But beyond the solipsisms ever to be had in the more dimly lit and lonely of the rooms of academia, my ambitions with this question on the context of a running BLOG is personal–but by “personal” I do not intend it the more dimly lit way. Rather, how and why is it that different musician personalities compose their selves as they do? When producing not only music, but their selves as composers or producers of music in relation to professions, “personal lives”, rerelationships with signs, fans, audiences…how are they made and making-up their role within the many layerd stratifications of the field of cultural production? And from where in the hell come all these new genres, figures, and types, in which broader cultural or historical motions of force do they make a habitat of musician discipleship and forms do all these many habitats take? How did the continent of music become so genorously huge, and what kinds of people endeavor to live there?

This can involve many more focused questions. How did the figure called Rihanna become Rihanna, why do some people worship at this figure while others go and worship other figures, or worship Rihanna in a pardoic, ironic way? Or, maybe better, since I cannot at the moment claim to speak of the process of this woman’s discipline into a kind of performing artist, I can speak of mine. And even better, I can try to make a kind of story of mine in such a way that it encourages others to share their stories of becoming forms of music discipleship. Moreover, I can actually take the time to make of this a case study of the making-up of musical authority–the disciplines of music–musician discipleship.

Base (Why did I write “Base” here and then forget about both it and why?”)

So this is my proposal. And I will leave it as a proposal to begin because of three reasons mainly. First of all, and least of which, the time commitment I can reasonably devote to this more interesting, and hopefully in the long-run more participatory line, is no more than 3-5 paragraphs a week. Second, blog posts ought not be much longer than that anyway most of the time. Text fatigue? But mainly, as it stands with these four paragraphs, it opens a space of time for the off-chance others might like to begin this story-sharing conversation of music and the constitution of selves, economies, and cultures of bodies political and their signs. I myself will be back by July after my honeymoon to begin to share mine. When you do music what do you do? Why?

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.

When talking about CDs humbly and in closing, I will have to say I am not ashamed of having to shit to survive, and I will not be a dick to people who shit in ways I personally find suboptimal. Somehow having helped ‘carve’ this location-work in digital spaces of emmancipatory and musical-textual discourse I am now too responsible for s(h)itting through it as it were. I listed these much earlier in the introductory CD fetish post as roughly: technofetish, finality, mythological, audiophiliac, and efficiency waste. I discussed technofetishism and the mythos of CD as music’s final product in previous posts. And I think I can shit a line to and through all the rest of the types, modalities, justifications, or whatever they are to be called for practices of CD fetishism in the submissions policies of college radio.

‘Most of us become at least part-time functionalists when we go into the toilet’

The above typology is not just an abstract conceptualization, but also really how I selected and prioritized DR’s Good ep submissions to publishing organs and agents in relation to taking our own professed bullshit and making it as much as possible part of our practically embodied (dis)belieifs–what we somehow don’t say and say with what we do and don’t do in our relations with the field of musical production (relations we all to plainly fuck and love). I reserve the right as all people do to think and speak about the shit I do and don’t like for myself in relation to others and why. But I always promise to be “responsible” for having trodden a hopefully deterritorializing trajectory of confession, practice, and emmancipation theologies in this shit-talk, for a CD, like a shit-talk, is a power. As is a song and its singers and a stage. I like stages, singers, songs, shit-talk, and yes sometimes CDs.

I made eight cdr, and called them rings of power, and mailed those embodied audio texts to publishing bodies, a select handful of radio satations/programs and digital reviews. Perhaps they will sink to the bottom of a long lost body of water to someday be scooped up accidentally by a well intentioned creature of a man. Perhaps they will freeze like a volcano freezes our imaginations and the landfills of the people of Pompeii. Produce a CD if you will. I have, though I doubt I will again for the need for it as a publishing vehicle elludes my sense and sensibility… As one map to a possible future read this and the work of many other people who talk about free music. While I have not read an problematized all these words, there is an impulse with which I feel my projectile shit can find a hand to throw–”The Free Music Philosophy“, which itself links to the kernel of “Free Software” discourse that is, of course, the GNU/Linux project whose technology both excites me as it escapes my skills to emply/deploy.

