(a complete PDF is linked below)
senior thesis in the disciplines of art and social studies at bard college. 35,000 words.
all rights reserved, tom moore 2017
INTRODUCTION:
records retold
In the Spring of 2014, vinyl records were a constant in my collegiate social life. On evenings, in a small dorm room in disarray, friends and strangers would gather in one particular room in Bard College’s Tewksbury residence hall. Two friends, Alex and Mango, lived here. Their room had tall windows, with blinds haphazardly thrown about, slightly yellowed from years of sun (and likely smoke, too). Their two twin beds doubled as couches that fit as many as 5 people per while records were spinning atop the dresser next to the door. The smell, though palpable, never deterred the gatherings that ensued.
We would sit quietly, numbering around seven or eight people on most nights. Almost always two were talking in whispers in one corner about a book, one of Alex’s drawings, or sometimes about the album that was playing. Otherwise, any extramusical sounds were just the quiet ambience of the HVAC system and the footsteps outside.
Mango’s speakers were computer speakers, retro-fitted for use with a turntable. Unlike the stereo hi-fi system I would usually associate with vinyl, these speakers were sleek, black, curvaceous, and had just two knobs: volume and “bass boost.” The bass boost function was almost always off because its resonance shook the turntable, creating a low hum that would often turn into a bass-y feedback drone. We listened to rock, mostly, a music that typically does not beg for enhanced low-end response anyway. I remember we listened to about three albums each night.
Alex and Mango’s room was a welcomed escape from the hyperactive sociality of being at a new school with an impression to maintain. Socializing with the records was easy, predictable, and often more rewarding. Every night spent in that room left an impression, and each record we played was key part of that impression. I hardly remember what I heard, though.
These evenings stood out because of what they were not. From the outside, it would appear that nothing was happening. Today I cannot remember what specific records, save two, that we would listen to. The understanding of that space as an escape was evident and that was a shared understanding among all its visitors. It might have been the real reason many of us frequented. On one night, after a traumatic day for the whole school, I remember we all ended up there, the usual group. Every visitor seemed to arrive as if they had been summoned there; each of us came alone, uncoordinated and unannounced.
Without discussion we put on a record and it was perfect. It was Neutral Milk Hotel’s In the Aeroplane Over the Sea. That album did not exactly describe the trials of that day, but it did provide us an alternative focus. That night, what was unforgettable was how we listened to—and saw—that record together. It wouldn’t have been anything alike if we all had headphones, or some other alternative. The importance of the medium across which we listened was paramount to that feeling of appreciation for music and for each other.
These evenings, which occurred one-to-two times every week for about three months, were where I first and last witnessed something I had always imagined surrounding vinyl, namely a kind of rapturous listening, a unique form of aural attention not characteristic of radio-listening, iPod-listening, or live performance-listening (this is not to say that I thought vinyl records necessarily got more attention than those other media, I just imagined a different form of attention). Since I was a kid, my parents described such scenes from their younger years, where the record player was, in memory-space, always at the center of the room, surrounded as if it were a bonfire, demanding a profound, shared attention given to one thing. This bonfire-vision has been described to me innumerable times and in many variations by older friends and family who lament the “death” of ‘albums’ as they were know to these 1960s and 1970s fanatics.
Alex and Mango’s dorm was on the south end of campus where noise and festivities were constant. Their room was a sanctuary, where, unlike anywhere else in that building, a calm-cool reigned and attracted anyone desiring a brief escape from the sure chaos outside. The room was also at the very center of the residential hall, on the first floor, across from the commons and the kitchen, sandwiched in-between two bathrooms. Foot traffic was constant. Outsiders stepping-in were inevitable.
