Gimme Shelter

The Archive from Sean Dunne on Vimeo.

At The Archive’s webpage, Paul Mawhinney highlights the scope and impact of the collection, writing:

If you started listening to the music in this collection on the day you were born, and listened every minute of every day, by the time you finished, you’d be 57 years old. That’s a lot of music. And it’s a lot of history.

Agreed.  Make one wonder how a place of higher education, like Miami University, can drop millions into expansion and construction, but apparently can’t consider the historic preservation of this music collection and the enrichment it would bring to the public.  In my head, I keep returning to what Mawhinney said in the documentary about how the Library of Congress had assessed that of Mawhinney’s recordings from 1948 through 1966 only 17 per cent of that music is available to the public currently.  Incredible.  That means, roughly, that 83 of every 100 songs recorded in those twenty years isn’t/can’t be listened to anymore.  In a discursive sense, it illuminates how the vast majority of those chords, harmonies, rhythms, expressions, behaviors and opinions committed to record–and given quite a chance to circulate–never make it in the end.  What facet of life did they reflect and reveal, narrate and question?  For Americans, just like our appetite for the easy, lifeless mp3, our sonic genealogies are compressed, reduced, and commodified.

A larger, HD video is also available here at director Sean Dunne‘s site.

Die Gedanken Sind Frei

Sorry for not posting in a while, I’ve been captivated by Frontline’s awesome underview of the Bush Administration in my extra time at work this week. In terms of my last post, I’m just going to link ya’ll to Columbia lecturer Scott Horton’s excellent distillation of Obama posted to Harper’s the other day. The cat is pretty much in the bag in terms of the cast for this year’s reality show ‘The US Presidential Election,’ and Clinton’s death throes (here, here, and here) are going to make a hilarious montage for our non-Idol contestants, John and Barack. But I digress. Speaking of Judases: Battlestar Galactica had a two-page spread ad in Rolling Stone this week that parodies da Vinci’s ‘Last Supper,’ with Six as christ and Apollo as Judas. Eight days!!! OoOoooOoh!

The cultural insularity of music today is not simply the consequence of deficient pedagogy or propagation. It would be too facile to groan over the conservatories or complain about the record companies. Things are more serious. Contemporary music owes this unique situation to its very composition. In this sense, it is willed. It is not a music that tries to be familiar; it is fashioned to preserve its cutting edge. One may repeat it, but it does not repeat itself. In this sense, one cannot come back to it as to an object. It always pops up on frontiers.

-Michel Foucault

Yeah, so on that note, link dump:

Believe it: Four glorious hours of In Rainbows‘ haunting closer “Videotape”, committed to an obsolescent media format, with accompanying visuals from Philip M. Lane and some pretty swank cover art designed by Jacob Blandy.

Shejay: A world-wide network of female DJs, producers, vocalists, promoters and musicians in the field of electronic and dance music. (MP3′s here)

Dave Matthews tickets go on sale this Saturday! Matthews and Bob Dylan are shockingly some of the only two mainstream live acts that offer tickets for a ‘reasonable’ fee (usually between $45-60). So why on earth would someone pay $85 to go see these fucktards play? Can’t we just start a national recycling drive to hand out old copies of boybands of yore to the twelve year old girls that will go see them? God I can’t wait until Hannah Montana has an abortion scandal because of them. SOS, really? ABBA should come and slap the shit out of them. Someone please give them some LSD.

The Score

Okay, so I missed Obama’s speech yesterday, but reading the transcript in my office this morning made me break down and think a little. Eloquent prose aside (after seven years of President Shrub it’s nice to listen to someone speak in sentences), and even though there wasn’t really any one policy action he was outlining as a president-elect, I’m aware and transformed by the exigence of the speech itself. He rallied all the correct arguments, accented all the correct impacts, and projected alternatives (prophesied? okay okay, I’ll lay off) for an emotional architecture of solvency. The synthesis of excellent rhetoric and semiotic inflection made me eat that shit up in ways you can’t imagine.

Since the election campaign started about a year and a half ago, I’ve done nothing but bitch and complain about the appalling process (read: reality show) Americans call ‘Elections.’ I’m committed to third party candidacies, feed off the asinine caricatures politicians make of themselves, loathe the amount of wealth spilled for a few ballots, and generally distrust the issues chosen for campaign platforms. And while I still think my hesitations have their merit, I sometimes forget that radical change can truly come from within institutions–from the bowels of governmentality. As for Hilary, no matter how important the novelty of having a woman president may be, she hasn’t put herself out there. She’s here to service power, and not to have power service us. For those who look to her as a feminist, she still has a lot to learn about Seneca Falls.