Proprietary

There were a great many number of fine looking digital outlets and analog radio broadcasting units which sadly accepted CD only submissions on the basis of proprietary concerns. This is too bad, because it works in the direction of barriers between a lot of good music and a lot of good people. Sometimes this was presented in terms of the ‘final product’ notion discussed elsewhere. Somehow the song simply HAS to be the finally owned and located thing possessed by the brain and hand of the musician genius even from the imaginary depths of their vomit, wreckage, sublimity, brainblood and ashes of their grave. And to me that sucks, because I want people to take not only my music but all kinds of music and fuck it up. And so, thankfully, there are people whose dispositions toward all this seem to jive with my own, and so here we are, and there they are in other forms and times as I stumble upon them in the multi-dimensionalities of space, myth, text, and time.

Mythological

The previously discussed hiccup over the final product is a mythical fetish no doubt. And it links to a myth entertaining the CD as a mark of legitimacy–the only true and publishable form of official musicianship–(although it’s not that cut and dry as I make it sound here, and especially not when considering the broader scope of CD production and music publication in other formats et al… No, this is a very particular myth operating in this instance with online and analog independent and college radio, and, for that matter, reviews. Now, of course and awesomely it is not even ‘within’ the station that things are this cut and dry–especially when one gets to those delightful stations where the DJs can sign-up take a slot and play mainly whatever the fuck they want and so connect in that way to other awesome people. In fact, it was in this manner Paul first obtained a copy of a Godspeed You Black Emporer–by getting his friend to broadcast its entirety on a shift.

Demos, bootlegs, “apocrypha”, novelty, canonical “underground” and other bits of good are a conductive kind of energy here. That’s also an embodied myth of college radio–these notions of conductivity in freedom and work, I’ll even wager to say a somewhat nostalgic (which does not a priori imply conservative) disposition toward work, employment, professionalism, and craft. And so, the point for me is not so much that a given mythology here is “wrong”, but that somehow the myths seem to be compellingly entangled, co-dependent, generative, and utterly at odds.

Audiophiliac and Efficiency Waste

In the case of the audiophiliac argument the CD is said to be needed in order to maintain production and broadcast of the highest standards in audio quality. The efficiency waste argument says or hints at, almost invariably, the image of the reality of the ‘all too many snailmail submissions with their letters, one-sheets, and enclosed junk cluttering our office as it is; so we don’t have time to waste on emails and links to the musical texts of mere wanton and delusional amateurs’ (who, I agree don’t need to be on the radio just because they aspire to it). Okay.

One specific station explained their Audiophilic CD fetishim this way–they have to transfer the contents of the CD into their radio station’s digital music management system, and so they only want to digitalize music of the highest audio fidelity possible, which they say is a CD. But, if I have digitalized this already, for you, and at a high bit-rate (or the fidelity I feel appropriate to the integrity of the product of my musical craft) what can be easier than downloading a cut almost directly into the system? I don’t want to make a big fucking deal about this. It just kind of boggles me a bit.

A similarly really lame argument is the office clutter argument. I mean, where does all that fucking shit you pile on your desk and throw into the trash come from? Methinks it may be in part the rules at the gate.

Conclusion

Well, I lied I guess. I’ll cut that shit next time.

There is a step-change in the narrative as the series moves from season 4 into season 5, as Rory begins the long-trajectory of temptation and realization of her pedigree–bejewlled with diamonds and crowned with a tiara by her grandmother for presentation at a gathering of sexually available ivy league sons of wealthy alumni. It is a meat market and she does eventually chooseone of those men, Logan, Rory’s final boy and eventually big breakup at the end of the series.

Whereas in the episode before, Rory’s mother left with her self-employed, working class partner in his truck. Dean, Rory’s not self-employed working class partner drives away alone in his truck, and so leaves the show for good as Logan steps up to the distraught Rory and invites her to get stinking drunk with his “secret society” — ‘the Life and Death Brigade’. Whereas Dean represents a lunch of trashed food in a crowded supply closet and a ‘one lifetime experience’, Logan somehow represents a liminal moment of freedom, abel to afford extravagant weekends with eccentric rich friends engaged in well dressed (tuxedos, ball gowns) stunts and wordgames, leaping from high scaffodling with umbrellas, maintaining a normal pace of conversation without using a word that is spelled with an ‘E’.