Their room was the eye of a hurricane or, alternatively, the center of a spinning record. Movement within it was relatively nil and this was where one could collect their bearings in preparation for the outside world, which was mad, spinning, and high-energy. A small number of individuals had the right to choose the albums: if anyone else chose one, it was almost unfailingly cut-off before side A was completed. These were Alex and Mango’s records, Alex’s turntable, and only their few trusted comrades were permitted to flip through the milk-crate of sleeves. I was not ever given the privilege of choosing a record—which never really bothered me. I was, however, always welcome to subject myself to them.
The LP-induced calm of Alex and Mango’s room is still unexplainable to me. It was almost too ideal, too in-line with how my parents had described albums to me. It was exactly what I had imagined as I grew-up and caught-up on decades of recorded popular music through the consumption of iTunes downloads, CDs, and, later, vinyls. Because of the absence of vinyl in my childhood, along with its near legendary status as a musical medium, I learned to understand that black plastic as different from my own music in an almost strictly social capacity; I had music, but I did not have vinyl, the idol-object that called for an experience.
At around twelve-years-old, I acquired a CD of Jimi Hendrix’s Are You Experienced—what I lacked, however, was the portal that Jimi had made for his music, the record that puts me there, that lets me “experience” it just as he had intended. Fittingly, some of the first vinyl records I bought were Hendrix records, despite my fandom having waned since I first listened to the CD. When I bought the vinyls, all with scratched-up grooves and deteriorating sleeves, I never had the intention of putting them on a record player (I didn’t own one yet).
I bought those records because they represented a relationship that I lacked, one that my parents enjoyed and described to me regularly. On one trip to a used-book store around the age of 15 (2010), I put a vinyl record of a contemporary band (I cannot remember who) into my shopping basket. My dad told me to put it back. He couldn’t see to the point in buying a record on vinyl that was not of the ‘vinyl era.’ Clearly, to him, vinyl was not so much about what it stored in its grooves but was rather about its social history and the particular social importance it had for a generation of recorded-music-making and consumption. What his statement implied was, that if I wanted to listen to that band, I should not get a vinyl. Vinyl was not worth buying for what sound it contained, but was worth his money if I was buying something else, namely the experience to go along with a particular music. My dad’s actions suggested that the popular acts of my own youth could not possibly understand this, that they were subject to new media and should be consumed and understood as such. I could listen to my classic rock MP3s, meanwhile holding the real thing in my hands. To him, this was what it meant to buy a vinyl record in 2010.
Alex and Mango’s room, then, was of profound importance for me not because of the music (they played old and new vinyls) but because that social interaction with a record happened before my eyes. I was amazed that this experience, one that I had tried to prepare myself for through the gradual amalgamation of record-artifacts, was suddenly appearing in front of me, exactly as it had been described, no matter the music that was being played. For the first and last time I had the kind of relationship with vinyl that one is supposed-to.
Part I: The Question of Sociality as Mediated in Recorded Music Objects
Since first seeing it with my own eyes, I have asked myself this question: How are albums social, and why does this matter? Vinyl records, specifically in the form of an LP, are treated as socially agentive forces, with which individuals and groups interact. This project aims to explore possible understandings of that social role in records new and old, physical and virtual. Here, I propose a theoretical framework through which this question could be tackled, provide a few case studies of commercial albums that epitomize this social function, and explore three possible routes through which I can release my own album—one that I made as I worked on this written portion of my senior thesis. My work rests on a fundamental tension between the ideas of albums “being” music (as many musicians I have worked with have claimed when asked) and being something else—a kind of socialized exterior, a context for recorded sounds. This seems, to me, a more fitting definition considering what I have witnessed in places like Alex and Mango’s room—or what my dad had seemed to unknowingly suggest as he asked me to put a record back on a shelf.