I really wanted Kucinich. He’s unabashedly liberal, totally weird, and so full love that people often can’t access his lens of politics. I’m totally proud to call him my Congressperson. Plus, his favorite musicians are Willie Nelson, Ani DiFranco and Michael Franti. He’s a kindred stoner. But Joan Baez supports Obama. And Obama is down with Miles Davis, Bob Dylan and the Fugees. Fu-Gee-La baby.

In the white community, the path to a more perfect union means acknowledging that what ails the African-American community does not just exist in the minds of black people; that the legacy of discrimination — and current incidents of discrimination, while less overt than in the past — are real and must be addressed. Not just with words, but with deeds –- by investing in our schools and our communities; by enforcing our civil rights laws and ensuring fairness in our criminal justice system; by providing this generation with ladders of opportunity that were unavailable for previous generations. It requires all Americans to realize that your dreams do not have to come at the expense of my dreams; that investing in the health, welfare, and education of black and brown and white children will ultimately help all of America prosper.

I still have a lot problems with Obama. His website indicates that he supported Israel’s blitzkrieg of Lebanon in 2006. He wants to expand the military by adding nearly a hundred thousand soldiers and Marines. He’s blatantly lacking any dialogue about gender and sexuality issues. His plan for energy consumption pretty much consists of replacing oil with biofuels and ethanol. His ideas on immigration are shockingly uncritical and amounts to ‘border security’ coupled with assimilation through bureaucratic means. He’s not talking about how to legally fix the insane expansion and annexing of executive powers in the past seven years. Obama is way outdated on the economy, and nowhere is he outlining the criminal processes occurring in the name of money, nor the transparency and civil liberties displaced.

In short, he’s not perfect. But a my roommate Sarah has been hounding as she researches imperialism and democracy in Iran, we need to stop abandoning–indeed, attacking–liberals who may not fight for our particular brand of liberty and progressivism, but realize that in the end, we are all struggling for similar humanness.

“When the power of love overcomes the love of power, the world will know peace” ~ Jimmy Hendrix

Jesus Walks

Just in case anyone missed the cover of Rolling Stone this week, I’ll bring you up to speed: Barack Obama is the second coming. He is the Cristo Redento, the latest incarnation of Horus, will probably give birth to the next Dalai Lama, and clearly, the Big Cheese. Even the homosexualites want to lick his pretty face (wait, what was the question again, Sullivan?).

‘Salvation’ and ‘redemption’ both reflect really dangerous rhetoric in political spheres where discursive complexity is minimal (blogosphere aside–generally speaking, we have three candidates, and about two or three mass media outlets). Although Obama has done surprisingly well at resisting the temptation to slide into populism, the discourses of redemption that orbit his campaign are not helping to envision solutions to our fucked up postmodern imperialism, or our current financial meltdown. A frenzied populace, who fear decisions and critical assessment of the America in which we live, would rather double-down on ‘hope’? That’s called externalizing democracy. There’s an incredible amount of political agency we abandon when, for starters, the economy overruns both the government and its constituents… If Obama wants to be a leader, he needs to earn that now through action, and not just give us a poetic IOU.

Saying that, the one *ahem* redeeming aspect of Rolling Stone’s Obamagasm was Bob Boynton’s interview with Cornel West. Asking about “handing the reins of power” to someone inexperienced, West replied:

There is a certain freshness and newness that people confuse with inexperience. I don’t think Obama is actually inexperienced when it comes to governing as president. He’s going to choose a high-quality team, and he has shown he is capable of excellent political judgment… I told Obama that when he wins–which I think he will–I will celebrate for one day. I’ll break-dance in the morning and party in the afternoon. But the next day, I’ll become one of his biggest critics.

Also, suck my balls Hilary Clinton. Suck ‘em.

