Professional Documents
Culture Documents
on Music, Technology,
and Culture
Listening Spaces
Edited by
Richard Purcell
and Richard Randall
Titles include:
M. King Adkins
NEW WAVE
Image is Everything
Jennifer Otter Bickerdike
FANDOM, IMAGE AND AUTHENTICITY
Joy Devotion and the Second Lives of Kurt Cobain and Ian Curtis
Ewa Mazierska and Georgina Gregory
RELOCATING POPULAR MUSIC
Rosemary Overall
AFFECTIVE INTENSITIES IN EXTREME MUSIC SCENCES
Cases from Australia and Japan
Trajce Cvetkovski
THE POP MUSIC IDOL AND THE SPIRIT OF CHARISMA
Reality Television Talent Shows in the Digital Economy of Hope
Tuulikki Pietil
CONTRACTS, PATRONAGE AND MEDIATION
The Articulation of Global and Local in the South African Recording Industry
Raphal Nowak
CONSUMING MUSIC IN THE DIGITAL AGE
Technologies, Roles and Everyday Life
Michael Urban
NEW ORLEANS RHYTHM AND BLUES AFTER KATRINA
Music, Magic and Myth
Richard Purcell and Richard Randall (editors)
21st CENTURY PERSPECTIVES ON MUSIC, TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE
Listening Spaces
You can receive future titles in this series as they are published by placing a
standing order. Please contact your bookseller or, in case of difficulty, write to us
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Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS, England
21st Century Perspectives
on Music, Technology,
and Culture
Listening Spaces
Edited by
Richard Purcell
Associate Professor, Carnegie Mellon University, USA
and
Richard Randall
Cooper-Siegel Associate Professor, Carnegie Mellon University, USA
21ST CENTURY PERSPECTIVES ON MUSIC, TECHNOLOGY, AND CULTURE: LISTENING SPACES
Selection, Introduction and editorial matter Richard Purcell and
Richard Randall, 2016
Individual chapters Respective authors, 2016
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2016 978-1-137-49759-8
ISBN: 978-1-349-69803-5
E-PDF ISBN: 9781137497604
DOI: 10.1057/9781137497604
Distribution in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world is by Palgrave
Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in
England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke,
Hampshire RG21 6XS.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress
Acknowledgements viii
Notes on Contributors ix
v
vi Contents
Index 195
List of Figures
vii
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank the Media Initiative of the Center for the Arts
in Society at Carnegie Mellon for their support for this project. The
intellectual and administrative home provided to us by CASs Paul
Eiss, James Duesing, Kathy Newman, and Anna Houck is a model for
interdisciplinary research in the arts and humanities. We are grateful to
Golan Levin, director of Frank-Ratchye STUDIO for Creative Inquiry at
Carnegie Mellon University, for hosting the 2012 Listening Spaces sym-
posium and our 2013 seminar. Since the establishment of this project in
2011, we have been fortunate to work closely with an inspiring group of
scholars and practitioners. Specifically, we are indebted to Larisa Mann,
Trebor Scholz, Graham Hubbs, and Jonathan Sterne, Josh Kun, Carleton
Gholz, Margret Grebowicz, Ian Nagoski, Abby Aresty, Rich Pell, Elaina
Vitale and the students in our Listening Spaces seminar in the fall of
2013. We need to single out the contributions of Gesina Philips. She
was the best research assistant two busy academics could ask for and
was there from the very beginning of our project. Rich Purcell would
also like to thank Steve Secular and Lauren Lancaster-Gudorf for their
research assistance. We would also like to thank Jennifer Howard for
guiding our manuscript to its final form.
viii
Notes on Contributors
Editors
Contributors
(Taylor 2007, p. 4). We also acknowledge that with the rise of the
Californian ideology we have increasingly fetishized the devices,
software platforms, and other disruptive technological innovations
that are increasingly associated with music delivery (Barbrook and
Cameron 1995). In other words, given the unprecedented availability
of file formats, storage capabilities, mobile devices, and web-based
platforms geared towards music playback and production, it would be
easy to focus our inquiry on the objects geared towards delivering music.
At first glance, such an object-oriented approach makes sense because our
interactions with media are often the most recognizable kind of sonic
engagements. It is easy to conflate musics elusive objectness with the
reifications required for production, distribution, storage, commodifica-
tion, and performance. Similarly, it is also tempting and perhaps disci-
plinarily convenient to reduce music and the associated experiences to
sound and psychoacoustics. The Listening Spaces project revealed to us
that even in our increasingly digital world, music remains not a thing,
but a lattice of affordances, experiences, and actions that are specific to
music. We began to focus on listening as a choice that is either made
by us or for us for reasons that span from transgressive empowerment
to hegemonic oppression. Scholars such as Jacques Attali, Peter Szendy,
and Susan McClary have discussed that to listen to music is to make
real the promises and qualities it embodies. This project wove together
threads from a variety of disciplines and the resulting fabric revealed that
musical listening spaces are everywhere and each comprises a complex
of cultural, psychological, political, and economic meaning.
In order to approach these listening spaces we first needed to under-
stand who or what is listening as well as how and why they are listen-
ing. Listening is not an idle activity. We are saddled with responsibilities
and rights, as Szendy tells us, as listeners (Szendy 2008, p. 4). Listening
expresses as well as creates subjectivity. It also suggests or at least neces-
sitates a certain level of active attention, especially when it comes to
music. There is of course the furniture music of Satie or the smooth
arrangements that play to you while you shop. Style, composition and
intent aside, these background musics demand a listener to listen, but
at a different threshold of engagement. Yet they all are intended, to
borrow a phrase, as forms of accompaniment to activities that for all
intents and purposes we think about outside of the musical realm. But
what is music? We do not ask this as an empty rhetorical provocation.
Rather, taking seriously the activity of listening as accompaniment
requires that we become part of an ensemble with our bodies as literal
and figurative accompanying instruments.
Introduction: Listening in on the 21st Century 3
how past musical practices can provide a guide for the present. Through
these essays we hope to construct a discussion of universal themes of
modern music practices.
Carleton Gholzs The Scream and Other Tales: Listening for Detroit
Radio History with the Vertical File is one of two essays in this anthol-
ogy addressing the relationship between radio and our 21st-century
listening practices. Using Susan Douglas canonical Listening In as a
starting point, Gholzs contribution uses archival research and oral his-
tory to give us a sense of the way terrestrial radio stations have shaped
the cultural and political imagination of the residents of Detroit,
Michigan from 1941 to the present. For Gholz, the archive containing
the history of Detroit radio is not only a resource but is itself an object
of analysis. For a city so vital to American and world music, Gholz
wonders why the historical record of its most important radio stations
are either absent or, in the case of urban contemporary radio station
WJLB, which recently located from downtown Detroit to the suburbs of
Farmington Hills, contained in one manila file folder of photocopied
promotional materials going back only a few years. WJBL, which was
purchased and relocated by its parent company Clear Channel, creates
an occasion for Gholz to reflect on the longer history of Detroit radio
and its meaning for critics of media and culture. In the aftermath of the
Telecommunications Act of 1996, with the rise of non-terrestrial radio
and Internet-based streaming services, Gholz contemplates what kind
of listening space radio is now. While stalwart station WJLB still features
live DJ late-night mixes, the rash of corporate consolidations in the
wake of the Telecommunications Act has atrophied Detroit terrestrial
radio options.
Kieran Currans essay, On Tape: Cassette Culture in Edinburgh and
Glasgow Now, provides an ethnography undertaken in the two largest
cities in Scotland (Edinburgh and Glasgow) both of which have vibrant
independent music scenes. He presents interviews with a local pro-
moter, a band, an independent label and a fan in each city, the subject
being the seeming resurrection of cassette-tape culture in the digital era.
The questions Curran seeks to answer are: Why is this happening? What
issues arise out of the artifact of the tape itself? What is the appeal of
such an oft-derided format, especially in the context of the proliferation
of digital music? Are there unique sonic qualities that are preferable?
Is the physical form of the tape somehow more authentic feeling
than a digital download? He arrives at intriguing insights into the role
of the cassette tape in contemporary Scottish music-making, as well
as connecs with broader moves, internationally back to analog modes
Introduction: Listening in on the 21st Century 7
References
Barbrook, R. and Cameron, A. (1995). The Californian Ideology. Science as Culture
6.1, 4472.
Crary, J. (2013). 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep. New York: Verso
Books.
Crawford, K. (2009). Following You: Disciplines of Listening in Social Media.
Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 23(4), 52535.
Debord, G. (1983). The Society of the Spectacle. Detroit: Black and Red.
Introduction: Listening in on the 21st Century 11
Elder, J. (2014). Apple Deleted Rivals Songs from Users iPods. Online,
3 December. Available from: http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2014/12/03/apple-
deleted-rivals-songs-from-users-ipods/ (accessed 31 May 2015).
Small, C. (1998). Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening. Hanover:
University Press of New England.
Sterne, J. (Ed.) (2011). The Sound Studies Reader. New York: Routledge.
Szendy, P. (2008). Listening, A History of our Ears. Trans. Charlotte Mandell. New York:
Fordham University Press.
Taylor, T. D. (2007). Beyond Exoticism: Western Music and the World. Durham, NC:
Duke University Press.
1
The Scream and Other Tales:
Listening for Detroit Radio History
with the Vertical File
Carleton Gholz
Figure 1.1 Mackey, R. (1971) Employee Sit-In Silences Radio Station for 3 Hours. 12th January. Used by permission of Detroit
Free Press
The Scream and Other Tales 15
Aural History
Listening in Detroit
For Douglas (1999), radio splits open the struggles over 20th-century media
consumption and production, throwing early media scholars preoccu-
pation with television into relief and allowing her readers to focus on
how radio interacted so significantly with the American imagination
(p. 20). Douglass history of that imaginative dialectic between radio
technology and its audiences maps well against Detroits regional radio
history. Conot (1974), for instance, points out that in the 1920s Detroit
had one of the first radio stations, WWJ (p. 226), while a college media
text by Hilmes (2014) remembers how populist demagogues like Father
Coughlin from the Detroit suburb of Royal Oak made national news
and directly impacted the way political voices made their way onto
the airwaves in the 1930s (pp. 1415). And starting in the 1940s and
taking off in the 1950s, black DJs became strong personalities on the
air and streets of Detroit, including Martha Jean, whose early career is
mentioned by Douglas (1999). In the 1960s and 1970s, Carson (2006)
reminds his readers that Detroit stations like WABX were on the cutting
edge of FM free form radio. But Detroit also has some unique features.
Detroits radio frequencies share a border with Canada, reminding us
that the emergence of radio in the United States is a transnational and
global story. My own parents, who grew up north and east of Detroit in
the border city of Port Huron, remember hearing Motown Records in the
1960s not from black DJs in Detroit, but white DJs in Canada broadcasting
from the Big 8 studios of CKLW (McNamara, 2004).
Perhaps most importantly, Detroit radio has a significant relationship
to black history and performance. As Barlow (1999) points out, Detroiter
Joe Louiss rematch victory over Max Schmeling in 1938 caused instant
jubilation across the country when it was carried on radio nation-
ally from New York City (pp. 4950). But even without the help of the
Brown Bomber, the Detroit area had one of the first black-owned radio
stations, as Cintron (1982) describes, in WCHB in nearby Inkster and, as
documented by Smith (1999), a robust, politically motivated black civic
and cultural movement that produced, amongst other things, Motown
Records. As I have described before (2009) and document below, in the
1960s and 1970s, black program directors, general managers, and on-air
talent pushed owners for increased control over management decisions
as well as content of stations like WJLB. The result of that radio rebellion
was that in the 1980s and 1990s, black DJs were key in disseminating
and establishing the sonic signature of contemporary electronic music
including disco, house, techno, and hip hop.
18 Carleton Gholz
Two interesting moments stand out in these early clippings. The first
is the new owners early struggles with the initial ethnic programming
of the station. John L. Booth, Sr. bought the station in 1940 and named
it after himself in 1941, when the station changed its call sign and
moved into the then Eaton, now Broderick, Tower that still stands on
Grand Circus Park in downtown Detroit. The tower has recently been
renovated into luxury apartments and the original studios destroyed.
Originally an AM station, a Detroit Free Press clipping (1941a) states
that WJLB began broadcasting on FM the same year, and, according
to notes and research by Cintron (1982), began its first broadcast
program oriented toward the Detroit metropolitan black community
in 1941, [with] the Interracial Goodwill Hour, hosted by Edward
R. Baker. WJLB was a truly modern station, with cutting edge facilities
and a progressive programming attitude indebted to the early days of
broadcasting and government regulations, like the Communications
Act of 1934 described by Hilmes (2014), which attempted to reform
early radios commercial paradigm. But struggles over management and
the programming mission arose from the start. In 1943, a year marked
by major race riots in Detroit, the stations WMBC-era commitment to
foreign language broadcasts began to be phased out (Detroit Free Press,
1943) even as the company was taken to court. The company was tem-
porarily banned for canceling programs which had been broadcasting
since the 1930s (Detroit Free Press, 1948). The suits were closed by the
spring of 1948 (HC, 1948).
The second harbinger moment from the early clippings is the issue
of automation. By the 1950s, Booth Broadcasting was applying for tele-
vision station licenses in multiple cities in Michigan including Detroit
and imagining how new computer-based technologies could help
increase efficiency in its radio operations (HC, 1952). In the fall of 1960,
staff announcers at the AM WJLB and sister FM station WMZK could see
the writing on the wall. A contract between the American Federation of
Television and Radio Artists, a part of the ALF-CIO, and the owners of
Booth Broadcasting was coming to an end with layoffs of announcers
to be replaced by automated equipment imminent (HC, 1960d). Local
newspapers later elaborated that the strike was over alleged speedup
practices and automation (HC, 1960c). An article the next day revealed
a further issue: seven announcers had been fired without severance pay
(HC, 1960b). A Detroit Free Press staff writer described the scene:
AFTRA was called in. Booth sued the union (Kirk, 1960). Weeks later,
the strike was still on (HC, 1960a). The culmination of the strike is absent
from the Hackley file, but the specter of automation would continue
to haunt the station. Nevertheless, the strike did not seem to affect the
stations bottom line or long-term prospects. In 1962, journalist Osgood
described WJLB as among the top five independent stations in the
nation in commercial sales for four years running (Osgood, 1962).
Programming and automation may have caused corporate hiccups for
WJLB in its early years but, according to the file, by the birth of the top
40 era, the station had solidified itself as key outlets for entertainment
and news.
Nichols who would later run for Mayor that would be called Buzz
the Fuzz (HC, 1971a) but was still on strike when the first broadcast
was to take place (HC, 1971b). By the next week, the strike was over,
and Nichols took calls while the Queen moderated (Kohn, 1971). WJLB
was not the only station plagued with labor strife during this period.
According to the clippings, there was an earlier strike at WGPR in
February of 1969 (Griffin, 1969) and in 1970, the National Association
of Black Media Producers (NABMP) had accused local broadcasters,
except for WCHB, WJLB, WGPR, and (Canadian) CKLW, of failing to
comply with the Communications Act of 1934 (Ingram, 1970). Local
radio and TV stations denied the accusation (Peterson, 1970).
What is most compelling about this post-Rebellion period in the
clippings file is the sense that these years in Detroit, especially for black
audiences, were not merely a time of tumult and strife but also politi-
cal and cultural emergence. Detroit was entering a postcolonial period,
soon to be solidified when Coleman A. Young became the first black
mayor of the City of Detroit in early 1974. Simultaneously, WCHB and
WJLB had been joined by WGPR and as evidenced by the clippings
in the file, competition for the citys black audience was robust. By
1973, Free Press writer Watson could confidently say, [Black radio]s
an institution that will probably be around as long as some folks sea-
son their string beans with hamhocks and others use salt (Watson,
1973). This would include programs dedicated to serious Black music
(Michigan Chronicle, 1974). During this era, young DJs like Donnie
Simpson would become teen hosts of local shows. Simpson had started
as a Teen Reporter at WJLB in 1970 (Michigan Chronicle, 1970a) and
would later become a national radio personality (Michigan Chronicle,
1989b). By 1977, John L. Booth II took over administrative respon-
sibility for the station and in February 1979 moved the station to
new studios on the 20th floor of the City National Bank Building, also
known as the Penobscot (HC, 1981c). According to one clipping, the
station was so independent of major label influence and other radio
networks that by 1979, major record labels like MCA were wondering if
there had been local payola involved (Griffin, 1979). WJLB had clearly
entered its own postcolonial period under Booth II and re-ingratiated
itself to the local community.
By 1980, internal marketing materials describe the Monday through
Saturday lineup at WJLB as Contemporary music and news and spe-
cial features geared to the sophisticated black adult. On Sunday, that
sophisticated programming turned towards Gospel/spiritual music,
church services, community affairs, and public service programming
22 Carleton Gholz
(HC, 1980b). That same year, the station was financially confident
enough to use raising money for local children as a promotional
device. The subject of a station sit-down strike less than a decade ear-
lier, Normal Miller, was now ensconced internally as management and
externally as its public persona. In a letter penned at the beginning of
a brochure for a night with the stars, Miller made sure to highlight
the connection between WJLBs values and the community: All of the
WJLB family extends a warm, heartfelt thanks to you for your partici-
pation. But more important than our thanks and appreciation is that of
the young people whose lives you have touched (HC, 1980a). Millers
note preceded John Booth II and Mayor Youngs proclamation, as well
as ads from national companies like Motown Records, A&M Records,
CBS Records, and local companies like Simpsons Wholesale record
shop in Detroit and Ami Distributors Corp. in nearby Livonia. The air
staff or Super Stokers during this moment were listed as J. Michael
McKay, John Edwards, Martha Jean, Claude Young, Lynn Tolliver, and
Reuben Yabuku.
The stations apparent stability and success did not come without spo-
radic and drastic personnel changes and ongoing struggles over labor
amongst other larger industrial and technological changes in radio. On
December 1, 1980, WJLB went to 97.9 FM (HC, 1981c). By May 1981,
new DJs had been added to the mix, including Keith Bell and Claude
Young. Martha Jean moved to the noon hour (HC, 1981g). The station
emphasized its efforts to meet the needs and interests of [the] Detroit
metropolitan black community, including religious programs overseen
by the Queen, editorials by Jim Ingrim and Carl Rowan, a talk show by
Sid McCoy, and even a show called Labor Looks at the Issues, hosted
by Tom Turner, President of the Detroit chapter of the AFL-CIO (HC,
1981c). But the Queens regular noon slot was eventually moved to a far
less inspiring 5 am6 am slot. Cintron (1982) marks this key moment in
the history of the station:
[WJLB] has its own music researchers on staff to compliment the pro-
gram director, and though the station acknowledges the data provided
by Arbitron and other similar service it has its own market research-
ers and other personnel who do nothing but call and survey listeners.
The result is a computerized play list where each record is dictated.
This computerization is quite unique. Most black radio stations in
Detroit rely solely on the research and creativity of the program
director and the input of the respective disc jockeys.
The 1980s census reported what many knew already: Detroits black
population had soared. Marketing material from the Hackley file attests
to the influence of black audiences in the Greater Detroit area which,
according to market maps, spread beyond Detroits Wayne County
into Oakland and Macomb counties to the north, and Livingston and
Washtenaw counties to the west:
Reach! To get it all in Metro Detroit you need The Market within the
Market that 63% Black Detroit the WJLB FM 98 Listener! Latest
1980 U.S Census figures show Detroits Black population to be more
than 758,939 strong. You dont have Metro Detroit covered if you
dont have the powerful reach of Detroits Black Contemporary station
WJLB FM 98 (HC, 1981e).
One of them is the piano playing dee jay Jack Surrell who performed
and curated records in Detroit from the early 1950s through the 1960s.
He did a tour on WJLB in the mid-1960s and died in 2003 (May, 2003).
Another is the Queen herself who, after leaving WJLB, would start her
own radio station in Detroit WQBH and broadcast through the 1990s,
dying in early 2000 (Kiska and Hurt, 2000). But the mysterious Charles
Electrifying Mojo Johnsons file seems singular in noticing journalists
attempts to understand what draws radio audiences to their chosen,
ethereal, heroes. Included in the clippings is the extended profile by
then Free Press writer W. Kim Heron while Mojo was still at WGPR in the
fall of 1981 (Heron, 1981), numerous clippings by Jim McPharlin includ-
ing a short piece announcing his imminent move to WJLB in the summer
of 1982 (McFarlin, 1982), a feature from Detroits then main alternative
paper the Metro Times (Borey, 1982), a Michigan State University law
students fan dedication to Mojo (Wofsy, 1983), and consistent check-
ins on Mojos job status deep in to the 1990s by Michigan Chronicle
writer Steve Holsey.
Mojos moment at WJLB had been precipitated by transitions in local
programming. WDRQ went on the air in early 1982 with a focus on
continuous music and directly challenged WJLB for leading ratings.
A number of clippings from the file foreground the battle in the market. In
1982, Norman Miller was replaced as General Manager on WJLB by Verna
Green. Michigan Chronicle writer Nina Eman drew attention to Greens lack
of experience: Asked about Ms. Greens lack of broadcast credentials (she
has none), Ms. [Carol] Prince [WJLB representative] replied that the new
station manager was selected primarily for her management ability. We
needed an organizational specialist (Eman, 1982). Throughout Detroit,
radio stations were changing formats and call signs. Patrick Gilbert of the
Detroit Monitor attempted to describe all the shifts, summarizing WJLBs as
personality emphasis, 1982; shift from black to urban progressive with
frequency shift from 1400 AM, 1980 (Gilbert, 1982). James Alexander
joined the staff as program director in the fall and in November of 1982,
Green and WJLB cancelled all church services on Sunday (Walker-Tyson,
1982). By 1983 the station was playing more music. Local newspapers
played up the competition in their pages (McFarlin, 1983).
