RC: How does your ‘memory of disco’ affect the disco you make? Do you knowingly exaggerate some elements while downplaying others, etc? What, if any, is the personal moment with disco each of you is attempting to recapture?

DB: Paraphrasing Barney Frank, I’m going to revert to my ethnic heritage by answering your question with a question: Can you be nostalgic about something you didn’t experience yourself?

…in a way that really syncs up well with that recent article I wrote, or should I say, syncs up well with an idea that maybe should have been teased out a bit more in that piece.  I called this idea, when it’s expressed in Hipstamatic-encoded digital photography, or through old photos on album covers that speak to us through a shared “old” aesthetic but not a shared memory, “synthetic nostalgia.”  It could equally be called (and has been called) “ersatz” nostalgia and “armchair” nostalgia.

The important thing is that this is a sort of nostalgia that doesn’t require the person (the nostalgee?) to have ever experienced the thing itself (and which therefore should maybe not be called nostalgia at all).  It’s a shared feeling not as much for the quality of the experience itself (a dicey area to get into; I’ll avoid it), but for the ways in which that experience is rendered and circulated.

In a section of the article that I wisely sliced off before submitting, I riffed for a paragraph on what it actually was that drew me to the Dum Dum Girls’ I Will Be cover. I didn’t know Dee Dee’s mom, had never “chilled” with her, wasn’t even born when that photo was taken.  But in lieu of remembering that room in the house I grew up in, or the way the woman still makes that face today–like Dee Dee might–I do something else.  I see the woman, but I see her bathed in the washed-out colors, with long, straight hair and a slightly agape expression.  I see the closet.  I focus in on the invisible formal infrastructure that makes up the photo.  That’s what I’m “nostalgic” for–not the representational content of the photograph, but, for lack of a better term, its style.

To answer Balis’s rhetorical question, then: yes, we can be nostalgic about something we haven’t ourselves experienced, but only to the limits that our language will let us speak about it.  He’s not remembering, as we know that word, as much as he’s accessing a shared store of memories.  Instead, what Balis is doing is borrowing from a psychic public domain that was seeded with the memories of those who were there for disco’s original moment (or what we’ve congealed that into), and which has grown or wilted as it passed through time and space, depending on how often its been refreshed, by whom, and with what aim.  Large portions of this psychic public domain have been fictionalized and romanticized (and thank god), and equally large portions of it have been visually indexed through photographs, which carry with them their own assumptions about truth.  Balis is situating himself toward this era with a sense of longing and reverence, and turning that passion into music.

In a similar way, when I look at the photo of Dee Dee’s mom on the cover of I Will Be, my mind creates an aggregate of my own family photo album (it helps that I’m also white, I grew up in the suburbs, that closet and haircut looks really familiar, my mom’s probably around the same age as Dee Dee’s), and it looks similar.  The photo and the person aren’t the same, but they’re both activated, I could say, within a similar genre of memories.

My own imagination, with its own storehouse of imagery, meets that photograph on a particular plane.  Not one of nostalgic reminiscence–that’s unique to the family–but one in which a technology’s generic imprint becomes saturated with cultural meaning.  I’m nostalgic for how the instant camera extended itself into Dee Dee’s mom’s bedroom and framed a section of mundane activity as fit for aesthetic contemplation.  And if I let it, it strikes me that this private photograph has left the realm of Dee Dee’s family’s shared memory, and the shoebox or photo album that contained it, and is now sitting in my living room–at the moment sharing space with a photomontage of Nick Lowe playing dress-up, and a realistic drawing of Marvin Gaye as a Greek god.  In private, that photo signifies a wealth of shared knowledge and culture and memories in unpredictable ways.  Circulating through my living room as the frontispiece for a flat musical commodity, it stands out as a striking tile in my floorbound taste mosaic.

