On Re-Shifting the Focus

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As Carl recently wrote, there’s been a lot of meta-blog-chatter floating around the Web lately, kickstarted by two independent happenings: first, a very fun to read “music-blogger symposium” at Rockcritics.com featuring such luminaries as Carl, Simon, and my good friend Maura dishing their feelings about the medium, its past/future, etc., and second, the release of the Oxford American’s annual music issue, featuring a well-crafted, yet timeworn critique of blog hype by Bill Wasik, devoting particular attention to a band called Annuals. In the former discussion, Maura mentioned a thing I wrote a bit over a year ago, within which I started sorting out my feelings regarding the situation of mp3 blogs within Web-mediated music fandom. I’m still relatively happy with the piece, but I’ve also moved quite a bit away from my position within it. It’s probably as good a time as ever to spend a few minutes (ahem) catching up with where I now stand in relation to that piece, a slight polemic that primarily grew from, well, my dissatisfaction with Idolator’s original manifesto, and my desire to intersect fan studies, still a passion of mine, with the realm of mp3 blogging. In this entry, I’d like to examine not the external focus of those who write about mp3 blogging, but the foci of the mp3 bloggers themselves. It’s a year later, and I’ve gotten a bit grumpier.

To begin with, a consideration of the technologies at play here. Blogging, in any form or fashion, is a communicative technology like any other—television, sign language, radio—inasmuch as it’s not a thing, but a way of doing things. And, of course, like any emergent form of communication, it comes into being bound with competing ideologies as to its ideal functionality and place within society. For I’m assuming the majority of folks not in the employ of the industry who are passionate about music, blogging and p2p technology would ideally facilitate a culture in which we’d get music for free (perhaps also requiring, of course, a system that supports the artists themselves through public grants, foundations, and so forth. Sigh.), and could engage with it on a variety of interesting, conflicting and eye-opening levels, all resulting in a valuation of art at a level unheard of in recorded history, and capable of significant philosophical and epistemological change.

Uh-huh. Instead, what has happened with online popular music and the fandom for same during the current century is an expansion in the wrong direction; a focus, as it were, on the wrong thing. First, we’ve got the music for free. Mission accomplished. The floodgates have been opened, and are showing no signs of forcible closure in the near future. When the industry and its governmental lobbying forces whack one mole, thousands more moles sprout up from different mole-holes that are in turn tougher to whack. This distribution revolution one might take as a sign of some inherently human urge for the free circulation of musical affect, independent of market forces and the strictures of commodity culture (I’ll get to that in a minute). Of course, however, it’s not. Instead, it’s a sign of a large and growing contingent of tech-savvy music fans who wish to engage with music on a strictly superficial level, as a means to an end. And who also, more importantly and unfortunately, wish to more thoroughly engage with the technologies that bring them the music, to the detriment of course of the people on the other ends of those technologies, and of course to the music that flows through them.

This is our problem. By and large, music fans don’t seem to be fans of music anymore, but with every extramusical thing that has emerged to surround the music, making it progressively less likely that the music itself is the object of discussion. Fandom, as I mentioned before, often gets a bad rap—for representing the basest form of engagment with art, for inherently supporting the commodity as the only unit of cultural exchange known to man—but as we all know, it doesn’t have to be that way. The sad fact sis that, for the vast majority of mp3 blogs, it is that way. No matter the rhetoric around technology’s inherent capacity for “the democratization of culture,” technology itself has emerged as the preeminent fetish commodity. The focus isn’t on the water that comes from the tap, it’s on how to find new ways to make the tap itself more appealing.

The oft-discounted new media theorist Sherry Turkle referred to computers in 1995 as “objects to think with.” With this phrase, she was trying to situate forms of media within a broad social perspective, assessing how our forms of communication define us, and more importantly, the subtle ways they help to shape our understanding of the world around us. We can easily look at music fandom in 2007 through a similar lens. At the level of mp3 blogs and their social networking bretheren (a distinction that Tom referred to here), the desire for connection across geographic boundaries is still present. Only now the focus of the fandom is distressingly directed toward just “connecting,” with the role of music subsumed to the level of metadata; a way to win friends and influence people. This thoroughgoing focus on the medium itself, formerly the provence of easily-ridiculed audiophiles who bought Gold CDs and spent three grand on a receiver, is now the coin of the realm, now that the realm is also a means of interpersonal communication itself. Of course, it would be stupid for me to deny that music-as-a-form-of-social-distinction is in any way a new trend. This sort of music fandom is, however, like so many social phenomena remediated into the “virtual” realm, exponentially expanded to an extent that all sense of focus is directed toward the medium itself and how it visually represents fandom as, interchangeably, a popularity contest and a direct reflection of (and buoy for) shifting industrial formations.

Which brings me to the point I’d really like to er, focus on here. As I mentioned above, my previous writing on this very subject left a lot of things out, because it was formulated at a time when my understanding of much reception theory was still nascent. I relied too heavily on the pre-Web writings of Henry Jenkins, for instance, and his conception of fandom as a form of resistance to mainstream consumer culture. Yes, of course, Jenkins was correct then; fans shouldn’t be lumped into a category of fawning sycophants in toto, and many of them in fact create works of their own that extend and often improve upon the original texts. But post-Web (it sounds quaint to even think that now), things have gotten much more complicated, and the border between fan affect and corporate/for-profit labor has become blurred to the point of unrecognizability.