The moment Dean drives away from the Rory who can no longer tell him he “belongs here” in the future narrative of her life (re: the show) is also I think the moment where the class discourse shows in the Rory narrative its overfull face. Logan does not replace Dean. Logan is Dean renewed, the ‘boy character as he should have been’ in the manner of Saruman vis-a-vis Gandalf versus simply Gandalf the White. With Logan as Dean, Rory’s narrative can wrest itself free from the concerns of a threat of entry in Rory’s biography into ‘working class’ life, dispositions, expectations, etc. Freed momentarily from this threat the narrative can continue moving to finish Rory’s teleological performance as a particular technologized, gendered, and professionalized dispostion and trajectory of upper middle class work, life, and culture, and so also finish the performance of redeeming her mother’s past deviances to the upper class teleologies of her time.

Logan realizes his professional future involves keeping “idea notebooks”, Rory realizes her professional future is contingent on social netowrking opportunities with the “right people”. And by advancing these kinds of cultural and social capitals our [Dean]Logan-Rory unit is both broken at the end of the show, but united in their common employments in relation to “Web 2.0″…Rory covering the Obama campaign for a somewhat obscure but respectable online paper, and Logan as a business idea developer for online technologies, tools, games, etc.

I think this intersection of their professional aspirations with the field and technology of IT points to, or tries to play on the emmancipatory imagination which has come to surround its cultures, norms, rules, and so…going even back to the cybernetic discourses. Here, it becomes a means for Rory and Logan to claim their professional trajectory while, within the class distinctions set up by the show, both be appearing to kind of renounce their upper class pedigree in exchange for this ‘new frontier’ of professional change–where digital lightsabres for MMORPG can make big bucks and where an Obama kind of biography is a dominating force in the ritual myth work for an “American politics of change”. Of all the candidates to cover, coverage of his as a first assignment is a the sure mark of new, postmodern liberalism, embodied here in the simulacra of a particular kind of young professional female who ‘gets along’ with anybody–a kind of Christianne Ammanpour, Madaleine Albright, Heidi, Norman Mailer, and Donna Reed, all rolled into one.

So, please, listen with me to the lapping, quiescent bliss of Marnie Stern finger-taps layered behind the sputtering, polycoherent resonances of lyrical wunderkind Lil’ Mama. To wit:

I said my lip gloss is cool, my lip gloss be poppin’
I’m standing at my locker, and all the boys keep stoppin’
What you know ’bout me?
What ‘cha
What ‘choo know ’bout me?

No, it really is totally rad. Go get it.

I prefer for these occasions of making and the politics of making to maintain an affinity with the radical feminists. Making it is not so different from reading it, writing it, meaning it; our differential identities are organic, technological, textual, mythic—cyborgs. [1]

When it comes to the consequences of loving musical life, having affinities for kinds of it, it is not to say we should not love our affinities, but love also the distinctions which mark where our affinities lie. And love can be expressed in so many ways, including but not limited to punches, lies, and hugs. All of us who hear or feel the vibrations of music, or “see” its presence in dances, videos (sometimes muted), radios…one smells music too sometimes. So the conditions of love; the terrains of synesthasia.

And so, at last, let me mark at least one page of Marx it is worthy to mark, a fine indexed concept—fetishism—in some musty dusty thick academic book for cooks and geeks alike. For Marx, commodity fetishism is when

"…the products of the human brain appear as autonomous figures endowed with a life of their own" (Marx, Capital v. 1 p. 165).

Now, some sentences before this passage on commodity fetishism, Marx discusses the passage of light to the eye which becomes the biological vector of how "we" see; a constitution of the body which permits what poststructuralists and others these days call a "gaze", a gaze which "objectifies its object" [2], scientific, juridical, normalizing, psychologizing, anthropological, saintly, etc., etc. A look—way of looking—that touches as it makes…

I love making music, and so I come to care about how, as part of my constitutive and constituted body, music as part of my body is made.