But that’s not all.  I’m most nostalgic for the idea that this technological signature shows its age.  This is where Hipstamatic (and its clones), pre-distressed jeans, “old movie” filters on editing software, and any other ultramodern veneer-producer comes into play.  They take our mundane objects or creations and lend them a metaphysical space of engagement on their surface.  Even though we know this surface has been applied after the fact and not “earned,” we unconsciously react to it as much as the actual object (I haven’t thrown away my “non-aged” jeans, but they’re in a corner of my closet ready to reappear once their time comes again).  But enough about jeans, let’s get back to culture.  If publics are instantaneously created through the circulation of (musical, filmic, literary, televisual, etc) texts, then what sorts of assemblages are we creating through the way we react to the veneers of texts?  Generationally-defined ones?  Yes, but then what?  Texts inherently give us something to talk about and react to. What do veneers do?  Do they lock us into an idea of the past, making it a necessary piece of luggage for a trip to the future?  One thing’s clear: for Apple, Levi’s, and the guys who make the Hipstamatic app, veneers make lots of money by embedding the the psychic allure of age into commodities that are otherwise perennially shiny and new.  They’re smart, because like the music industry, they’re selling us frozen time.

///

But music isn’t a digital photo, or a pair of jeans.  Musical inspiration and creation is a lot messier than veneers (though veneers are always an option)–a recorded song is always already not a thing, but a montage of tracks representing micro-performances that happened at different times and places–and there are regimes of value associated with the quality and fealty of reverence to one’s chosen past.  In a piece for the New Yorker, which Sylvester’s own piece was written in response to, Sasha Frere-Jones considers the implications of the closeness of bands such as Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings, the Budos Band, and Kings Go Forth to their obvious predecessors.  He ends the first section with this question:

Very few of these bands like the word “revival,” probably because it robs them of credit even before they take the stage. But how much of the past does one need to draw on before shifting categories from new to retro?

This last question is one that’s helped significantly guide much of music criticism since its inception, particularly over the past few decades.  “Retro” and “revival” have become bad words in music crit circles, which tend to privilege difference and newness.  Read ten record reviews at random: I bet that some form of these ideas are present in 7 of them.  In which “shaping influences into something new and exciting” is good, while too much dedication is a “retread” or “unimaginative” (from today’s lot, for instance: second sentence) I know this because it’s often a kneejerk reaction I have to artists like the Dap-Kings–I dismissed them for seeming too conservatively indebted to a bygone era and recreating it like a wax museum, while I loved other bands who draw just as strongly from more obscure, less admired, or more heterogenous source material.

Critics aren’t unique in looking for these qualities about music.  Critical discourses are part of a larger way of looking at the world–anthropologists and economists have argued that we see in cultural objects unique hybrids of past cultural objects and ideas as a part of being modern and buying into the necessary capitalist mindset.  In many different ways, we want musical culture to work like good commodities, to play into what Sean Nixon brilliantly has called (in advertising discourses) “the narcissism of minor differences.” As Frere-Jones points out, Sharon Jones is not just acceptable, but near-great because they tweak James Brown and Stax just so much. Re-applied elsewhere, this worldview drives entire economies (it’s Pitchfork’s engine since 2004-5), making us do ridiculous things like buy new-looking cars when our current ones are running just fine, and nod our heads approvingly at the result of boardroom decisions about five fucking blades.

But retro and revival bands aren’t unwelcome everywhere, of course.  Far from it.  I’d bet that globally, there’s as much if not more of a premium on the conservative impulse to maintain a tradition through music than on incessant hybridization and new-seeking.  Cultures with perceived life or death stakes in keeping their traditions alive in the face of creeping modernity take huge strides to make certain that performances hew closely to what they’ve been for centuries.  The argument for these societies (boiled down to generic bones) is in its own way as rife with existential dread as my earlier question about possible publics for veneers: if our performances change by bending to the whim of the market, then what’s left of us?  Who are we?  What are we talking about?

