Not posting because I have a dog in this race, but more to marvel at how calm and borderline debonair Gene Siskel is as he lays into John Ritter (Larry Sanders Show, Season 2).  Who knew Siskel was such a stone-faced assassin?  Don’t worry about the intricacies of the “dog” stuff after the jump, either; the joy is watching a roughed-up Geno do his best James Caan. And Rip Torn bleating a “shut the fuck up” that’ll make your hair curl.

From a Harper’s Magazine, early/mid ’70s, that I found in my office the other day.  Anyone else never hear of these? (EDIT: OH GOOD SWEET LORD THEY ARE IN THE 80S TOO)

I’m going to keep posting these examples as they arise.  Hope that’s okay (they’ll be under this tag).  For those times we all have that make us go “these kids/these days.”  Here, we have Bartók, in the midst of the Modernist revolution:

To be frank, recently I have felt so stupid, so dazed, so empty-headed that I have truly doubted whether I am able to write anything new at all anymore.  All the tangled chaos that the musical periodicals vomit thick and fast about the music of today has come to weigh heavily on me: the watchwords, linear, horizontal, vertical, objective, impersonal, polyphonic, homophonic, tonal, polytonal, atonal, and the rest…

From Alex Ross’s magisterial “The Rest is Noise: Listening to the 20th Century“

(via)

The two biggies have recently sent out their CFPs.  One (EMP) is much more tailored to my interests than the other (IASPM), which means I’ve got a better chance at going to LA than Cincinnati.  So.  If you’re interested, though: EMP is much easier to get into (I’m told) than IASPM, which typically wants academics (unless you want the strange “independent scholar” tag).

The calls for both conferences are after the jump.

(Continued)

Managing Media Work is out, via Sage.  My chapter, titled “Same as the Old Boss? Changes, Continuities, and Careers in the Digital Music Era,” is the twenty-first chapter.  It’s really nothing like the dissertation proposal, but more of an overview of how the hell an American music career works right now.  Amazingly, it’s still current, even though I wrote it 8 months ago!  And David Hesmondhalgh blurbed it!  Which means that David Hesmondhalgh has read my name, and perhaps nodded approvingly (approvingly!) at one or more of the points I make.  On the off-chance that anyone reading this blog also gets assigned in an undergrad Comm course to read this book, and they let me know of same, it would be like the coolest thing I’ve ever known.

There’s Wendy Fonarow, whose Guardian column on indie rituals is as good as her book on same.  This latest bit, on “why say ‘check 1-2′ during soundchecks, is particularly awesome:

This isn’t a matter of creativity. Saying “testing, one two” or “check, one two” is formulaic and serves the same function as other formulaic expressions, such as greetings. People often claim that formulaic expressions are meaningless, ignoring the work they do. When someone says, “How are you?” in English or “Have you eaten?” in Thai, they aren’t really asking about your well-being or your last meal, they’re expecting to receive an answer from a predictable repertoire of replies. This opens lines of communication and allows the parties to focus on other important interactive information. With formulaic speech, you don’t need to focus on content or specific words, but rather the acoustic information provided by slight variations in sound. By saying the same thing at a soundcheck, crew and performers can hear the significant contrasts in sound quality. The content of a formulaic expression is arbitrary. However, “check, one two” has a variety of sound units: the voiceless postalveolar affricate in “ch” (which has a lot of turbulence) and an alveolar plosive (which has a strong expulsion of air). Additionally, the audience are also aware of this routine and, therefore, don’t pay attention to it. If something different was said, such as a movie quote, it would draw attention to the soundcheck and create confusion. However, if you ask a crew why the soundman says “one, two”, their answer is “because you lift on three”.

Re: that last mega-post, there are plenty of people doing similar sorts of work out there.  If you don’t read Tom, and you were at all interested in what I wrote in that earlier post, start!  Tom’s point here, about pop music, is anthropologically valid!  It’s also called “capitalism.”

Put crudely, you succeed in pop music (or any kind of commercial art) by a mix of novelty and comfort. When critics want to put novelty in a good light we call it innovation. When we want to put comfort in a good light we call it “timeless” or “classic”. But this rapidly turns complicated. Stuff that used to be novel can become comforting, stuff that used to be comforting can be finagled into seeming novel again. And both terms are only meaningful inasmuch as they’re relative to the people you want to sell the records to – who might well construct their own comfort AS novelty. So it’s all hugely tactical even IF you accept the idea that this commercial art is by its nature “manufactured” and the desires and preferences of the creators don’t really come into it.