First, however, I must explore some fundamental terms and questions that serve as a background to my work throughout. These fundamental questions include, (1) What do I mean when I say “music?” (2) Why am I talking more about albums as objects/commodities, and less about albums’ contents, ‘music?’ (3) Why is ‘packaging’ a term suited for discussion of recorded music objects? Why is it especially important to explore packaging when attempting an understanding of commercial music? and (4) What is the role of a record label, or record-making firm, today? These questions serve as background because they are the questions that have guided me towards or spawned from my central question about the sociality of albums. They are also the questions that, in writing this thesis, have come up repeatedly as peers and advisors have critiqued my work. I unpack these questions with my experiences in album-making, interviews, observations, and professional work experience in labels and venues in mind. These assumptions are the distillations of those experiences along with considering the texts I’ve read this past year, and none of them are directly tied to any one such reading or experience.
- The problem of defining ‘music’ is of central concern to musicologists and ethnomusicologists. One particularly compelling suggestion is Christopher Small’s one that ‘music’ not be considered a noun but instead a verb. In this intervention, all the activities that surround various events of “musicking” can and should be included in one’s understanding of what it is ‘to music.’ When I say ‘music’ I refer not to a recording, performance, or transcription of music, but rather the idea of music in the abstract and all the activities surrounding it. When I aim to to be more specific, I will preface the term with descriptors like “commercially recorded music,” or “performed music.” In its most abstract sense, music is an artificially defined attention to changes in air pressure around the human ear and includes all that goes into shaping that attention. In other words, if someone has an idea of a sound that can be created—either by guiding your attention towards it (think of 4’33” by John Cage) or by creating it with the help of instruments, sheet music, and a concert hall (most any music)—that is music. Music is necessarily variable because it occurs in space and in time. A recorded music is a freezing of a ‘musicking’ and the ‘music’ that was captured continues to exist separate of that recording. When people listen to a record, they are also “musicking” because they are participating-in and defining a musical state-of-being. This redefining of music as a verb also makes clear the importance of the social when it comes to musical happenings.
- I talk about albums as objects and not as ‘music’ because albums, by definition, only store recorded music. In this, they are involved in recorded-musicking, but should not be considered music in the sense of that word being a noun. The same ‘music’ printed, carved, or coded on an album can exist elsewhere, and most often does. Because an album is only an instance of a commoditized ‘music,’ it is an unsteady claim to make that the album is the music. Exploring albums is exploring media, not only the contents of media, and such a conflation of the two, while common, is problematic from the perspective of anyone attempting a holistic approach to exploring these objects. Beyond “object,” albums can be better defined as “socially affective storage devices” because they are simultaneously storing music, providing visual/social context for music, and are devices in that they are objects that must be activated (played) for ‘use,’ therein requiring an element of interactivity.
- Recorded music packaging is fundamental to my work, and my idea of it is very much in dialogue with the above idea of albums as “affective storage devices.” Package design is the way in which such “storage devices” become affective, and such packaging can be considered both physical and/or virtual throughout my writing herein. More than recording processes themselves, I argue that changes in musical media have almost always been changes in packaging; recorded musical sound is the constant, the thread that ties it all together. The formats of musical media, in a word, are packaging. The vinyl record, the tape, and the MP3 all store music. The importance of packaging is in how its ability to store makes it an object that is affective for producers and consumers. Later, I will invoke some of the early writings of the anthropologist Arjun Appadurai in exploring this “affect” of commoditized things such as the recorded music object.
- Finally, the record label (i.e. a company that makes records out of music) is important today for the same reasons it has always been important; it makes and promotes recorded music. When asked, I like to say that record labels are in the business of image-making, which is why recording musicians need them. Musicians make music, labels make images to contain musics. Concretely, record labels make records, which are packages of the music that songwriters write and musicians then perform. The label’s interest is in making records—as objects—affective so they can speak for themselves and be sold as both socially capable and agentive. In other words, the role of the record, as object and as package, is to commoditize, which itself requires a kind of case-by-case social engineering, one that is most often in the domain of a label’s responsibility. A record’s particular socially affective qualities are what distinguish it from the masses of like objects produced on a constant basis. This kind of social character in commodities is not unique to the recording as commodity.
