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.