In blog years, I’ve been away for long enough to put out a reunion album.  If only I had more to show for it.

Not that I haven’t been “being productive.”  The opposite, actually.  It’s just that said productivity hasn’t manifested itself publicly.  Yet.  Along with taking trips out of town for various reasons (the Pitchfork Festival, a Cubs game/bachelor party, a glorious Tom Petty ampitheater show, WEEN–most of which I’ll write about soon, along with other stuff), I’ve been typing my ass off.  About 10-12,000 words, most of them copy-edited and good.  Weirdly enough, though, for two vastly different audiences.

If you were around these parts last year about this time, you can probably guess the two audiences.  The (much) larger audience will get to read the more enjoyable piece in a few weeks, so word on that will wait until that goes up.  The other audience, of four academics, will get to read the equally long, much drier piece (and then grill me on it) that’s been swirling around my head since last September.  It’s called a “dissertation prospectus,” it’s gone through four drafts, and finally I get to defend it at the end of this month.

I’m cutting it pretty close, to be honest.  I was lucky enough to receive a 2010-11 Mellon Foundation grant via the Sawyer Foundation, which will allow me the rare opportunity to truly/madly/deeply engage in my own research (without having to teach, which takes up 30-40 hours a week) while participating and helping organize a year-long series of symposia and other events around IU’s campus.  It’s seriously the greatest academic honor I’ve ever received, and I’m amazingly psyched to start it.  August can be loooooooong.

If you click around the Sawyer site for a few minutes, you can get a good idea of the sort of research on which I’m preparing to embark (and if you were at SxSW ‘10 or around Bloomington’s Landlocked Music this past Record Store Day, you’ve already seen me embarking): an anthropological study of music circulation.  Exciting!  If you want to stick around for a bit, I’ll clarify (to a degree) what it is I’ll be doing with my time, and how I’ll be doing it.  In as few words as possible, and with (ideally) a minimum of jargon.  I get asked about what I study a lot, and I have a hard time cramming everything into blurbs between beers.  Hopefully this will make up for my interpersonal insufficiencies.  Maybe (maybe) it’ll even give you some ideas.  The following are some big, weird, and decidedly formative ideas, but they’re the stuff I’ve become passionate about.  At the least, they’ll hopefully explain a lot of what I jabber about here.

NB: A dissertation (as I started talking about in this post) is a document intended for particular audiences, and is written in a very particular way.  Think of reading a legal brief, or leafing through a lengthy dossier of scientific findings on something–you’ll find tons of insider language and decoder-ring jargon meant for a specific (small) audience of other academics.  Think of it this way: the research I’m doing is designed as a report back to a small(ish) community of academics.  A lot of the stuff I discover might be super-obvious to people reading this blog, or people like me who keep up with the micro-grooves of digital music circulation, indie music, and so forth.  At the same time, though, I can guarantee you that anthropologists, ethnomusicologists, linguists, sociologists, folklorists, and/or cultural studies theorists are not as up-to-date.  Hopefully I’ll help them out, and do a reasonably good job of it.

Ahem.

Circulation hasn’t always been something that anthropologists (or anyone doing ethnographic research) have concerned themselves with.  Really, it’s been since the rise of global technological infrastructures (radio, TV, internet, web) that field research has devoted itself toward “following” cultural objects (which can be a text, a mode of performance, a set of ideas, etc) across many different locales and domains.  It’s become crucial, in other words, to discover how and why culture moves, what people do with it when it reaches them, how it transforms them and they it, and so on.  Honestly, it only really took off in the late 80s.  Bureaucracy, y’know.  Contextually: The academic journal Public Culture has blazed many trails in this area, as have “famous” anthropologists of circulation like Arjun Appadurai, Bruno Latour, Greg Urban, and wonderful theorists of publics and social imaginaries like Benedict Anderson, Yochai Benkler, Charles Taylor, and (especially) Michael Warner (if the cover of Warner’s book alone doesn’t make you want it, then I don’t know what to do with you).

If, like me, you’re interested in understanding what’s happened to music over the past decade or so, circulation is just about the only way you can go.  In this piece from last year, I started aiming in this direction: okay, we’ve effectively burned down the old factory.  What are we putting up in its place?  What is driving the circulation of music and music culture now? How does it compare to the old models, and what can we learn from the changes and continuities?

