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.

(via)

The calls for both conferences are after the jump.

Time Keeps on Slipping:  Popular Music Histories || 2011 IASPM-US conference || Mar. 9-13, 2011 || Cincinnati, OH

We invite proposals for individual papers or panels of three or four presenters.  Alternate presentation formats, such as lecture/performances and roundtable panels, will also be considered. We welcome proposals concerning all facets of popular music in the U.S. and abroad, but especially encourage submissions that address the following themes:

Canonical Histories:  What aspects of the popular music past have assumed greatest authority, and why?  What sort of power do canons (of music, of scholarship, of criticism) exert over the writing of popular music history?

Alternative Histories:  What parts of popular music’s past have gone unrecognized?  How can we re-imagine popular music history through the lenses of:
- Race and ethnicity?
- Gender and sexuality?
- Nationality and colonialism?
- Cultural hierarchy (high, low, middlebrow)?
- Bodily ability and disability?
Conversely, how can the study of popular music in historical perspective help to shed new light on these critical subjects?

Archival Approaches:  What sources can we use to uncover popular music’s many pasts, and where can we find them?  How are musical archives changing in the digital age?

Historical Methods:  What counts as history, and what role does history play, in the various disciplines and sub-disciplines that comprise the field of popular music studies?

Local Histories:  How can we decipher popular music’s connection to specific places at specific points in time?  How can we use the location
of this year’s conference–Cincinnati, Ohio–as a starting point for reflection on aspects of popular music history?

The deadline for submissions is October 1, 2010.  Proposals should be submitted electronically to Steve Waksman, chair of the program committee, at iaspmus2011@gmail.com.  Individual presenters should submit a paper title, 250-word abstract, and author information including full name, institutional affiliation, email address and a one-page c.v.  Please send abstract and c.v. as separate MSWord attachments.  Panel proposals should also include a panel title and abstract for the whole session.

All presenters at the conference are required to be current members of IASPM-US.  For membership information, go to www.iaspm-us.net.

——

Cash Rules Everything Around Me: Music and Money || 2011 EMP Pop Conference at UCLA || Feb 24 – 27, 2011 || Los Angeles, California

Jointly sponsored by Experience Music Project and the UCLA Department of Musicology

“The best things in life are free, but you can give them to the birds and bees, I need money!” Motown founder Berry Gordy co-wrote it, Barrett Strong sang it, and John Lennon’s vocal in the Beatles cover offered a fervent affirmation. By the time Wu-Tang Clan recorded “C.R.E.A.M.,” however, chasing bucks in pop found kinship more with high stakes gundowns and teens behind bars.  For this year’s Pop Conference, the tenth annual meeting and first outside of Seattle, we invite presentations on a matter Los Angeles knows well:  the relationship between song and paycheck–or, to invoke the O’Jays hit “For the Love of Money,” bass line and bottom line.

Topics can cover any era or style of music and may include, but are not limited to:

Selling out:  self-objectification and compromise, but also selling out as breaking out– codebreaking and innovation

The music industry, past, present, and (?) future, from records to radio and retail; impresarios in idolatry; the current slump and pop through boom and bust, affluence and scarcity

Money, bling, “Life in the Fast Lane,” etc. as a topic in song and discourse: how different genres view commercialism differently; charity and social consciousness as rival impulses

Class as operating force; profitable music and blurred hierarchy, the working class and “Don’t Get Above Your Raisin’”– how class-bound assumptions affect musical valuation

Los Angeles  in the pop imaginary, a place that has never pretended music is a solely artistic enterprise

“Capital (It Fails Us Now)”: payola blues, the pervasive sense of the business as (to quote Hunter S. Thompson) a “long shallow money trench” and distillation of capitalism’s inequities

Globalization and monetization: pop as international product, differing national and regional approaches to music merchandising

Patronage: sponsorships, institutions as  support structures for pop, music in advertising

Financing musical production: the aesthetics of hi-fi — as David & David once sang, “all that money makes such a succulent sound”

The EMP Pop Conference, launched in 2002, joins academics, critics, performers, and dedicated fans in a rare common discussion. The conference is jointly sponsored in 2011 by the Department of Musicology at the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music and by the Experience Music Project/Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame. This year’s program committee members are: Jasen Emmons (EMP/SFM), Robert Fink (UCLA), Gaye Theresa Johnson (UCSB), writer Maura Johnston, Josh Kun (USC), Katherine Meizel (Oberlin), filmmaker Jim Mendiola, Ann Powers (Los Angeles Times), writer-musician Tim Quirk, Jeffrey Rabhan (NYU), and biographer David Ritz.