CD as the finished product. I am not an ideologue. If you feel the CD system serves your body. Fine. You are no sinner in my book for listening to, buying, reviewing, loving, playing, making and releasing a CD. And if you “DIY”, all the more respect, because that is great but pressing work. CD as a symbolic gesture or even a tactical move in political struggle, I understand it. Believe me, I can think of way worse ways and less effective politics than cutting a vinyl, or pressing a CD. And publicity makes sense for the identity committed to the enterprise, whether that enterprise be celebrity pop or something like the goth diaspora, or even Good. So, what concerns me in this instance is not so much "the CD" or "celebrity" as such, but when these come to be insufficiently hardened barriers to conditions of publication.

The problem with college radio stations which predicate broadcasting policy by virtue of the "finish" of the embodied CD, is that this too casually, imho, closes potent circuits of musical power and forgets to remember the paradoxical rejoinder, just how finished is finished?

What are the many ways unfinished finished things can be? Or is finished intended to convey the mythic ritual of polish? I prefer the way of the tao on this matter. A song is not finished. It is set free, or "abandoned" if one wants to be a little more "western" with the metaphor. But the abandoned metaphor is just as bad as the metaphor of finish. Both maintain a propertarian claim to the text which forgets a song, so long as it survives, mutates as it moves from device to device, room to car, speaker to heart, heart to voice.

One way to set music further free, make it a sweeter freedom, in addition to the mailing of hard media for those who want to play that game, some genius can devise an email client for music departments at radio stations that would automatically direct incoming emailed music submissions into folders by date, and rank the folders in reverse chronology so the oldest submissions remain at the top until reviewed at which point the mp3s are downloaded and added to the library/playlist or they are ignored and the email is chucked or saved—on to the next.

If we go with F.M. Einheit (or was it N.U. Unruh?), anyway one of those guys from Einsturzende Neubauten, and entertain the notion one only needs to hear 3-10 seconds of most songs to get from them most of the cultural information contained within. Now, if auditioning songs meant opening email, and clicking on the link to stream the song (and not an mp3 attachment or a mandate to go to the web page), then auditioning email submissions this way even only an hour a day would see at least 500+ songs auditioned a week—if they wanted.

What gets junked gets tagged by a database, what gets added to the library or rotation get tagged into databases and these results could be auto-emailed to people who sign-up to the mailing list. No more need to field as many calls from labels and bands about whether or not you guys reviewed the album yet–just more time to BS, enjoy music, station life, reading…

If stations wanted to move through the list slower, linger over fine new tunes from other sources, delve into their library, or stop on what’s “hot” for a beat—those options would still be there…only now augmented with an additional powerful circuit of musical power to tap when desired. A station still maintains whatever brand and/or local commitments it has assumed for its work, while at the same time honors a commitment to the movement of music and sometimes “finding” new music to like and so "making music news".

Sure, there would be a perpetual backlog. But there are those anyways as it is. At least this way every submission could, eventually, so long as the system operated and people employed it as described (but of course people thankfully would not), be heard. And there would not have to be reinvented these lame fantasies of a kind of product as finalization; that because I hold it in my hand the fantasy of an authoritative musical body is more real.

[1] See Donna Haraway, esp. part 3, "Differential Politics for Inappropriate/d Others" in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, a contemporary classic of socialist feminism, poststructuralism, late marxism, and widely read in continental anthropology, science and technology studies, and among the postmodern waves.

[2] Bourdieu, Pierre (1978). A "generative structuralist", Bourdieu is pulled into poststructuralist discussions with some regularity vis-à-vis his concepts of habitus (our socially contingent second natures) and embodiment (how our dispositions and our bodies are both written and performed in variously antagonistic cultural games and games of economic, cultural, symbolic, and social values).

This forced concession that the insurgent mp3 regime seems to have garnered from even the most staunchly capitalist peddler of popular music is that you pretty much can’t offer to sell somebody music without giving away a few samples.