Rag & Bone

I happened to be shuffling through some backfiles of news articles on hip-hip and rap this morning trying to make sense of the fear I have over what Madonna’s new LP means for that genre and the industry. (There’s a whole post in the works about this topic for later, but here’s an example from fan forums: “Woop! Tres excitement! Though I’m also apprehensive about her going all supposedly ‘hip hop’ & using the ubiquitous Timbaland as producer (seriously can Timbaland just go on holiday for a year or 2?! …every song nowadays is done by him or has him in the background or something)…Still, any Madonna album is a good thing to look forward to!” That flavor of statement reminds me (not just of Kanye West–also a whole separate post…) of the timbre of argument that’s usually a harbinger of assimilation; a form of assimilation distinct from synthesis (sonic, in this case) because someone like Madonna forecloses musical dialog by subsuming/co-opting/reclaiming a history and allowing it to be heard only through the filter of her music. This is not the first time Madonna’s done this; in fact, there’s plenty of literature indicating this trend is formulaic in her music).

Sheesh. Regardless, ISO50 made me laugh, since he posted these cool faux-7″ sleeve mashes (check out other artwork by Nikolay Saveliev) to make them look like the covers of academic articles:

I killed some time at my office scrolling through Scott’s ISO50 blog and also found this cool vintage Playboy shot, which reminded me of the razzy Barkley video earlier.

All Along The Watchtower

Well here’s an interesting turn of events. The flailing Warner Music has now hired former Napster senior executive Leanne Sherman in an effort to develop digital markets in Europe, Africa and western Asia. Huh. They claim:

“The breadth of her experience will be invaluable as we evaluate opportunities in music, music-related and wider entertainment sectors, and her proven ability as a dealmaker, coupled with her high-level understanding of new technologies and business models, makes her a great fit for the team.”

Things are getting heated for record companies, and no one is developing new models for music consumption in the context of capitalism. Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails (in addition to performer-first [called 360-degree deals] contracts for Paul McCartney, Madonna and Coldplay), seem to be at the forefront of our ‘digital music age’. Evan Serpick for Rolling Stone reported this week (RS1047) that EMI’s new chief Guy Hands’s big new idea for the company is simply to downsize and spend less. To his credit, there’s a lot to be said about the music industry’s taste for bling and big lunches:

Hands was appalled at the label’s wastefulness, citing expensive gifts sent to artists, multimillion-dollar severance packages for executives and salaries the rose even as revenues drop.

All true. But why are they relying on artists to come up with the silver bullet? The facts are plain and simple: aside from a dedicated audiophile core (myself included), they way people experience music has fundamentally shifted from quality to convenience. While it’s true that CDs have incredibly higher quality audio, it’s fundamentally easier for someone to quickly download an over-compressed version of the song straight to their computers (when you’re listening to the majority of your library through crappy laptop speakers, the nuances of audio quality aren’t that important). The backlash since P2P systems have become widespread, have not been toward the innovation of the record industry, but directed at consumers, who now face a jungle of digital restrictions, lawsuits, and the increasing fascism of the RIAA.  John Naughton of The Guardian makes this point last week:

Accepting the music industry’s demands would mean a radical transformation of the ISPs’ role – changing them from common carriers into organisations which have to know about every file they handle. This would be technically challenging and have terrifying implications for privacy; but it would also create horrendous legal liabilities for ISPs. As common carriers, they have very limited responsibility for what users do with their services; but as Taylor’s proxy snoopers they could be held liable – and not just for copyright infringement, but for lots of other questionable or controversial activities that people get up to on the net.

…

An analogy may help to illustrate the point. Millions of people use the telephone network for questionable, illegal or unethical purposes. But we would regard it as unthinkable to impose on phone companies a legal obligation to monitor every conversation.

All you free-market capitalists must be scratching your heads.  But let’s put this all in perspective: there is no threat to music here; music will still be produced by people in the world inspired to do so and consumed by everyone who has access to it.  What we might see, on the other hand, is a tanking of pre-packaged bands sold to consumers as art.  And I’m okay with that.  Bye-Bye-Bye Justin!

The record industry is also responsible for disseminating musical art to the masses; I agree.  Talent needs to be heard.  Music is a source of change personally and politically.  We need to stop worrying about our idols ‘making it’ in the biz, and starting listening to music that is made and supported by our appreciation of it.

Sound is free, and in the internet-saturated age (widely available to 1/6 the world’s population), our access to orchestrated sound should also be free.  Live music and hard copies of music are where the record industry needs to focus, not on the facsimiles of songs themselves.