For the major labels, it’s more or less variations on the 20th century model: They have the rights to music, they exploit those rights exclusively, through the channels they choose and with the handcuffs they select, and if you don’t like it then they’ll sue you like crazy.  Ask Irving Azoff, he’s still fighting.  Of course, their model doesn’t work, and so they’re trying to milk revenue out of other areas–performance, merchandise, etc–traditionally controlled by artists and/or non-label affiliated unsavory characters.

But indie labels and the new crop of tech capitalists, on the other hand, have been much more flexible, prone to experimentation, and resistant to publicly shaming fans and possible consumers (with notable exceptions, of course).  This, to me, is much more interesting (and of course, so is the music).  Because there’s been so much change and expansion within their ranks, these groups of folks are who I’m primarily studying.

But how?  Glad you asked.

First, by studying the effects of discourse on circulation.  Which, let me explain.  Above, I linked to Greg Urban’s book Metaculture.  In said book, he claims that culture can and should be studied alongside other forces of motion that propel objects through the world.  Culture itself is immaterial–accumulated, socially learned knowledge–but it finds transitory homes in the material world.  But what moves culture through the world?  For Urban, it’s discourse.  The way we talk about things, the way we compare “new” things to the “old” things that they resemble: this is how culture moves–through metacultural responses to cultural objects.  For Urban, we don’t know anything about culture without knowing it through the metacultural responses that travel with it.  We don’t approach anything in a vacuum, in other words–stuff gets to us for a reason.

Think about music, and all the culture that’s associated with music, in this way.  A song is immaterial culture at its core: artists soak up what’s around them, what they’ve learned, what their friends like, and make new, unique things out of these experiences.  They record this stuff and release it, and hope to make money off it.  But there’s more–and this is specific to how music is a different sort of commodity than films (what Urban uses as his examples).  The recording is the primary commodity form of music, but over the past century, tons of other ancillary commodities have emerged to help drive sales of recordings.  There are those that the artist or label uses to flesh out their image/move some product (live performances, advertising campaigns, merchandise, music videos), and those that are totally metacultural, based on people’s responses to the recordings and all that stuff (criticism, fandom, journalism, and the like).  Ideally, the latter parenthetical group works together with the former group, and you get the Beatles or Radiohead. If they don’t?  Well.

Which is where I come in, and where my research will jump off.  How is indie (music and culture) adapting to the last 10-15 years of massive digital changes?  What are the new forces driving circulation? When any old John Q. Pitchfork has the same access to music that only critics or mega-geeks had a decade ago, how have these forces been altered, and what does that say about indie music, not to mention the way we use new technologies?  What hath blogs and message boards and Twitter wrought?  A couple weeks ago, A.O. Scott wrote a short and sweet article about Inception, but really about the new paradigm of critics critiquing critics as part of mainstream film criticism–often before the stuff even comes out.  This sort of thing is part and parcel of the vastly accelerated cycle of critical (and fan-driven) discourse now that access has been, ahem, “democratized” to a large degree–and indie is no exception, of course.

Not to mention that within indie culture, we’ve created our own discursive forces–the kind of stuff completely foreign to mainstream rock.  Indie ideologies–best espoused by Wendy Fonarow–have traditionally walled off indie recordings, made fans work for them (”How many indie kids does it take to screw in a lightbulb?  You mean you don’t know?).  The opposite of the idea of acceleration so necessary to making money from music.  What’s happening to those?  We also metaculturally evaluate indie music–and therefore circulate it to others–based on what label it’s on, what score it got on Pitchfork, what artists are RIYL’ed by a blogger.

What I’m driving at, of course, is that when we talk about music, we’re not just talking about notes and melodies and timbres.  We’re talking about lots of other things, as well (please subscribe to Nitsuh’s wonderful blog and read his wonderful column if you want to know more about this stuff).  Over the past decade, we’ve started talking about technologies and indie rock together in interesting ways.  You find mentions of mp3s and blogs in so many reviews of indie albums–how do discourses merging music and technologies help to circulate the music.  Hell, how do they help to circulate the technologies?