It’s been obvious for some time now that labels heavily rely on the work of music fans to push their product, and also that if said pushing isn’t done in the proper fashion, with the appropriate music, consequences can and do arise (it’s become a strange scarlet letter among bloggers to have a file removed at label/artist request; like passive resistance to label hegemony, but with added personal gain as a bonus). It’s less obvious, however, that companies like BlogBurst are out there, leeching bloggers’ content and offering it to online newspapers (USA Today, Gannett, the WSJ, etc.), who then plaster this free labor with advertisements and repay the bloggers only with a link to their websites. Apparently, there is a form of compensation at play, but only for the largest bloggers that service the most content. In other words, the bloggers who continually write about what BlogBurst’s clientele wishes. In still other words, the bloggers’ time and effort being used for profit, and (even more egregiously) the bloggers themselves being satisfied with something as an increased hit count as a result.

I know I’m pushing toward Marx here, so please indulge a bit more pushing, just for a moment. McGill University professor, scholar (and blogger) of all things aural, and author of this wonderful text Jonathan Sterne wrote in a 2005 article called “The MP3 as a Cultural Artifact” that the free circulation of music within culture has the capacity to occasion a shift in popular music back to use value, from its long-term residency within exchange value:

“Epochal proclamations are tempting when confronted with this state of affairs: one could say that if recording shifted music from use-value to exchange-value, then digitization in the form of the mp3 liberates recorded music from the economics of value by enabling its free, easy and large-scale exchange.”

In other words, as Rodman & Vanderdonckt argued in their own article on the topic:

“What circulates…is not just a commodity or a piece of intellectual property: it’s a set of affectively charged social relationships. For fans, the impulse to buy and the impulse to share are often too tightly intertwined to be separated: the music that you purchase often becomes the music that you simply must tell others about, and the music that other people share with you can inspire you to make a few purchases—sometimes more than a few—of your own.”

Both of these are proclamations of the ostensibly liberatory power of mp3s, file-sharing, etc., made by respected academics in peer-reviewed journals. Unfortunately, both of them have proven to be much too optimistic. For all of the mp3 blogs that operate under a rubric equally divided between fandom and critique, there are hundreds if not thousands of them that accept what they’re given, and reconstitute it as, if not Marx’s definition of market value, then an equally uncritical appropriation of digital music files as capital in a prestige economy in which site traffic, links, “friends,” etc. are currency. Music and music fandom, in other words, has largely become a means to a social-networking end. Again, this is not necessarily anything new; even traditionally-defined “subcultures” are most always based upon mirrored hierarchies that required significant amounts of cultural capital (or, in Sarah Thornton’s coinage regarding the early 90s British rave scene, “subcultural capital”).

Yet there seems to be something inherently missing with the elbo.ws/Hype Machine era of mp3 blogging, and with the current state of music fandom in general, in which status is accumulated through the trading of endlessly reproducible commodities, and not necessarily (sadly, in fact, increasingly rarely), through a Jenkinsian model of what one has to offer to a discussion about the art itself, or even what one can do with the music once one has it in his/her possession. Obviously, the fact that Hype Machine itself is usually the lede for the music industry/Web 2.0/Long Tail puff-pieces is a sign of blogger centralization; and the sort of techno-consensus based on rankings and self-congratulation. The elbo.ws message board devoted to mp3 blogger conversations (and hosted by elbo.ws, the Go-Bots to Hype M’s Transformers) has been taken over across the last year or so by self-promotion, link requests, questions about why their mp3s or blogs don’t appear on the aggregator, questions about code and blog widgets, and of course, links to the latest ways to socially network with others interested in similarly shiny things, less with the content. You get the idea.

One of the most recent releases from the Continuum series of records-as-books, Scott Plagenhoef’s take on Belle and Sebastian’s If You’re Feeling Sinister addresses the trajectory of modern music fandom in a way that I’ve found hard to express for a while, mostly because I don’t have the board experience he does (obvious full disclosure here, he’s my editor at Pitchfork). But his discussion of music fandom as exhibited on the Sinister List in the mid/late 90s, surrounding a band that refused to give biographical information about itself, and subsequent comparison to where we are now is very instructive. On the SL, he writes, the focus was on artist-specific research—not the type created by PR machines and distributed through email blasts and one-sheets—but the sort that took time and effort to unearth (and often create), and led to the creation of a sustainable community based around shared musical interests. Of course, I don’t necessarily blame the PR folks for the fact that so many mp3 bloggers uncritically copy what they offer. Music needs promotion, especially in such a crowded environment. I do, however, direct blame at the large subset of mp3 bloggers who either eschew any form of personal or critical engagement with the music, in the interest of fawning over its newness or novelty, which is another form of technology-centric focus (it’s pre-new! Kill it!). Sure, there’s the frequently offered excuse of “well, just don’t read those blogs.” Fair enough, but there’s also the opposite notion–idealized instead of cynical–“imagine if only half of those blogs were interested in contributing to long-term discussions about the music they promote.”

The latest models of mediated communication usually come complete with all manner of gadgetry that, in practice, draws attention to itself, no doubt what their creators intended. The technologies don’t possess any internal agency, of course, yet they’re treated as if they do; the sad irony emerging that social networking, of course, is, more and more, used to atomize us more than connect us.