of my portable, milk-crate-sized library was purchased secondhand at a used bookstore.

Record stores were the same.  You'd wander the bins of weird and worthless vinyl and walk away with some Italian disco album you never made it all the way through, or a timeless classic like the 2nd self-titled Tindersticks album, or nothing.  It's like searching for treasure.  Sometimes you find something.  Sometimes you don't.

I remember a sticker I picked up at a record store.  It was yellow, with a black, blank silhouette that looked like Mickey Mouse's head, under which was written AVOID MONOCULTURE.  The implication was obvious:  Avoid Monoculture, which in the 90s meant anything corporate and mainstream, such as Disney.  It's hard to believe now, but there was a time when people were concerned about the "Disneyfication" of culture.  I didn't coin the phrase "Disneyfication;" I read it somewhere.  In hindsight, it was a great problem to have.

I'm not against the internet.  That would be like being against books.  Maligning the internet because any crazy idiot can start a blog or make a video is like never learning to read because any crazy idiot can write a book. 

The internet is the greatest technological advancement since the printing press.  But there's a downside.

I'm aware that there is more music out there than ever, and that you can find almost anything you want on Bandcamp alone.  Completely disregarding the control and power concerns inherent in consolidating all your new music on a handful of virtual thrift stores that make true artistic independence almost impossible,

do you really want to spend your time looking for new music on.... Bandcamp?

To cut to the chase, social media is the pinnacle of monoculture.  Including YouTube and Bandcamp.  Even though you can find pretty much anything on these platforms, they are monolithic and hyper-corporate by nature.  They stifle independence.  Inherently.  Forget about all the obvious censorship and deplatforming problems; those concerns are real, but expecting YouTube and/or Bandcamp or any other monolithic, independence-crushing, hyper-corporate entity to behave any other way is totally naive.  It never surprises me when somebody says their video got taken down, or they got a strike against them, or they were removed from the platform completely.  Of course they did.  That's what those things are built for.  They're only doing what they've been designed to do.

So, how to maintain your artistic and intellectual curiosity in an age dominated by centralized hyper-compliance? 

The answer is probably the same as the answer to the question, "how to make a living and/or stand out as an original artist with an idiosyncratic vision in an era in which art has been democratized to the point that true art has been replaced by sick content, in which the artistic value of the work itself has been reduced to the hyper-generic, corporate, culture-less word "content," while the artist has been replaced by the self-important term 'creator.'"

In a word, "dunno."

"When you think that you can’t go on,
don’t you sing this stupid song."
Bobby Conn

But there has to be a way.  There always has been, and now can be no different than any other of the idiotic dark ages man has imposed upon himself throughout history.

The self-absorbed tyranny of the "creators" will come to an end.  The landfill content they produce will not stand the test of time.  No one will cherish the files they buried in their Faraday cage the way I cherish the vinyl EP of Bobby Conn's Llovessonngs I bought in Chicago, which features a great cover of Harry Nilsson's "Without You."

The cover art of the vinyl EP is the same as Harry Nilsson's Nilsson Schmilsson, except with Bobby Conn wearing a bathrobe and holding a pipe in front of a refrigerator, instead of Harry Nilsson.  I found it in the bin, and it was a cool thing to find.  Bobby Conn was a strong influence on me in the early years.  I never even noticed that his first album has an upside-down cross that takes up half the front cover until yesterday.  I used to love that album. 

Listen to it at your own risk.  Another great artist hijacked by demons.  It isn't Slayer, but then again, neither is Led Zeppelin.  You've been warned.  Great music, but I'm not letting those entities into my life again.

"Shouldest thou help the ungodly, and love them that hate the LORD?
Therefore is wrath upon thee from before the LORD."
2 Chronicles 19:2

The answer to the question, "how to maintain your curiosity, etc" is probably to never age.  I'm in my late 40s.  People in my demographic never buy new music.  We buy new books instead of used ones, learn (or worse, care) about food and wine, buy reading glasses, relax into the comfortable position of believing we've learned all we need to learn in life, and many other unfortunate intellectual atrocities.

The hell with that.  I'm going to take advantage of the neo printing press while I can.  I just discovered Penny Ikinger, an Australian "post-punk" singer and guitarist who has been playing for the last 40 years or so.  She has an amazingly-low play count for someone with such an interesting output and pedigree. 

She made an album in Tokyo a few years ago titled, unironically, Tokyo.  I actually really like it.  While the thrill of discovery doesn't register on the scale you find in used book and record stores, it isn't entirely nonexistent.  I did see some people selling vinyl records out of cardboard boxes on the sidewalk in Mexico City recently, which was encouraging.  Maybe the emergence of the black market in an age of vax-induced mandatory suicide will reinvigorate the culture of independence that people used to go out of their way to preserve and protect, like an endangered butterfly on the verge of extinction.  Only hipsters and people with an encyclopedic knowledge of music, art, and film used to be hardcore about compliance.  They used to exclude you from the scene; now, they excommunicate you from the community.  The devolution of the scene into the community is one of the worst things to happen to our culture over the last few decades.  In the past, you might not get invited to the party.  Now, the church of content creation excommunicates you into the outer darkness and removes your ability to produce landfill content, connect with other "creators," and even make a living, if you don't comply with its dogmatic demands. 

"Hipness is death to the individual, and
only the individual is truly hip."
Me

Anyway, Penny Ikinger.  Check her out now, before the people at the perfectly-named hipster wasteland PITCHFORK ruin it for everybody by giving it their punk-rock soccer-mom stamp of approval, and the mob comes to your door with torches and pitchforks demanding you listen to it if you still want to exercise the right they've deigned to bestow on you to agree with them about everything.