The bad news is that progress is sometimes slow, or else half-assed: Many organizations still think they can fulfill their end of these new economic terms and conditions with either a 30-second song sample or with a DRM’ed file. I like to think we are already in the process of watching them learn that it does not.

Despite the best efforts of these glue-footed capitalist rabble-rousers, the more civically-minded among us are already on-board with the program of “free music.”

This all by way of introduction to the first post in my recurring column where I provide you with the best of the free mp3s that I find in my incessant music trawling of the internet.

So, hi. Here’s some free music.

Specifically, I’d like to whet your appetite with a song from a recording session of French electro-pop sensation Yelle, distributed by the gracious patronage of Public Radio International’s “Fair Game”. These recordings rock my humming, bearded face, and my heartiest suggestion is that you allow them to do the same to you.

Get down, pardner: Yelle - on Fair Game (2008-02-19) - performs Les Femmes.

Also, word to Fluxblog and you can download one other song at Fair Game.

It would be a misrepresentation to suggest that college radio has somehow availed of an ideological allegiance on the “side” of the CD production model as the hegemonic audio format for legitimating a given maker of a popular kind of music. While an ‘ideological’ investment may pertain in some rarity of cases, the advent of CD fetishism in the field of college radio, as I will point out, is less a formal will to the universalization of a given audio format and, in the main, a number of historical contingencies which enabled college radio to come into being.

On “the Popular”

Before moving to discuss in later posts a typology of college radio stations in relation to CD fetishism and their submission regimes, I wish to clarify my position in relation to this loaded concept of ‘popular’. I do not use the term popular in a disparaging way, as has been the case with far too long a lineage of social theorists (See radical theorists like Pierre Bourdieu, the Frankfurt School, as well as liberal theorists like Robert Putnam). Current discourses on the Left have worked well to build upon and move past the all-encompassing tendrils of “ideology” with its inescapable claws and elitist conceptual markers of ‘high’ and ‘low’ cultural forms (See Tony Bennett, Janice Radway, and even the contested and contestable Slavoj Zizek for radical and radical feminist perspectives, or the work of Henry Jenkins or Liesbet van Zoonen for a liberal take).

A little known, but nonetheless true fact related to the trans-national anti-comics campaign circa 1920s-1950s, but the various Communist, Socialist, and Social Democratic parties sided with radical, progressive, and conservative liberals of the period to wage a censorship campaign (See the anthology on the international dimensions of the anti-comics campaign edited by Lent, J. 1999). This actually placed organizers of the Left on the ground, the left’s ‘organic intellectuals’, in a culturally awkward situation.

Responsible for mediating the links between the ‘party line’ and its constituent working class ‘mass’ in places like the newsletter, party meetings, union organizing, and on the work floor, organizers of ‘the Left’ sought to actively discourage the reading of comics and encourage the civilizing process of learning to appreciate the gratifications of ‘high’ cultural productions. Party membership collapsed in short order and workers walked out of the revolutionary doors, and many for good to go and enjoin their political allegiance to one of the various capitalist political organizations or, whether for better or worse, to no political organization at all.

On the one hand, the liberal discourse disparaged comics and the reading of them in the terms of social control, and by extension eugenics, linking the product and practice to crime and illiteracy, immigration and feeblemindedness. For ‘the Left’, on the other hand (or rather in addition), the comic book was considered party to capitalism’s imperialist epistemology and a vehicle for the imperialist capitalism’s ideological conquest of worker allegiance.

For these modern radicals the popular graphic text was naught but a tool for making the worker perceive their own subservience as the legitimate and natural order of things. In both cases, ‘the popular’ was evicted from political and revolutionary—hegemonic—discourse and with it a key constituent of hegemonic struggle came to be alienated from a radical left discourse which, as I have written about elsewhere, was in fact very much present in the comics discourse, albeit in a pseudo-populist form. The virtues of radical class struggle and smart identity politics is an apparent theme even and especially in the first issues of that American superpower par excellence, ‘Superman’ (See the 1937 Action Comics 1).

