CD Fetishism: Coda

At last, I arrive at the point where I can close my provisional thoughts on CD submission regimes, rituals of music submission to fields if music circulation, such as “college radio”, and emerging fields of online radio. The purpose of this discussion has not been to mark the sides of good and evil and so reproduce some nargle of a dispute over and over and over and over again until the Orwellian boot has hit us in the face just one too many times. It has been to very basically sketch some thoughts on college radio as a politically charged and emancipatoraly potential domain of musical circulation and production. It has also been to place a focus on practices which block flows, and so obstruct potential musicological emancipations and moves. And, in doing this it has not been to render the makers and users of these elaborate music machines powerless in relation to the organizational terms of “the system”, but to emphazise the extent to which people are powerful in relation to it.

In the end, college radio will do what it will, as will I and others. It will either remain relevant as a system of circulating “new music” or it will not–although in any case it may retain the myth or the history of the myth. In the end, I learn as a system I do not “need” it just as it does not, in a strict sense “need” me. If ecocentric models punish my musical text for the mere contingency of its body–its format, there are communities to be had, made, invented, built, contested which work without blockages and rooms with bars and locks, and so comes Deconomics Records to haunt the mossy beds of corporate trust. For our purposes, 8 rings of power and 1,000 years is more than enough.