I fully expect my baseline assumptions to offend some music fans—particularly music-makers—who might not see it fit to so thoroughly and unapologetically brand all such record-objects as commodities (almost anyone will accept the commodity status of some pop music, and all muzak) (cf. Sterne, 1997). Often, the relationships these objects promote are so intimate that using the word “commodity” to describe them is grounds for offense. Such offense is often argued by claiming a number of things about recorded music. First, musicians I interviewed regularly argue that records are direct artistic projects, they are ‘pieces’ crafted by artists, with vision and control; that they are sold—and explicitly made to be sold—by labels does not requisitely have consequence on any original artistic intent. Second, other musicians have argued that while much music is commoditized, some records can exist outside the capitalist hegemony of commoditization, those being “independent” releases, or DIY (do it yourself) modes of release that have boomed in recent years with sites like SoundCloud and Bandcamp. Finally, other musicians and non-musicians argue that records might be commodities, but that music transcends its commodity form.
In response, I would (and will) argue that “vision” and “control” are often aimed towards commoditization (to some, that itself might be the ‘art’); that any release, “independent” or not, follows the distribution and production models set in place by major, corporate labels (because such form is the dominant one, the one that consumers know how to relate with); and that to say the contents of a commodity can transcend the particular qualities of commoditization is absurd (even ‘subversive’ recorded music must be bought, most often, as we will see with Bow Wow Wow’s infamous cassingle from 1980 in Chapter Two). Following Raymond Williams’ reading of Antonio Gramsci’s idea of Hegemony, the commodity form (in a hegemonic understanding) permeates all levels of sociality in a capitalist world. To suggest that something could possibly transcend this order of things would be to claim a much greater instability within the capitalist system overall (cf. Williams, 2009, 110)
All of these questions together inform my general exploration of albums as socially affective storage devices, both in my writing and in my work composing, recording, producing, and releasing an album. My interest and inspiration for this project comes not only from my reading and recording practice, however. The consumption and collection of recorded music looms large in the American public’s imagination, and this informs the viewpoints of many people I interviewed for this project. Even for those who do not collect and consume physical recorded music objects, they are undoubtedly informed by the commoditized sociality developed across this industry’s history.
Records, for that reason, continue to be social in their new, virtual packages, too. This claim is central to much of the work throughout this project. The new paradigm of commoditized sociality is one emphasized in recent practice in mass music, as can be seen with Beyoncé’s Lemonade (initially released on HBO as a feature-length film, totally alternative to normal music media) and Frank Ocean’s Blonde / Endless (a project where film, print, and music-streaming all came together to create a social landscape in which one could relate to the artist’s landmark work). To explore this social world has pushed me to break (to the extent that I can) with my own subjectivity as a music-maker and consumer in order to see beyond the inhibiting focus on music for music’s sake, a focus that a traditional music education and vocabulary suggests. In exploring records, I am consciously exploring representational, commoditized, and ‘low’ music. To do that well requires that I hold nothing sacred.
Part II: My Life with Music: The Origins and Direction of this Project
It is hard to set a start date for this project, as it surrounds a question that has been more or less central to my work in music-making throughout my life. I have been making music since I was seven-years-old. I have been collecting recorded music objects since around the age of fourteen. When I was twenty-one, I began working on a new body of songs that would eventually become my third (but in many ways my first) album, one that I consider part and parcel of this written project overall. I was nineteen when I witnessed, in awe, the magic of vinyl records in Alex and Mango’s room, and I was twenty when I finally became comfortable enough in a studio environment to begin producing other peoples’ records. I have had innumerable conversations over the course of my life about albums, and have internalized a massive body of assumptions regarding what earns a record the status of ‘album.’ I have also started a record label, put together concerts for well over 100 acts, written album reviews, and more. In a sense, my interest in albums and album-making has guided my whole life in music and has been the cause of even my explorations outside of recorded music (namely publishing and the affect of its materiality). It has been a kind of context through which I have understood many of my projects both inside and far-from the studio. It has also, however, sent me down a life-path in which I found myself becoming a subject of the very thing I wish to study herein.
