DECONOMICS RECORDS

All right. The long wind is now let out to breeze through these topographies with speed so I can soon get on to the more interesting business in later blogs of what I like. The relevance and explanation is behind in the introduction and the rather long part 2 of CD fetishism. Fetishism? The term fetishism demonstrates a lingering Marxian affinity which cannot be left without qualification.

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).

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.