DECONOMICS RECORDS

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.

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.