Ironically, the ‘right’ feared comic books for the threat they posed to the liberal, capitalist, and democratic world order, while the ‘left’ feared them for their supposed dampening of revolutionary will, their complication of the uniform identity of the ‘revolutionary worker’, and for their role in conserving the liberal capitalist hegemony over the (un)democratic world. Whereas the first temptation is to ask, ‘well which is it’, I think the more fruitful position is that classic piece of intellectual blackmail, ‘neither and both’. It seems the more efficacious strategy for emmancipatory actors and discourse is to engage popular culture, and not be so haughty as to remain ignorant and fail to engage popular genres as texts, production regimes, and circulations of readership all with emmancipatory potentials.

Of course, this is not a novel proposition. It is a point well developed not only in ‘left’ philosophical discourse, but also in many of the discourses of social research to emerge after Barthes, Foucault, radical feminism, and the 1980s (re)turn to a Gramscian reading of Marx. However, despite these discussions, not only do many academic discourses continue to partake in formalist discussions of the relation of popular culture and levels of ‘social cohesion’ and ‘civic engagement’ or ‘degrees of deliberative democracy’, but on the ground most radical activist organizations continue with positions which stigmatize, to varying degrees, the content, and often the form of popular cultural productions.

Organic Intellectuals and College Radio as “the Musical Progressive”

Now to turn the discussion back to college radio, the position of college radio, or at least its position in myth as a kind of ‘progressive’ and/or ‘counter-hegemonic’ force in the field of musical production. Regardless whether or not this reputation is an earned one, it must be said that the reputation is linked to at least one distinguishing trend of most college radio—the relative freedoms of student DJs and station Directors as organic intellectuals of radio broadcasting. An ‘organic intellectual’ is a Gramscian term for a doer in some field of social or community relations, a person who deploys, directs, uses, manages some technology, position, or relation—these are technicians, managers, and so on.

And thus these subject-positions of college radio must be considered as constitutive and constituting of fields which partake in the hegemonic struggles over regimes of culture, practice, language, production, work, etc. This is the relevance of what most stations call their “submission policy” or “submission guidelines” which apply to all record labels or musicians who wish to add their musical speech to a particular (trans)local or virtual circuit of popular culture. So long as radio broadcasting remains a viable or priority circuit of publication for musical speech, and so long as these nodes in the flows of a cultural circulatory maintain a “CD only” policy, the field of musical production will fall short of its present emmancipatory potential as a field of and for free and fearless speech.

Vested Devices: the accidental fetishism of the technophobic and the techno-poor

Despite college radio stations’ near unanimous mandate and reliance on CD (or sometimes “at least” CDR) airplay submissions, this mandate is stated or persists and performs in a variety of manners. To problematize an essentializing tendency on my part in the very form of the term “CD fetishism”, I have considered college stations, for now, in relation to four broad types of CD fetishism: Techno-poor/Technophobic, Proprietary, Mythological, Audiophiliac, and Efficiency Waste. I will for now discuss the first type, saving the other three for following posts.

The thing with typologies, of course, is that as interpretive artifice they always fail to ‘capture’ and define adequately all types so that, in the end, there is always not only mis-categorization, but a category devoted to ‘that which does not fit’—an ever present and, perhaps, ‘spectral’ remainder of the ordering of perception and interpretation. That said, these types I identify are contingent articulations of a mode of identification, and as hermeneutic tools contain (ir)reducibly particular relations within networks of living forces and all their open-ended potentiality, specific history and context, and idiosyncratic manner.

I contain roughly three categories of college stations in what I call “technophobic and techno-poor” college stations.

First, this category contains those many college radio stations which, despite the advent of the so-called “information economy” have not taken the time, have not acquired the resources, or perhaps lack the knowledge or support from their university to establish even a basic web presence.

It is also intended to denote those stations who, although they have at some point, or perhaps recently, established a web presence, the website itself lacks updates, useful information, or basic functionality for fans or music professionals so that even finding a playlist or the station’s submission policy requires sending an email to an overburdened music director who, in my experience, will probably not respond.