This last point is a major one–technologies facilitate the circulation of music as much as discourse does.  This is sort of a “duh” point.  But one thing that goes underreported is how technologies themselves circulate–discursively and otherwise.  What does it mean that some music is referred to as “blog rock”?  What does this reflect about blogs, or blogging, let alone Clap Your Hands Say Yeah?  Is there any precedent for the amount of music press that has been devoted to mp3 technology?  What does this say about where music journalism is right now?

These new technologies have also facilitated the rise of new speech genres–new ways of talking about music that accelerate its circulation–unknown a decade or so ago.  Chris Weingarten’s 1000 Times Yes Twitter feed is way too tailor-made for this sort of discourse critique, but his mini-feud with the Hype Machine folks a few months back is ripe for analysis.  Bitter, cynical old-school critic, meet optimistic tech capitalists!  2010!  Much of what Chris complains about in his already-legendary public rants is shot through with nostalgia for the time when things were slower, less people were opining about music and doing it better and for money, and criticism was more easily separable from PR (or so we think).

And nostalgia is a discursive force for music circulation, don’t you forget it.  It always has been, since fledgling turn-of-the-century record manufacturers started mining 19th century standards to move product.  Nowadays, though, it’s different: it can be Weingarten ranting about what others have called the “monoculture,” but it’s also record store owners (and corporate distributors) playing on our nostalgic love for physical media (read: vinyl) by making a yearly holiday out of buying it.

As I’ll argue later in that other piece I mentioned at the beginning of this thing, nostalgia is the residue of progress, and oh, has there been a ton of technological progress over the past decade within indie culture (and music culture in general).  And these technologies can’t be ignored as forces for music circulation, of course.  We just have to be careful how we talk about these things.  This is where Science & Technology Studies and its spinoff, Actor-Network Theory, come into play.  They both work to locate a productive middle-ground between technological determinism (the view in which technologies do everything) and social constructivism (in which humans do everything, regardless of technologies).

In other words, how do new technologies shape particular forms of social interaction?  What do we do with these things, and what do they do to us?  If we treat a technological object as an active participant in social relations–what ANT scholars call an “actant”–we can not only understand those objects better, but we can also start to understand their roles in our everyday lives.  Engineer/sociologist Madeleine Akrich has come up with some interesting ways to think about this topic, and I’m going to steal them from her.  Namely: the difference between the “scripts” written by technology manufacturers (and the other legal/governmental agents guiding their hands) and the “enactment” of those technologies in particular social circumstances.  She calls this “de-scription.”  You can probably guess the technologies I’m going to explore for this part.  Then, there are the infrastructures through which music flows–large-scale affiliations of technologies, people, rules, and the standards and protocols that govern circulation, often invisibly.  How are we linked together through indie music and culture?  How much authority do we really have?

Now, then.

As for the “who” I’m going to study: sorry, but I need to keep that under my cap for now.  There’s the not-so-small matter of getting approval by the University for any research I do, and the less-not-so-small matter of respecting the privacy of my informants (I really enjoy being able to say that).  As for the “how,” that’s a bit easier (though, per the type of research, still rather vague and totally boring).  1) I’m going to travel along with music, from the earliest moments of its creation through the entire cycle of production and circulation.  2) I’m going to explore one particular technological artifact–a website–that could only exist at this moment.  I’m aiming to try to understand why it was built the way it was, what behaviors it tries to predict, and then talk to users to understand how it was taken up.  3) I’m going to South by Southwest 2011 and talking to a ton of people.  4) Same for Record Store Day 2011.

Of course, I’m not going to post research on this blog, but I will post pithy stuff that comes to mind over the next two or three years.  This is an enormous project I’m preparing to undertake–the biggest thing I’ve ever done–and I’m really psyched to get going on it.  Hope you can stick around.

Michelangelo Matos interviews Rob Sheffield over at eMusic’s blog, and it’s long.  It’s also compelling and funny and just plain great.  This bit made me tear up a bit.  Sheffield has a knack for doing that.  I’ll be back tomorrow, with something much less wonderful than this:

A lot of listening to music is memory, and a lot of memory is listening to music. It’s funny that music is always in the present. It always confronts you with the new, the right-now. But it’s always connected to memory. Even if you’re writing about a song that’s playing right now, you’re always writing about it after the fact. It’s always after the moment. Especially writing about dance music—if you can call it a genre of pop-music criticism, it’s my favorite genre, because that’s built into it. The impossibility of trying to recapture that moment—even if you’re writing about something you heard last night, the immediacy of it makes it more exciting to read. There’s something retrospective built into it.