In a lower-stakes example, you can see retro and revival ideals held up highly in the cultures (and massive fanbases) surrounding professional tribute bands.  These groups play to the tons of people who want the music of their youth handed down like myths, played with respect and fealty to the original–the “Pledge of Allegiance” model of music circulation, perhaps.  This is most prominent with boomers and their classic rock bands, but there are more than likely elements of this desire in all art.  For instance, I used to date a figure painter, and she was extremely gifted at representing the human form using the following tools: oil paints, brushes, her hand and arm.  But the response that she got most often–mainly, it must be said, by those who didn’t have MFAs et al–somehow replaced these with “camera.”  “It looks so real!”, they would say, inevitably followed by “like a photograph!”  To an artist’s artist, painting from a photograph is comparable to a particularly obedient tribute act.  And this is something that many artists, and fans of artists, spend careers striving for: duplication and reverence to an original, to the degree that they turn into something of a veneer. But this approach doesn’t get much, if any, play in critical circles.  Which is why Frere-Jones recommends at the end of his piece that “perhaps we simply adjust our expectations and give less credence to the importance of novelty.”

That might be a good start.  But maybe it’s also a matter of shifting our focus a bit to dial in on what it is that travels through musical performance.  That stuff, the residual culture reappropriated and just slightly hybridized, must be something pretty important, mustn’t it?  To travel that well, that relatively cleanly?  Not everything is lucky enough to travel at all.  Here’s Balis again, with an anecdote about what usually stays at the gate of the original disco moment:

Bobby Vitteretti, a legendary DJ from San Francisco’s Trocadero Transfer came to our last show. So naturally, we’re both thrilled: here’s this sweet guy from disco’s halcyon days and he loves the show. But after the show, he asked us both the same question: why don’t you have more ”bombs” in your set? Blank stares. He explained what he meant to Eugene — the high-pitched “boooom” synthetic tom drum sound that most people know from “Ring My Bell.” And while we get where he’s coming from, it’s the sort of thing you have to be careful about. Certain timbres and musical devices — and it’s hard to put your finger on why — don’t date well. There are plenty of things we’re perfectly happy to leave behind: dance tracks about dancing sometimes seem a bit redundant, or songs about music.

Certain stuff about disco is pure kitsch, and other elements from the same time period sound really fresh in a different moment.  In the same way, Sharon Jones and the Daptones should be credited as savvy cultural laborers as well as die-hard soul fans: they’re no retro-revivalists, but are keenly able to balance the best aspects of the JB’s/Otis/Stax/Motown salad days in the same way as that massive group was carefully sieving the church out of their music.  Tweaking in different ways, but in both cases just enough to allow the music to circulate outside parochial contexts.

Though a photograph is different in many respects than a song, the I Will Be snapshot is good to think with here, particularly when you think about artists composing with genres as much as notes or sounds.  It makes you think about the fact that it’s not just the music or photo itself that travels through time and space in unpredictable ways: sometimes the ineffable sense of age and wear that arises as a cultural object decays–the visible remainder of a technology’s unique operation–splits off and circulates on its own.  We’re not nostalgic for those veneers–there’s no way we could be–but we sure know them when we see and hear them.

I’d been thinking about album covers as possessing a unique kind of rhetorical force since starting to follow No Caption Needed, a blog run in part by John Lucaities, a professor in my department, and designed to accompany and build from the book of the same name.  But it wasn’t until I read this post (excerpted in full in the piece), by Christy, a recent Bloomington transplant and all-around cool chick (this is her new blog–see what I mean), that everything clicked.  I ran into her at a show, I was drunk, we chatted about the post, I stumbled home and everything hits at once.  A few more conversations, a few books flipped through, and it basically wrote itself the week after the 4th of July.

Yes, it’s the other thing I was working on when writing my prospectus, which you may or may not have figured out if you read this post.

The piece might tempt a tl;dr, but I hope you give it a shot.  I basically cover three domains that I see intersecting on these photos-as-album-art: the aesthetic predecessors (Jandek and William Eggleston) who allow everyday snapshots such as these to circulate as objets d’art; the music (or certain music) itself that also reflects a larger sociological/cultural compulsion overlapping significantly with the ideas represented in these photos; and the technologies and technoculture that greatly facilitate the way we see them as nostalgic objects.

