Musicking Utopia and Nu(um)-Skool vs the Old Skool

Two great new posts at Rogue's Foam:

The Firstis a transcript of a lecture on the potential for a utopian musicking. The "k" in musicking is intentional, a term I've been using for years, but just now found out has its roots in the theories of Christopher Small who broadened the term "music" from an abstract nound describing a specific quantifiable sound object to a series of interactions, relationships, and processes.

Christopher Small's debunking of music reification is left somewhat unremarked-upon except to say that iPods make great containment units. However, one can't simply assume that reification is necessarily a bad thing, even though it may mask the spectacle-ular alienation that musicking's terms may reveal.

Which is what this PopMatters article I think tries to convey in its argument that the physical object brings a passive listener closer to the music. Rogue's Foam's post posits that only active participation will result in the kind of utopian or near-utopian musicking he talks about. However, he's ignoring the kind of artificial utopias capable through headphones and object permanence.

Arguments against reification tend to be proposed regularly by proponents of virtualities (the MP3 generation) who laud the death of the album format because "music is music, it doesn't matter what format it's in." While this is undeniable, the unspoken assumption is that there is no room for active participation in music as an object/thing, which is simply untrue (just ask the guy who sleeps with the Zappa record under his pillow).

The more dangerous assumption intrinsic to this argument, however, is that virtual music is somehow less passive and more "interactive" a process than putting on a record. In my experience, even at the dawn of virtual music (the golden age of Napster which spawned exactly when I entered college with a T1 connection), the so-called "interaction" with virtual music does not involve an active examination of the new possibilities inherent in technology or a kind of new universal understanding of the alienations of Small's musicking, but rather just a new way of toying with music as object, the object transformed to the icon, from the physical to the clickable. The discernment between how we interact with virtualities as opposed to physical objects is a subject that requires more depth than I have time for in this forum, but considering music as a social interaction leaves one pondering the different ways in which people interact with one another online vs face-to-face. If virtual music is the analogue to object music as social networking is the virtual analogue to real human communication, the implications of these new relationships should be frightening. I'm not denying that what virtualists proclaim to be community can indeed be a new form of community, but it can also be mutually exclusive solipsism.

Virtualists also proclaim victory by stating that by seperating music from its object, it removes the potential for commodification. Surely, P2P has damaged the music industry well enough to ensure this process. Still, the virtualization of music has left unanswered a crucial question: if music is decommodified, how do you approach musical artifacts that are still found to be valuable without re-entering that value back into the market?

Another part of the lecture that's troubling is RF's resignment of feminine pressure- the female diva sample- as a non-consenual male producer subbordination. There's a definite point to this perspective when divorced from the other heterotopian aspects of rave, but at best it's a replication of the disco source material- which was generally made by male producers and imported female vocalists. I've always seen the combination of a raw masculine energy on Nuum backing tracks and sirenic nurturing female vocals to be a hybridization, a kind of recombinative transgendering of sound like the one that Burial has made explicit in interviews (as RF points out). This also seems to me to be complimented by the anonymity of the producer and the "chipmunking" of said vocal samples, reducing identity politics to a kind of guessing game at best. In addition, the gender gap RF sees in rave seems significantly narrower than those found in almost all other popular genres with the possible exception of pop.




The second post boldly takes on Simon R and the "Metalheadz Generation" on the idea of "hyperstasis" ("the scenario in which a range of original music is energetically produced using a wide range of sources and influences, but the parameters of its originality never reach a point that he feels he can acknowledge as original, hence ‘stasis’"). I have to say that I haven't chosen a side here yet, but I'd probably be leaning towards RF mostly because the failure of dubstep/wonky/funky doesn't seem to be a failure of the technologic/futurist impulse as much as it is a failure of theory to articulate why all this music gets lumped together in the first place.

The best take on this appears in the comment boxes for this post by "jasl":

"For me, this is not a parallel or ethereal dimension of 'nuum. It is as if the 'nuum has suffered from a fractal escherian cut and paste, and rearranged itself on a whole new homeomorfism perspective. In less mathematical words, this new fragmented melange is quite amazing and opens a whole new field for UK bass music. "