DECONOMICS RECORDS

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.