Please send proposals of 250 words, with 50 word bio, to organizer Eric Weisbard (University of Alabama). Deadline for proposals is Friday, October 15.  Panel proposals, specifying either 90 minutes or 120, should include both overview language and individual proposals/bios, or overview and bios only for roundtable discussions. We welcome unorthodox proposals and proposals aimed explicitly at a general interest audience. Registration is free for presenters and the public.  For more information, go to http://www.empsfm.org/education/

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.

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.

…(in 1905) the humor magazine Puck satirized this rapid turnover in a series of ‘diary entries,’ written from the point of view of a popular song, recounting its creation, its plugging, its meteoric rise, and its precipitous descent into neglect–all in the span of five weeks.

David Suisman, “Selling Sounds: The Commercial Revolution in American Music” (previously)

CNN’s Rick Sanchez, desperately trying to make some we were there first drama out of a sadly necessary BP CEO PR appearance. Or: trying to wring tabloid revenue out of a yet-undefined, heavily-scripted corporate necessity.  Svanberg, if it’s not obvious from watching this staged newspool footage, is saying “get him out of there” to that cameraman because he instinctively wants to appear like he’s in control of something right now. He’s not yelling at some random photog who might reveal this mess to the world–Svanberg is the reason the cameraman is there in the first place.  It’s not much more than a strong-willed actor telling his DP what to do.  Or, as it were, “news.”

Sanchez, sad as he is, and The Huffington Post, whose “BP Is ‘Big And Important’: BP Chairman Strikes Out At Critics, CEO Scolds Photographer At Oil Spill Site” are acting out of economic (not moral) self-interest.  They didn’t cause the catastrophe, but they don’t seem to have any particular interest in it ending, either.  If they work just as hard as Svanberg is to frame it for their own audiences, they’ll make bank the longer it draws out.  People scooping sludge, about people scooping sludge.

There’s this piece on Junkyard Dog, for example.  It was hard for me to decide which snippet to pull from it, it’s that good.  Elsewhere in the piece, for example, there’s a bit on JYD’s early incarnation as a character called “Stagger Lee” during which the author cites Mystery Train. Throughout, there are several moments at which JYD allowed his race to be exploited for the entertainment of millions that astonishes me–seriously, some Amos & Andy level stuff.  The ending is incredibly sad, somewhat poignant, certainly sudden.  The part I selected comes in the middle, and describes the WWF’s successful strategy solely from the perspective of racial and ethnic identity.  Read the whole thing, though–this doesn’t do it justice:

In 1984 JYD was hired away by the WWF, which was then making itself into the first national wrestling promotion and was poaching the top stars from around the country to build its stable and its audience. They were also rather blatantly assembling a roster of multi-ethnic and multinational characters that traded on stereotypes to differentiate each wrestler in the broadest strokes possible. JYD was, in no uncertain terms, the Black Guy — just as Tito Santana was the Mexican Guy, Mr. Fuji was the (ambiguously) Asian Guy, the Iron Sheik was the Middle Eastern Guy, Nikolai Volkoff was the Russian Guy, Jimmy Snuka was the Pacific Island Guy, Andre the Giant and “Big” John Studd were the Big Guys (though Andre was demonstrably French), and Wendy Richter and the Fabulous Moolah were the women. Rowdy Roddy Piper and Hulk Hogan were, as their names suggest, originally cast as the Scottish and Irish Guys, respectively, though their celebrity grew (particularly in Hogan’s case) to demolish those parameters.

…while the laws of supply and demand governed everything on earth, the easy money was in demand—manufacturing it, manipulating it, sending it forth to multiply, etc. As a rule of thumb (and with some notable exceptions), the profit margins you could achieve selling a good or service were directly correlated to the total idiocy and/or moral bankruptcy of the demand you drummed up for it.

This was easier to grasp if you were in the business of peddling heroin, Internet stocks, or celebrity gossip; journalists, on the other hand, were at a conspicuous disadvantage when it came to understanding their role in this equation. In the past, newspapers had made respectable margins selling a non-inane product largely because people had little choice but to herald their sublets and white sales alongside the journalists’ tales of human suffering/corporate corruption/government ineptitude. The times were prosperous enough that much of the print media even chose to abstain from taking a share of the demand-creation campaigns of liquor and tobacco brands in the seventies and eighties. Indeed, journalism, it went without saying, was about delivering important information about the world—information people (and democracy!) needed, whether they knew it or not. That journalism’s ability to deliver that information—to fill that need—ultimately depended, to an unsettling degree, on the ability to create artificial demand for a lot of stuff that people didn’t actually need—luxury condos, ergonomically correct airplane seats, the latest celebrity-endorsed scent—was an afterthought at best, at least in the newsroom.

Journalists, by and large, had so little appreciation for their dependence on the larger engine of artificial demand that they were mostly blindsided when the Internet happened and they lost the benefits of that engine. A lot of them seemed to take it personally.