POPPING THE SEAMS

“…the whole point of this show seemed to be based on the perverse, reverse notion that grungy, foul-mouthed, self-despising meatheads who grind out undifferentiated noise and swing their long hair are good – and ‘honest’ – by virtue of their not being ‘rock stars’. How confounded this primitivism is, which defines bands in the reverse image of someone else’s market position, rather than music.”- Paul de Barros, Seattle Times on the Boxing Club show (Mudhoney, Blood Circus, Swallow – 7/8/88) as quoted by Fred Moody in Seattle and the Demons of Ambition.

This quote reflects my feelings about the time and scene rather well. Which means I recognize it as both accurate and inverted. I like the idea that we might “define bands in the reverse image of someone else’s market position, rather than music.”

Whenever someone is talking about rock or pop and says it’s all about the music you have to think of all the things they are actually saying it’s not about. Power, control, money, race, gender, the culture industry. The music all on its own is pretty thin soup.

More confounded primitivism.

Before the widespread use of the internet, music-sharing was enabled through the use of preloaded cartridges (cassettes) of magnetic tape.

Cassettes were introduced to the market in the mid-1960s and by the 1980s had become the dominant format for consumer audio applications. Although they generally offered lower audio fidelity, cassettes were easier to use and more portable than open-reel tape and more rugged than phonograph disks. They were offered for sale both pre-recorded and as “blank tapes.” With a consumer-grade cassette tape machine one could record audio programs from records or the radio onto a cassette. Because the cartridges were small and easy to handle the players became popular accessories in automobiles. In the 1980s small, lightweight players such as the Sony Walkman became available and personal listening in public spaces via headphones became a common practice.

The assemblage of “mix tapes” in which one sequenced selections of music for various purposes, such as listening to while driving or dancing to at a party became popular. The choice of music on such “mix tapes” could be highly expressive making them suitable as a gift or as a token given from one party to another during courtship.

By the 1980s, the popularity of archiving and sharing commercially-available music led to a lobbying and public relations campaign by the music industry with the warning that “Home Taping is Killing Music (and it’s Illegal).” The industry survived this threat, perhaps partially through their embrace of compact disc technology, which, at the consumer level was a non-recordable medium at the time.

The fact that typical consumer-grade cassette machines were capable of both playing back and recording had far-reaching consequences nonetheless. By taking two cassette machines and connecting the output of one machine to the input of another, one could record the audio material from one tape onto another. And with appropriate cables, several cassette machines could be ganged together so that the contents of one “master tape” could be dubbed to several blanks at once, effectively creating a cassette duplication factory.

The cassette audio format was exploited as a cheap and readily available consumer technology which allowed musicians and other producers of audio programs to essentially manufacture their own small-run releases on very small budgets.

Thus, producers working on the margins (geographically, aesthetically and politically) were able to use cassettes as a medium of distribution. Many of these releases only saw small circulation among the producers’ local environs. In many cases the releases were intended for small or localized audiences. However, the concurrent increasing availability of photocopy machines coupled with the regularity of postal delivery also allowed alternative networks of print information exchange to develop. Through such networks artists working in marginal forms often were able to gain access to geographically disparate audiences.

The cassette format, which had held the threat of destroying musical creativity through its use in the unauthorized duplication of commercial audio material became a vehicle for an increased democratization of the creation and dissemination of recorded audio programs.

Rising Breed of Migrant Worker: Skilled, Salaried and Welcome

DeParle, Jason. NYTimes 8/20/07 A1

We’re stuck in the paradigm of thinking that migration is only about poor people moving to rich countries,” said Dhananjayan Sriskandarajah of the Institute for Public Policy Research, a London research group. “But lots of people move among rich countries, and people from rich countries increasingly move all over the world.”

As part of my Seattle immersion… here I am, basking in the (architectural) power structures. Reflected in the glass of Seattle’s fancy new Rem Koolhaas-designed central library is the (old) US Courthouse across the street.

“Those who pirate and hijack owned material attempt to challenge our tendency to treat cultural material as property.” – Christine Harold, OurSpace: Resisting the Corporate Control of Culture p 117.

