The dream of the 90s?

I still collect concert posters.

Remember those?

For any young person who has randomly picked up this newspaper: Concert posters used to be how you learned a band was playing in your town. They were printed on various sizes of paper and stapled to cork boards in high traffic areas in the days before Al Gore invented the internet.

Pearl Jam has been my favorite band since I bought a cassette tape of their debut album Ten from Sound Station Seven in the mall. And no, I am not going to explain cassettes or malls. Ask your parents.

I have seen the band live more than 40 times now, and to this day they still have concert posters designed by local artists for nearly every show. They’re designed to be collected now, not stapled or taped to posts.

They’ll helpfully sell you a hard cardboard tube to protect your souvenir right at the show.
You get older, you get smarter; if perhaps less punk rock.

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I got to thinking about concert posters — and life in an age of AI — after interviewing my friend Toby Kane for a story about his band playing a show at Phil’s in Sioux Falls for the first time in decades.

The new owners at Phil’s had discovered a trove of old concert posters from the 1990s in storage and used them to decorate the entrance to the bar.

The ‘90s masquerade as a decade, but it’s important you kids understand — the cultural ‘90s was actually shorter. Sociologists usually use the rise of grunge in 1991 and 1992 as the beginning, and point to Sept. 11, 2001 as a hard stop. But honestly, that’s too long, in my mind.

Maybe because I graduated high school in 1997, but to me the 90s were mostly over by then. Kurt Cobain was dead in 1994, Jerry Garcia in 1995, and by the time I moved into a dorm in St. Paul in the fall of ‘97, MTV was seemingly showing only Total Request Live and the moment had passed.Truly, the whole thing only lasted five or six years.

So what even was the deal with the ‘90s, then? In a way, it was about concert posters.

The whole ideal, if we even had a conscious concept, was a do-it-yourself ethos that was cribbed from punk rock but that sprawled into something more.

A small generation of latch-key children of divorce were left to their own devices, and so mostly decided to do things on their own.

Seemingly overnight, after a decade obsessed with brand-name labels, we all started dressing in either our dad’s old flannel shirts or whatever we could find at Goodwill. After Michael Jackson and Prince ruling the airwaves with pop music in the ‘80s, the music was edgier, louder, distortion-filled and angry, and the lyrics were suddenly raw and real and demanded introspection.

The only way Generation X was going to have anything of its own was by making it ourselves, and we all threw ourselves into the effort, it seemed.

A lot of it centered around music, but it was a whole scene, is I guess what I am trying to say.

Say there was going to be a show? Someone designed the poster, and someone interviewed the band for the local paper and someone took pictures for the people who weren’t there.

Maybe the band needed practice, and maybe the poster was weird and maybe the photographer wasn’t the best in the world, and maybe the writer was just a kid who loved the band — but the whole grimy, flannel, smoky mess was ours. Even as our parents’ music still dominated everywhere — Beatles albums were still topping the charts in 1995 and 1996 — we had our own thing. In our little egalitarian universe, for those few years, whatever someone felt like doing was pretty cool, if they cared about it — and if they did it themselves.

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Which, I guess, brings me to why the recent plague of artificial intelligence event posters drive me up a wall.

I think I managed to anger at least a few people by calling it what it is — slop. But I thought I at least ought to explain why AI graphics offend me so much.

First, it just looks bad. The key to design, someone told me once, was to make something BE designed well without LOOKING designed at all. I am certainly a better writer than I am a designer, but people have been paying me to design things for them for all of my adult life, so I have some standing here. And the AI-produced stuff that’s out there now all looks the same — and it’s all way too much.

Second, I think it’s strange to get offended on behalf of the robot that produced the work. But I think I get it. People are overwhelmed and a shortcut is welcome, and they don’t want to feel shamed for taking one. And I certainly get that. Truly, I do.

Here’s the thing, though. I am a capitalist, as far as that goes, even if a sometimes-reluctant one. I’d like to see labor get a little more of the value it creates than ownership, but on balance, a profit motive has steered humanity when allocating scarce resources.

But I know how AI will be used in a capitalistic society: To extract value from people without any regard for them at all.

I’ll never forget the first time I read about Uber and its stock prices even as it rang up billions and billions of dollars in losses during its first few years. Why would people pour money into a company that doesn’t — and seemingly cannot — make money?

Because they’re all betting they CAN make money if they don’t have to pay any drivers, one day. The point is eliminating the labor cost altogether.

This is not a dystopian future. This is happening right now. Uber, Amazon, Google — all the tech giants — are looking for ways to replace humans with machines. And the only way they can do that is if the humans train their replacements. And THAT is what happens every time you have AI design something for you and provide feedback.

What’s more, these posters, they’re designed for community events. They’re supposed to bring people together — and there are people who know how to design them to do just that.

When I take stock of my concert poster collection, the thing that strikes me is that the artist — apart from the band — had something to say, even if that something was “I think this looks cool.”

Using people to recruit people to do things with other people — doesn’t that have to be the baseline? Don’t we at least have to start there?

Wouldn’t you rather see a young person’s first poor attempt at something than another over-designed and over-saturated repeat from a robot?

We live in a time of extreme political anger, with populism animating both sides of the political aisle. People of all stripes feel like it’s too hard for the average person to get ahead. So why, then, would we help tech bros automate our jobs out of existence?

At what point are we going to pump the brakes and demand that technology serve people and not merely whichever billionaires are able to win an AI war?

Because it won’t stop at graphic designers. And the dangerous point is now, when it still looks so bad. For real. By the time it looks like an actual person might have done it, it will be too late.

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People are sometimes confused when I tell them I have seen one band more than 40 times. And I get the question, I do.

But they play a different setlist every night. Often, they’ll play the same city two nights and they might repeat a song or two.

What’s more, they, more than any other band I have ever seen, are acutely aware that the audience means as much to the show as the artist does. The entire front of the house is always full of fans who bought the tickets through Pearl Jam’s fan club, a practice they started in the 90s and never stopped.
One song that’s frequently in the band’s encore is Yellow Ledbetter, a song that didn’t make it onto Ten because singer and lyricist Eddie Vedder never finished the lyrics.

Eventually, though, the band released a soundcheck recording as a fan club single, and it’s become a beloved staple.

The house lights come up for it, and it’s a big, by that time often-boozy, singalong. No one is singing the exact correct lyrics, because they don’t technically exist. We’re all sort of right; we’re all sort of wrong. But Mike McCready on lead guitar locks into the solo that plays with a famous Jimi Hendrix riff, Vedder tosses tambourines and picks and empty red wine bottles into the pit and we all belt our own part into the night. For a few minutes, anyway, it’s a DIY masterpiece, and we all have our part to play in the tricky, sticky, human experiment — we’re all heroes and rock stars and none of us are.

With our posters and our T-shirts and our pictures and our voices, we’re all part of something that will never be right, so it will never be perfect, but it will never be wrong, either. It’s grimy and grungy, but it’s ours, and we’re human together — and I’ll take that over an algorithm any time.

Linehan is the Beacon’s managing editor and welcomes story tips and comments at BrookingsBeacon@gmail.com