In being a musician and a fan of recorded music I am someone who, if it were not for my project, would be the subject of a like project. From an anthropological standpoint, such a subjectivity is difficult to work around. In order to conduct my research it became fairly clear soon after I began this project that serious effort would need to be put towards breaking from my own subjectivity so that I could more properly explore my thesis as both a clear-minded outsider and as an embedded interlocutor. I would need to be able to both be and see what I would study, which was challenging considering that I would so thoroughly be it.
Fortunately, this process was not as difficult as I thought it would be for two reasons: I was not exploring this subjectivity per se and, as became clearer over the course of my research, I was managing to break from my own subjectivity anyway in internalizing the information that I gathered in conducting textual research for what I wrote here. The very conducting of this semi-ethnographic project denaturalized many of the assumptions I had about recorded music and its affect.
In a strict “this is my project” sense, I have made an album and written a largely theoretical project that incorporates ethnographic, musicological, art-criticism, sociological, and media-theory approaches into a two-part, joint venture in music and anthropology. In a strict “ this is for my project” sense, I have done a lot. I have conducted fieldwork and have observed many hours of album/recorded-music consumption. I have read a wide array of different perspectives on commodity, sociality, music, and media. I have made an album of my own. Lastly, an integral part of my project has stemmed also from casual discussion regarding my thesis. Nowhere else, oddly enough, were my preconceptions more frequently challenged and nuanced by matter-of-fact statements of friends and associates. These conversations often exposed new ways of discussing recorded-music I would have otherwise been totally oblivious to.
Ethnographically speaking, the project is informed by countless hours of studio time, interviews (in large part, the most recently-conducted few), participant observation of album-consumption, and casual discussion. Regarding the discussions, interviews, and experiences that ethnographically informed this project, I’d roughly assume that about half my informants were students, all around my age (a group of six teenagers, my youngest sister’s friends, were also consulted). A quarter of those I worked with were adults coming from various backgrounds outside of music, but who nonetheless were fans of music. Another quarter were recording/music industry professionals, who varied in age, occupation, and roles played (musicians, engineers, desk-workers, etc.). Of the students I interviewed, maybe ten per-cent were musicians themselves. I tried to have as many non-musicians as possible because, as I argued above, my interest is in consumers, and musicians’ subjectivity in regards to records is something I am yet to find a way to crack: musicians tend to conflate record with ‘music,’ which is a conflation worth exploring in itself, but does not fit within the scope of this particular project.
Part III: I am a Musician and a Traitor: Breaking from my own Subjectivity
This project, although inspired by my many years of curiosity surrounding albums, was sparked by two books I read in the winter of 2015-2016. Both of the books were written by art critics/curators, and both were published by the same art-house publisher in Holland, Onomatopee. These two books were Can You Hear Me: Music Labels by Visual Artists by Francesco Spampinato and The Magic Circle: On The Beatles, Pop Art, Art-Rock, and Records by Jan Tumlir. While both of these texts were heavily used in my early writings, they have all but fallen from my citations as of late. However, their approach to commercially recorded music with an art-world vocabulary has remained significant in the writing to come. Tumlir emphasized packaging, visuals, and discourse among The Beatles and artists including Peter Blake and Richard Hamilton. Spampinato explored the phenomena of visual artists who start record labels. Both of these critics’ central arguments were concerning context, packaging, and (of central importance) relationality. Both of them did not speak so much to the recorded music that The Beatles and these labels actually produced and subsequently stored on their releases.
These two writers’ works led me down a rabbit hole of art theory and criticism, which then led me to explore Marxist perspectives on commodity as well as some media theory read prior to the making-of this project. Overall, the major contribution these critics made to my understanding of recorded music was their insistence on the social agency of things. Using their lexicon, I was better equipped to regard the album as a socialized art-object and track its evolution into the virtual socialized object I focus on later. In the particular body of text I surveyed it is argued that objects, both physical and virtual, are designed with sociality being an integral part of their make-up. The social design of things is fundamentally tied to their commoditization, as many of these critics I worked with posit. To explore an object’s social design is effectively an exploration of its commoditization in that social design implies an intended future for said object in the world of exchange and presentation.
