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OP-ED
Music Minus Everyone
by Tildy Bayar & Tom Djll
January 2005
Music escapes from musicians.—Jacques Attali, Noise, 1977
Does John Coltrane have any records out?—Ed Sullivan (on-air, 1970)
You find the funniest things online. Last spring, a music reviewer for an online
new-music site mercilessly skewered a bunch of DIY-improv artists who release
many, many CDs, between which it’s often difficult to distinguish, dubbing
said artists “the unavoidables”. Reviewers, opined our anonymous
one, roll their eyes on receiving yet another release from this gang of usual
suspects; yet through a reasonably intuitive yet ultimately specious equation,
this sheer output volume creates a necessity for critical attention. In short,
this guy was cranky at being forced to take these artists seriously simply because
so many of their releases had stacked up on his desk.
It’s all about commodity value; further, it’s about locating that
value outside the properties of the artwork itself. Tildy’s friend Ben
says: Contemporary music seems to be about anything and everything but the actual
music being played. Ya gotta getta gimmick: cf. Vienna Vegetable Orchestra, Music
After 9/11, Toychestra—the list goes on. But in order to put these ideas/texts
out, actual music is still needed, some sounds/notes/content from which to hang
that pet idea, a frame to display it to advantage, or perhaps a comfortably non-threatening
background to soothe and reassure audiences challenged by the explicit topic.
This is not limited to contemporary music, however. If we look hard at the music
world, the venerable history of this last proposition should be clearly visible:
Extra-content aspects such as school, scene, and reputation were always important
components of a work’s value. This definition of “value” is
a social/financial one with its own gravity and momentum, quite distinct from
what we might refer to, for contrast’s sake, as “interest value”—in
other words, that value constituted in whatever hooks us, intrigues us, draws
us into a piece of music as individuals, one listener at a time.
Value is a shifting terrain, and music has occupied a fractured landscape of
functional valuations over the course of cultural evolution. Without going deeply
into a discussion of the originary myth of originality in Western Art, let us
for the purposes of this argument create a starting-point for valuation—an
imaginary “ground zero” in cultural evolution where the work of art
was a unique object which carried within it a certain amount of content. Here,
the more (or deeper-layered) the content, the “better” the art. The
artists who generated more of these things have been deemed, by the canon-makers
of the last 150 years, the Masters, and their works, “masterpieces”.
Thus, our originating equation: More significant unique objects signifies “better
artist”.
Walter Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction traces
the migration of culturally assigned value away from the unique object (the “masterpiece”)
and towards that which celebrates and extends the power of mass production itself.
Once mass-market manufacturing and distribution models became economic norms
and generators of unheard-of wealth and power (in his landmark essay, Noise,
Jacques Attali situates this tipping point at the beginning of the post-WW2 era),
a re-mapping took place, wherein value was situated in the sheer number of reproductions
pressed. In music no more fitting example could be given than the Gold Record
phenomenon. In 1942, the first Gold Record was minted in recognition of the Glenn
Miller band’s recording of “Chattanooga Choo Choo” (which was
only the second million-selling record). Ironically, that particular Gold Record
wasn’t very valuable; what it represented had far greater currency. Who
knows where that Gold Record ended up? What is remembered is “Glenn Miller,
million-selling bandleader, Gold Record-winner”. Today, a $0.001 “Gold
Record” sticker on one of millions of identical CDs by a top-selling artist
confers this value upon it. The original pressing of the CD is filed away somewhere
and never seen; indeed, it’s not even valuable to the manufacturing process
as an “original mold” because it, too, can be “losslessly” replaced.
Gold Records have given way to Platinum and Double, hold the presses, Triple
Platinum—the industry seems to have reached a ceiling on superlative-signifying
metaphors. (But that may be simply another sign of an industry undergoing a life-crisis.)
Thus, the marketplace equation: More reproductions signifies “better artist”.
Not only was the artist better in the eyes of the record biz suits, they used
the idea of the Gold Record to convince the buying public that the Gold-Record
artist was better. As Attali points out, the industry became more about production
of demand than production of supply; the Gold Record was but one pioneering tool
for creating a “demand-side” economy. Your Hit Parade,American
Bandstand, and, later on, Soul Train, were others. During that bygone
era, the hype was based on the proposition “You’ll want to get it
because all your friends have it.” Today market-speak is poured, unmediated,
right into the advertising: “You want it because it’s the biggest
seller this week.” Raw number-worship is all that’s needed to get
the buying masses excited; cf. bestseller lists, Amazon.com rankings, ticket
sale reports, etc. It’s as if the marketers want us, the consumers, to
become our own hype-spinning machines.
The advent of digital reproduction hasn’t taken us beyond the scope of
Benjamin’s thesis. True, mechanical means have been micro-sized; tools
have gotten smaller, more precise and more nimble. Storage has become commoditized
and, via the internet, instantly accessible and broadcast-ready. And a hoped-for “democratization” of
the means of production via easier access to these tools has generated an ocean
of mediocrity. What we see today in the age of DIY is a perversion of the marketplace
equation. Go back to our opening scenario and examine the situation of the bootstrapping
artist-entrepreneur who founds a small label and racks up release after release,
knowing fully that a significant percentage of his/her inventory will never sell.
A big chunk will always be given away or traded: These are not marketplace currency,
but possess exchange value in a (hoped-for) expanding peer group. CDs become
circular business cards, multimedia résumés—notches on your
gun. Growing sales is not the point here. The point is to show your peer group
that you are a serious artist who has made a significant investment in your career.
The DIY equation: More releases signifies “better artist”.