There’s tons of stuff that didn’t make its way into the piece, for obvious reasons.  I’ll chunk them below.

–I didn’t include the Sleigh Bells or Tanlines covers inter alia, because they’re not the same thing.  Scanned images from publications (and altered, in the Sleigh Bells case–looks like it’s from a yearbook), are public, which sort of does away with the privacy ideas rampant in the other ones.  Yet this idea is something I also chatted with Chris about, and which he and Ryan (and Panda Bear, and earlier, Robert Pollard) are obviously big fans of.  As with Polaroids, scans from old magazines, particularly of the rich Kodachrome stock from mid-20th century National Geographics or the hazy retro-futuristic patina of Omni (ahem) give the same sense of tactility and grain when surrounded by the sharp lines of a web browser.  It’s the same ahistorical, “found” sense I get when I listen to mp3s from GvsB or Altered Zones, which makes sense.

–In terms of songs that negotiate nostalgia well, but which I couldn’t shoehorn into the piece (though on an early draft I tried), there’s well, all of Village Green Preservation Society, but primarily “Picture Book” and (especially) “People Take Pictures of Each Other.”  And the refrain from “Sound of Silver” is also a nice rebuke to the overwhelming sense of childhood regression so omnipresent in indie these days.

–I could have talked about Jamie Livingston, the Impossible Project, the “make your own indie album cover” memes, Harmony Korine, Marc’s great cassette piece (which I swear to god I’m just now seeing has a title almost identical to my own.  Ha.), Pitchfork’s own A>D>D series, and so on and so forth.  But.

–I wanted to write a bunch more about the connections between music and visual culture, and the rituals associated with album art and imagination, etc.  But I have a feeling there may be a venue where I can do that soon

–I didn’t use the word “retro” once, I think.

–This is Virginia Heffernan’s article, which didn’t get linked in the piece.  Here’s Warhol’s Polaroid book, too.  The Trubek quote at the top of the second page is from Jandek on Corwood, a well-meaning and very informative if not necessarily overly compelling documentary.

–One night I went a little nuts reading about Edwin Land, who messed around and eventually invented Polaroid.  It’s a cute story that’s sort of DIY and punk as fuck–dropping out of high school, moving to NYC, breaking into Columbia at night to use their facilities.

–If you want to read more academic-style stuff about nostalgia and culture, there’s Appadurai’s Modernity at Large (chapter titled “Consumption, Duration, and History”) and Boym’s absolutely wonderful The Future of Nostalgia (which is more about nationalism, but still a great book).  There are probably more, but these are the two I (re)read while writing this.

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.

First, this question: “who the hell else is going study your research once it’s published?“  It’s a good question, and one I’ve been asked a lot.  There are two answers.  First, I’m working on my dissertation now–just getting started on the research, actually–which is a very specific piece of writing.  It’s basically written for five people.  Not, as our friend suspects, the “the 5 music cretins with PhDs in the Sex Pistols” (<– huh), but instead myself and my four committee members.  I chose this committee–a chair and three others–because they’ve done the exact same thing that I’m hoping to do: researched and wrote a dissertation, published a bunch of stuff in academic journals, got a job at a research university, and so on.  I’m doing this research not because I anticipate it appealing to a huge audience, but because it’s the last requirement I have to fulfill in order to obtain my PhD.  It’s not a book (yet. Fingers crossed!), but more or less a big, fat (probably around 180-200 pages) research paper.  Doing this research, which should take a few years, also fulfills the function of teaching me how to do more general things too: formulate questions about particular phenomena, observe human behavior, ask people what they think about stuff, filter tons of data into something manageable and readable, write.