Finally, this category denotes stations who have established at least a moderately functional web presence, but who demand submissions on CD only (or maybe vinyl) because they ‘lack the necessary tools to broadcast digital files such as mp3’.

Whether or not this lack of technology, resources for technology, or technological know-how constitutes a form of CD fetishism is questionable, or at least not readily demonstrated. It seems, rather, a more or less structurated outcome of a number of factors. First, many contemporary college radio stations were establishing their selves at a time (1980s-1990s) when the CD format attained hegemony over musical consumption so that to establish a station meant, beyond all the broadcast apparatuses, obtaining and using the proprietary play device we conventionally call a CD player. Thus, spare resources were invested in particular means of broadcast.

Second, most college radio stations are not places of long-term employment. Students circulate in and out of the station and its management/administrative positions from one semester or school year to the next. Not only does this make long-term planning difficult, but it makes the level of techno-skill present at the station unpredictable and, I suspect, the morale for committing to long-term projects lower than what one finds in ‘the professional world’.

As an organization staffed by college students, those who do possess techno-skill may only possess a pre-professional level while those who possess a professional level of techno-skill may well have little time or interest in pro bono work for their college radio station which, they well know, will probably not be “their” station upon graduation. In other words, those possessed of skill needed to open a given college radio station to the online world may well be devoting the extra-curricular use of that skill, understandably, to money making opportunities for things like tuition, books, food, and an actual career.

Third, and this is applicable to all stations not just the techno-poor and technophobes, there is no shortage of music on CD and/or CDR sent by record labels able to float the publicity costs just as there is no shortage of student DJs coming in with their own CDs and CDRs to play (or run through the Music Director). In other words, this is a situation where an organization can afford to be anachronistic and continue (for now) to play by the ‘old rules’.

While it is clear from my last post that I find myself waging a kind of battle against CD fetishism, it is important to make clear that CD fetishists are not intellectual or professional “villains”. They are people deploying tactics in given situations to realize personal and organizational strategies which, in most cases, are understandable. While I would prefer that more college radio stations make information on and access to their broadcasting platform available more broadly, I also understand the situation many college radio stations and their volunteer workers find their selves.

This then begs the questions of strategy. What does the discussion of this type of ‘CD fetishist’ imply for the publication strategies for labels like Deconomics Records? And, by extension, as more labels like Deconomics Records come into being how might (college) radio not only adapt itself to the democratization of publication regimes for (popular) music, but how might its nodes of power move from a reactionary or conservatory position to become more radically and pro-actively enjoined to the emancipation of musical production from its capitalist tropes of profit and cultural aristocracy?

These are questions I will close with, for now, but will return to in a few weeks time after I’ve brought my discussion of college radio and CD fetishism to a coda.

For this was on seynt Volantynys day
Whan euery bryd comyth there to chese [choose] his make [mate].

1382: Geoffrey Chaucer writes Parlement of Foules to honor the first anniversary of the engagement of 13-year-old King Richard II of England to 14-year-old Anne of Bohemia. This is the first recorded association of Valentine’s Day with romantic love. Flash forward 450 years.

1836: Relics are exhumed from the catacombs of Saint Hippolytus, astride the ancient road leading from Rome to Tivoli, Via Tiburtina. These relics, later identified with St. Valentine of Rome, and in a bit of almost hysterically poetic economic foreshadowing, are transported, a gift of Pope Gregory XVI, in a casket to the Whitefriar Street Carmelite Church in Dublin. Less than ten years later, in 1847 and in Worcester, Massachusetts, Esther Howland will sell the first mass-produced valentines of embossed paper lace.

Flash forward 160 more years to today, when many hundreds of tourists preside, in the grand Catholic tradition, over the aforementioned casket, carried in solemn procession to the high altar for a special Mass [1], and simultaneously, halfway across the globe, the United States Postal Service engages in its second biggest day of the year, delivering the greeting cards which have become a multi-billion dollar business (Hallmark and American Greetings recorded 1995 sales of over three and two billion dollars respectively [2,3]).

At the same moment, somewhere else entirely, Deconomics Records launches.