The rise of new stations like WDRQ as well as continuing competi-
tion from WLBS pushed WJLB to buy out its on-air competition from
WGPR. What was significant about Mojo was that he was touching a
black audience but also, local journalists noted, a crossover audience
of suburban whites. As Free Press writer Gary Graff reminded his readers,
The Scream and Other Tales 25
It was the areas black oriented stations that took the new music styles
first, and it was the Electrifying Mojo first at WGPR-FM and now at
WJLB-FM who exposed commercial radio to white acts like the B-52s,
Talking Heads and Lene Lovich while the album rockers stuck with Led
Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, et al. (Graff, 1983).
By 1985 WJLB was using a new slogan declaring itself the home of
strong songs and accompanied this language with the image of black
male bodybuilders flexing on TV advertisements in response to WDRQ
(McFarlin, 1985). But the competition switched formats and Mojo was
sent packing at the peak of his powers. In 1988, morning talk personal-
ity John Mason from WJLB had become the most popular on-air dee-
jay for Michigan Chronicle readers behind Rosetta Hines from WJZZ and
Clarence Foody Rome at WGPR. Writer Steve Holsey noted though
the irony that Mojo still came in fourth.
It is interesting to note that Mojo, who left radio in 87, still managed
to get enough votes to secure fourth place. Detroiter Nazrine White,
wrote, Mojo is missing from the airwaves but he will never be
forgotten. She added, I miss the Prince songs! (Holsey, 1988).
In 1989, Mason would win the survey, receiving a plaque from Holsey
(Michigan Chronicle, 1989a). Just a few years later, Holsey would com-
ment on Mojos departure from another local station in 1992, stating
that Mojo is unique, an oasis in the desert of basic radio sameness
(Holsey, 1992). Mojo would continue to DJ on and off at a number of
local stations through the 1990s before vanishing from the Mothership
in which he claimed to have been brought. Like the Queen before him,
Mojo had mixed entertainment with a powerful appeal to the imagina-
tion, and for a few years WJLB had been a willing collaborative outlet.
But as the archive notes, the story of black radio in Detroit has always
been a search for talent and the tension between that talent and the
bottom lines of market share. Despite his extensive fan base, Mojo was
not immune to those forces.
The Hackley archive breaks off in the late 1990s with only a few clippings
from the 2000s. By January 1995, the Michigan Chronicle could proudly
report to its readers that WJLB had beaten out WJR as the No. 1 radio sta-
tion in the Detroit radio market with adults 12-plus (Michigan Chronicle,
26 Carleton Gholz
The Queens style is a cross between Dear Abby, Prophet Jones, and
Wolfman Jack. She gives advice, prays, preaches, and has played
The Scream and Other Tales 29
The newspaper columnist Dear Abby and rock n roll radio wildman
Wolfman Jack will likely be familiar to readers. But Prophet Jones was a
regional voice with tremendous influence during the time leading up to
the rebellion. He is largely unknown outside of Detroit and rarely dis-
cussed in Detroit histories. According to historian Tim Retzloff, Joness
popularity as well as his ambivalent sexuality was much discussed and
talked about at the time (Retzloff, 2002). The complete absence of
Jones or for that matter DJ Cent from the Hackley vertical file then
is a significant aporia in the collection and points to the need to queer
Detroits media histories. Following Retzloff as well as self-proclaimed
archival queer Charles Morris (Morris, 2006), I remind the reader that
archival work is an active practice and the story I offer here is meant to
create the grounds for and call into being such work. In Detroit, at least,
we need to read such creative research so that we might still tune in to
such fresh ideas on the radio.
References
Arnold, D. (1960) Robots Move in on Radio. Detroit Free Press. November 13. p. 16A.
Arnold, J. (2008) The Telecommunications Act of 1996 and Diversity: The
Effects of Television Broadcasting in the Public Interest. Journal of Mass
Communications, 2 (2), pp. 129.
Bailey, M. (2013) Butch Queens Up in Pumps: Gender, Performance, and Ballroom
Culture in Detroit. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.
Barlow, W. (1999) Voice Over: The Making of Black Radio. Philadelphia, PA: Temple
University Press.
Borey, S. (1982) Mojo Takes Off. Metro Times. October 28November 11.
Brevard, L. (2001) A Biography of E. Azalia Hackley, 18671922. Lewiston, NY:
Edward Mellen Press.
Brogan, M. (1970a) WJLB Asks Court to Bar Pickets Pressure Tactics. Detroit
News. December 17.
Brogan, M. (1970b) Picketing of Home Barred. Detroit News. December 18.
Brown, N. (1970) Firing of Black Sparks Walkout. Michigan Chronicle. December 19.
Carson, D. (2000) Rockin Down the Dial: The Detroit Sound of Radio. Troy, MI:
Momentum Books.
Carson, D. (2006) Grit Noise and Revolution. Ann Arbor, MI: University of
Michigan Press.
Cintron, E. (1982) Bell Broadcasting Company: Black Owned and Operated Radio
in Detroit, 19541981. Masters thesis. Detroit: Wayne State University.
Cockrel, K. (1975) Cockrels Comment. Michigan Chronicle. November 8.
Conot, R. (1974) American Odyssey. New York: William Morrow.
30 Carleton Gholz
Wendlend, M. (1971) Pact Puts WJLB Back on Air. Detroit News. January 12.
Wittenberg, H. (1970) WJLBs Striking Blacks Go after Union Backing. December 16.
Wofsy, N. (1983) Mojos Magic Keeps Workin and Workin. Detroit Free Press.
January 2.
Woodford, F. (1965) Parnassus on Main Street. Detroit: Wayne State University
Press.
2
On Tape1: Cassette Culture in
Edinburgh and Glasgow Now
Kieran Curran
Introduction
Susan throws in intermittent whoos and come ons into the mix,
exhorting the rather stereotypically composed noise music crowd (mainly
darkly clad in jeans mainly wearing plaid shirts, mainly in their late
20s/early 30s and male) to join in. They look on detachedly, awkwar
and slightly sullen; predictably, they dont get involved. The humour-
ous intervention of the popular cultural sphere into a scene akin to
Chris Attons popular avant-garde (Atton, 2012) exposed some of
the generic taboos (i.e. an almost fanatical devotion to no melody!)
of improvised music. Yet the experience of their live performance
and the sense of tension, of incipient laughter, and of the genuinely
unexpected was palpable.
I had spoken to Stuart and Susan about cassette culture in Glasgow
months prior to this, and Stuarts record label Total Vermin has been
an aesthetically astute user of cassettes as a medium of release. Why
(and, indeed, how) would you commemorate the idiosyncrasy of their
performance in a live context? And why would you particularly wish to
do so on tape? What was the appeal of cassettes to those engaged in the
DIY improvised music world?
Background
Most human beings adjust, because they must, to altered, even radi-
cally altered conditions. This is already marked in the first genera-
tion of such shifts. By the second and third generations the initially
enforced conditions are likely to have become if not the new social
norms for at many levels of intensity the conditions may still be
resented at least the new social perspective, its everyday common
sense. (Williams, 1983, p. 187)
Cassettes were utter shit ... Cassette store day should involve a mass
smashing of the pieces of shit which are left in circulation, it would
be carthartic [sic] for me, I know that much.
In one of my first interviews for this essay, Ali Robertson one half of
Edinburgh improv group Usurper, and mainstay of long-standing tape/
CD-r label and promoter Giant Tank found the resurgence of interest
in tapes to be a bit odd:
I know a lot of younger folk are putting stuff out on tape, and I find
that a bit peculiar. Somebody of my age6 has the nostalgia of dubbing
tapes, or taping songs off the radio, and the next generation dont
have that ... I wonder: is it just a fashion thing? I spoke to my mate
and said Im doing this interview about tape culture, and he said: just
say you want your album put in Urban Outfitters.
Were living through these times of just trying to squeeze every last
bit of monetary worth out of stuff. And thats like that shit Tapes,
hey! Lets see if we can milk this!
Similarly, Ali spoke of this appeal as a seller of tapes after gigs and at
record fairs; their novelty and rarity value make them easier to market:
That was their first release and it was an interesting process because
they wanted to use completely sustainable materials, They spent two
weeks trying to find the right kind of paper because the girls were
really adamant and we were into that. They gave us the artwork, and it
was really beautiful and we wanted to make them something special.
Graeme and Beks relationship in its early stages was bound up with
tape culture and sending compilations to each other the roots of the
On Tape 39
This leads to the appeal of the specific object of the cassette itself. Good
Press is a comic book/zine shop and small gallery space, situated in one
part of the iconic Mono store in the Merchant City area of Glasgow city
centre. They also sell a small quantity of cassettes. The gallery hosted an
exhibition called A History Of, which invited attendees to make their
own mix tapes in the space itself, and to add their own specific art-work
(or not, depending on taste). It was a success, and somehow timely. A
core of what I spoke about with Matt and Jess had to do with the cas-
sette and cassette sleeve design as objects:
appeal. Matt spoke of his lack of interest in nostalgia, and hinted at the
unpopularity of tapes amongst others:
Adam Todd of Edinburgh indie pop band The Spook School had regu-
lar exposure to tapes being played in our Dads car, but never really
made mixtapes, or had mixtapes made for me by friends his pre-
dominant mode of music consumption was through compact disc. Yet
the cheapness, portability and ease of tape recording technology was a
core aspect of their early music as well as the unique and appealing
sound of live drums, or overdriven, lo-fi, in the red guitar recorded
to tape. Of course, tapes can present problems as music carriers
finicky tape players eating cassettes,8 their deterioration in sound
quality over time, and the almost auto-destruction of poorly made
tapes snapping or unfurling. Yet this was certainly a constituent part
of its appeal. David Keenan a critical historian of early Industrial and
Noise music (Englands Hidden Reverse), regular contributor to The Wire
and record store/label owner (Glasgows Volcanic Tongue) noted the
specific utility of the format of the cassette for noise music. Cassettes
are unpredictable as they are, and manifestly different sonically with
every play:
Noise music can actually make play of accidentals ... pop music, or
indie music, does not embrace accidentals its very very deliberate.
But the cassette is perfect for noise music the medium sounds like
the music it was being used for.
When talking with Ali Robertson, I asked about the combination of ideal-
ism and craftiness involved in tape production and the practical nature of
the cheapness of the format (a point Ill return to later):
I wouldnt say that tape is the perfect format for everything Ive ever
recorded. I put stuff on tape and I hear the nice warm hiss ... but that
drowns out the miniscule click sounds Im making ... so sometimes
its gotta be a CD. I was going to say sometimes its gotta be vinyl
no times has it gotta be vinyl. Its just too expensive.
On Tape 41
For others such as Zully Adler,9 an American artist in his early 20s, recently
based in Glasgow as a postgraduate student and head of the label Goaty
Tapes the effect of the contemporary resurgent interest in tapes would be
economically minimal. Still, Zully thinks initiatives such as Cassette Store
Day could ultimately benefit so-called mom n pop record stores:
A tape is just a tape, its a commodity, and Urban Outfitters has every
right to sell them as anywhere else if thats gonna bring in an extra
couple hundred extra dollars, by all means ... but at the end of the
day, whos really making money on Cassette Store Day? Its that indie
record store thats on the precipice of bankruptcy as it is.
Zully was also somewhat critical of the notion that the whole enterprise
was necessarily imbued with youthful nostalgia for an imagined past:
and revisit them, and the ones who are old enough have used them
straight through, pretty continuously.
People want something in their hands that they can hold, they want
a relationship with the artist again and I think thats why thats
come back. But again, historically, noise and avant-garde under-
ground music have never stopped using cassettes. Weve stocked cas-
settes in our shop from day one ... cassettes have never gone away,
and they never will, because they have something specific to them
that is impossible to replicate using any other medium.
A lot of pals also put stuff out on cassettes, sourced from Tapeline ...
there was quite a wide range of things happening. Noise, psychedelic
On Tape 43
Ive definitely put out my fair share of power electronics, and extremely
abstract improvised music ... but I would say the core of the tapes that
Ive released revolves around more eccentric takes on popular genres ...
The bands that I usually release there are all sorts of tag-lines for
them you know, loners, outsiders. And of course these people arent
loners or outsiders I talk to them pretty regularly. The point being
something attracts me to people working in these intimate settings,
and the domestic qualities of the sound that can be transmitted
through the music.
of lonely ... Theres something very sad and moving about a lot of
industrial noise music. I find it emotional very emotional.
I dont think its the inaccessibility of the medium itself that draws
people to it. I think the medium is more of a conduit, its not an end
in itself ... its everything around the tape that gets people going ...
I get asked all the time: why tapes? And I dont ever have a good
46 Kieran Curran
J: I feel like theres a lot of people that have worked with Good Press
online, where its gone from Yeah well stock books, and then you
find stuff out about their cultures. You can find a lot about it and get
interested in it.
M: Our online shop and our website is really key to us, Were keen
on it. When we set up the press we wanted to make sure there are
photographs of everything we do online. Theres nothing worse than
coming across a website where theres no pictures.
If someone uploads it to a file sharing site, and that site makes most
of their money from advertising pornography. If someone visits that
site to download my work, then the people who are profiting from
that are pornographers.
Ive got thousands of CDs and tapes and records, and Im thinking
I dont know what to put on. Im living in a library here. And its a
sense of too much choice and the internet is just too much choice
isnt it? I cannae deal with the overload I quite like getting things
at a slow pace, receiving things.
Id read about it, obsess about it, 3 years later I would find one thing ...
and just devote all my time to this one thing for ages, and really get
to know it. Whereas now I meet people who are like *beep* I know
it, *beep* give me something else.
Part of the fun thing about cassettes was the effort you had to put in
to put together knowledge it was initiatory (Keenans emphasis) on
a genuine level. You had to write away to these unknown addresses,
you had to order through catalogues Every discovery was a mas-
sive thrill; it was a massive commitment ... it was life-changing.
Googling something and reading a wikipedia entry does not make
you an expert, and has no initiatory effect whatsoever.
Youre always going to get bands putting out tape, because of the
simple fact that putting out your own record is way too expensive,
putting out fifty tapes is not.
This sentiment was echoed across all of the interviews for this piece.
Soft Powers attachment to the tape format has, as earlier stated, an aes-
thetic and a romantic dimension to it. But it is also definitely pragmatic,
due to the relatively cheap production costs in comparison to vinyl,
especially on limited runs and thus more profitable for the bands
50 Kieran Curran
I dont want to sound utopian here ... but their musical project is one
that isnt tethered directly to the imperatives of making money. There
are things they want to do and there are different ways they want to do
it. Sometimes they can cash in a little bit, and sometimes they wont
whether the timings not right, and whether they just dont feel like it.
None of the people (apart from David Keenan) I spoke to who work with
tapes and work in what you could broadly term the music industries
do so for their living wage all have other day jobs. Adam Todd is a full-
time student as well as a musician he also performs stand-up comedy.
Adam Neil works in a bar, as well as promoting Unpop; Ali Robertson
was a long-term member of staff at the now-defunct Edinburgh record
shop Avalanche. Thus, amateur pragmatism is a core characteristic
of tapes appeal tapes are relatively popular for Arnott, they sell.
Robertsons goal is always to break even, after having had negative
experiences of losing heavy amounts of money by self-financing tours to
the US. There is also the option of seeking state subsidy, even in times of
apparent widespread austerity. However, this brings about its own prob-
lems. As Robertson identifies, management speak does not necessarily
come fluently to artists:
Were trying to do a tour in the States ... So were looking into what
sorts of funding are available. And you know, its all about Career
Development. The language used is always about a return on your
investment, and its impact on your career. Well, its not really a
career ... What return do you expect on this? Smiles from the
audience, hopefully.
Leave your safety gear at the door; only the most spunky, agile, and
dauntless will prevail. This narrative is little more than an updated
version of social Darwinism, but when phrased seductively, it is
sufficiently appealing to those who are up for the game (Ross, 2009,
p. 45).
living standards for practitioners. It frees artists from the rigidity of the
division of labour In a communist society, there are no painters but
at most people who engage in painting among other activities (Marx
and Engels, 1973, p. 71) yet, bleakly minus the egalitarian organisa-
tion of society, and added market competition.
Conclusion
The reason cassettes are here? People who listen to noise and experi-
mental music are the contrariest fuckers out there. Who else would
listen to this shit?
On Tape 53
Notes
1. The title On Tape references the eponymous cult indie pop hit of 1988 by
The Pooh Sticks.
2. Do-It-Yourself is a term bound up with perceived independence and
self-sufficiency within cultural production, and often has connotations
of authenticity and opposition to the mainstream. This is perhaps surpris-
ing, given the terms parallel, non-musical history as the British synonym
of home improvement. Two key philosophical implications inhere in the
concept. On the one hand, it can serve to propagate the image of an isolated,
neoliberal subject toiling at home in isolation whilst dreaming of making it
big due to her individual effort (or exceptionalism) work all day and make
your magnum opus at night. Yet, contrastingly, there are other, more uto-
pian connotations of active local and trans-global collaboration and creative
freedom DIY culture has always promoted the maxims of anti-elitism
and, with new technology, they are truer than ever (Spencer, 2008, p. 332).
Alas, this does not mean they are owed a living (paraphrasing Crass), and
practitioners of this milieu often enjoy scant remuneration.
3. The commercial high-water mark of the cassette is way back in 1988
(1.4 billion units sold), reminding us of the relatively recent period of its
market dominance.
4. To clarify, a myriad of devices (essentially modelled on the Walkmans tem-
plate) by a vast array of different electronics companies reinforced and
proliferated this medium of personalised listening.
5. Interestingly, for a brief period before the explosion in digital downloading,
sales of cassette were larger than sales of vinyl.
6. Ali is in his mid-30s.
7. Soft Power tape releases are often accompanied by an MP3 download code,
allowing for a listening space to be constructed digitally, whilst the cassette
can function purely as an ornament.
8. Memorably referenced by the hip-hop artist Nas on his classic 1994 LP
Illmatic: Never put me in your box if your shit eats tapes. Related to this,
a professor of music I spoke to about the format pointed out that the key
technology [for tapes] was actually the pencil you inserted in a tapes hole
to turn loose tapes back to order.
9. In the often oppositional positioning of Edinburgh vs Glasgow within
everyday Scottish culture, the sedateness of Edinburghs more middle class
music scene is juxtaposed with Glasgows more edgy, vibrant expressive
world. As Ali Robertson commented in our interview: we live in Tartan
Disneyland right here ... in Glasgow, because they dont attract as many
tourists, they dont have to market themselves as shortbread city. On this
note, it seems fitting to state that Zully and I conducted this conversation
sitting in a dingy doorway on a rainy autumns evening on Renfield Lane
sandwiched between two key venues in Glasgows DIY music scene (Stereo
and The Old Hairdressers, respectively).
10. A medium-sized town in Fife (north of the Firth of Forth from Edinburgh),
nowadays acting as a sort of commuter belt area for the city of Edinburgh;
has produced notable pop bands such as Big Country in the past, and
Miracle Strip in the present.
54 Kieran Curran
11. Music sociologist Kyle Devine has written fascinatingly on the ethical impli-
cations of forms of musical dissemination on the environment in a forth-
coming article for Popular Music entitled Decomposed A Political Ecology
of Music.
Bibliography
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Popular Avant-garde. Popular Music, 31:3.
Benjamin, W. (2000) Illuminations. London: Verso.
Calder Williams, E. (2011) Combined and Uneven Apocalypse. London: Zero Books.
Chambers, I. (1990) A Miniature History of the Walkman. New Formations: A Journal
of Culture/Theory/Politics, No. 11, pp. 14.
Devine, K. (2015) Decomposed A Political Ecology of Music. Popular Music.
Forthcoming.
Fisher, M. (2014) Ghosts of my Past. London: Zero Books.
Jameson, F. (1990) Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. London:
Verso Books.
Long, J. (2013) Why Weve Created Cassette Store Day and Why Its Not Just
Hipster Nonsense. NM. Available at: http://www.nme.com/blogs/nme-blogs/
why-weve-created-cassette-store-day-and-why-its-not-just-hipster-nonsense
Marx, K. and Engels, F. (1973) On Literature and Art. L. Baxandall and S. Morawski
(Editors). St Louis/Milwaukee: Telos Press.
McGuigan, J. (2009) Cool Capitalism. London: Pluto.
Michaels, S. (2013) Inaugural International Cassette Store Day Announced for
September. The Guardian. Available at: http://www.theguardian.com/music/2013/
jul/16/international-cassette-store-day-announced-september-2013
Noys, B. (2014) Malign Velocities Accelerationism and Capitalism. London: Zero
Books.
Prior, N. (2010) The Rise of the New Amateurs Popular Music, Digital
Technology, and the Fate of Cultural Production. In L. Grindstaff, J. R. Hall and
L. Ming-Cheng (eds.), The Handbook of Cultural Sociology, 398407. London:
Routledge.
Reynolds, S. (2010) Retromania. London: Faber & Faber.
Ross, A. (2009) Nice Work if You Can Get It. New York: NYU Press.
Spencer, A. (2008) DIY The Rise of Lo-Fi Culture. London: Marion Boyars.
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Winston, B. (1998) Media, Technology and Society A History: From the Telegraph to
the Internet. London: Routledge.
3
Radio in Transit: Satellite
Technology, Cars, and the
Evolution of Musical Genres
Jeffrey Roessner
***
Contemporary listening spaces are generally premised on the fans abil-
ity to define his or her own playlists for private enjoyment. From online
services such as Spotify to the ultra-portable MP3 player, for example,
listeners now choose what they want to hear, when they want to hear it,
with technology individualizing the audio experience and breaking down
most spatial constraints. This is a privatized contemporary experience:
ultra-portability and the ubiquitous white earbuds or more recently,
the bulkier, 1970s-throwback cans that attempt both to mark a rejec-
tion of Apples iPod and to signal another level of consumer indulgence,
with the priciest headphones easily costing hundreds of dollars.
