DECONOMICS RECORDS

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.

One of the best things about the wide acceptance of downloadable digital audio files, such as mp3s, coupled with the proliferation of cheap, fast internet connections, is that free music - the best sort of economic contagion - seems to have insinuated itself into almost every capital-based musical interaction.

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.

CD fetishism is a term I use broadly. It is intended to denote relations of musical production where a musical recording embodied on a piece of compact disc technology is taken for granted as the most legitimate body for the circulation of recorded music. It is, in truth, little different from other/previous forms of audiophilia which cannot simply enjoy the production and circulation of music, but can only entertain the enjoyment of musical productions in specific formats or under specific listening conditions construed as those of some purity - vinyl, “hi-fi”, “lo-fi”, surround sound, stereo, mono, etc.

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