But don’t get me wrong here, like all grad students, I hope that my dissertation will be something that I can turn into a book, which would be published by an academic press (the second answer).  This would be incredible.  Can you imagine?  If it did happen, though, it would be several years into the future, maybe even a decade.  Still: how cool is that?  But to go back to the original question again: not many people will probably read it.  Thousands, maybe.  Academic books, if they’re good and widely applicable, will circulate around academia, perhaps a chapter or two will get assigned for students to begrudgingly read.  Maybe you’ll translate it into a guest spot on NPR, answering particular questions about something.  Maybe it’ll get you a better job at another university.  But to be clear here: academics aren’t operating under the assumption that their work is going to make them world famous, or even as specifically famous as, for people studying pop music, for instance, a Robert Christgau or Greil Marcus.  They’re first and foremost concerned with “contributing to a literature,” or adding to the work of other scholars who have done similar research, in the interest of helping everyone (ideally, sure) get a better grip on a problem that exists, and then contribute to further studies, etc.  It’s only later that Malcolm Gladwell makes millions off your ideas (The Zinging Point).  (His other point about grant funding drying up for guys like me is actually pretty spot-on.  Especially in the economic climate in which we find ourselves right now, the humanities are the first on the chopping block for most universities.  Which sucks.  We need people studying culture along with people inventing medicines.  That’s for another time.)

Second, this question: “What the hell are you going to be adding to society by furthering research in this field?“  It’s phrased in an unnecessarily douchey way, and it’s a loaded question obviously, but the basic idea is valid.  This is something my particular corner of academic education is constantly struggling with: legitimacy and larger relevance.  But at the same time, and more importantly, this is a fundamental question that anyone can ask themselves: is what I’m doing for a living serving society in any meaningful way?  I think there are very, very few people who are lucky enough, smart enough, and who can sacrifice enough of their time and energy, to add to society in a meaningful or lasting way (the ways I think he’s talking about).  Social workers and other civil servants, medical professionals and disease researchers, philanthropists and serious, long-term volunteers, investigative journalists.  I’m missing a ton, but you get my point.  The rest of us–me, this blogger, billions of other people–have to get by hoping that they’re doing well enough by others, feeding their families sufficiently, or just plain not doing harm.  Which is all noble in itself.  Now, I’m sure he didn’t mean his question this way.  But maybe he did, and if so, I think it’s an elitist standpoint to assume that the vast majority of people on the earth who won’t “add anything to society” aren’t therefore doing shit.

Which leads directly to my next point.  I’m not only doing research, but I’m teaching.  This is important, and another aspect of graduate school, and academic life for many, that people outside of it don’t know, or forget about.  You teach undergraduate classes, and that’s what pays your tuition and gives you a modest stipend (when you’re a professor at a research university, your teaching pays your salary, and subsidizes your research and writing).  I should save this for another post, but man: teaching is pretty fucking awesome, and I’m honored and privileged to be able to do it (And not all grad students get the luxury of A.I. appointments, so that’s something to be thankful for as well).  I’m not sure what this blogger would think about the general worth of undergraduate education–probably some one-liners about never being able to get a job with a Creative Writing degree, if this post is a predictor of his “Evening at the Improv” comedic approach–but I and my colleagues here take our teaching responsibilities incredibly seriously, and the students we teach frequently amaze me with their unique ways of reasoning and writing.  And I do feel like I’m making a tiny iota of difference in their educational careers by giving them the tools to critically assess the culture around them.  So there.  Yeah, you can tell that I get emotional thinking about teaching.  It can get weird sometimes, especially when talking to other teachers.  Before this gets sappy, though, on to the next minor quibble.

Our blogger friend mentioned “field” in his comments, and that’s worth of a brief explanation.  In academia, one might say, there are fields, and there are disciplines.  Disciplines often end in -ology, and they are separate from fields because they typically have methodologies (method + theory) attached to them.  Anthropology, ethnomusicology: these are the two disciplines my work comes closest to.  More ethno than anthro (same ancestors), but they share methodologies–data collection through fieldwork, which implies “ethnographic” research, in other words lengthy participant observation, interviews, fieldnotes, transcriptions, recordings, and so on.  In terms of “fields,” my research overlaps most with what’s often called “new media studies”–which has no particular methods but a common “thing”–as well as the hazy thing called Cultural Studies, as well as the loose conglomerates called fan studies, science and technology studies, and a few others.  So that’s what that is.