Regardless of the style or price of headphones, though, the delivery
system ensures sonic isolation. Seemingly no locale is an inappropriate
listening space while youre consuming your music privately: walking
on the street, riding the bus, lounging in a cafe, or even dining.
Given this contemporary context, the car may seem a ridiculously
antiquated vehicle in which to deliver music. The automobile is bulky
and at least a semi-public space if youre playing the radio with the
windows down or sharing the car with other passengers (Bull, 2003,
p. 367). And with radio, theres always the sense that no matter how
alone you feel, there are others out there tuned in, partaking of the
same auditory communion. How different that experience is from what
is offered by the slim, ever-shrinking and highly portable MP3 player or
smart phone. With the move toward privatizing even the most public
of spaces, it is no surprise that automobile makers now boast multiple
ways of playing a personal music collection in the car. If you want to
ditch your clunky CDs and their perennially lost and broken cases,
youve got plenty of options: from plug-and-play technology for your
Radio in Transit 57
By 1999, the law had resulted in dramatic changes: Of the 4992 sta-
tions in the 268 ranked markets almost half were controlled by a
superduopoly, that is, they [were] owned by a company that [had]
three or more stations in the market (Polgreen, 1999, p. 9). The result
of such consolidated ownership was a staggering decrease in radio diver-
sity. By the early 2000s, for example, radio giant Clear Channel had
acquired more than 1,200 stations in the United States, which took in
more than $3 billion, or 20% of the industry dollar volume, in 2001
(Garofalo, 2007, p. 14). Noting that radio has always had to balance
commercial interests with audience desires, Lydia Polgreen argues that,
nonetheless, it used to be the case that if listeners didnt like what they
heard on a station, if it was monotonous and repetitive, they could tune
away. Now there is just less choice out there (1999, p. 10). In fact, that
very lack of choice set the stage for the birth of satellite radio, predicated
on delivering more options than could be found on the increasingly
squeezed bandwidth and playlists of over-the-air stations run by media
conglomerates.
Initially satellite radio services were operated by two companies on two
competing systems: Sirus and XM receivers. Despite various attempts to
differentiate themselves, and in the context of serious fiscal challenges,
both systems functioned as largely commercial-free subscription ser-
vices in opposition to over-the-air radio. Merging into one company in
2008, SiriusXM in its current iteration now must also distinguish itself
from the increasing competition of online services striving to generate
ever-more-personalized playlists from vast catalogs of music (Bruno and
Tucker, 2008). From its inception, then, satellite radio has been branded
and marketed against the backdrop of other delivery platforms. Indeed,
such pressures for market share illuminate the approach satellite has
taken to everything from genre and format construction to audience
identification and presenting, or deejaying, itself.
Given the rapid evolution of contemporary listening habits, satel-
lite radio makes a major bid for subscribers by exposing the fact that
over-the-air radio, with its constricted playlists, might not reflect the
identities of some listeners. As David Hendy (2000) notes, If it is true that
through radio we hear what we are, it is also true that to some extent we
are what we hear (p. 214). He goes on to suggest the ways that radio may
exaggerate or even distort certain tastes, or notions of identity, rather
than simply reflecting them (p. 215). The situation leaves listeners
with several options: agree that the identity offered by a station rep-
resents them (I only listen to Froggy 99.7), channel surf to maintain
the sense of autonomy (No single station can capture me), or seek an
Radio in Transit 59
Classical (2)
Christian (3) 3%
4%
Hip-Hop (3)
4%
R&B (4)
5%
Dance/Electronica (6)
8%
Rock (29)
39%
Country (7)
10%
Jazz/Standards (8)
11%
Pop (12)
16%
songs. In an average two-hour episode, Van Zandt offers over thirty min-
utes of commentary (p. 583). Featuring wry observations, jokes, and artful
selection of songs, the Tom Petty show Buried Treasures, in fact, became
so popular that it now has its own dedicated channel. Such develop-
ments suggest a return to the idea that a radio show has a distinctive
character and that you might be tempted to make time to listen. This
presenter-driven programming is also a revolt against the car radio as
background noise, there to provide a steady stream of fairly predict-
able sonic wallpaper for your life. The re-emergence of the deejay as
a distinctive character functions as part of satellites anti-commercial
aesthetic: not beholden to a single, restricted demographic profile and
the advertisers who want to reach it, SiriusXM has the luxury to offer
spontaneous talk by presenters.
Revitalizing the presenter, moving toward openness in format, and
destabilizing genre categories, satellite radio evokes a clear historical
echo. At its advent in the late 1950s, Top 40 AM radio aimed squarely
at the burgeoning teen pop market. By the mid-1960s, however, the
once-radical Top 40 format had worn itself thin, with its frenzied patter
by clock-obsessed deejays and relentless spinning of a narrow range of
hits (Douglas, 1999, p. 254). In that context, FM intervened with a radi-
cal alternative: deejays who were able to set their playlists, often full of
album tracks too long and too obscure for AM stations, and who could
spend air-time talking to listeners about mature subjects. In a sense,
as the counter-culture came of age, so did its taste for both music and
political/social commentary. While young teens still followed the manic
hijinks of Top 40 stations, their slightly older brothers and sisters were
awakening to a darker reality, involving issues of war, lack of civil rights,
and womens inequality (Fisher, 2007, pp. 1345). In this sense, FM deliv-
ered the soundtrack to the countercultural revolution and of course,
it didnt hurt that FM was far superior to AM in sound quality as well.
In contemporary culture, satellite radio hearkens back to that era of
revolution as it breaks with FM formatting. As in the 1960s, it is a new
mode of delivery this time in the form of satellite broadcast that has
allowed for radical shifts in radio practice. With the means to deliver
not just one channel but literally hundreds, SiriusXM has the ability to
multicast to reach relatively diverse audiences. In this sense the goal of
satellite radio is diametrically opposed to commercial radio: rather than
trying to reach a narrowly defined audience with a single channel, try to
reach as many audiences as you can with as many channels as you can
broadcast. Replicating the great moment of freedom at the emergence
of FM in the 1960s, satellite radio thus promises an escape both from
66 Jeffrey Roessner
motoring. This separation from the environment will likely find its
ultimate expression in self-driving automobiles, which given program-
ming to assess the risks of various roadway scenarios may ultimately
even threaten to take ethical decisions away from drivers (Lin, 2013). It
is within this context that listening and being entertained while driving
assume crucial roles, both for marketers and consumers.
Although many of the physical and psychological associations of driv-
ing itself such as mobility, freedom, adventure are being constricted,
these qualities are simultaneously being reconstituted as an aesthetic
experience of the interior space of the automobile.16 Karin Bijsterveld
(2010), for example, offers a compelling analysis of the cars sonic space,
engineered precisely to distinguish brands and convey specific emo-
tional resonance to consumers (p. 202). In its current design, she argues,
the automobile functions as a sanctuary from the assaults of the every-
day world and provides a personal acoustic cocoon: in so doing, the car
may provide a last bastion of privacy as it affords you control over
your acoustic environment (p. 191). And such auditory privacy and
control not only defines the interior space of the car, but also consti-
tutes an experience of personally possessed time for harried or bored
drivers/listeners (Bull, 2003, p. 365). For satellite radio subscribers, the
wide swath of channels undergirds this sense of power, since they get
to choose, fairly specifically, the type of programming and music that
serves their needs in the moment.
Still, along with recuperating a sense of control and privacy, satellite
radio simultaneously proffers a space of imaginative freedom and explo-
ration. While driving the car itself has become a more regimented and
controlled experience, the options for listening re-open possibilities for
discovery. Describing the appeal of satellite programming, deejay Jim
Ladd a refugee from over-the-air FM sings the praise of free form
presenting on SiriusXM: What was once a creative and rebellious art
form has become a boring, repetitive machine. Rock is supposed to be
fun. Its supposed to be unpredictable. And its supposed to be a little dan-
gerous. And SiriusXM is re-revolutionizing rock radio by giving me more
freedom than Ive ever had (Pham, 2012). Ladd here succinctly captures
the emotional charge packaged in a car equipped with satellite radio:
it is fun, unpredictable, and slightly dangerous, infused with a sense of
freedom and revolution. Such qualities emerge partly in SiriusXMs chal-
lenge to other platforms: the reinvention of genres and formats, the exten-
sive playlists, the deejays supplying context, humor, and deep passion for
the music these elements, and the emotional connections they invoke,
allow both the car and the radio to hearken back to a more radical past.
68 Jeffrey Roessner
Notes
1. A more recent study of automobile listening puts the SiriusXM audience at
18 percent, versus 67 percent for broadcast radio (Hill, 2014).
2. A recent Edison Research and Triton Digital study further revealed that In
2014, 26% of mobile phone users have connected devices to a vehicle, either
physically or via Bluetooth, up from 21% in 2013 (Webster, 2014).
3. The most ominous sign for AM/FM broadcasters surely must be whats hap-
pening with the next generation of listeners. A recent Edison study based on
one-day audio diaries reports that teenagers aged 1317 spend on average
64 minutes per day listening to streaming audio programs, versus 54 minutes
per day on over-the-air or streaming AM/FM radio (Hill, 2014).
4. In 2014, the chief financial officer of SiriusXM, David Frear, ruled out expan-
sion to European or other world markets given the prohibitive start-up costs
as well as the lack of the larger, comparatively more homogenous culture of
the United States (Forrester, 2014).
5. For a thorough treatment of genre issues and an insightful survey of the
critical literature, see Fabian Holts Genres in Popular Music (2007).
6. The list reflects content on Siriusxm.com as of October 8, 2014. For the pur-
poses of this study, I have used SiriusXM radio and the All Access package.
Satellite broadcasts are also available on two other models of radio Sirius
and XM but the differences between the music offerings are slight. And
of course, other listening packages are available with fewer channels; how-
ever, I am interested in the categorization of the broadest number of music
channels, which the All Access package offers.
Radio in Transit 69
7. A further irony: the Party category, with eleven channels, exists only
online. One imagines thousands of house parties hosted by a whole under-
ground of urban, tech-savvy young people, with no cars, raving through
the night, listening to the classics, oldies, punk everything that has been
shoveled into this format.
8. See Taylor and Morins Pew study Forty Years after Woodstock, a Gentler
Generation Gap (2009), which reports that rock is the favorite genre of
every age group in the U.S. except those over 65.
9. As Deleuze and Guattari make clear, a fragmented system can nonetheless
appeal to a larger sense of an organic perhaps circular or spiral whole,
while a true multiplicity has neither subject nor object, only determina-
tions, magnitudes, and dimensions that cannot increase in number without
the multiplicity changing in nature (the laws of combination therefore
increase in number as the multiplicity grows) (1987, p. 8).
10. Fabian Holt places these developments in a larger philosophical context
when he contends that The erosion of cultural hierarchies and the massive
increase in the circulation of cultural products have created new forms of
categorical complexity and given rise to critical reactions against the large
philosophical systems of Western modernity (2007, p. 6).
11. In Simon Friths discussion of genre function, he notes the competing and
sometimes contradictory work done by genre as employed by artists, record
companies, record stores, radio stations, music writers, and fans in other
words, those who are playing, selling, and listening to music (1996, pp.
889). In the case of satellite radio, we can see the complication of broad
genre distinctions as an attempt to serve those fans/audiences who were
unhappily affiliated with industry offerings. More cynically, we might see
satellite as largely catering to the tastes of older audiences (particularly
rockers) in whom the contemporary music scene has lost interest.
12. I dont want to suggest that such proliferation of categories is a new develop-
ment, but rather that technology has allowed it to happen in a novel way
for a broader spectrum of listeners. Frith, for example, notes how music pub-
lishers in the early 20th century employed multiple, sometimes non-musical
characteristics in defining an array of labels for types of songs (1996, p. 76).
13. This and all subsequent playlist data comes from dogstarradio.com, the
primary site for cataloging what gets played on satellite radio.
14. Pandora (n.d.) touts its Music Genome Project, the most sophisticated
taxonomy of musical information ever collected, in which every song is
coded for a host of qualities by live human beings. Does it really matter? This
classification system still aims to hit the same target as a digital analysis: a
playlist following a particular pattern of mood, tempo, emotional sonority,
instrumental style, etc. The premise of all such systems is ultimately con-
vergence how can musical data be sliced so thin that I hear more of what
I already know I like? An alternative approach, generally found left of the
dial, if at all, might raise the issue of divergence: how do I discover something
genuinely different, which exceeds the bounds of my declared tastes?
15. Bill McKibben presents this argument against the flattening effect of satellite
radio as opposed to the multitude of local cultures represented through
online radio broadcasts: Just like the Clear Channel stations, it [satellite]
surrenders the thing that makes radio so magical: connection to a commu-
nity (2007, p. 134).
70 Jeffrey Roessner
16. For a critical reading of this development, see Michael Bulls overview of
the theory that technological products of the culture industry replace the
subjects sense of the social, community or the sense of place (2003, p. 363).
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4
The Internet and the Death
of Jazz: Race, Improvisation,
and the Crisis of Community
Margret Grebowicz
while the real jazz players and composers, the ones who challenge us
aesthetically, intellectually, and sometimes even politically, continue
to wallow in un-Grammied obscurity. For a good dose of the latter,
one need only to check in daily with the anonymous blogger who goes
by the name Jazz is the Worst, and whose dark, ironic tweets have
become a staple of jokes among jazz musicians on social media, like
#FightingForScraps and The average age of the Newport Jazz Fest
audience is deceased (JazzIsTheWorst, 2015). The author of the blog
is a jazz musician, judging by the amount of insider information, and
it is interesting to note that musicians love circulating these tweets and
blog entries. In the hands of the players themselves, the pronounce-
ment that jazz is in fact the worst has become something like a form
of resistance, precisely when the music itself has ceased to be resistant
enough.
Many deaths of jazz have been announced at the hands of the
Internet. Most famously, the Internet means the death of record labels.
Anyone can self-produce a record, which means the loss of the old meri-
tocratic weeding out mechanism that labels ostensibly provided. Jazz is
also dead because artists can no longer count on record sales for a size-
able portion of their income. This affects everyone, from bandleaders
to side musicians. Incomes are falling steadily, causing more and more
players to look for work teaching privately and trying to get university
positions, many of which take them away from urban areas, which are
the only places to gig. Heated debates about the deaths and rebirths
of jazz take place on Facebook, the very platform where musicians
announce their gigs. But technologies are themselves non-innocent.
They do not merely reflect these debates and conversations back to us,
but bring to the table their own, built-in imaginaries of community by
definition. Thus, as jazz musicians talk to each other about the scene,
the fact that they do it as a mode of belonging to social networks mat-
ters to the question of what is said. In what follows, I attempt to map
the effects of this on jazz with special attention to the online debates
about race in the contemporary scene. My working hypothesis: that
the modes of sociality created by the Internet shape what counts as
being-in-community today, which in turn affects the relational aspects
of improvisation. This chapter is not a critique of online jazz commu-
nities, but of the effects of Internet and social media more generally
on this particular form of music today, down to the playing itself. To
understand the gentrification of jazz1 we must look beyond economic
factors and the backdrop of American race politics, and more closely at
exactly how the Internet shapes social life.
74 Margret Grebowicz
spirituals, gospel, blues, so-called jazz and soul. Hailed as The Savior
of Archaic Pop, Payton is rooted in tradition, yet isnt stuck there.
Both Marsalis and Payton hail from New Orleans and play the trum-
pet. At stake in the online disagreement between themis not only the
nature and future of jazz, but the nature and future of blackness and
the consumption of black culture by white audiences. And although
they remain in a sort of public dispute, many would claim that Payton
and Marsalis are not at all very different from each other, both carrying
on the authority of the black jazz trumpet player, a figure onto which
so many fantasies have been projected, and both in fact stuck in the
tradition. Jazz is the Worst (2014) writes that, like Miles Davis, Payton
has managed to alienate white audiences:
But chasing after blackness has had the opposite effect, drawing white
audiences more powerfully than ever. On stuffwhitepeoplelike.com
(2008), for instance, we learn that white people like Black music that
Black people dont listen to anymore, the worst of which is Jazz, followed
by The Blues (deftly capitalized by the authors) and old school hip-hop.
Historically speaking, the music that white people have kept on life
support for the longest period of time is Jazz. Every few months,
a white person will put on some Jazz and pour themselves a glass
of wine or scotch and tell themselves how nice it is. Then they will
get bored and watch television or write emails to other white people
about how nice it was to listen to Jazz at home. Last night, I poured
myself a glass of Shiraz and put Charlie Parker on the Bose. It was
76 Margret Grebowicz
Then theres the issue of the players themselves. The future of jazz is
arguably bright white: todays young players are mainly white men
with music degrees. They leave relatively sheltered upper-middle-class
suburban childhoods all over America and move to New York City,
many with trust funds, to attend very expensive music schools. The
film Whiplash (2014) received passionate criticism in jazz circles for
being unrepresentative because its protagonist is precisely a young
white man studying jazz drumming at a New York City conservatory,
surrounded by other white male students and dreaming of following in
the footsteps of celebrated, white big band drummer Buddy Rich. Many
objected to how disconnected the students learning process was from
jazz reality, which is black, small group, and avant garde, but arguably
(completely bypassing the drama between the student and his sadistic
teacher, as well as the absurd footage of the protagonists practice ses-
sions), Whiplash depicts todays jazz conservatory culture, the first stage
in the ongoing gentrification of jazz, pretty accurately.
But there are fifty shades of white, as one discovers watching the
satirical YouTube video series called Hans Groiner Plays Monk (2007)
in which the white, Jewish jazz pianist Larry Goldings dresses up as an
Austrian pianist so offended by the music of Thelonious Monk that he
reharmonizes it, thereby removing everything that makes the music
gritty, challenging, and rhythmically strange. Reharmonizing standards
is a common practice in contemporary jazz, and almost every new
record that comes out includes arrangements of known tunes. The
videos, which went jazz-viral a few years ago, position the American
jazz player (the implicit viewer) as somehow less white than the clown-
ish, platinum blond European on display. The implication is that even
though jazz musicians and audiences are overwhelmingly white, with
Goldings himself as a great example, at least theyre not this white.
There is always someone whiter than the white American jazz musician,
namely the foreigner, usually European or perhaps Asian, both groups
that heavily populate the conservatories currently.
Melancholy longing for a lost blackness, a longing whose correlate
is an aversive paranoia about whiteness, especially ones own, is ironi-
cally becoming deeper the more we participate in the very technologies
which mark this particular neoliberal late capitalist moment. Many
white musicians are arguably even more focused on the blackness of
The Internet and the Death of Jazz 77
jazz than Wynton and Payton are, blogging about the need to check out
the tradition and to learn about its roots, whether those be in Africa or
the black church.2 Meanwhile what is emerging in response to this is a
sort of safe, gentrified version of black music, which continues to fulfill
white fantasies of blackness. For example, Banana Republic chose three
musicians for their 2009 vimeo ad campaign City Stories, which was
ostensibly supposed to show urban blackness, appeal to young people,
and offer proof that jazz is still hip. They strategically chose three people
of color, Esperanza Spalding, Miguel Zenon, and David Sanchez, but all
three are light skinned, mixed race people. They are not too black, a
point underscored by their being dressed in the whitest, most suburban
clothes in the world, namely Banana Republic. And there are several
other stories of avant-garde black music completely missing from the
conversation, ones not as easily linkable to New Orleans, gospel, com-
mercial funk, R &B, and what counts as black music today: Ornette
Coleman, Art Ensemble of Chicago, Sun Ra, George Lewis, and Anthony
Braxton are just the first and most immediate names to come to mind.
Perhaps because it is historically too connected to the white avant garde,
and thus to European art, this African American art music tradition is
consistently excluded from todays debates about jazz and race.
Rather than solving any of these issues in the present chapter, I am
interested in why we desire to settle them today, perhaps even more
strongly than in the past. I suspect this desire is symptomatic of the
panic around social life that is connected to internet technology.
In other words, the race conversation is about a lot more than just race.
An expression of a desire for a common ancestry, it is also about com-
munity (musicians of all races agreeing that the music is really black,
for example) and thus a shared project, or space of common values. But
for jazz, this crisis of community has special consequences, if Berliner
is right that for almost a century the jazz community has functioned
as a large educational system for producing, preserving, and transmit-
ting musical knowledge, from apprenticeships to jam sessions to the
culture of sitting in and finally to professional affiliations (Berliner,
1994, p. 37). Furthermore, since the social is so operative in small group
improvised music, anxiety around social life necessarily affects the
music itself at the most basic level, the level of the playing.
into two levels, the level of the imaginary and that of the actual labor
of community. On the level of the imaginary, all communities are in a
sense lost, and striving for greater unification.
That lost age never existed, but the longing for it is built deeply into
Western social imaginaries. Todays crisis in jazz echoes something like
this, playing back to itself Berliners fantasy of a brotherhood unified by
love (if not for each other, then for the music). Alongside the imaginary,
we remain engaged in the labor of community, the logic of which must
be understood otherwise, he argues. Nancys notion of inoperative
community shows that community is not an entity, but a being-with,
a movement of unworking and incompletion. Community can never
be anything but incompletion, because only incompletion allows for
singularities to be-with each other, rather than being alone. It is not
a matter of making, producing, or instituting a community; nor is it a
matter of venerating or fearing within it a sacred power it is a matter
of incompleting its sharing. Sharing is always incomplete or it is beyond
completion and incompletion. For a complete sharing implies the dis-
appearance of what is shared (Nancy, 1991, p. 35, emphasis mine).
Community is always and by definition open to rearticulation.