While Harold does not dismiss appropriation art out of hand she paints these artists as mocking “copyright criminals”or as self-styled pirates who aim to liberate the use of texts, thereby unintentionally affirming, through their theft, the prevailing notions of intellectual property ownership.

But art based on the appropriation of existing source material is not exclusively about transgressing copyright law. For instance, Negativland have used pirate imagery but actually developed their practice over the course of a decade largely on their community radio show where individual music sample clearances are not necessary. Because a broadcast is considered a performance and not a copy, radio stations pay fees to organizations which represent songwriters and composers and nothing to the owners of the recordings. The payment to the performing rights organizations are negotiated as a blanket fee, which tends to make the process of licensing for broadcast transparent for individual DJs and programmers. It was one of Negativland’s CD releases which finally caused the group to run (infamously) afoul of copyright holders (Island Records, U2…). “We knew nothing nor cared anything about copyright law until we got sued for working this way on a record we made in 1991.” (Joyce in Chandler and Neumark, 179) writes Negativland member Don Joyce. As well, the logic of hip hop sampling was developed in the context of live DJing where copyright violation is not an issue. So, while the image of the pirate is a prevalent posture, for instance Evolution Control Committee has released an album of blatantly uncleared samples called Plagiarhythm Nation v2.0, in much of what falls within appropriation art, the films of Jay Rosenblatt, the music of DJ Shadow, etc etc etc the more central concern seems to be an important exploration of the terrain of the media landscape, with the trespass aspect of this exploration only occasionally being integral to the work.

Joyce, Don. “An Unsuspecting Future in Broadcasting: Negativland.” in
Chandler, Annmarie and Neumark, Norie, eds. At A Distance: Precursors to Art and Activism on the Internet. 2006. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press.

Harold, Christine. OurSpace: Resisting the Corporate Control of Culture. 2007. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Massarsky, Barry M. “The Operating Dynamics Behind ASCAP, BMI and SESAC, The U.S. Performing Rights Societies” Coalition for Networked Information. Accessed 15 Aug. 2007. www.cni.org/docs/ima.ip-workshop/Massarsky.html

OurSpace: Resisting the Corporate Control of Culture
Christine Harold
University of Minnesota Press; 2007.

For Harold, resistance takes the form of interventions in the field of texts, signs and symbols that dominate our culture. OurSpace contextualizes contemporary interventionist media – appropriation art, culture jamming and media pranks – within a history of Situationist detournement. While Harold does not categorically dismiss this work she argues that while the tactics of the SI were relevant to the early stages of late capitalism the shift from a production-based disciplinary society toward a post-Fordist society of control calls for different tactics.

Following Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter (Nation of Rebels: Why Counterculture Became Consumer Culture) she notes that any sort of culture of dissent becomes marketed as a commodity and that the individualism, distinctiveness and novelty of subculture are what drive consumer culture anyway.

She ends by referencing Michael Warner’s Publics and Counterpublics and the idea that texts are not created for an existing public but that texts create their own publics and by embracing the Creative Commons model as a way to foster the creation of texts which create publics in ways which are not locked into being simple negations of corporate-controlled culture.

She invokes the classical Greek idea of “kairos” to suggest a model for us to consider texts as always in the process of being created, not as fixed and owned.

For Harold, Creative Commons is not so much about freeing intellectual property as about creating an intensification of the regulation of texts so that they remain subject to reconfiguration and recontextualization.

“In other words, whereas traditional copyright offers prefabricated products for the public to consume under a priori conditions and restrictions, an open content approach opens cultural products to a public process, by “wrapping” content in a flexible, accessible layer of regulation.”

She sees here the opportunity to build an alternative order within the present order as theorized by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. “Resistance, say Hardt and Negri, should not be concieved as an opposition to Empire, but as simultaneously productive of and different from it: ‘The creative forces of the multitude that sustain Empire are also capable of autonomously constructing a counter-Empire, an alternative political organization of global flows and exchanges.’”