Third, I’d like to offer this extended quote, because it’s something I don’t run into that often.  He answers his own question, “who the hell else is going study your research once it’s published?”, with:

The god damned MUSIC INDUSTRY. Yep, I mean that art-crushing boogeyman so often referenced. With every piece of dense, plastic text, you could be gifting useful data to R&D departments of the very companies you think construct Lady Gaga out of legos. That’s either really funny or it murders my soul in this hard decade ahead. Or it could be complete bullshit. Hell, I’m just making it up.

To this I say, using the same typographic latitude he gives himself: I FUCKING HOPE THE MUSIC INDUSTRIES* WOULD PAY ATTENTION TO WHAT I HAVE TO SAY.  Again, I understand where he’s coming from here.  After all, he uses the Sex Pistols as an example, so he’s clearly working with a cartoonish “us against the world” idea of what academia is all about.  But in reality, it couldn’t be further from the truth. I really, really hope that my work is good and thorough enough that my “contribution to society,” or if I’m lucky, one of my contributions to society, is that people who work in the recording industry read my stuff and then maybe pay a bit more attention to how music fans engage with and re-circulate music, create new meanings for the things they love outside of officially-sanctioned commercial culture, and so forth.  And maybe realize that fans (of stuff on major labels, mainly) aren’t their enemies, they’re just waiting for these lumbering corporations to catch up with them, to start speaking their language.  And maybe other stuff!  I haven’t even been approved by the Institutional Review Board yet!  But not only do I not think that “R&D departments…construct Lady Gaga out of legos” (I don’t know what this means), but I think that the particular research I’m going to do could very well help them a lot, and this can’t be underlined heavily enough–I HOPE IT DOES.  Kansas professor and author Nancy Baym, among many others, is totally speaking truth to power, for example.

So there’s my response.  It’s long, probably too long.  Sorry for the no-doubt many grammatical errorages.  But it allowed me to get a lot of stuff off my chest.  Granted, stuff that this guy probably doesn’t care at all about.  But stuff nonetheless.  Doesn’t make for a good party conversation.  But if that blogger (or anyone else without academic access) wants recommendations (or even pdfs maybe) of good articles or academic books that address issues I mentioned above (or others that don’t do it well enough that you should say away from), hit me up!  There’s lots of great stuff out there.

*Nitpicky, but no one should use the phrase “music industry.”  There are many “industries” that work to sell music, and putting them all under one umbrella does a disservice to how they operate.  For instance, it’s the “recording industry” that suffers from downloading, not the touring, merchandising, or technology components of the music industries.  Lazy grammar like this, especially when it appears in newspaper stories, only serves to help the RIAA (the real evil, yo) manufacture fake numbers about the decline of this chimerical institution thanks to downloading culture  Here’s Williamson and Cloonan (pdf) with a much lengthier explanation.  Ahem.

1. The ever-creeping-upwards margin of what seems to constitute a “bad Pitchfork score”. Bloggers are twisting their knickers over a 7.6??? (Ed. note: This link is from me, not Tom)

2. The use of figures to “illuminate” the editorial process at Pitchfork as if it was some kind of mystical black box and only the use of statistics can crack the code. Seriously, go to ILM, find Scott’s username, search for posts by him – he is enormously open about Pitchfork’s decision-making. Of course you can still act conspiratorial about it and assume that ratings get changed all the time and the year end polls are rigged, but in that case stats won’t reveal the truth either.

The boring truth is that there are ‘inconsistencies’ between BNM and Pitchfork marks and end of year lists because they are the results of separate decision making processes:

Ratings are decided by the reviewer – conversations with the editors may or may not take place.