If Nancy is right that sharing implies the impossibility of comple-
tion, we can begin to see how the fantasy of community manifested in
todays social networking culture actually works against the possibility
of being-with. Sherri Turkles critique of social media, Alone Together:
Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other (2012), by
some happy coincidence named after one of the best-loved standards
for musicians to call at jam sessions, describes technologically mediated
relationships as relationships the way we want them, reminding us
that real relationships are unstable, destabilizing, unpredictable, and
often painful. In other words, love hurts, but not on the Internet. She
argues that contemporary technology reveals, speaks to, and produces
The Internet and the Death of Jazz 79
fear of intimacy and what she calls fatigue with the difficulties of life
with people (Turkle, 2012, p. 10).
While Turkle focuses on how technology constructs a particular
experience of other people (the way we want them), Jonathan Crarys
book 24/7 (2014) zeroes in on the experience of time in late capital-
ism, offering a different spin on exactly how the Internet forecloses
the possibility of community. The 24/7 non-time of capitalism neces-
sarily interferes with any possibility of being-with one another. As the
Internet appears to create conditions of sharing finally free of the pesky
constraints of human time and human life cycles, simply because any-
one can virtually reach out and touch someone anywhere and at any
time, these technologies actually impede the possibility of authentic
relation, creating instead conditions of radical individualism and the
breakdown of the experience of time in common. Self-fashioning is the
work we are all given, and we dutifully comply with the prescription
continually to reinvent ourselves and manage our intricate identities
(Crary, 2014, p. 72). We are told that without an online presence, we
will disappear, professionally and socially, a threat which, taken to its
logical end, results in a society of people hungry for social co-existence,
terrified of ceasing to be in common with each other, but stuck in a
cycle of compulsive self-fashioning, thereby working against the work
of being-with. If it may be said that there is a mode of being-with that
characterizes Facebook, it is a contradiction: what we share is an inca-
pacity to share, as we share the mania for fashioning ourselves. Crary
adds to this what he calls 24/7 temporality, the time of late capitalism,
a switched-on universe for which no off-switch exists. He continues:
Its not easy to improvise, its the most difficult thing to do. Even
when one improvises in front of a camera or microphone, one ven-
triloquizes or leaves another to speak in ones place the schemas and
languages that are already there. There are already a great number of
prescriptions that are prescribed in our memory and in our culture.
All the names are already preprogrammed. Its already the names that
inhibit our ability to ever really improvise. One cant say whatever
one wants, one is obliged more or less to reproduce the stereotypical
discourse.
The true self of the improviser is accessible only to other, and not to
herself. Improvisation thus creates something not subject to circulation
and exchange, not by creating something absolutely unique in time
and space, or something proper to the player (self-expression), but
something recalcitrant and not subject to disciplinary control. And it
is the essential recalcitrance of the improvising self that makes improvisation
an experience of sharing, or of the necessary incompleteness that constitutes
community. I am at that very moment precisely not able to see myself,
and from this follows the possibility of being-with others.
Finally, it is not only the self that becomes recalcitrant, but also the
environment. Environmental theorist Timothy Morton writes about
improvisation as a form of what he calls the ecological thought,
ecological because it overflows reality, imagines different worlds, and
is ruled by the uncanny encounter with strange strangers. In both
cases, the point is that something happens which frustrates vision and
comprehension, exceeds it, and places us somewhere strange. When
improvisation happens, we are not at home. Far from providing an
experience of presence, or truth, or authenticity, much less anything
like self-expression or be here now, improvisation is the fundamental
breakdown of the self, the ground, and the world. Morton links this
to what he calls the poetics of anywhere (Morton, 2010, p. 50). The
closer we look at our location the here the more we realize that it is
shot through with the possibility of being anywhere, and the more we
seek to know the stranger, the stranger they appear.
Concluding Remarks
Thus, the death of jazz at the hands of the Internet wont have been
about the economic shifts that result from filesharing, and the whiten-
ing of jazz wont have been merely the latest example of how white
America steals the best of black culture. Internet sociality, an atrophied
sociality that forecloses the interstitial nature of being-with and thus
precludes community, is at the heart of the present ostensibly postracial
moment. To eulogize jazz by focusing solely on changes in the market
is to treat the music as if it remained intact through these social and
economic shifts. But it does not remain intact. The deep relational-
ity of jazz suffers when the social becomes atrophied, compromised,
shallow. Contemporary technologies effect a cultural shift away from
investment in non-visibility, incompleteness, opacity, and recalcitrance.
Because of this we face a much more serious crisis of community than
one gathers from blogs and tweets bemoaning dissensus in the scene or
The Internet and the Death of Jazz 83
the loss of black roots, or (usually) both. The more serious crisis is the
one faced by improvisation itself, and the real danger to jazz is not that
it might die, but its zombie apocalypse, the undeath of jazz, its contin-
ued taxidermic, museified, nonliving existence, presented in todays
music market as the real deal.
Notes
1. I thank Mark Ferber for this phrase.
2. See for instance Bad Plus pianist Ethan Iversons (2015) response to Whiplash
on his blog Do The Math, currently very popular with musicians.
Bibliography
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19938906 (accessed January 1, 2015).
Berliner, Paul F. (1994) Thinking in Jazz: The Innite Art of Improvisation. Chicago, IL:
University of Chicago Press.
Crary, J. (2014) 24/7. New York: Verso Books.
Derrida, J. (1982) Unpublished Interview (1982) (online). Available from: http://
www.derridathemovie.com/readings.html (accessed January 1, 2015).
Groiner, Hans (2007) Hans Groiner: The Music of Thelonious Monk, vol. 1
(online). Available from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=51bsCRv6kI0
(accessed January 1, 2015).
Iverson, E. (2015) The Drum Thing, or a Brief History of Whiplash, or Im
Generalizing Here (online). Available from: http://dothemath.typepad.com/
dtm/the-drum-thing.html (accessed March 13, 2015).
Jazzistheworst. (2014) How to Become a Successful Jazz Musician in 2015 (online).
Available from: http://jazzistheworst.blogspot.com/2014/12/how-to-become-
successful-jazz-musician.html (accessed March 14, 2015).
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(accessed March 13, 2015).
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Available from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c1fWJKaUZ_4 (accessed
January 1, 2015).
Morton, T. (2010) The Ecological Thought. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Nancy, J.-L. (1991) The Inoperative Community. Trans. Peter Connon et al.
Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
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(accessed January 15, 2014).
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Whiplash (2014). Directed by Damian Chazelle.
5
A Brief Consideration of the
Hip-Hop Biopic
Richard Purcell
Introduction
From the beginning, the moving image and narrative film have played
an integral if still under-theorized role in both documenting and creat-
ing hip-hop culture; enough so that I think an argument can be made
that it is a forgotten fifth element of hip-hop (Rose, 1994; Chang,
2006). Cinema, primarily through genres like the musical and subgenres
like the biopic, construct fantasies about creativity and labor that many
hip-hop films invoke (Altman, 1989; Feuer, 1993; Dyer, 2002; Cohan,
2005; Knight, 2002; Custen, 1992; Bingham, 2010 Berger, 2014). Elements
of these genres can be found throughout the history of hip-hop films and
I will especially focus on the biopic to draw attention to the way these
films like much of hip-hop culture demonstrates its complicated rela-
tionship to creative labor. As a genre, the biopic (or biographical film)
is a creature of the Hollywood studio system. It is a genre that enjoyed
an incredible amount of popularity after World War II with an emphasis
on narratives of upward social mobility and self-reflexivity about the
studio system itself (Vidal, 2014; Bingham, 2010; Custen 1992). For the
purposes of this essay I am interested in a particularly self-reflexive ver-
sion of the biopic that emerged out the Hollywood musical after WWII.
As Rick Altman writes, films like Jolson Sings Again (1949), Singing in the
Rain (1952) and The Band Wagon (1953) purposefully foreground the
cinematic means and materials of production the actual stars, cinematic
conventions and technologies of the studio system in order to reaffirm
Hollywoods ability to more convincingly reproduce the creative self
(Altman, 1989, p. 252). This moebus strip of authenticity, bent between
the cinematic image, musical performance and the industrial forms of
entertainment are at the heart of these films. Instead of petering out with
84
A Brief Consideration of the Hip-Hop Biopic 85
the studio system or the genre of the musical artist, biopics have only
proliferated in the post studio system era; enough so that we must won-
der if they double as biographies of the neoclassical studio system itself
(Bingham, 2010; Berger, 2014; Connor, 2015). This is to suggest that the
prevalence of the artist biopic within the history of hip-hop films seems
a useful way into understanding how artists and the culture industry
imagine creative musical labor especially as it pertains to race that
can be both radical and conservative (Feuer, 1993).
I am far from the first to focus on the relationship between hip-hop
and creative labor. This essay builds on and hopes to add to the work
already done by Tricia Rose and Robin D.G. Kelley, who still remain
the most important touchstones on the relationship between hip-hop
and what we now talk about as creative labor (Rose, 1994; Judy, 1994b;
Kelley, 1996 and 1998; Boyd, 1997; Watkins, 1998; Neal, 2001). Where
Rosss book and Kelleys essay are wide-ranging and look at multiple areas
where race, play-labor (Kelley, 1998, p. 197) and political economy
intersect I will focus on a small part of hip-hops relationship to these
matters: filmic representations of hip-hop, artistry and labor. Most of this
essay will focus on the first cycle of loosely conceived biopics about hip-
hop culture, with particular attention paid to two independent films: Edo
Bertoglios Downtown 81 (1981) and Charles Ahearns Wild Style (1982) as
well as one studio feature, Michael Schultzs Krush Groove (1985), which
was produced and distributed by Warner Brothers. These films represent
the shifting values that art, authenticity and creative labor have had
within hip-hop culture; especially once the priorities of high concept
cinema transformed commercial filmmaking into a delivery system for
commercial music and other goods (Wyatt 1994, Prince 2002). By way
of a coda I will bring these concerns into more contemporary hip-hop
films, the rise of the sharing economy and the crisis of musical valuation.
Perhaps the first and most difficult question to answer is: what is hip-
hop? More often than not this is less a concern about the universally
recognized four elements of hip-hop performance: mcing, turntablism,
graffiti and breakdancing. Instead it is about finding a central aesthetic or
ideological core to what began as a predominately black and Latino youth
culture. For some, hip-hop culture has and continues to play a central
role in imagining some continuity between the Civil Rights movement,
the various power movements of the 60s and 70s and a youth-cen-
tered cultural movement like hip-hop (Chang, 2005; Kitwana, 2002;
86 Richard Purcell
Rose, 1994; Dyson, 2007; Forman, 2002; Watkins, 2005). At the same
time, others have chronicled the long, fraught history hip-hop artists
have had with the free market and neoliberal rhetoric of late-capitalism,
which at times flies in the face of more radical liberatory rhetoric
(Charnas, 2010; Neal, 2001; Smith, 2012; Spence, 2011). These bigger
questions about race, aesthetics, ideology and political economy have
long been and continue to be a part of the important work of black
cinema studies. Surprisingly, despite the scholarly attention given to the
films of Spike Lee, the incredibly profitable and influential urban cycle
of black cinema in the early to mid-1990s, the crossover of rappers into
A-list televisual and feature film entertainment and the role of music
videos in marketing what Jeff Chang has accurately called hip-hop as
lifestyle, there is still surprisingly little media studies scholarship on the
explicit relationship between hip-hop culture and cinema (Monteyne,
2013; Watkins, 1998; Chang, 2006).
Like the general discipline of film studies in its nascent decades, early
black cinema studies was also invested in a multiplicity of historical and
analytic pursuits. If one looks through the foundational book length
works of academic black cinema studies the contents run the gambit
of cinema studies concerns: historical and archival work, ideological
analysis of commercial and Blaxploitation cinema, world film and the
rise of independent cinema (Guerrero, 1993; Diawara, 1992; Bobo,
1998; Bogel, 2001; Reid, 1993; Smith, 1997; Cripps, 1978; hooks, 1996;
Yearwood, 1982; Rhines, 1996). Of paramount importance throughout
all these works are the politics of representation since American cinema,
having emerged alongside the legacies of black-face minstrelsy through-
out the American arts, has long perpetuated racist stereotypes about
black humanity (Diawara, 1993). It is not as if hip-hop has not crossed
paths with the pioneering work done in black cinema studies over the
last four decades. But given the intellectual and political priorities of
black cinema studies, hip-hop has been both a blessing and curse to the
politics of black representation and aesthetics (Judy 1994a).
Although films about hip-hop are absent from early black cinema stud-
ies scholarship, Spike Lee was the cypher through which hip-hop appeared
(hooks, 1996; Diawara, 1993; Reid, 1993; Guerrero, 1993; Massoud, 2003;
Watkins, 1998). Lee provides an important if oblique connection to hip-
hop in early black cinema studies, yet is often represented as a starting
point to sketch the outlines of what has come to be known as hip-hop
cinema. The best example of this also appears in one of the most foun-
dational works of black cinema studies: S. Craig Watkins Representing:
Hip-Hop Culture and the Production of Black Cinema (1998). Watkins focuses
A Brief Consideration of the Hip-Hop Biopic 87
on a span of films that runs from Lees first feature film, Shes Gotta
Have It (1986) to the premier of the Hughes Brothers feature Menace
II Society (1993). In explaining his periodization, Watkins (1998) tells
us that from 1986 to 1993, black youth began to mobilize around the
resources of the popular media in ways that are simultaneously visible,
complex, problematic, and commercially viable (p. 67). Perhaps most
important to Watkins are the possibilities of collective and symbolic
action, especially from the social margins of society (p. 67). Clearly, he
wants to draw hip-hop into the possibility of collective and symbolic
political action that was explicit in the new black realism. When Watkins
begins to describe what is particularly hip-hop about the films of Lee
and Singleton, he reverts to a discourse that reveals his anxiety about
the relationship hip-hop has to the powerful forces of corporate com-
modification (p. 171). Hip-hop, primarily through gangsta rap music,
becomes a style used and nurtured by movie studios to market films like
Boyz n the Hood. Watkins is not alone in grappling with how to define
the aesthetic and conventions of hip-hop cinema. More contemporary
critics have also struggled to define hip-hop cinematic tropes that, as Jeff
Chang (2006) writes, reflect the cultural ideals hip-hop was founded
on (p. 306).
That Watkins and others have shied away from making any genre
claims is to their credit. Genre, as Watkins (1998) writes, is a difficult
term to sustain analytically because the boundaries are so fluid
(p. 170). Yet, beyond his passing mention of Michael Schultzs Krush
Groove (1985), there is little attention paid to the important cycle of
films that falls slightly before and within the period Watkins covers; a
span that runs from independently produced Wild Style (1982) to the
Def Pictures/New Line Cinema produced Tougher than Leather (1988).
All of these films are centered on the elements or performers rooted in
the elements of hip-hop culture. The most significant genre question
these early hip-hop films raise has to do with the biological category
of race. Besides Schultzs Krush Groove none of these more generically
identifiable commercial films are directed by African Americans. Here
we can see the conflicted relationship between black cinema studies
scholarship and hip-hop cinema as many of these early hip-hop films
are arguably teen-exploitation films that attempt to capitalize on the
incredible popularity of rap music and break dancing in the mid-1980s
(Watkins 1998). Watkins elision of these teen films returns us to ques-
tions having to do with political economy and its relationship to the
politics of representation within commercial entertainment. If the pos-
sibility of collective and symbolic political action is fundamental to
88 Richard Purcell
both black cinema and hip-hop then the films of Lee, Singleton and the
Hughes Brothers engage these politics in ways that are either absent or
politically ambivalent in either more mainstream or independent films
produced and directed by non-black people.
Kimberly Monteynes Hip-Hop on Film: Performance, Culture, Urban
Space and Genre Transformation in the 1980s (2013) attempts to address
this reading by arguing that early hip-hop films have both absorbed
and radically changed the long-standing conventions of the classical
Hollywood musical. Taking a more semantic/syntactic approach to
genre, Monteyne shows that these earlier, more generically stable films
are infused with a similar interest in the politics of representation and
political economy that Watkins finds in the films of Lee and Singleton.
In fact, she suggests that proper attention to hip-hop cinema as a genre
has been overshadowed by the importance of New Black Realism in the
late-1980s and 1990s (Monteyne, 2013, p. 4). Early hip-hop films reliably
feature the presence of at least some, if not all, of hip-hops four elements,
the use of diegetic musical performance and a narrative culminating
in romance as well as a final production number (Monteyne, 2013,
pp. 56). However, while following the prescribed generic film musical
structures and patterns, hip-hop cinema transforms the rather con-
servative ideological elements of the Hollywood musical by presenting
a positive, multiethnic and racial representation of American inner city
life during the 1980s (Monteyne, 2013, p. 6). While Monteynes very
formalist generic approach rescues these earlier films from the dustbin
of cinematic studies history, hip-hop films raise lingering methodologi-
cal concerns having to do with genre study, the institutional formation
of black cinema studies, as well as larger epistemological and aesthetic
questions about hip-hop itself.
While I cannot delve into all of these concerns here, for my purpose
the most significant has to do with the use of commercial film as the
organizing principle through which to gauge the relationship between
hip-hop, cinema and questions of black political economy. Despite
Watkins hesitance to use strict genre identification or Monteynes strong
adherence to the conventions of the classical Hollywood musical, start-
ing the narrative of hip-hop cinema within the history of commercial
film ignores its more unruly and ambiguous roots. A strong case can
be made that Gary Weis 1979 documentary about South Bronx gang
life 80 Blocks from Tiffanys, Manfred Kirchheimers cinema verite hom-
age to subway graffiti Stations of the Elevated (1981) along with Tony
Silvers graffiti classic Style Wars (1983), Edo Bertoglios Downtown 81
(1981/2000) and, most importantly, Wild Style (1982) connect the history
A Brief Consideration of the Hip-Hop Biopic 89
neighborhoods they resided in and the gallery space, which had become
a mechanism to show the community to itself (Kwon, 2002, p. 306).
Between the premier of the Times Square Show in June of 1980, the
principal shooting of Downtown 81 in December 1980 and the first
run of Wild Style in 1982, the alternative art network in New York
City went through an era-defining expansion. Times Square Show was
the catalyst in a three-year run of exhibitions that embodied both the
politicized spirit and commercial growth of the alternative art commu-
nity in the early 1980s. This spate of artist-run exhibitions, at least for
a time, succeeded in obscuring the commodity status of the art itself.
In 1981, former Colab member Diego Cortez curated the New York/New
Wave show at P.S. 1 in Queens, Charas hosted the 9th Street Survival Show,
and perhaps most famously The Fun Gallery, a small gallery directed
by underground film actress Patti Astor, opened. Looking back on the
proliferation of galleries and collectives that emerged out of Colab
and the Times Square Show, Alan Moore writes that along with the
intentional celebration of populist and vernacular art there was a stra-
tegic reaction against government funded alternative art and, at least
initially an appropriation of the idea of the gallery fraught with self-
consciousness and humor (Moore, 2007, p. 330). Even the respective
locations of the Times Square Show, New York/New Wave and other pop-
up galleries and performance art spaces either parodied the traditional
business style of SoHo and mid-town galleries or were in buildings
and neighborhoods that did not conform to the exhibition aesthetic.
Especially in the case of the Times Square Show, these strategies of
exhibition works mounted at the Times Square Show lacked title or the
names of the artists opened up the gallery experience for populations
that would not otherwise visit.
The Times Square Show also featured the work of an unprecedented
number of women and artists of color. Professional trained artists like
Candice Hill Montgomery intermingled with graffiti writers who in
some instances were displaying their work in a gallery for the first
time (Thompson 2010 and Lippard 1990). Nonetheless, many of
these shows, despite being conceptualized and exhibited as critique
were conceived in the commercial terms of the art world (Moore,
2007, p. 330; Lippard, 1990; Thompson, 2010; Goldstein, 1980). As
Margo Thompson observes, the ambivalence these artist-run collec-
tives felt toward entrenched art market practices did not mean they
could afford to turn their backs on their benefactors completely
(Thompson, 2010). Given the centrifugal force that art collectives and
the music scene exerted, it comes as little surprise that No Wave cinema
92 Richard Purcell
(a) (b)
Figure 5.1 Basquiats art gets him a check he cant cash while Stedings brings
despair and little compensation in Bertogilos Downtown 81 (1981)
A Brief Consideration of the Hip-Hop Biopic 95
(a) (b)
Figure 5.2 The opening shots of Charlie Ahearns Wild Style establish nostalgia
for graffitis past. Later, Zoro grapples its post-graffiti present
A Brief Consideration of the Hip-Hop Biopic 97
Post-Graffiti
It did not very take long for commercial films to quickly follow the
success of Wild Style. Canon Pictures released a cycle of hip-hop films
including (1984) Breakin and Breakin II: Electric Boogaloo (1984) and
Rappin (1985). Warner Brothers added to this early 1980s cycle when
they released Stan Lathans Beat Street (1984) and Krush Groove (1985).
Krush Grooves importance in this corpus of early films cannot be over-
estimated. While it only grossed $4 million domestically compared to
the $36 million Breakin earned the year before, Krush Groove was released
just as rap music began to dominate conceptions of what defined hip-hop
culture. The historic viability of music and, in particular, American music,
as a tradable and easily consumable market commodity on a global scale
98 Richard Purcell
explains why rap won out over the ambivalent cultural legitimacy of
graffiti as well as what was incorrectly understood as the faddish nature
of breakdancing. The growing dominance of rap music was tied as
much to its undeniable aesthetic novelty as it was to the serendipity
of raps emergence during the consolidation of corporate media and
entertainment companies on a global scale. For the film industry, this
same period of the 1970s and 80s brought a renewed interest in creating
marketing synergy around their products. Movie soundtracks, 12-inch
singles, pay for play, music videos and other forays into music and radio
allowed Hollywood studios to extend the pop culture presence of their
films (Wyatt, 1994).