February 14th has come, for many of us in the United States, to signify the very essence of the monetization of the "love emotion", increasingly understood as socially constructed, "interpreted, propagated, and deployed." [4]

Uncannily, we often find ourselves, on February 14th, poised tottering on the fulcrum between what one might offer as the great existento-trancendental signified, love, and its overwhelming expression as the ugly, economic maneuverings of units of its socially-constructed sentiment, greeting cards.

Acknowledging the danger of stretching our socio-economic metaphor beyond its tensile abilities, one might (carefully) propose music as another sublime lever, or operating modality for this most resistant existential signified. Going even further, one might posit a micro-sociological analogy between the dominant economic mode of transport for music with the aforementioned economic transport love.

One should operate very carefully here, but, after all, in for a penny, in for a pound. Best just avoid the whole mess. Which - as it turns out - is our message to you on this, the most sublime of our holidays.

1. Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Valentine.
2. American Greetings Corporation (AGC). 1996. “Corporate Profile.” http://www.amgreetings.com.
3. Hallmark, Story The. 1996. “Hallmark History is the Story of Birth of an Industry.” http://www.hallmark.com/ourcompany_bin/corporate/hisbirth.asp.
4. Jackson, Stevi. 1993. “Even Sociologists Fall in Love: An Exploration of the Sociology of Emotions.” Sociology 27(2): 201-217.

CD fetishism can take various forms, happen in a number of places, and is (re)produced by virtue of many kinds of social relations of musical production which demand the artist make and submit CDs - radio stations, the music press, record stores, labels, artists, connoisseurs, casual listeners. Any system establishing or necessitating regimes of submission of music for “consideration, “review”, or “purchase” runs risk of (re)producing the CD as a fetish object, the mark of ‘true musical artistry, professionalism, or craftsmanship’ instead of what it really is - but one of music’s many vehicles.

Of course, this is not a new observation. David Byrne, among many others, has said something similar. Only Mr. Byrne’s discourse points less at the problem of CDs as a fetish object and more on the anachronism that is becoming the ‘major label’ and ‘indie label’ models of musical mass-production and putting out. More artists, he says, are faced with more choices as to how they wish to shape their regimes of musical publication and so model the trajectory of their career. [1] If the future is bright, why do I cite CD fetishism [continuing to be] a problem?

While more bands and/or small labels may be positioned effectively to pursue DIY modes of musical production, many fields for the circulation of musical publications are still largely clinging to, if not the mass production model, then at least an anachronistic form of the putting out model which mandates, ‘music not embodied in a CD will not be listened to, reviewed, circulated, and broadcast because, since it is not on a CD, it must not be worth listening to.’ This becomes problematic for a number of reasons.

Music embodied in a resource intensive format like CD practically necessitates musical production for the propertarian purposes of a body for ownership and prostitution. Beyond this, however, CD fetishism erects nothing less than reactionary barriers to the freedoms of language and speech so that, despite any best intentions, its practitioners partake in the reproduction of the very capitalist models of musical production as well as its cultural aristocracies - a parasitic and exploitative regime which no shortage of artists and fans have claimed at least nominally to be against.

One field clinging most firmly to this fetishism of the compact disc is the self-congratulatory and inchoate system of college radio. Having now surveyed the several hundred of North American college radio stations twice over, once four years ago as publicist for the now defunct Isochromatic Records and now here today for the very much alive and emmancipatory Deconomics Records, it seems different stations provide differing justifications for entertaining and reproducing the idea that ‘only bands which go through the effort of producing a finished product’ deserve, or are to be legitimately entertained as “artist” to the public.’

In my next post I will continue this discussion and sketch in more detail how CD fetishism plays out differentially in regimes of submission for college radio. I will discuss the differing justifications to see specifically how their logic and operation does disservice to the production and circulation of musical texts as “free speech”. In a later post, I will detail how the regimes of musical submission which co-generate CD-fetishism are being carried over into the much lauded but under-utilized field of so-called online radio.

1. See David Byrne’s recent article in Wired “Survival Strategies for Emerging Artists - and Megastars” http://www.wired.com/entertainment/music/magazine/16-01/ff_byrne?currentPage=1