"Multimedia scares me off"
About this Quote
“Multimedia scares me off” is the kind of offhand confession that lands like a flare from someone who helped invent the very chaos he’s backing away from. Michael Nesmith wasn’t a Luddite; he was an early architect of pop’s screen-age future, pushing music video formats and experimenting with televised performance long before MTV calcified the grammar. That’s what makes the line bite: it’s not fear of technology, it’s fear of what the technology does to the signal.
In Nesmith’s mouth, “multimedia” isn’t a neutral word. It’s the industry’s favorite euphemism for bundling: sound plus image plus branding plus “content,” all welded into an attention trap. The subtext is an artist watching the center of gravity shift away from the song toward the delivery system. When everything is a platform, the work risks becoming merely the fuel.
The phrase “scares me off” is crucially human and a little funny. He’s not staging a heroic refusal; he’s admitting a gut-level aversion, like stepping back from a party that’s gotten too loud to talk. Coming from a musician whose fame was mediated through a manufactured TV band, it reads as lived wisdom: visibility can be a costume you can’t take off, and the more channels you add, the less room there is for interiority.
It’s also a quiet critique of audience expectations. Multimedia promises total access; Nesmith is saying that total access can flatten mystery, and mystery is where art keeps breathing.
In Nesmith’s mouth, “multimedia” isn’t a neutral word. It’s the industry’s favorite euphemism for bundling: sound plus image plus branding plus “content,” all welded into an attention trap. The subtext is an artist watching the center of gravity shift away from the song toward the delivery system. When everything is a platform, the work risks becoming merely the fuel.
The phrase “scares me off” is crucially human and a little funny. He’s not staging a heroic refusal; he’s admitting a gut-level aversion, like stepping back from a party that’s gotten too loud to talk. Coming from a musician whose fame was mediated through a manufactured TV band, it reads as lived wisdom: visibility can be a costume you can’t take off, and the more channels you add, the less room there is for interiority.
It’s also a quiet critique of audience expectations. Multimedia promises total access; Nesmith is saying that total access can flatten mystery, and mystery is where art keeps breathing.
Quote Details
| Topic | Technology |
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