In retrospect, Schultzs Krush Groove was positioned between two bur-
geoning corporate cultures: the triumph of Hollywood high-concept
blockbuster cinema as well as the simultaneous corporate codifica-
tion of music as the face of hip-hop culture. Krush Groove is for all
intents and purposes a biopic, albeit a semi-fictional one about Russell
Simmons and Def Jam Recordings grass roots emergence into what is
now a multi-billion dollar media and music company. Like most early
hip-hop films, Krush Groove stars many of the early 1980s most vis-
ible hip-hop cultural icons: Run DMC, The Beastie Boys, Dr. Jeckel and
Mr. Hyde, L.L. Cool J, and the Fat Boys. Krush Grooves cast is noteworthy
because, not unlike studio era films, it primarily features musical acts
signed to Def-Jam Recordings. The most prescient feature of Schultzs
film is the absence of the other elements of hip-hop culture, which
in spite of the popularity of breakdancing and the fine arts legitimacy
of graffiti art, gave viewers a glimpse of hip-hops music dominated
future. While exalting the value of self-expression, family loyalty and
grass-roots, multiracial entrepreneurship, Krush Groove reveals that the
image, the voice, and the family are absorbed within the horizontal
organization of the multimedia corporation; versus the decentralized
if still fraught organization of creative labor in Downtown 81 and Wild
Style. In the credit sequence we can see the way Krush Grove constructs
a visual space that reflects an already commodified listening space.
The credits combine extreme long shots, slow tracks and pans that
cut between distinctive tourist landmarks like the Manhattan Bridge,
United Nations and Empire State Building and perhaps less than recog-
nizable buildings above 125th Street in Harlem (Figure 5.3). The images
in these shots straddle the line between the recognizable and nonde-
script, public and the private spaces, that give us a rather generic rep-
resentation of Manhattans skyline. To many this is New York City, or
what Manhattan has been turned into after the enormous changes in
A Brief Consideration of the Hip-Hop Biopic 99
the public sphere through slum clearance programs and the restructur-
ing of Midtown and the Lower East Side by the state and private capi-
tal in the 1970s and 80s. Media campaigns like Mayor Edward Kochs
I Love New York, were devised to bring private capital investment
back into New York City during the immense fiscal and social crisis it
endured during these two decades.
The next scene cuts to an interior shot of a recording studio where
Run-DMC are recording their 1985, hit King of Rock (Figure 5.4a).
This self-reflexive moment in the studio is the beginning of a series of
scenes that blurs the line between the non-diegetic soundtrack music
and the diegetic production of Run-DMCs song. Non-diegetic music is
assumed to be a finished product of post-production yet the supposedly
spontaneous musical performance by Run-DMC is in fact lip-synched
as we can hear postproduction effects like echoes and multi-tracked
ad-libs. As the scene unfolds, Run-DMCs studio rehearsal becomes the
soundtrack for the film, leaping between diegetic and non-diegetic realms
of signification and reception. Like the already corporatized version of
Manhattans skyline in the credit sequence, Run-DMCs lip-synched
Figure 5.3 The credit sequence of Michael Schultzs Krush Groove are filled with
iconic images of Manhattan, like this shot of the United Nations as well as the
postmodern 1 United Nations Plaza
100 Richard Purcell
Figure 5.4 The assembly line of musical post-production in Michael Schultzs Krush Groove (1985)
101
102 Richard Purcell
There has been growing backlash against the corporate cooptation of con-
cepts that for all intents and purposes have long been associated with the
arts. Since the late 1990s economists and sociologists have turned their
interest to creativity as well as the revolutionary rearrangement of corpo-
rate workplaces and management styles around collectivism. The aspect
that most of us experience is the centrality of Web 2.0 in providing a
platform to create affect and aggregate our life practices in order to gener-
ate surplus value. All of these significant changes to culture and political
economy can and have been categorized under the socioeconomic and
political conditions of neoliberalism. As Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello
point out, we must acknowledge the role that the post-68 emphasis on
blurring the line between aesthetics and politics had on the rise of this
new spirit of capitalism; one that celebrates the sort of deviance and
eccentricity that we usually associate with artistic avant gardes (Boltanski
and Chiapello, 2007). Perhaps it goes without saying that the present
revival of collectivism and those who champion its profit-driven virtues
have excised or perhaps have little idea of the radical roots of these
concepts. Those artists, scholars and cultural critics who have responded
to this commodification have not. For every work of willful historical
amnesia there are plenty that recall the relationship between collectiv-
ism, radical anti-capitalism and the arts. This history has been critical in
understanding how the dark matter of our collective surplus labor has
long been a part of the new economy (Sholette, 2011).
104
Figure 5.5 George Tillmans assembly line homage to Krush Grove ends with a different kind of performance for the artistic self
in Notorious (2009)
A Brief Consideration of the Hip-Hop Biopic 105
If, as Giles Deleuze suggests, a visit to the factory with its rigid disci-
pline has become ideal entertainment in the late 20th century these
early films both critique and reify the development of the corporate
musical commodity in the late 20th century (Deleuze 1995, p. 72). Is
cinema the ideal avenue for such a critique? I think the late works of
Deleuze provide us with a possible answer to the use of cinema. Found
throughout his interviews and occasional essays from the late 1970s
to 80s we can see Deleuzes mixture of concern and hope over the
rise of television and video. His most extensive and lucid comments
on the role of cinema in an age of newer media come in Letter to
Serge Daney, his introduction to Daneys Cine-Journal (Daney, 1986).
Cinema, Deleuze tells us, is unique precisely because it has the potential
to create a supplement to nature by either beautifying or spiritual-
izing it (Deleuze, 1986, p. 73). Before we accuse him of returning us to
the romanticist aesthetics of Sir Philip Sidney, Deleuze reminds us of the
important intellectual and historical function this supplement provides.
The cinematic image preserves events but they are always out of step
with things, because cinematic time isnt a time that flows on but one
that endures and coexists with other times (Deleuze, 1986, p. 74). The
aesthetic dimension of cinema reveals this coexistence to us and it is
there that a change in human thinking can hopefully take place, where
new paths of possibility open up for imagining human existence.
Wild Style, Krush Groove and finally more contemporary biopics like
Notorious demonstrate a variety of paths that force us to reconsider
the history of the biopic. It would be easy to read these hip-hop films
as remedying the historic absence of African Americans in the biopic
genre or appropriating the syntax and vocabulary of biopics in order to
subvert them (Bingham 2010, p. 176). Instead of these politics of repre-
sentation I suggest that, given the staggering level of post-studio media
consolidation and high-concept cinema in the 21st century, hip-hops
biopics reveal something about how we conceptualize the creative sub-
ject in the late 20th and 21st century. Films like Downtown 81 and Wild
Style complicate the redemptive narrative of the biopic. I wonder if this
has something to do with how they were produced. Both Downtown 81
and Wild Style have ties to and in part use the screen to imagine a decen-
tralized, at times criminal collective artistic labor that is in constant
tension with forces of commodification (Moore, 2007 and Yokobosky,
1996). Despite my claim that hip-hop confers a sense of authenticity
and value to this collectivist vision, these films are surprisingly silent
on race, which was the case with much of the No Wave cinema. On the
other hand, the post-studio turn of Beat Street, Krush Grove and Notorious
108 Richard Purcell
provide the viewer with a fantasy of black political and collective action
within the market place, but in the process elides the profoundly vio-
lent and criminal contradictions of race, labor and advanced capitalism
that hip-hop often willfully foregrounds.
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NC: Duke University Press.
Thompson, M. (2010) The Times Square Show in B. Momchedjikova (ed.) The
Urban Feel, Streetnotes 18.
Vidal, B. (2014) Introduction: The Biopic and its Critical Contexts in The Biopic
in Contemporary Film Culture. New York: Routledge.
Watkins, S. C. (1998) Representing: Hip Hop Culture and the Production of Black
Cinema. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Watkins, S. C. (2005) Hip Hop Matters: Politics, Pop Culture, and the Struggle for the
Soul of a Movement. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.
Wyatt, J. (1994) High Concept: Movies and Marketing in Hollywood. Austin, TX:
University of Texas Press.
Yearwood, G. (1982) Black Cinema Aesthetics: Issues in Independent Black
Filmmaking. Athens, OH: Center for Afro-American Studies, Ohio University.
Yokobosky, M. (1996) No Wave Cinema, 197887, Whitney Museum, New York
City.
A Brief Consideration of the Hip-Hop Biopic 111
Filmography
Beat Street. (1984) Film. Directed by Stan Lathan. [DVD] USA: MGM Home
Entertainment.
Boyz n the Hood (1991). Film. Directed by John Singleton. [DVD] USA: Sony
Pictures Home Entertainment.
Breakin. (1984) Film. Directed by Joel Silberg. [DVD] USA: MGM Home
Entertainment.
Breakin II. (1984) Film. Directed by Sam Firstenberg. [DVD]: MGM Home
Entertainment.
Da Last Don. (1998) Film. Directed by Master P and Michael Martin. [DVD] USA:
No Limit Films.
Dead Presidents. (1995). Film. Directed by Albert and Allen Hughes. [DVD] USA:
Hollywood Pictures Home Entertainment.
Downtown 81. (1981/2000) Film. Directed by Edo Bertoglio. [DVD] USA: Zeitgeist
Films.
8-Mile. (2002). Film. Directed by Curtis Hanson. [DVD] USA: Universal Studios.
80 Blocks from Tiffanys. (1979) Film. Directed by Gary Weis. [VHS] USA: Above
Average Productions.
Get Rich or Die Trying (2005). Film. Directed by Jim Sheridan. [DVD] USA:
Paramount Pictures.
Hustle and Flow. (2005). Film. Directed by Craig Brewer. [DVD] USA: Warner Brothers.
Im Bout It. (1997) Film. Directed by Moon Jones and Master P. [DVD] USA: No
Limit Films.
Jolson Sings Again. (1949) Film. Directed by Henry Levin. [DVD] USA: Sony
Pictures Home Entertainment.
Juice. (1992). Film. Directed by Ernest Dickerson. [DVD] USA: Warner Brothers
Home Entertainment.
Krush Groove. (1985) Film. Directed by Michael Schultz. [DVD] USA: Warner
Home Video.
Menace II Society. (1993) Film. Directed by Albert and Allen Hughes. [DVD] USA:
New Line Home Cinema.
New Jack City. (1991). Film. Directed by Mario Van Peebles. [DVD] USA: Warner
Home Video.
Notorious. (2009). Film. Directed by George Tillman. [DVD] USA: Fox Searchlight.
Rappin. (1985) Film. Directed by Joel Silberg. [DVD] USA: MGM Home Entertainment.
Ray (2004). Film. Directed by Taylor Hackford. [DVD] USA: Universal Studios.
Shes Gotta Have It. (1986) Film. Directed by Spike Lee. [DVD] USA: MGM.
Singing in the Rain. (1952) Film. Directed by Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen.
[DVD] USA: Warner Home Video.
Smithereens. (1981) Film. Directed by Susan Seidleman. [DVD] USA: Blue Underground.
Stations of the Elevated. (1981) Film. Directed by Manfred Kirchheimer. [VHS] USA:
First Run Features.
Streets Is Watching. (1998) Film. Directed by Abdul Malik Abbot. [DVD] USA:
Roc-A-Fella Films.
Style Wars. (1983) Film. Directed by Tony Silver. [DVD] USA: Public Art Films.
The Band Wagon. (1953) Film. Directed by Richard Schickel and Vincente
Minnelli. [DVD] USA: Warner Home Video.
The Brooklyn Bridge at Pearl Street (1978?). Film. Directed by Charlie Ahearn.
112 Richard Purcell
The Deadly Art of Survival (1979). Film. Directed by Charlie Ahearn. [DVD] USA:
BRINKDVD.
They Eat Scum. (1979) Film. Directed by Nick Zedd.
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Twins (1980). Film. Directed by Charlie Ahearn.
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Walk the Line (2005). Film. Directed by James Mangold. [DVD] USA: 20th
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Wild Style. (1982) Film. Directed by Charlie Ahearn. [DVD] USA: Rhino Films.
6
Love Streams1
Damon Krukowski
Making Cents
113
114 Damon Krukowski
Free Music
Notes
1. This essay is adapted from articles originally written for and published by the
music website Pitchfork.com in 2012 and 2013. Reproduced with permission.
2. http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/author/ben-sisario/?_r=0
3. https://web.archive.org/web/20130308075714/http://www.pandora.com/
static/ads/irfa/irfa.html
4. https://www.dittomusic.com/blog/spotify-founder-states-that-profitability-is-
absolutely-not-a-priority
Reference
Benkler, Y. (2011). Free Irresponsible Press: Wikileaks and the Battle over the Soul
of the Networked Fourth Estate, Harvard Civil RightsCivil Liberties Law Review,
46, 31197.
7
A Case for Musical Privacy
Richard Randall
Every song has a story. Whats yours? read the subject of an email sent to
me by the streaming-music service Spotify (2014a). The email continues:
Spotify
#thatsongwhen
Find a song, tell your story, share with the world.
Nothing triggers a memory quite like a song. You know, that song
when weekend mornings meant sugary cereal and cartoons. Or that
song when you did everything to win the heart of your playground
crush ... So were asking what songs take you back to a special
moment?
Does one of them spark a good story? Wed love to hear it.
Or explore other stories in the gallery.
When I saw this list of songs, I knew exactly when I was listening to them,
where I was, how I felt, what was going on in my life, and how these songs
made me feel. These experiences came back in vivid detail. I probably
listened to the song Give Out (Van Etten, 2012, track 2) over a hundred
times during this period on my MP3 player, on my computer, and appar-
ently on Spotify. When I saw Spotifys request that I share why with them
and the world, I was taken aback. The time in question was emotion-
ally charged and challenging. I felt fragile and disoriented. The song was
an anchor for me. It was a point of reference and a constant companion.
The song made me feel I wasnt alone in a way that was safe, private, and
confidential. To me, sharing the details of this experience would be on par
with sharing a private conversation with a therapist or a trusted friend.
While this story might seem melodramatic, I share it to highlight
the personal and intimate relationship we have with music. Listening
to music is an important part of our lives and our listening habits say a
lot about who we are, how we feel, and what we believe. Over the past
ten years we have seen an unprecedented transformation in how we
are able to discover and listen to music. Online streaming music ser-
vices such as Spotify and Pandora comprise a complex of technologic,
economic, and critical human issues. Some of these issues are common
to streaming media services in general (e.g. YouTube, Netflix, Hulu)
and the Internet, while others are unique to music services. This essay
examines streaming music services (SMuS) from the perspective of the
listener. Listening to music online is drastically different from offline
listening largely because the economics of online listening create a new
model of the audience commodity and raise critical privacy issues.
The economics of SMuS have been discussed largely as to whether or not
artists are fairly compensated for their music or how SMuS represent a
new business model for the industry. However, in the context of SMuS,
listening becomes a transaction whereby a users selection labor is con-
verted into a commodity that has exchange-value. Moreover, this essay
explores how selection labor reveals personal information we make
freely available anytime we make a choice that is recorded by a second
party. This essay works to raise awareness of the kinds of transactions
we are engaging in and risks we are exposed to when we listen to music
online and frames musical identities as something worthy of protection.
In order to discuss streaming music services it is important to
understand some background and issues of online digital capitalization.
122 Richard Randall
groups. Depending on the analytic goals, Big Data can be used to iden-
tify a person as a potential product buyer (behavioral targeting), medical
risk, or terrorist threat. The main ethical issue with Big Data is that digi-
tal prosumers never know how their data will be used. In his critique of
Big Data analytics, Acquisti asks us to:
A week after the app was introduced on its website, more than 4,000
people had activated it, the Samaritans said, and those users were fol-
lowing nearly 1.9 million Twitter accounts, with no notification to
those being monitored. But just about as quickly, the group faced an
outcry from people who said the app, called Samaritans Radar, could
identify and prey on the emotionally vulnerable the very people
the app was created to protect. (Singer 2014a)
revolution, but also of Web 2.0, itself. With the ability for users to make
requests and initiate delivery, content providers such as Pandora do not
have to create programming for users in the hopes that they will be
able to sell their attention to an advertiser. Instead, users create their
own programming from a library. The catch is that in all pull technolo-
gies, the gateway application, for example Pandora, is also a surveillance
device that directly monitors and records each users behavior.
Online streaming media services have realized that such choices
represent a set of collectable and analyzable behaviors that not only
allow providers to refine their own recommendation algorithms and
marketing strategies, but also to package and resell these behaviors to
third parties. Numerous scholars have critiqued the labor implications
of user-generated content and prosumption (Scholz 2012). But the politi-
cal economic issues associated with making choices about listening and
watching are more subtle. Consuming media has usually been framed as
a leisure activity or unproductive labor, that is, labor that does not pro-
duce a good with exchange value. However, in the case of SMuS, where
listening requires input from a user, behavior resembles something like
the subjective immaterial labor that underpins cognitive capitalism
(Fuchs, 2011). Cognitive capitalism holds that ideas and thoughts can
be commodities with use and exchange value. There is currently exten-
sive global competition to attract the best brains, writes Larsen, and
[k]nowledge becomes a strategic force of production and an important
commodity (2014, p. 161).
Related to this is selection power and selection labor. In his book
Human Information Retrieval, Julian Warner posits that selection power
is the human ability to make informed choices between objects or
representations of objects (2010, p. 17). Warner is referring to how rec-
ommendation algorithms model human behavior. In SMuS, algorithmic
recommendation is a crucial part of the listening experience. Given
a users choice of two songs, for example, an algorithm will choose a
third song that it thinks the user will like. It is important for the algo-
rithm to be correct because that will improve the quality of the users
experience and keep them using the service. The user can affirm or
deny the selection (e.g. thumbs up or thumbs down), which provides the
algorithm with additional information so as to make better decisions in
the future. In the case of recommendation, the results of an informa-
tion retrieval algorithm, at best, will represent the selection power of an
individual or group of individuals. It is a property of human conscious-
ness and represents a variety of human experiences and desires. Selection
power is produced by selection labor, which can be understood as the
126 Richard Randall
dramatically (2011, p.3). These are claims that online social networks
would love to make. The music industry never has to create a demand
for what it sells, as we will never stop wanting and needing to be musical.
They only need to convince us that the product theyre selling and the
way we access it is what we want.
The materialization of music by means of notation and recording has
had a profound influence and effect over musical practice, especially in
capitalist economies. Jacques Attali writes that music, an immaterial
pleasure turned commodity, now heralds a society of the sign, of the
immaterial up for sale, of social relation unified in money (1985, p. 4).
He argues that material physical formats such as LPs, CDs, musical scores,
and piano rolls, allow us to exercise political and financial control over
what music is and how it can be used. Wherever there is music, he
says, there is money (Attali 1985, p. 3).
Streaming music services eschew the notion of materiality altogether.
In its place is the notion of service. These services mediate our access
to music and in doing so are situated in a position to observe how lis-
teners behave. By moving to a service model, companies like Pandora,
Spotify, and Rdio provide access to a limited catalog when you want it,
where you want it. No need to manage an MP3 collection or purchase
and download music. It is pitched as a radio where a user gets to choose
the songs. These services have been widely criticized in recent years for
the small amount of royalties musicians actually make compared to
how frequently their songs get played (Krukowski, Chapter 6 in this
volume). The fact is, these services do not seem to make money. They
have relied on ads and subscriptions to generate revenue and not one
SMuS operating in 2013 made a profit.
When we listen to music on a SMuS, we make choices about what
we want to hear. These choices reflect who we are, how we feel, what
we believe. Our musical tastes have developed over years of personal
reflection and social interactions. We have learned how to use music to
make ourselves feel better and to create social bonds. Christopher Small
coins the term musicking as a verb that describes a diverse collection
of activities that comprise musical engagement (Small 1998). Small pro-
poses that being musical involves not just performing and creating, but
also listening and sharing. Listening is not a capricious activity. In fact,
listening preferences develop over time and reflect important individual
characteristics and social choices that represent who we are.
Natasha Singers article Listen to Pandora, and It Listens Back
describes a new solution to an old problem: how can SMuS make money
from our desire to be musical (2014b). One solution is to commodify
128 Richard Randall
Peoples music, movie or book choices may reveal much more than
commercial likes and dislikes. Certain product or cultural preferences
can give glimpses into consumers political beliefs, religious faith,
sexual orientation or other intimate issues. That means many organi-
zations now are not merely collecting details about where we go and
what we buy, but are also making inferences about who we are (2014b).
When you use the Service, we keep track of your listening activity,
which may include the number and title of songs you have listened
to, the songs that you like (thumb up) or dislike (thumb down), the
stations you create or listen to, the number of songs you skip, and
how long you listen to a station (Pandora, 2013).
It does not say that your listening history will be subject to algorithms
and classifiers in an attempt to create personality profiles that can be
sold and used for reasons you never intended. Nor does Pandora say
what they will do with this data, or if personal identities are protected.
Spotify is more detailed and explains what they collect and what they
do with it.
While this is more reassuring, Spotify is later very clear that they reserve
the right to sell your information.
Consumers have the right to clearly understand how their musical
identities are being used. More importantly, we have the right to opt out
of data collection. While our musical identities may not seem as impor-
tant as social security numbers, health records, or banking information,
they nevertheless deserve protection. As companies like Pandora and
Spotify work to extract, bundle, and sell our information, we need to be
aware of whats at stake.