BNM is entirely an editorial mandate. My understanding – and that’s all it is, I’ve never reviewed or even pitched to review one – is that the idea of a BNM is that the site’s typical reader can buy this record secure in the knowledge they’re going to find it worthwhile, which explains why exceptional but inaccessible albums in (to P4K) fringe genres might get the mark but not the award.

Year end polls are, er, polls, which means they’re the collective decision of a bunch of people.

For DECADE end polls the “inconsistency” is absolutely a feature not a bug, since Pitchfork’s writing team includes several people who came to the attention of the zine precisely because they complained eloquently about things like 3.8s for Basement Jaxx.

About 40 years later, Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett were watching television in their flat, and had the same epiphany: “Everybody on TV’s a fucking zombie,” Albarn told Wired back in 2005.  “The Gorillaz cartoons seem more real to me than the actual people on TV.”  In four decades, then, “vast wasteland” becomes “fucking zombie,” but Albarn and Hewlett’s contribution to public culture has proven to be much more successful.  The two dove headfirst into Minow’s cultural landfill at a time when “public interest” had expanded to incorporate a global audience, and sold more than 10 million albums of post-apocalyptic, polycultural melancholy patched together from “western bad men,” “gangsters,” “violence” and of course, “cartoons.”

Which leads to “Stylo” (click for more).

Even better!  A few of my favorite Pitchfork writers wrote about some of my favorite LPs:

Amy Granzin on Beast Rest Forth Mouth: “If Bear in Heaven’s reps weren’t working New Moon ticket queues with sound vans and promo swag, they missed a brilliant opportunity. No one’s nailed adolescent melodrama this well since, I dunno, My Chemical Romance?” By the way, there’s this, if you’re into that sort of thing.  More importantly (and relatedly), there’s this awesome extract from the before thing.

Douglas Wolk on Bird-Brains: “The album was very clearly made with nothing more than the tools at hand– a ukulele, a couple of pieces of percussion, a yard-sale keyboard, a loop pedal, a crappy cheap mic, some free audio software, and Garbus’ larynx, which gets to express everything her machines can’t take care of. The whole thing is held together with duct tape, but that’s what makes it shiny.”

Mark Richardson nails The Visitor: “The Visitor sometimes feels more like a perplexing sonic game than a proper album. It keeps pulling you back in, partly because you want to take another crack at it.”

Rob Mitchum on jj n° 2 (the album is not a huge favorite, but this passage nails it, and “Ecstasy,” so well): “Never mind that the centerpiece of the record is “Ecstasy”, which over the most enjoyable piece of copyright infringement this year manages to simultaneously recreate the experience of being on MDMA and hanging out with someone who’s rolling and can’t stop telling you about it. But it’s the other songs, with woozy stray passages of Toto and Taylor Dayne, blurts of movie dialogue, and moments of fashionable Afropop and acoustic folk slipping in and out of focus, that make this album fail its urine test.”

We’ll end there.

And does Dame come to the shows?

Oh, absolutely. The last show that we did on Tuesday (with London Souls and the Cool Kids), after the show was over, he told everyone to stay and he MC’d like a freestyle-off, with Curren$y, Jay Electronica, Amanda Diva, Swizz Beatz, just everyone that was there.

Swizz Beatz was there?

Yeah, he was the DJ. There was a rotating set of people who were throwing beats on a laptop. Mos [Def] got there five minutes too late [to perform]. He was coming back from Letterman. But that’s what I like, the spirit. The spirit of what Dame has going on there is just getting people together and making things happen. After the first at Under 100 [with Javelin, Knyfe Hyts, and Sleigh Bells] was over Mos was like, ‘I want to jam with Javelin.’ And Damon was like, ‘Let’s do it right now.’ 15 minutes later everyone’s in the basement again at three in the morning. They set up and Knyfe Hyts asked me if they could jam with Javelin and I was like, ‘Of course, let me just run up to Javelin.’ And Javelin was like, ‘Of course.’ And now we have two of my favorite bands jamming, and then Mos did like twenty verses over it. It was very special. I’m very happy that we got photos and video of it because there were about 10 people there at the time. That was a very promising first show. If any of the shows are half as good as that was and how special that was to me I’m very happy to continue working and doing things at Under 100.”