This kind of thinking is actually being pushed at some levels of academia. We
hear of one well-known performer-turned-professor who informed his classes, “You
have to have 20 releases at least, to be taken seriously.” This professor,
according to one student, half-jokingly confessed to running an informal race
with Steve Lacy to propagate his vinyl seed across the Earth. But, added the
student, “At least those guys are (were) master musicians.” One might
add that those guys were masters before they had 20, 30, 40 notches on
their guns.
The greater the number of releases, the more serious the artist—so the
thinking goes. To a lesser extent, the scope and variety of projects represented
in the catalogue plays a role, too. Here, value is again remapped to a new territory
which barely refers to the content or meaning inherent in any tangible object,
separated yet another degree from any coherent intellectual/artistic realization.
From a consumer viewpoint (i.e., record-collector geeks in remission), we’re
less interested in buying and listening to “alternative music” CDs
because now there are so damn many of them. The shopping-as-gold-seeking experience
has been infected with a kind of deflation. Instead of having to put in real
work and time to excavate the exotic vinyl-era self-issue like Milford Graves’ BABI (which,
not incidentally, demanded much work and money for the artist to produce), one
can go to Metamkine or Forced Exposure (a revealing name!) any old time and be
confronted with a virtual wall of DIY/microlabel releases just from the last
month. In our eyes, each individual release loses potential value just because
of all the others up there, competing for our attention. How in the world does
one choose a representative Steve Lacy recording, anyway? Are they all equally
good? What if we don’t want to trace his artistic development, we just
want some finger-snapping soprano saxophone? (Enter another fellow-traveler in
this caravan of devolving meaning: The discographer, the one who documents
prolificity and locates value in the list.) To put it in Cro-Magnon terms,
the buying experience has devolved from one of hunt-it-down-and-kill-it, to cast-your-net-take-one-at-random-and-throw-the-rest-away.
Radu Malfatti had a neat formula for this conundrum: “Buy or borrow one,
then you know about the rest.”
So, o’er these shifting seas, we’ve returned to that empty landscape
of value-meaning. With our telescopes pointed bass-ackwards, we see: More choices
generates less engagement. More surface = less depth. Choice has an economy
all its own, demonstrated in behavioral terms in Barry Schwartz’ The
Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less (Amazon.com ranking #2476). Schwartz
cites studies that show, for instance, that shoppers faced with a few choices
of similar items will likely buy the one they like best. But when faced with
dozens of choices, the numbers show shoppers are more likely to buy nothing.
Schwartz goes further to suggest that our psyches are actually damaged by the
flood of meaningless choices we face every day. (These alarm bells were first
rung by Alvin Toffler, in his classic Future Shock of 1970, Amazon.com
ranking #22547) This is surely part of the problem “the unavoidables” and
their ilk think they’ve got licked: The bigger my section in the bins,
the more likely it’ll be noticed.
To compound the re-location of value in music, there’s boosterism—appealing
to that mythical “wider audience” which everyone seems to be convinced
exists out there somewhere, although it’s never been glimpsed anywhere
improvisers hang out. While energies and attention are focused either on advertising
strategies or community building, the music quietly atrophies. It’s easy
to see why: Any critical view (especially from within) will be counterproductive—and
actively negative—if what you’re after is enticing sheer numbers
of warm bodies into your musical orbit; for this, your only hope is the PR blitz
and its attendant relentless positivity. In PR terms—“the music”, “this
music we make”, “the scene”—reduce a diverse and compellingly
motley collection of activities and personalities to a monodimensional landscape,
a univocal entity defined by its most vocal members, i.e. those with the highest
volume of output. The demand being generated here emanates from a hierarchical
economy of ideas with all the subtlety, depth, and “community spirit” of
a street gang.
To an extent this may simply reflect the problem that media representations in
general are reductive, and with “scenes” being perceived as more
coherent and integrated than they ever actually are—but the fact that “insiders” have
internalized these ways of seeing/hearing their own music is somewhat disturbing.
(We cite last year’s long threads on ba-newmus and Bagatellen concerning
definition of and membership in “lowercase” or “eai” or
whatever scenes or scenelets are in contention.)
Unfortunately (but perhaps relevantly), the PR doesn’t seem to work. (As
we write, three favorite Oakland/Berkeley venues friendly to adventurous music
are closing their doors, or seriously rethinking their friendship; in Seattle,
the steadfast folks at Polestar have closed up shop.) Meanwhile the clamoring
and pleading for audience attention, and the whining and griping and raging about
how no one listens, continue as a sop to wounded egos unwilling to take definite
steps toward either implied solution: Going pop enough to attract a wide and
sustainable listener base; or, being aesthetically committed enough to forge
an identity based on a more marginal/critical position.
Wait, wait, the artists protest: How are we supposed to get our music out to
listeners if we don’t make CDs? That seems a fair question. As a reaction
to the attention-inflation conundrum pointed out before, disengagement seems
a sure path to obscurity. (Although “obscurity” could constitute
the “more marginal/critical position” mentioned above.) Non-participation
as an artistic statement! What a shame more would-be artists don’t practice
it. But adding another dim voice to the clamor hardly seems a more robust course
of action.
Tildy Bayar thinks and writes about music as a doctoral student in UCSD's Critical
Studies and Experimental Practices program.
Tom Djll has one self-produced CD release, Mutootator (1993; no Amazon.com
ranking). Since then he has produced a handful of CD-Rs, but otherwise has been
happy to let his friends produce their own CDs with him as a guest. He hopes
that they do not read this article and show up at his doorstep one dark night.
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