In her analysis of the Jamaican street dance, Mann invokes two key
concepts: cultural intimacy and the exilic space. Cultural intimacy, Mann
writes, arises from practices that embody both self-knowledge and self-
representation, wherein the self is collectively defined. This intimacy
allows marginalized people to affirm as positive the shared traits, situa-
tions, and actions that are designated negative by broader society (Mann,
forthcoming, p. 4). Cultural intimacy is a set of traits that simultaneously
creates closeness within a marginalized group and distance between this
group and powerful outsiders who pose a threat to the group (Mann,
forthcoming, p. 4). The exilic space allows cultural intimacy by protect-
ing the group from being observed and allowing members to act openly
in a way that promotes intimacy. Mann examines how increased vis-
ibility on globally networked media platforms can harm marginalized
communities and their ability to celebrate their identities through vari-
ous performance practices (Mann, forthcoming, p. 4). She goes on to
say, marginalized people need the power to exclude as much as the
power to include (Mann, forthcoming, p. 4).
I argue that opacity of privacy protections in SMuS creates significant
ambiguity as to what kind of space online listening really is. In the
most dangerous scenario, SMuS listeners might believe they are in an
exilic space and act openly and inclusively as members of a marginal-
ized group. Greater care needs to be taken to ensure that listeners are
aware their behaviors are subject to hegemonic observation with pos-
sible damaging consequences. We need to reframe online listening as
prosumption, meaning that listeners are generating content as they
consume content. This content has exchange-value in that it can be sold,
but more importantly this content has the capacity to reveal highly
personal and identifying information.
Furthermore, making choices about what we listen to is a form of
commodifiable labor for which listeners are not compensated. It is
the conversion of leisure time into work time as our personal
experiences become products that have use-value (in that they refine
A Case for Musical Privacy 131
Notes
1. Significant work has been done in the last ten years to raise public awareness
about the implications of sharing information on social networks. In addi-
tion, there are frequent stories of people experiencing negative repercussions
(e.g. losing a job, being suspended from school) due to comments they have
posted online. This highlights an important aspect of prosumptive privacy,
which is that users can opt not to produce content they feel would put them
at risk.
2. There are other reasons as well, such as optimizing a service to enhance user
experience and satisfaction.
3. It is important to recognize that broadcast radio can stream their content
online. In my argument, I am making a clear distinction between any form
of media delivery that is essentially push versus those that are pull. Streaming
music services as I am discussing them are therefore defined by a users ability
to initiate content delivery.
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Public Good: Frameworks for Engagement. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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Manchester University Press.
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A Case for Musical Privacy 133
Introduction
134
Digital Music and Public Goods 135
The view shared by White and Lowery here is primarily ethical, not
legal. Lowery (2012) is clear about this: he describes downloading deci-
sions as personal ethical issues, and he characterizes the sharing of
music files as a social injustice perpetuated against musicians. He
does not accuse White of deliberately committing this injustice; rather,
he characterizes her as a young person confused by two competing
worldviews. One, which he endorses, sees the unauthorized replication
of music files as infringing on the rights of musicians to reap the fruits
of their artistic labors. He calls the other the Free Culture movement,
a phrase he adopts from Lawrence Lessig without, somewhat ironically,
citation.1 According to Lowery, this worldview seeks to undo the princi-
ples that underlie the first view simply because it is technologically pos-
sible for corporations or individuals to exploit artists [sic] work without
their permission on a massive scale and globally (Lowery, 2012). Lowery
thinks that those who stand to benefit from the use of this technology
are advocating a shift in morals, one which, in his view, is wrong.
Lowery suggests that many are confused or even brainwashed by the
Free Culture mentality and therefore do not see the wrong in copy-
ing digital music. Describing the state of affairs back in the Napster and
immediate post-Napster era, Steve Jobs has a different explanation: We
believe that 80% of people stealing stuff dont want to be, theres just
no legal alternative (Issacson, 2011, p. 396, quoting Langer, 2003).
According to this diagnosis, those in the early 2000s who downloaded
music from peer-to-peer file-sharing services believed that what they
were doing was a form of theft, which they did not want to perform yet
were compelled to anyway. This characterizes the typical Napster user
as motivated by the following trio of desires: the desire for the track
she wants to download, the desire to pay either little or nothing for the
track, and the desire not to perform an act of theft. Although she believes
that downloading music from Napster is theft, her other two desires win
out, for there is no way to satisfy all three of her desires simultaneously.
One way to think of iTunes and Jobs appears to have thought of it this
way is as providing a means to satisfy all three desires at once.
These are not the only views one might hold regarding the motives
behind peer-to-peer file sharing, nor do they necessarily exclude one
another. White would appear to fit Jobss description quite well: she
wants a lot of music, she does not want to pay much or anything for it,
and she does not want to steal. She thinks that obtaining music from
peer-to-peer networks is stealing, so she does not acquire music this
way; she thinks copying files from friends is not stealing, so she goes
about doing so. This is all compatible with the Free Culture desire to
136 Graham Hubbs
get music without having to pay (much) for it. Perhaps it is necessary to
add Lowerys idea to Jobss to get a full explanation of Whites behavior;
perhaps Jobss account is sufficient on its own; perhaps some further
alternative does better. Whatever the case, Lowery, Jobs, and White her-
self all agree that had White assembled her music library via peer-to-peer
networks, her activity would have constituted a massive heist.
The goal of this essay is to critique this apparently shared assumption.
Before proceeding, however, it is worth noting that the very idea of
assembling a private music library can seem antiquated given the rise
of streaming music services such as Pandora, Spotify, and Apple Music.
White, Lowery, and Jobs all seem to think that for an individual to have
access to a vast musical library, she would need to possess a private,
potentially unnetworked device containing the music files. Streaming
music services make such a library available without having to own the
relevant files. One suspects that most of the music White spent hours
ripping is now available to her via these streaming services; it would
be unsurprising if someone five years younger than White found her
hours of ripping an old-fashioned waste of time. Mark Mulligan sees
the rise of streaming music services as the third phase of digital music,
the successor to the first phase of piracy networks such as Napster and
the subsequent phase of download stores such as Apples iTunes Store
(Mulligan, 2014).2 I will address this third phase at the end of this essay,
but my focus here will be on the inclination to characterize the networks
of the first phase, which have persisted through the other two phases
into the present day, by use of using the concept of piracy.3 I will argue
that the concept theft does not readily apply to the digital music that
can be obtained from a peer-to-peer network. Such music lacks the hall-
mark features of private property, so it lacks the features that one would
expect something stealable to have.
Instead, I will argue, digital music has the hallmark features of what
economists call a public good, for digital music in a peer-to-peer network
is neither a rivalrous nor an excludable good. It lacks these features
because it is, in a sense, spaceless. To be sure, digital music is embodied
in what a philosopher would describe as a medium-sized object, such as
a disk drive, which takes up space. This embodiment, however, does not
preclude a stranger from copying the drives music even as its possessor
listens to it, if the drives files are accessible via a peer-to-peer network.
The embodiment is thus practically immaterial. Put another way, digital
music in peer-to-peer networks occupies practically no objective space,
which I intend literally to mean the space inhabited by medium-sized
objects. Descriptions such as these carry an air of paradox, for they
Digital Music and Public Goods 137
Public Goods
The immediate forebears of public goods are the mid-20th century econo-
mists Paul Samuelson and Richard Musgrave. It is common to regard
Samuelsons work in the 1950s as the foundation of the modern theory
of public goods, but it is a paper by Musgrave that supplies what has
come to be the textbook definition of the concept.6 Musgrave defines
public goods in terms of the following two characteristics: [t]he first
is the characteristic of non-rivalness in consumption, i.e., the existence
Digital Music and Public Goods 139
property of the shovel, and the shovel remains, as ever, only usable by
one person at a time. It likewise remains an excludable good, although
who can legitimately do the excluding has changed. Once I have sold
the shovel, I no longer can legitimately force someone to pay me should
she wish to use it; that is now your prerogative. When you hand me
money for the shovel, I give away something beyond the mere physical
object: I also give you the right to exclude others from its use.
In talking of legitimacy and rights, we move from considering the shovel
as a brute physical object to one that exists within a specific normative
space here, a space defined by the institution of private property. For sim-
ple tools, such as shovels, this move can be easily tracked by contrasting the
capacity to exclude from the right to exclude. Suppose I put a shovel that
I own under lock and key in an attempt to exclude you from it; suppose
that you beat me, take the key, and make off with the shovel. Should this
happen, it shows that I did not have the capacity to exclude you from the
shovel, but it does not follow that I lacked the right to exclude you. This
right to exclude, which can obtain even in the absence of the capacity to
exclude, is, arguably, the fundamental norm of private property.10
For a normative space that includes the institution of copyright, how-
ever, this simple distinction between capacity to exclude and right to
exclude will not suffice to demarcate legitimate from illegitimate uses of
property. If a bit of private property is copyrighted, then its owner has,
at best, a limited right to exclude others from its use. This limited right
is perhaps most clearly explicated by distinguishing a bit of copyrighted
material from its physical manifestation. Focus presently on books,
where the distinction is conspicuous. The copyrighted material is, to a
first approximation, the series and organization of letters, numbers, and
punctuation marks in the book. The pages and ink that are comprised
by the book are its physical manifestation. Should someone buy a copy-
righted book, type a copy of it mark for mark on her computer, print
what she has typed, and then sell the resulting printing, she would do
so without right and therefore violate the copyright. By contrast, she
may have the right to sell the physical book she has purchased; this is
commonly known as the right of first sale.11 If she has this, then she
has the right to exclude others from use of the physical object, but she
does not have the right to exclude others from the series and organiza-
tion of letters, numbers, and punctuation marks printed on the objects
pages. That right which, put positively, is the right to profit from the
organization of language belongs to the copyright holder.
Let us momentarily set any further thoughts about copyright to the
side: we will come back to the topic in due course.12 Instead, let us
142 Graham Hubbs
musical embodiment qua object is rivalrous, its proper use that is, its
being played on a phonograph produces a good that, depending on
the circumstances, can be non-rivalrous. If the music is played through
headphones, then only the headphone-wearer can listen to it, so it is
rivalrous. If, alternatively, it is played through loudspeakers that sit near
a window that opens onto a public street, then it is non-rivalrous.
So far we have considered the record as an object, and we have con-
sidered the music it produces when it is played. Neither of these, how-
ever, is the most important way (at least in the context of the present
discussion) to conceive of a given musical record, or for that matter
any other physical manifestation of an album. Because the music is
embodied in an excludable and rivalrous object, the person who owns
the record may possess a capacity to listen to the music that others
lack. Consider a record I own that you do not. I can listen to its music
whenever I want, as long as I have ready access to a phonograph. You
cannot do the same unless you get the record. Should I sell my record,
I will thereby exchange the ability to listen to its songs whenever I want
for the money I receive. As goes the record, so goes this ability unless,
of course, I make a copy of the music on the record. With the advent of
domestic cassette recorders, it became possible to make a new embodi-
ment of a given bit of music and thereby keep the unlimited ability to
listen to it even after selling the original object of embodiment.14 With
cassettes, the copies tended to be subpar, but the advent of the domestic
compact disc writer allowed one to make copies that to the average
listener were acoustically indistinguishable from their source. These
copies were new musical embodiments, possessed of all the properties
described above: they were (qua objects) rivalrous and excludable, their
proper use produced goods that might be rivalrous and excludable (if
played on headphones) or not (if played in public on loudspeakers), and
in their non-use they contained the possibility of the music recorded on
them. The physical embodiment of the music in a medium-sized body
resulted in a replication of all of these features.
Consider these features now exclusively from the perspective of a per-
son who wants to own a given album she does not presently have. Let the
year be 1998. If she goes to a store to get the album, she will find herself
excluded; she will either need to pay for the album, or she will need to
steal it, in which case she risks getting caught for theft. She can avoid
both paying and being caught stealing if she either borrows and copies
a friends copy or arranges for the friend to make a copy. (To be sure,
this might violate copyright; again, we will come to this in due course.)
There are two things presently worth noting about copying the album.
144 Graham Hubbs
First, whether she or her friend makes the copy, the result will be a
medium-sized object containing the music and possessed of all the meta-
physical properties listed above. Second, whether she or her friend makes
the copy, while the copy is being made the friend must forfeit the rival-
rous good of being able to listen to the album whenever he wants. This is
clearest if the friend lends the album, but even if he makes the copy for
her, he cannot, while he is making the copy, use the album as he pleases.
Should he choose, for example, to listen to tracks in something other than
their original order, he will not be making a copy of the album. The album
cannot be copied without tacitly acknowledging its rivalrousness or its
excludability, so it has the necessary features of a bit of private property.
None of this holds for digital music that is available in a peer-to-peer net-
work; such music is neither rivalrous nor excludable. Since the advent of
Napster, one need not acquire a medium-sized object in order to acquire
the ability to listen to a song or an album one does not have. Should one
acquire a bit of digital music from a peer-to-peer network, what one has
acquired is, as stated in this essays introduction, spaceless, a spaceless
copy of a spaceless original.15 The spacelessness of the original allows it
to be accessed without depriving its owner of the capacity to listen to it
while it is accessed. This spacelessness makes the object non-rivalrous.
It does not follow that the object is necessarily thereby non-excludable;
one can imagine any number of ways of devising network tollbooths
to require payment for access. Peer-to-peer sharing networks, however,
have no such tollbooths, so the files available in these networks are not
excludable. These files thus have the characteristic features of public
goods, not of private property, so any music encoded in them likewise
has the characteristic features of a public good.
With these points in mind, consider anew our character from the
previous section, now a decade on in a world with music files available
through peer-to-peer networks. She will be excluded from these files if
she lacks Internet access, but let us suppose this is not an issue. Suppose
that she joins a peer-to-peer file-sharing group online, searches for a
song she wants, and finds it. She encounters no rivalry if she seeks to
copy the file; indeed, it is possible that the person whose file she is copy-
ing is at that moment listening to the music encoded in it. She is not
excluded from the file; she can easily obtain it without payment. For
her, the file is like the oxygen in the air, a non-rivalrous, non-excludable
good. For her, it is a public good, not a bit of private property.
Digital Music and Public Goods 145
The very fact that digital music in peer-to-peer networks lacks the hall-
mark features of private property can, somewhat paradoxically, explain
the attitude shared by White, Lowery, and Jobs that obtaining such
music is theft. It obviously can explain the opposite idea, that obtain-
ing such music is not theft: if the music is not a private good, then it
cannot be stolen. The fact that it is neither rivalrous nor excludable,
however, is at confusing odds with the more familiar idea of recorded
music embodied in a medium-sized object. As noted above, to obtain
the listening potential of the music embodied in such an object, one
must negotiate its rivalrousness and excludability; within an economic
and legal system of private property, this thus requires interacting with
a bit of private property. To interact legitimately with a bit of private
property that one does not own, one must, with the owners permission,
temporarily deprive the owner of acting on his right to exclusion. When
a person downloads music from a peer-to-peer network, however, she
ignores any concerns of exclusion, for, again, music in a peer-to-peer
network is not excludable. When music is embodied, the only way to
ignore this right is to violate it, which can make any such ignoring seem
like a violation, that is, like theft. It is thus that the non-excludability
and non-rivalrousness of music in a peer-to-peer network can make it
seem like obtaining such music is theft.
It is perhaps more conceptually coherent, however, to run the inference
in the opposite direction. If a song is readily available in a peer-to-peer
network, then the potentiality of that song in any embodiment may be
considered a public good. To see why, it will help to mark a distinction
commonly drawn by analytic philosophers between type and token.
A type is an abstract object; a token is the physical manifestation of
some specific type. A recorded song, for example, is a type, and its tokens
are the musical events of it being played. Now rivalrous and excludable do
not apply to types per se; these concepts do not apply to abstract objects.
Nevertheless, we can use phrases such as rivalrous type and excludable
type to refer to types whose tokens are rivalrous and/or excludable.
Prior to the existence of digital music, the capacity to generate a song-
token of recorded music was necessarily embodied in a medium-sized
object, which, as we saw above, is necessarily rivalrous and exclud-
able. Song-types and album-types were thus necessarily rivalrous and
excludable. This is no longer true for song-types and album-types whose
token-potentials that is, whose digital files are available in peer-to-
peer networks. These song-types and album-types are not necessarily
rivalrous and excludable, because their tokens can be generated from
files that are, per the argument above, public goods. This by itself does
146 Graham Hubbs
not show that these types are public-good types; it only shows that
they are not necessarily private-good types. If, however, a given song-
token can be generated for free and without depriving anyone else
of being able, at that very moment, to generate the token, it would
seem accurate to conceive of the relevant type as a public-good type.
If this is correct, then it would be correspondingly accurate to consider
song-potentialities embodied in, for example, CDs as public goods. The
physical discs themselves may still be rivalrous and excludable, but the
potentialities they embody are not limited by this fact.
This shift in rivalrousness and excludability is, I think, a shift in kind,
not degree. If it is not already clear, it is the existence of digital music in
peer-to-peer networks, not merely the encoding of music in computer
files, that marks this change in kind. Were there no digital networks,
the encoding of music in computer files would not alter the rivalrousness
or excludability of music. The files would not be spaceless; accessing
them would require interacting with disk drives qua medium-sized,
and so rivalrous and excludable, objects. Once the files are available
in a network, however, their physical embodiment does not effectively
limit their accessibility. Copying the files does not require interacting
with their embodiments as medium-sized physical objects. To think
nevertheless of these files as rivalrous and excludable is either confused
or metaphorical: digital music just isnt made of the stuff of normal
private property.
This last fact has not, however, prevented digital music from being
legally classified as private property. In the United States, a digital music
file is subject to the same principles of copyright that govern the use
of records, cassettes, and CDs.16 Such a file is to be treated as exclud-
able, but not generally; it cannot be legitimately used as the basis of a
copy, so the file owner does not have the right to exclude others from
that is, to grant others access to copies made from it. In short, it is
to be treated as if it were music embodied in a medium-sized object,
subject to the familiar rules and restrictions that apply to such objects.
I will not argue that this is conceptually incoherent, although the label
copyright, understood literally in terms of its etymology, is not a per-
fect description of the relevant restriction as it applies to digital music.
Taken literally, copyright is the right to make copies; what is restricted
here, as noted above, is the right to grant access to the basis of a potential
copy. There should be no mystery why the literal notion of copyright
Digital Music and Public Goods 147
has been extended to cover this somewhat different case. The goal is to
prevent individuals from obtaining unrestricted access to a bit of musi-
cal potential that is, to a given song-type without compensating
those involved in the production and distribution of the music. One
might conceive of such compensation as a matter of social justice for
musicians, as Lowery does, but this is not necessary; a cynical record
label might want to enforce this extended notion of copyright simply in
an effort not to lose profits. Whatever the precise motive, the goal is to
prevent the public from having free and easy access to digital music.17
But if this access cannot, in fact, be effectively controlled via the exten-
sion of copyright law, and if we think artists should still be compensated
for making music, it may be best to stop thinking about music in terms
of private property altogether. As long as digital music is non-rivalrous
and non-excludable, we should not be surprised if it proves difficult
to fund through the private sale of individual albums and songs. Such
funding requires people to ignore how different digital music is from
medium-sized objects; indeed, it is remarkable how successful iTunes
was in the 21st centurys first decade at habituating people to treat non-
rivalrous, non-excludable goods as if they were rivalrous and excludable.
The power of Apple is mighty, and I have no basis for suggesting that
the model of the iTunes store which, to return to Mulligans multi-
phase schema, is the exemplar of the second phase of digital music
will run its course. If, however, a large enough segment of the population
comes to treat digital music as it is, non-rivalrous and non-excludable,
then means of funding that are sensitive to the public nature of the
good will need to be developed. It is of no use here to complain that
this depends too heavily on the charity of the listeners; it is just as
problematic to depend on listeners to buy something that they can
get for free. Apple has managed to get listeners to do this and thus has
delayed, perhaps indefinitely, the widespread acknowledgement of the
non-rivalrous, non-excludable character of digital music. But brute facts
have a way of being recalcitrant to false beliefs the Earth was spinning
around the sun for millennia before Copernicus took note.
If we stop pretending that the record is still the center of the musical
universe and understand digital music as a public good, we can frame
the funding challenge for music as a version of the free rider problem.
Consider the problem as a spectrum of possibilities. In the limiting
case, no one pays anything for recorded music, which, in turn, vastly
diminishes the quantity and quality of new music being produced. Let
the other end of the spectrum be what presently happens. Many musi-
cians are able to earn livings off of recorded music, but many more
would be able to if they received compensation for their music that is
148 Graham Hubbs
donated monies and what they fund. It is correct in noting that, like the
monies raised from selling cupcakes, Kickstarter donations are contribu-
tions to a future public good. It is mistaken, however, in depicting the
roof as something that belongs to the artist; the roof is the music, and it
belongs, as do all other non-rivalrous, non-excludable goods, at once to
no one and to everyone. In spite of its confused analogy, Kelleys remarks
helpfully point out a natural solution to some of the problems created by
the non-rivalrousness and non-excludability of digital music. If we think
of digital music as a public good, then funding it through quasi-public
means such as Kickstarter is not only to be expected it is fitting. Some
sort of public model seems a natural solution to the problem, and so it
should not be surprising to see Kickstarter filling this void.
Another natural solution, at least for these early decades of the
Internet era, is to fund musicians through a hybrid advertising/subscrip-
tion service. This model fits well with third-phase digital music delivery
services, such as that offered by Spotify. Spotify subscribers can select
either a free account, in which case they are subjected to occasional
advertisements in their streams, or an advertisement-free account for
which they pay a monthly fee (Spotify AB, 2015). Listeners choose the
songs they listen to, and artists are compensated according to the
number of times their songs are played. This hybrid model generates
an excludable good that allows free riders to ride, though not for free
those who do not pay with money pay instead with the time that they
are subjected to the advertisements. The model has the potential to deal
effectively with free riders who, as it were, take their music ride on the
streaming service, but if the same ride can be taken freely somewhere
else, the problem of free riding persists. At present, the ride can be taken
somewhere else: first-phase delivery systems persist, and one may turn
to them instead of using a streaming service to obtain the music one
wants. As long as this is so, digital music will be a public good, poorly
suited to be governed by the institution of private property.
