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?

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.

On the one hand I want to push for a humility with edge, and the previous discussions lacked a humility which I feel dampened the edge that they had. But nevertheless, it is an important thread that I want to not only “finish up” as it were for the mere sake of ‘finishing’, but also because there is an unexpected “objectified” reason which has been carved out. Somehow one of these texts on CD fetishism has colonized, at least the last time I checked, the “number 1″ entry under a Google search for the term, “emmancipatory”. A term having to do with “freedom”–and so not unsmall pieces of shit to eat.

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.

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.