Finch and Dash both call it a “DIY” space, which is an interesting way to leverage that loaded term–I mean, it’s not exactly like they’re struggling for money or exposure.  Regardless, it’s hard not to be excited about the possibilities inherent in this sort of collaborative locale–merging into one physical space Pitchfork’s and the Web’s penchants for non-stop newness, hipness and spreadabilityness with Dash’s money and rap-world connections–no matter how much people want to hate on Brooklyn, Pitchfork, or whatever.  Sure, there’s a distinct possibility for this to end up being another incestuous hipster group-grope party-haven, but music fans should hope not.  Blakroc was okay I guess, but I’d hope Sleigh Bells are closer to being what gets fucked with:

“IU law student Eric Harvey, writing an album review at Pitchfork, had this to say about Indianapolis:

‘It aired back in 2007, but I still vividly remember the end of VH1’s documentary “NY77: The Coolest Year in Hell”, when the talking heads were mulling over what had become of the formerly dangerous and tawdry Times Square, placed in contrast to that historically accursed year. “They turned it into Indianapolis,” Jimmy Breslin succinctly said. And more or less, here you go: Aside from David Letterman and the Colts, Indy gets a bad rap, when it gets a rap at all….My uncle used to jokingly tell out-of-towners he was from “India-no-place,” as a way of acknowledging the sort of cultural invisibility that guys like Breslin attribute to Indy.’

I’m not surprised Harvey remembered that quote from two years ago. Hoosiers are a modest, self-effacing people by nature, but quick to take offense at and remember slights. Clearly, the national reputation of Indianapolis – apart from the Colts and Letterman – is either non-existent or negative. That’s a fact. But while I think it is always good to get your message out in a positive way, you can’t let people in the likes of New York or Chicago get under your skin. Those cities define their own coolness in part by how un-cool they like to think of everyone else. So it is impossible to ever measure up. Rather than plan that sucker’s game, a better course is to put that famous ornery, contrarian Hoosier nature to work and chart a path to your own success. You won’t please everybody, but if you’ve got a message that appeals to some, you’ll find your own niche and your own place.”

“See, I have this hunch. I reckon that if you were to draw up a top 2,000 albums of every pop decade and compare them, the noughties would win: it would beat the 1990s decisively, the 1980s handsomely, and it would thrash the 1970s and 1960s. But I also reckon that if you were to compare the top 200 albums, it’d be the other way around: the 60s would narrowly beat the 70s, the 70s would slightly less narrowly beat the 80s, the 80s would decisively beat the 90s, and the 90s would leave the noughties trailing in the dust. Yeah, it’s just a hunch – but it has the ring of truth. Because I think that the higher reaches of a chart of this kind demand something more than mere musical excellence: there has to be an X factor, the hard-to-define quality that you could call “importance” or ‘greatness’.”

He uses Pitchfork’s early-Noughties (I feel weird and British using that word) slant to its Best of the ’00s list (Person Pitch being the only post-2005 inclusion) as the first bit of evidence.  Believe me, Pitchfork editors and staffers had an inkling that something like this would happen.

The most interesting part of this article is its conclusion–which, thankfully (and perhaps obviously, given its author) avoids the “they don’t make ‘em like they used to” argument.  Reynolds’ contention is that, as the numbers of (often good) releases goes up, the critics themselves are spread thinner, and consensus inevitably declines, especially in comparison to earlier decades.  I actually had a bit somewhat similar to this in my own 00’s accompanying essay–a similar conclusion, but having more to do with the role of technologies and the incursion of non-critic-critics into this situation–but cut it, for various reasons.