Notes
1. See Lessig (2004), which, appropriately, is available online for free. It should
be noted that both my use of free in the last sentence and Lowerys use
throughout his exchange with White is commercial: it denotes the freedom
one enjoys when one gets something without paying anything. This is not
the only use of free relevant to the present discussion, and it is not the
one that primarily concerns Lessig. Lessig is interested in freedom of activ-
ity, which need not be understood in commercial terms. Richard Stallman,
whose work on open-source software is an inspiration for Lessigs writing
150 Graham Hubbs
(Lessig 2004, p. xv), marks this distinction by contrasting the freedom of free
speech, which is not necessarily commercial, from that of free beer, which is
(Stallman, 2002, pp. 43, 59).
2. Mulligan wonders whether 2014 marks the transition to a fourth phase,
characterized by curated music services such as Beats Music. I set aside
discussion of this fourth phase, if indeed it be one.
3. I shall italicize terms to refer to concepts per se.
4. For a close historical study of the commodification of music in early
20th-century United States, see Suisman, 2009.
5. As with public good, I take the concept institution from economics. The slogan
typically attached to this concept is that institutions are the rules of the
game (see, e.g., North, 1990, p. 3, and Searle, 2005, pp. 910). The idea
is that institutions are constituted by norms that govern a given domain.
Institutions may be legal or illegal: for example, the institution of human
trafficking is the illegal application of the institution of private property to
the domain of persons. My claim here will be that the institution of private
property is not well suited to govern the domain of digital music. I discuss
institutions at greater length in Hubbs, 2014, pp. 6768.
6. For the claim that Samuelsons work is the foundation of the modern theory
of public goods, see Cullity (1995, p. 33), Musgrave (1983, p. 141), and
Pickhardt (2006, p. 439). For the argument that Musgrave is the source of
our contemporary definition, see Pickhardt (2006, pp. 4478).
7. Musgrave offers this as a definition of social goods, which replaces his ear-
lier talk of social wants (cf. Musgrave, 1959, p. 8). Public good becomes
the dominant term over the course of the 1970s.
8. Cf. Krugman and Wells (2012, ch. 17).
9. Buchanan appears to be one of the first to use the phrase free rider in print,
but the problem has long been a concern of those who write about public
goods. Consider, for example, the following passage from 1896 by Knut
Wicksell, whose work exerted a major influence on Musgrave: If the individ-
ual is to spend his money for private and public uses so that his satisfaction is
maximized, he will obviously pay nothing whatsoever for public purposes ...
Whether he pays much or little will affect the scope of public services so
slightly, that for all practical purposes he himself will not notice it at all
(Wicksell, 1958 [1896], p. 81).
10. See, for example, the central role that the related concept of just transfer plays
in Robert Nozicks Justice as Entitlement theory (Nozick, 1974, ch. 7.1).
11. In the United States, this right was established by Bobbs-Merrill Co. v. Straus,
210 U.S. 339 (1908). The case there concerned whether Bobbs-Merrill, a pub-
lisher, could set the price that a merchant could sell its publications to the
public even after the merchant had purchased the publications. The Court
ruled that copyright protection does not extend to the resale of publications;
rather, it only pertains to the first sale.
12. Although we will return to the topic, nothing will be said here about the
justification of copyright law. For a recent review of some of the central
arguments on the matter, see Falgoust (2014).
13. See, for example, Bicknell (2009), Davies (1994), Dodd (2007), Gracyk and
Kania (2011), Hamilton (2007), Kivy (2002), Levinson (1997), Ridley (2004),
and Stock (2007).
Digital Music and Public Goods 151
14. For more on the disruptive effects of tape recorders, see Attali (1985, pp. 96 ff).
15. Perhaps more accurately, this practical spacelessness is a perceived space-
lessness. Again, I do not mean to deny that spatial considerations play an
important role in determining the size and quality of digital music files.
16. The precedent here is established in Mai Systems Corp. v. Peak Computer, Inc.,
991 F.2d 511 (9th Cir. 1993). On the relevance of this case to digital music,
see Fantaci (2002, pp. 6578).
17. For more on the application of copyright to digital music, see Vaidhyanathan
(2001, ch. 5).
18. The importance of these features to public goods and free riding are
discussed throughout Cullity (1995).
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9
The Preservation Paradox
Jonathan Sterne
Later in the piece Taylor writes that even the [British] National Film and
Television Archive was only able to preserve just over 25 per cent of the
total broadcast output of ITV and Channel 4 in 199394. That means
75 per cent lost for posterity only a fragment of our contemporary
153
154 Jonathan Sterne
The person who cannot set himself down on the crest of the moment,
forgetting everything from the past, who is not capable of standing
on a single point, like a goddess of victory, without dizziness or
fear, will never know what happiness is. A person who wanted
to feel utterly and only historically would be like someone who
was forced to abstain from sleep or like the beast that is to continue
its life only from rumination to constantly repeated rumination
(Nietzsche, 1957).
choice, but it also has much to do with broader cultural attitudes about
recordings and the sound they contain.
Countless writers have commented that recording in one way or
another destroyed sounds ephemeral qualities. Sound itself, they write,
was rendered durable and repeatable by Edison. Thanks to recording,
sound exists in the memories of machines and surfaces as well as the
memories of people. Certainly, this is one of the almost magical powers
of recording. As Bijsterveld and Jacobs (2009) remind us, it has been a
selling point for new recording technologies at different times. And cer-
tainly, the possibility of preservation opens up the fantasy of cheating
time and death through an unbroken chain of preservation. But the
fantasy that we can commune with the voices of the dead, that what is
recorded today will be preserved forever, is just that: a fantasy. Sound
recording marks an extension of ephemerality, not its undoing. The
same could be said of any form of recording, whether we are talking
about ancient tablets, dusty account files in a file cabinet, tape backups
of the universitys mainframe or the CD-R I burned yesterday. Most
records available today are simply waiting to become lost records.
More and more of my friends whether or not they are serious about
music are unloading their collections of CDs and LPs, preferring instead
to keep their collections readily available on hard drives. In making this
simple move, while retaining the music for themselves in the near term,
they make it much less likely that any part of their collections will out-
live them, given the short lifespan of hard drives. What will happen
when this comes to pass and their collections either fade away or disap-
pear rapidly? If it happens too soon, they will recognize their loss and
perhaps seek to replace the missing music. But the lack of durability also
means that their collections are less likely to outlive them, and therefore
will not recirculate through various kinds of used markets or through
others collections. In turn, they will never make it into archives. This
process is less a simple kind of forgetting, like forgetting where one
left ones car keys; it is more properly a forgetting of forgetting. Our
descendants wont even know what is missing.
In important ways, the forgetting of forgetting already structures
the history of recording. The preciousness that characterizes all record-
ing is perhaps most apparent in surviving early examples of phonog-
raphy. Originally used to describe early printed books, especially those
from before 1500, media archivists have expanded the term incunabu-
lum to include early examples of any recording medium. In the case
of sound recordings, an incunabulum is any recording from before 1900
(Smart, 1980, p. 424). Relatively few recordings from this period exist,
The Preservation Paradox 157
and those that do are treated like treasures by archivists. James R. Smart,
Library of Congress Archivist puts it thus in a 1980 article:
They are historic documents in sound which, more than any photo-
graph or paragraph, illustrate nineteenth-century performance styles
in music, in vaudeville routines, in dramatic readings. They teach us,
more than any book can, just what our ancestors enjoyed in popular
music, what appealed to their sense of the ridiculous or their sense
of the dramatic (Smart, 1980, p. 424).
Smarts point here is that old recordings, when they are preserved and
properly curated, become living documents of history in the present,
a point he makes even more emphatically elsewhere in his essay. Even
though no playable recordings exist from the first ten years of sound
recordings history, he writes:
For Smart, the rarity of early recordings is paired with the rarity of
memory itself. He partakes of an ideology of transparency that has been
widely criticized by sound scholars, myself included, and yet it is unde-
niable that one of the reasons people find recordings precious is because
they offer some kind of access to lost or otherwise inaccessible moments
(Williams, 1980; Altman, 1992; Lastra, 2000; Auslander, 1999; Sterne,
2003). The curated recording is a hedge against mortality, the fragility
of memory, and the ever-receding substance of history. The interplay
between a bit of access and large sections of inaccessibility are precisely
what makes the past intriguing, mysterious, and potentially revelatory.
Thus, the idea that recordings can provide access to the past requires
two important prior conditions: (1) as Smart himself argues, it presup-
poses that certain recordings will be elevated to the status of official
historical documents and curated in an appropriate fashion; and (2)
in order for that process to occur, there must be an essential rarity of
158 Jonathan Sterne
recordings from the period. Most recordings must become lost record-
ings before any recordings can be elevated as historical documents.
Given the wide range of recordings made, the only way for a recording
to become rare is if most of the recordings like it are lost.
It may seem odd to think that most of the recordings ever made must
be lost before any of them can be found and made into historical docu-
ments. But in fact the vast majority of recordings in history are lost. For
all the grandiloquence about messages to future generations and hearing
the voices of the dead, most recordings have (and I would argue, are
still) treated by their makers, owners and users as ephemera, as items to
be used for a while and then to be disposed of. This has been a funda-
mental condition of recording throughout its history. As D.L. LeMahieu
wrote of the gramophone in Britain, popular records became almost as
transitory in the market-place as the ephemeral sounds which they pre-
served. Within a few generations, records produced by the thousands
and millions became rare items. Many were lost altogether (LeMahieu,
1988, p. 89).
Sound recording did as much to promote ephemerality as it did to
promote permanence in the auditory life of a culture. Inasmuch as we
can claim it promoted permanence, sound recording also helped to
accelerate the pace of fashion and turnover in popular music. Songs
which a few generations before might have remained popular for
decades now rose and fell within a year, or even months (LeMahieu,
1988, p. 89). The fundamental classification of recordings as ephemera
continues down to the present day, as record collections are routinely
mistreated, disposed of, and occasionally recirculated (Keil and Feld,
1996; Straw, 2000).
In this way, sound recordings became quite typical modern com-
modities, and the fluctuation of their commercial and historical value
depends on their mass disposal and disappearance. Michael Thompsons
very interesting book Rubbish Theory chronicles the life-cycles of similar
modern commodities. Thompson argues that mass-produced ephemera
begin their lives at a relatively stable level of economic value which
diminishes over time as they lose the luster of newness and become
increasingly common and available. This loss in value eventually results
in the object becoming worthless, at which point most of the objects in
question are thrown out. Once the object becomes relatively rare
through this process of devaluation and disposal it can again begin
to accrue value for collectors through its oddity or rarity. Thompson is
interested in old houses, Victorian keepsakes, consumer packaging, and
a whole range of odds and ends because of the relationship between
The Preservation Paradox 159
this game still cannot be played as it was intended: no one has seen it
working for 20 years, no one knows the correct colours, collisions are
not working, and there is no sound. Anyone can download a copy of
this (sort of) mass-produced digital work, but in this case redundancy
does not ensure the survival of the game. (Swalwell, 2007, p. 264)
The same conditions apply to digital audio. Not only will metadata be
lost, so too may be aspects of the files themselves. Archival specialists
also expect that preserving digital sound recordings will require more
in resources than preserving their analog counterparts. The added
expenses come not from storage itself (since digital storage continues to
become cheaper), but rather all the things that come with digital stor-
age: duplication and backup, the need to maintain proper equipment,
expertise for reading the digital files in whatever format they exist,
and all other aspects of infrastructure and maintenance (Russell, 1999).
Though there are really no data upon which we can rely with abso-
lute certainty, estimates for the durability of digital media are relatively
low. Unused hard drives fail within a few years and CD-R lifespan is the
The Preservation Paradox 163
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Jeremy Morris for the title suggestion and important research
assistance, to the volume editors for their helpful suggestions, and
to Carrie Rentschler for a much-needed read. Additional thanks to
Matthew Noble-Olson for help with final edits.
The Preservation Paradox 165
Note
1. This discussion is based on a personal conversation with Samuel Brylawski,
former head of the Recorded Sound Division at the Library of Congress
and Mark Katz, The Second Digital Revolution in Music, Music Library
Association Meeting (Pittsburgh, 2007).
References
Altman, R. (ed.) (1992) Sound Theory/Sound Practice. New York: Routledge.
Aug, M. (2004) Oblivion. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Auslander, P. (1999) Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture. New York:
Routledge.
Bannon, L. J. (2006) Forgetting as a Feature, Not a Bug: The Duality of Memory
and Implications for Ubiquitous Computing. CoDesign (2)1: 315.
Bijsterveld, K. and Jacobs, A. (2009) Storing Sound Souvenirs: The Multi-sited
Domestication of the Tape Recorder. In Bijsterveld, K. and van Dijck, J. (eds.),
Sound Souvenirs: Audio Technologies, Memory and Cultural Practices. Amsterdam:
Amsterdam University Press.
Brown, J. (2000) The Jukebox Manifesto, Salon.com, 13 November. Available
from: http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2000/11/13/jukebox/ (accessed
December 12, 2005).
Brylawski, S. (2002) Preservation of Digitally Recorded Sound, Building a
National Strategy for Preservation: Issues in Digital Media Archiving, ed.
Council on Library and Information Resources and the Library of Congress.
Washington, D.C.: Council on Library and Information Resources and the
Library of Congress.
Conway, P. (2005), Preservation in the Digital World, Report. Available from:
http://www.clir.org/pubs/reports/conway2/ (accessed December 12, 2005).
Evans, A. (2005) Sound Ideas: Music, Machines and Experience. Minneapolis, MN:
University of Minnesota Press.
Featherstone, M. (2000) Archiving Cultures, British Journal of Sociology (51)1: 16184.
Gillespie, T. (2007) Wired Shut: Copyright and the Shape of Digital Culture.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Jansen, B. (2009). Tape Cassettes and Former Selves: How Mix Tapes Mediate
Memories. In Bijsterveld, K. and van Dijck, J. (eds.), Sound Souvenirs: Audio
Technologies, Memory and Cultural Practices. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University
Press.
Katz, M. (2007) The Second Digital Revolution in Music, Music Library Association
Meeting. Pittsburgh.
Keil, C. and Feld, S. (1996) Music Grooves. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Lastra, J. (2000) Sound Technology and American Cinema: Perception, Representation,
Modernity. New York: Columbia University Press.
Lee, B. (2000) Issues Surrounding the Preservation of Digital Music Documents,
Archivaria 50: 193204.
LeMahieu, D. L. (1988) A Culture for Democracy: Mass Communication and the
Cultivated Mind in Britain between the Wars. New York: Oxford University Press.
166 Jonathan Sterne
What kind of listening space is an office space? In Mike Judges cult clas-
sic, Ofce Space (1999), a lowly worker named Milton Waddam (Stephen
Root) is trying to listen to the radio in his shabby cubicle. The films
handsome anti-hero, Peter (Ron Livingston), is bothered by the sound.
Peter: Milton? Hi. Uh... Could you turn that down just a little bit?
Milton: But I was told that I could listen to the radio at a reasonable
volume from 9:00 to 11:00.
Peter: Yeah. I know youre allowed to. I was just thinkin maybe like
a personal favor, you know.
Milton: Well, I-I-I told Bill if Sandras going to listen to her headphones
while shes filing, then I should be able to listen to the radio
while Im collating, so I dont see.ok.why I should have to
turn down the radio. Yeah. All right. Ok. I enjoy listening at a
reasonable volume... (Milton turns the radio down).
Peter: Thanks Milton.
Milton: from 9:00 to 11:00.
Ofce Space, one of the great satires of the modern day workplace, uses
humor to highlight the serious annoyances that most workers face every
day: egocentric bosses, meaningless memos, rude co-workers, equipment
that doesnt work, and slackers who get promoted. Not everyone goes
insane, but, in Ofce Space, Milton Waddam, with his thick, coke bottle
glasses and strange, monotone voice, is the ultimate wounded white-
collar worker. He has had his stapler confiscated, his desk moved and his
radio turned off so many times he is ready to set the company on fire.
But when it comes to being driven mad at the office, Miltons real
life counter parts might not be far behind. Modern-day office workers,
167
168 Kathy M. Newman
even well-paid managers, are chafing under the latest trends in office
management and design: the open plan office. Unexpectedly, one
way we can measure their suffering is by assessing the state of music
listening in the modern-day workplace. In the now dominant open
plan workplace, office workers listen to music via headphones, not just
because they want to, but because, in order to maintain their personal
space and their sanity, they have to. As one software engineer put it,
headphones are the new walls (Tierney, 2012).
In this chapter I look at the last decade of research on the effects of music
at work, as well as the ways in which human resource writers/bloggers
and mainstream journalists have used and reported on this research.
I argue that while much of the literature seems to be about music, as
well as what music-listening practices are best for employees, most of
the findings are more genuinely concerned with what is best for the
corporate bottom line. In other words, journalistic accounts of listening
to music at work are really about control, or lack thereof, on the part of
the modern-day office worker. Questions like, Is listening to music at
work good for workers, psychologically? And Is listening to music at
work good for workers in terms of increased or improved productivity?
are really questions about how much privacy, autonomy and control are
possessed by modern-day workersincluding relatively well paid and
elite workers on the cutting edge of a new economy.
Ultimately, these are questions about power, economy, and class
identity. As the economist Michael Zweig (2011) has argued, at least 62
percent of Americans can be considered working class on the basis that
they lack autonomy, power, and control in the workplace. As more and
more knowledge workers are moved to open plan workplaces, in which
even cubicles are dismantled in favor of an open arrangement of desks
and computers without walls or dividers, I am left wondering if now
even relatively well-paid professional/managerial workers are losing a
crucial share of workplace autonomy, and possibly even their class sta-
tus, in the digital age.
today Korczynski is both the founder of, as well as the most prolific
contributor to, a small but growing field of scholarship that looks at
how music and work intersect (Korczynski et al., 2006; Korczynski and
Pickering, 2013; Korczynski, 2014).
Korczynski and his colleagues argue that music and work have been
intertwined features of human experience for centuries. Korczynski shows
that in pre-industrial times work songs were closely associated with a
number of kinds of workers, from weavers to farmers, wagon drivers,
miners, sailors, peddlers, cobblers and tailors. Korczynski explains that
singing helped workers to keep time in the fields, but also at the loom,
and even on the bow of a ship. There were two kinds of sea shanties,
he explains, one suited for the hauling of ropes and setting of sails,
and one for working on the ships machinery. Each kind of sea shanty
had a different rhythm that was matched to a distinct kind of work.
Korczynski (2003, pp. 317, 318) argues that music and work formed a
dialectical bond of what he calls mutual constitution, with the rhythm
and pace of one informing the rhythm and pace of the other.
While Korczynski believes that work and music were dialectically
related, he leaves open the possibility that there was ambivalence in
the meanings made by these pre-industrial works songs. Were these
songs of consolation, or songs of recognition? Did they help to ease
the burden of work, or did they connect workers to a deeper conscious-
ness of their labor? Perhaps, Korczynski suggests, work songs blended
work and play in a way that did not treat them as binary opposites.
Perhaps these work songs helped those who sang them to create a map
of their world which allowed a melodious transport from the mate-
rial demands of labour while at the same time acknowledging these
demands. As Korczynski sees it, work and play were more integrated
during this time period, and there was pleasure within and through
hardship (Korczynski 2003, p. 320).
At the same time, this dialectal relationship between work and
play was relatively fleeting, because, as Korczynski argues, leisure and
work were forced to endure a big split under industrial capitalism,
for two reasons. The first was the urbanization and proletarianization
of previously rural workers, as the pace of labor was now more often
determined by machines and managers than the rhythm of a song.
Singing, whistling and talking soon became offenses punishable by
fines or worse. Under the dictates of the efficiency dogma that became
known as Taylorism, there was the increasing repression of sing-
ing, drinking or chatting on the job. The split between work and
play became part of the common sense of the era, as Teddy Roosevelt
170 Kathy M. Newman
opined, When you play, play hard. When you work, dont play at
all. But as the century progressed Marxist critics like Theodor Adorno
lambasted such ideas, arguing that, Work while you work, play while
you play this is a basic rule of repressive self-discipline (Adorno,
2005, p. 84).
Korczynski argues that the second aspect of industrialization that
divided music from its connection to work was the commodification of
music. From the player piano, to sheet music for sale, to the gramo-
phone, and the radio, music increasingly became something workers
bought rather than something workers made for themselves. While
much research has been done in cultural studies and cultural history to
show that working-class cultural producers were integrated into the mar-
ket during this period as performers, songwriters, inventors and entre-
preneurs, it is certainly true that the commodification of music eroded,
if not eliminated, centuries of organically produced folk song traditions.
At the same time, there is much evidence to suggest that the
20th-century workplace was not entirely devoid of music. Granted it
was rarely music made by the workers themselves, but, increasingly
in both Britain and the US, factory managers piped in radio programs
designed specifically for the tastes of factory workers. In the US the infa-
mous company Muzak, which was established in 1934, began charging
companies for the right to pipe in Muzaks own special brand of easy
listening pop songs that were rearranged, without vocals and heavy
on the strings. Only sanitized instrumental arrangements were used,
because the absence of lyrics made the music less likely to intrude upon
conscious thought (Owen, 2006).
In England the BBC produced a radio show, Music While You Work,
which was broadcast three times a day and which featured light music,
dance music, etc. According to industrial research from the period, the
music was not supposed to provide workers with a rhythm by which
they could pace their work. Rather, the music was supposed to function
as a means of creating a spirit of cheerfulness and gaiety. Music While
You Work was supposed to relieve workers, especially women who were
entering into factory labor as never before, from the monotony and
boredom of the factorys repetitive tasks. But the workers were not
supposed to be too interested in the music that played while they work.
