DECONOMICS RECORDS

And how do some of these assume a role of musician in different capacities? I feel a deficiency of knowledge to answer this, although not because no one has tried. On the contrary many have tried–and there I feel a deficiency in my knowledge too. How have current theories come to care about structurations and struggles of social systems and the role genres of music play in the performance of daily life and historical struggle–symbolic, cultural, economic, and whatever other big category you want to dump into the dead marshes of hegemony, identity, and social change–ahem, that is politics in all its embodied manifests. Why do I care? (Why) Do you care? Need we really bother?

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?

I’m not a closet fan of cancelled CW (formerlly WB) television serial Gilmore Girls, I am a fan. Well, maybe fan (which after all comes from fanatic) describes too dense an attachment than what I feel toward the series in its respectable seven year run. I think affinity, appreciation, a fond entertainment might come closer. Anyway, I only say this because the show syndicates with regularity so that at least once every year-year and a half one can choose to watch the entire run front to end on Dutch Net 5, and I’m sure no doubt on no shortage of other networks of the world. Somehow they even get the thing to dub into German, although most Germans I know tend to be put off by the fast talking and an averision to Amerca’s imprecise and idiomatic speech eaten fully by pop.

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.