In 1942, the song Deep in the Heart of Texas was banned from the
program because it contained a participatory handclapping section that
tempted laborers to stop work and join in (Le Roux, 2005, p. 1108).
In the 1930s and 1940s there was also a rise in labor union cho-
ruses. Unions like the ILGWU used worker choruses for new member
Headphones are the New Walls: Music in the Workplace in the Digital Age 171
age for effects of music research. Studies have shown that music can
improve cardiovascular functioning, help cancer patients to feel more
hopeful, bring about positive emotions, and even stimulate move-
ment in stroke patients. Music lessons for young people can improve
their verbal memory and improve their ability to process sound as they
age. In some cases even listening to particular composers, such as
Vivaldi, can make listeners more alert and improve their verbal fluency
(Morreale, 2013).
And, according to dozens of additional studies (and not just those
bankrolled by music companies), music is also good for us when we
work. Music, the studies show, makes us feel happier, and when we feel
happier we are more productive. Music can also calm us while we work,
or, more precisely, lower our perception of tension. Finally, music,
especially music we like, can increase our dopamine flow, which, accord-
ing to one researcher, improves our ability to focus (Lesiuk, 2005, p. 175).
Some of these studies claim that one kind of music in particular is
best for listening to while working. Classical music has been frequently
highlighted as a productivity booster. A famous study on Mozart and
task work, now called The Mozart Effect, found that children and the
elderly performed tasks better when they listened to Mozart, but the
studys findings have been difficult to duplicate. Another study found
that radiologists performed better and faster when Baroque music was
piped into their offices while on the job. Ironically, perhaps, this study
was motivated by an attempt to look at environmental factors that
could improve the work environment, given the increased workload of
todays radiologists. In other words, while hospitals could have chosen
to relieve the burden of overwork on their radiologists, Baroque music
was seen as a more cost effective solution to the problem (American
Roentgen Ray Society, 2009; Rauscher et al. 1993).1
In some cases the benefits of music are more subtle. One 1993 study
showed that workers listening to music in a major key reported higher
levels of satisfaction than workers listening to music in a minor key.
Other studies have shown that familiar music is the best music to stimu-
late a workers intense focus on the job, while, at the same time, other
studies show that music with lyrics can be distracting, especially when
it comes to retaining or learning new information (Blood and Ferris,
1993; Ciotti, 2014).
But for whom is music in the workplace most beneficial? Most
researchers argue that music in the workplace is a boon for work-
place efficiency, as opposed to (simply) a boon for the workers them-
selves. As Dr. David Lewis, chairman of Mindlab International, which
Headphones are the New Walls: Music in the Workplace in the Digital Age 173
iPod, Therefore I Am
Sound theorist and cultural studies scholar Michael Bull (2010) has
argued that the iPod, the most ubiquitous of the personal listening
devices (PLD), has given office workers greater control and autonomy
on the job. Using questionnaires returned to him from a variety of
newspapers, including The Guardian and The New York Times, Bull found
that iPods improved both the mood and productivity of their owners.
iPod owners wrote about how they used their iPods to keep distractions
to a minimum as their headphones became a kind of do not disturb
sign for busybody co-workers (Bull, 2010).
Bull (2010, p. 56) argues that while smart phones connect us to the
world, our iPods connect us to ourselves. As one iPod user in Bulls study
explained, I feel almost cut off from society if I dont have my mobile,
whereas I feel like Im cut off from a part of myself if I dont have my
iPod. Another user claimed to feel an unprecedented level of emotion
control while using the iPod. Another user went so far as to claim that
the iPod keeps me from feeling oppressed by being constantly sur-
rounded by other human beings. This is a pretty astonishing claim:
how many devices can claim to liberate us from oppression?
Ironically, perhaps, while many employers accept the idea that it is
good for their workers to listen to music of their own choosing, employers
do not like the iPod. The most commonly cited employer concern about
the iPod is safety. There are thousands of articles and reports, including
company policy statements and human resource newsletters, which raise
concerns about iPods and worker safety. One such article suggested that
listening to an iPod at 50 percent of its total volume is safe on the job.
However, if the work environment itself is noisy, exceeding 85 dB (equiva-
lent to the sound of city traffic from inside your car), then the worker
is required to protect their hearing, and theyd be causing hearing loss if
they substituted protection for another sound source (Main, 2011).
The second biggest employer issue when it comes to iPods concerns
how employees respond (or do not respond) to others when they are
wearing headphones. Employers frequently make complaints like this
one: I find it very frustrating when you approach an employees desk
and because they are listening to the iPod, they dont even know
that you are standing there. Other workers, even those in non-
supervisory roles, have also been known to express disdain for their
co-workers who use iPods. One office worker commented that every
worker should forego the iPod and do an honest day of work and
be proud of it. Another commented: If you are paying people to
Headphones are the New Walls: Music in the Workplace in the Digital Age 175
work they should not use their iPod on work time. We work, then
play. This comment echoes Adornos idea on repressive self-discipline
cited earlier in this essay.
While employers often complain about PDLs and headphones, office
workers defend them vigorously, as one human resource consultant
found when he asked commenters to weigh in. The pro-iPod contingent
argued that such devices were crucial to their mental health. One office
worker suggested that if someone took his companys iPod privileges,
that someone [m]ay as well send the little men in white coats, because
I am off to the funny farm. Another worker claimed that, radio has
saved my sanity. Another worker claimed that the iPod was best for the
safety of her co-workers: If I were not able to listen to classical music at
work I would probably kill some of my co-workers. They are constantly
talking about their personal lives, which I am not interested in. I use the
iPod to block them out (Bruce, 2008).
Much of the writing on the pros and cons of iPods at work represents
the fight as a generational one. Digital natives, especially workers born
the decade before the new millennium, argued Pew Research Centers
Lee Rainey in 2006, have grown up with technology and not only want
to work with multiple inputs and stimuli including music they
expect to. Rainey gives the example of a father/son pair who symbolize
the difference between digital natives and old fogeys: David Cintz, 22,
who attended Cal State, and his father who worked for Hewlett Packard,
each has his own level of comfort with technology. The 22-year-old
explained the differences between himself and his dad: He can kick
my butt on programming, but Im the one who works all the time with
two monitors on, listening to an internet radio station, with multiple
IM screens on, or having online phone conversations simultaneously.
Notes the younger Cintz, Im the one living in the digital world,
plugged into more devices. For him, its work. For me, its lifestyle
(Rainey, 2006).
Even some digital natives are chafing under the strain of the most
dominant office trend since the Great Recession of 2008: the open plan
office. This trend involves dismantling the much hated cubicle walls,
and replacing them with rows upon rows of open desks and monitors,
so that every workplace looks like a stock fund trading floor and
is about as loud, as well. While many human resource managers are
still skeptical about the iPod, over the last ten years, as the open plan
176 Kathy M. Newman
office has become both trendy and cost-effective, employers have been
increasingly permissive about headphones in the workplace. Indeed,
for many workers, headphones now constitute the only privacy they
have.
Take this widely publicized Washington Post article titled: Google Got
it Wrong: How the Open Office Is Destroying the Workplace. In this
piece Lindsey Kaufman, a senior ad writer who once had a private office,
writes how she felt downgraded and humiliated when her advertising
firm moved to an open plan office in Tribeca and she was forced to work
at a long desk surrounded by at least a dozen other people. After endur-
ing her first day of a co-worker she described as an air horn, as well
as the constant noise of background music, co-workers talking, laugh-
ing, and yelling, she barely made it until quitting time: At days end,
I bid adieu to the 12 pairs of eyes I felt judging my 5:04 p.m. departure
time. I beelined to the Beats store to purchase their best noise-cancelling
headphones in an unmistakably visible neon blue. She ended her
screed against the open office with a plea for more walls, not fewer
(Kaufman, 2014).
The open plan office is likely here to stay. As Kaufman points out,
a report by the International Facility Management Association found
that more than 70 percent of companies now use an open office layout
for their employees. Open plan offices have been implemented at tech
giants like Apple and Google, but even some hospitals and schools
are moving towards the redesign. Facebook recently bought a 56-acre
office park for $400 million, and has widely publicized the fact that
Frank Gehry has designed its new headquarters, which includes a single
room that is supposed to house 2,800 engineers, set to be finished in
2016, as well as a space for 2,000 Facebook employees in Seattle. And,
if open offices have allowed companies to shrink their square footage
overall, the open office trend has been a boon for office furniture and
design sales. A recent defender of the open office plan, Blake Zalcberg,
who wrote Its Time to Stop the War against the Open Office Plan
in The Hufngton Post, is the CEO of an office and school furniture
manufacturer (Bishop, 2015; Zalcberg, 2015).
As workplace historians have noted, the open office trend is an old
trend that has been made new. The white-collar offices of the early 20th
century were also made up of many individuals desks arranged in large,
open rooms. Most consider the first modern office space to be Frank
Lloyd Wrights Larkin Administration building for Larkin soap, which
was built in 1905 when Wright was only 35 years old. It included a large
atrium of open floor space with desks and people crammed together,
Headphones are the New Walls: Music in the Workplace in the Digital Age 177
kinds of power and autonomy workers have forfeited since the 2008
recession. Ironically, perhaps, it is the workers who are most central to
the new economy technology and information workers who are most
likely to be working under the panoptic glare of the open plan office.
Though these workers were once safe inside their own offices with walls
and doors, or, for a time, out of view behind a cubicle, today the typi-
cal white-collar worker, even those who make six figures, are forced to
create more metaphorical space between themselves and their nattering,
farting, burping, yelling coughing, sneezing, eating, slurping co-workers.
To create this virtual space they need high-end noise-cancelling head-
phones which they have to buy for themselves. What workers are lis-
tening to on those headphones suddenly seems far less important than
the fact that those headphones have become their only shield their
only source of privacy in a corporate culture gone nearly mad.
Note
1. The Mozart effect, a term coined by French researcher Alfred Tomatis in his
1991 book Pourquoi Mozart? was popularized further by a study published in
Nature in 1993.
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11
Researching the Mobile Phone
Ringtone: Towards and Beyond
The Ringtone Dialectic
Sumanth Gopinath
as the widely available MP3 files that are currently the most common
media format for listening to recorded music. Today, the only thing that
distinguishes any MP3 (or comparable file) from a ringtone is where
it is located within a mobile phones file directory and the fact that
many phones/carriers still do not allow ringtones to be longer than 30
seconds9. (Some phones require that ringtones receive a separate file for-
mat extension such as .m4r on the iPhone, a renaming of the standard
.m4a for AAC digital files.)
This simple series of changes had enormous consequences for the
ringtone industrys development. Chief among these were economic.
When the ringtone was a monophonic or polyphonic synthesizer-file
adaptation of a pre-existing musical selection, which was by far the
most common type of ringtone (as opposed to originally composed
ringtones), copyright law understood them to be arrangements of those
songs, and hence they were treated like cover songs. This meant that the
selections or songs composer (and the company publishing it) received a
certain, relatively nominal, fee from the companies selling the ringtones
(between 8.5 and 10 cents per ringtone sold). In contrast, a ringtone
made of a digital sound file not only used a pre-owned song or composi-
tion, but also had to license the master recording of that song or compo-
sition, and hence had to obtain and pay for that recording from a record
label. The heyday of monophonic and polyphonic ringtones typically
involved smaller companies that jumped into the nascent ringtones
market before larger music-business firms thought to do so, and these
firms helped to make up the emergent mobile entertainment industry
with such companies also selling other digital products for phones, like
phone wallpaper (which could customize the display screen of ones
cellphone). The major recording industry labels like BMG, Universal,
Sony/Columbia, Warner, EMI, etc. were not pleased with this state of
affairs as they were cut out of the lions share of profits (which instead
went to mobile entertainment firms), but they knew that if ringtones
became sound files, the legal situation would favor them much more
and allow them to squeeze out smaller companies or competitor firms of
a much larger size. (In an example of the latter, the Japanese instrument
company Yamaha was involved in selling high-quality polyphonic ring-
tones and became one of the largest ringtone sales firms in the world
in the early to mid-2000s.) Phone manufacturers sought to improve the
quality of their ringtones and thus a process of technological conver-
gence took place, in which the upgrading of phones ringtone formats
was motivated by phone handset design engineers desires to improve
phone performance and by pressure from the recording industry. By the
186 Sumanth Gopinath
mid- to late 2000s, firms partnering with or owned by the major record
labels were the dominant players in the mobile entertainment industry.
Thanks in part to the major labels oligopoly control of the sound-file
ringtone market, this involved a major hike in the price of ringtones:
whereas polyphonic ringtones might cost $.99 or $1.99, sound file
ringtones were upwards of $2.99 far more than the full-length digital
sound files (the same product!) that were locked into a price point of
$0.99 by sales portals like the iTunes store (RD, pp. 1926).
Small wonder, then, that recording industry spokespersons began to
announce that ringtones might actually reverse their industrys declining
fortunes, which had allegedly suffered on account of unauthorized file-
sharing. (Others argued that the industry was bloated and flooding the
market with substandard products, and that filesharing was a necessary
corrective to this situation.) But as overpriced products, sales of sound
file ringtones were essentially the result of what technology journalists
called a walled garden: a mobile phone operating system and file
directory that were extremely difficult to access by ordinary consumers,
hence making it nearly impossible for them to upload their own digital
sound files onto their phones and bypass the entire ringtone industry
altogether. Companies like Xingtone developed inexpensive software
packages that allowed phone users to upload music from compact discs
and digital sound files on their computers without having to pay extra
for each individual ringtone. Moreover, starting in 2007 with the advent
of Apples iPhone and other smartphones, which spurred the ongoing
convergence between the telephone and Internet networks, it became
easier to exchange and access files on cellphones, and online blogs and
reporters conspired to teach consumers how to avoid paying for ring-
tones. It wasnt long before ringtone industry profits began to dwindle,
and after receiving additional setbacks on account of the recession of
20082009, they would simply never recover (RD, pp. 3952).10
Economic shifts, however, were not the only noteworthy effects of
the ringtones technical transformations if they can even be called
effects at all, since the technical shifts themselves were ultimately
inseparable from the economic motivations that lay behind them. For
example, one of the studies I undertook in the book involved examin-
ing how ringtones were made, and I discovered that, like all products,
ringtones required a labor force to produce. It turns out that the labor of
making ringtones changed quite drastically as the file formats changed:
the skill requirements and labor time involved in making a ringtone
became much greater once the ringtone transformed from a single,
simple beeping melody into a full-blown imitation of a particular
Researching the Mobile Phone Ringtone 187
changes) and the cultural and social practices associated with the ring-
tone, turns out to be a particular version of a more general dialectic
commonly discussed within Marxist cultural theory: the relationship
between the economic base and the social, cultural, legal, and political
superstructure that seems to be founded upon it. Debates about Marxs
metaphor of the base and superstructure, as well as dogmatic adher-
ence to the idea, are replete within the literature and history of Marxist
thought, but the key issues appear to hinge upon how strongly the base
determines the superstructure and whether the metaphor is of utility at
all. I contend that it still has some value in the capitalist system, the
economy has a huge effect on so much of what happens in our lives
and my tentative solution to a complex and long-standing theoretical
problem is that one must examine the issue on a case-by-case basis, that
one ought not to force the base to appear to mechanically determine
what happens in the superstructure, and that one should instead con-
tinue to ask the question of how the base affects the superstructure, how
economy affects cultural form the two terms I use to translate base
and superstructure (RD, pp. xviiixx).
The dialectic of base and superstructure is not the only dialectical con-
tradiction at play in the book; one can be found within the economy of
the ringtone itself: specifically, the emergence of the sound file ringtone
both led to great profits for the ringtone industry, but its very fungibility
and exchangeability led it to destroy the very basis for those same prof-
its. Thus, we find a dialectical contradiction of profit and loss contained
within the potentialities of the sound file ringtone itself, a finding that
might be somewhat surprising at first glance. In fact, a number of com-
parable surprises became apparent as I researched the ringtone. Three
examples of these are as follows. First, I came to appreciate the way in
which the ringtone as a form engaged with an extensive prehistory
of short-form compositions, on the one hand, and with the sound of
functional ringer signals, on the other. These engagements were real-
ized in a wide variety of original ringtones created by Brice Salek for his
recording label Ringtone Records. In one amusing and uncanny exam-
ple, the Look Mommy Ringtone, Salek transforms his own voice into
a childs voice, periodically and slowly saying the words look Mommy,
a U.F.O. in a repetitive, almost signal-like way (RD, pp. 183200).
Second, through circumstantial evidence from Billboard Magazines ring-
tone hit-charts, comments from interlocutors in the ringtone industry,
and information from the Pew Internet & American Life Project from
2010, it quickly became evident to me that many of the primary con-
sumers of sound-file ringtones were working-class African Americans.
Researching the Mobile Phone Ringtone 191
When one combines this fact with the awareness that ringtones were
essentially a huge rip-off, one might surmise that black consumers
disproportionately bore the costs of ringtone consumption and thus
helped to artificially boost recording industry profits at a time when
they were otherwise flagging (RD, pp. 24167). Third, I came to appre-
ciate the ways in which the technologies used to produce ringtones
specifically, single-oscillator synthesizer, MIDI synthesizer, and digital
audio-file playback technologies appeared in comparable successions
in the history of computer music using large mainframe computers,
personal computer sound cards, video game consoles, and handheld
gaming platforms before they underwent similar transformations on
mobile telephones (RD, pp. 14, 545). I also found fascinating precursors
to the earliest beeping ringtones in various early digital devices such as
the digital watch of the late 1970s and early 1980s some examples of
which played ringtone-like melodies.12
Despite its smallness and brevity, the ringtone, then, clearly con-
tained an entire world worthy of consideration, and even provided one
way of analyzing the entire world although it should go without say-
ing that all of the ringtone world, let alone the world in toto, was by no
means represented in the book, which reflects my biases towards the
US as a US-American and scholar of the US. But given that the ringtone
developed far more quickly in East Asia and Europe than in the US, as
the basis for a study of global cultural processes the ringtone provides
a fascinating lens on a world in which the US, the global hegemon,
was not the primary protagonist in the tale. But although one could
use this aspect of the ringtone to prognosticate what the future of the
world might look like a future in which the US is not the dominant
power the greater interest for me lies in the fact that the ringtone is a
historical phenomenon, drawing attention to the way that the present
immediately becomes past, and the past passes over into the realm of
history, which always merits closer inspection.
Notes
1. The figures after 2012 are a bit problematic since the RIAA stopped including
music videos, full-track downloads, and other mobile in the same category
as ringtones and ringbacks a product of the changing ecosystem of mobile
sales, which are now not as useful to differentiate from other online sales
(given the present continuity between phone and computer access to the
Internet for most users, as well as the declining relevance of phone-specific
sales portals). Nonetheless, the decreasing trend for ringtone and ringback
sales may be beginning to level off somewhat. In 2013, ringtone/ringback
192 Sumanth Gopinath
sales were at $98.0 million (a decrease of $68.9 million from 2012), and in
2014, they had decreased to $66.5 million (a decrease of $31.5 million from
2013). See ibid., and RIAA, 2014. For a chart of ringtone (and other mobile)
sales from 2005 to 2011, see RD, p. 51.
2. Of course, ringtones have not disappeared from public life. As Saladin (2015)
notes, partly in reaction to my own work, Above all, however, the cultural
transformations linked to the [ringtone] phenomenon have taken on an
entirely different rhythm and lifespan to those of a mere speculative bubble
(Gopinath 2013). Today these ringtones are omnipresent in public space and
public transport, as well as in spaces (libraries, classrooms, hospitals, cinemas
and so on) in which they are banned, or rather in which an express request
is made to put mobile phones on silent, thereby revealing their ubiquity.
To my mind, Saladins argument is quite compelling, and my claims about
the death of the ringtone (see endnote 5 below and RD, pp. 4852) mainly
concern the decline of its importance as a system of capital accumulation
indeed, a speculative bubbleand as a fad. This decline has important
sociocultural consequences, including a normalized and even banalized
ubiquity. In Saladins words, Today, ringtones have lost their power to sur-
prise us. They may unexpectedly annoy us or confuse us when we mistake
them for those of our own devices, but they are now part of the set of audio
stimuli which accompany our daily movements.
3. For an informative treatment of Ranke in relation to his dictum, which
apparently is his translation of a statement of Thucydides and is thus bound
up with a classical ideal of history writing, see Grafton (1997, pp. 6771).
4. See Shklovsky (1990, p. 6), in which the sentence is translated as to make a
stone feel stony; also see Morson (1986, p. 4), in which the translation cited
above is used.
5. Jameson (1981) argues that all models of literary interpretation, including
apparently ahistoricist ones like that of the New Criticism, always imply
a whole philosophy of history (59), and one might say the same for any
arrangement of historical facts or example of history writing.
6. This could be argued in a couple of ways. For one, the fads economic death
obviates the need for prognostication, and thereby specious treading into
futurology or market reportage. In addition, the closure of the narrative not
only makes for a better story but also provides a contained phenomenon
and periodization from which one might better examine socioeconomic
and cultural dynamics. See, for example, the argument about the ringtone
conjuncture in RD, p. 273.
7. The melody continued to include the first 16 measures (or A section) of
the tune. My transcription is drawn on the source recording from Star Wars
(1977), and I cannot find a recording of the monophonic ringtone version,
although I recall it being slightly faster than the original and that the last
eighth note of the third measure (F#5) was instead an F5, tied over the
barline (and thus slightly simplifying the source melody).
8. Although since very short durations of that single sound were possible, the
monophonic ringtone offered a variety of possible effects beyond producing
melodies. See RD, 64.
9. To be clear, many phones today permit ringtones longer than 30 seconds.
(For example, the iPhones limit is presently 40 seconds, and this is easily
Researching the Mobile Phone Ringtone 193
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Index
195
196 Index