Jacques Rancière states that, “art no longer wants to respond to the excess of commodities and signs, but to a lack of connections” (Rancière, 2006, 90). The transformation that Rancière outlines in art, from the commodity-art of Warhol and others (which itself could be understood socially, especially considering Debord’s idea of the spectacle, which is a social relation mediated by the consumption of things and images) to the social/relational art of Rirkrit Tiravanija and others (more difficult to objectify, bound to time, place, and interactivity) is a transformation that is reflected in commercial music production as well. In my second chapter, I trace the experiments conducted in Kanye West’s stream-only album, The Life of Pablo back to The Beatles’ own experimenting with vinyl in Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. These case studies would not have been nearly as successful without the critical vocabulary provided by these thinkers.
Additionally, a heightened attention to media seemed fitting for my own work in musical media, and understanding the importance of the inevitable social questions that media raise would become the primary route through which I explore particular musical media. In exploring this subject in general, I have worked with Marshal McLuhan, Lev Manovich, Mark Katz, and Lisa Gitelman who all together inform my work with media, both new and old, outside of an art criticism context. Their most essential contribution to my work is their heightened attention to mediation as a sight of affective capacity and impact on the contents and consumption of various media forms. Media and commodity, particularly so with recorded music, are often one in the same thing; a record is at once a medium and a commodity. That, considered along with the contributions of the art critics I mention above, has provided me a navigable path I follow in pursuit of an understanding of the recorded-music-commodity as a site of its own, worthy of analysis beyond what the typical musicological vocabulary permits.
These art critics discuss art objects and the focus of analysis tends to be on objects. The ‘object,’ in their terms, can be a social phenomenon. This finding points to the complexity of the object while providing no real analysis of the social. In coming across this shortcoming, I felt the need to return to other texts by anthropologists and other social theorists. In these works I sought a definition of the kind of sociality that the aforementioned thinkers only dance around.
After reading art critics’ various takes on commodities, music, and the art therein, it became clear that a general weakness in much of the art criticism and media theory I’d worked with was in their apparent lack of input from (or concern with) consumers (or in their terms, viewers). This tendency showed itself as a complete favoring of the agentive capabilities of commodities and art objects, while substantially devaluing the necessary reflexivity of any social interaction. The record object, while certainly affective, does not have within itself alone the agency to create the myths and practices surrounding albums; its social agency relies, like any sociality, in a two-way relationship. This realization rekindled my interest in a number of social theorists whose focus on this other side of ‘the spectacle’ of commodities would become the spine of my theoretical framework that I build throughout Chapter One. Those most central are Jean Baudrillard and Arjun Appadurai. I spend particularly large amounts of time with Baudrillard’s idea of objects’ primary (use) and secondary (social) functionalities, which are further entangled in a participatory sociality using Appadurai’s idea of “scapes,” both to be explored in more depth in the next chapter. Generally, however, my work with these thinkers could be seen as an appendage to the one-sided focus of the works of art critics aforementioned.
Finally, I consulted many music publications, historians, and other sources in order to build a foundation and timeline that I had only had a loose idea of prior to this project. The histories I have internalized over my years of exposure often go against the media history and commercial history that I have uncovered over the course of this project, a history in large part provided the music industry historian, David Suisman. Other histories provided within other texts have also challenged and enlarged my understanding of how the recorded music industry came into being and how it brought with it a particular understanding of ‘music’ and ‘commodity.’ I also consulted archives of pop music journalism as primary sources in my exploration of recorded music consumption. Such journalism is central in my analysis of the case studies I explore in Chapter Two, and in my personal experimenting in Chapter Three.
Part IV: Three analyses of the Recorded-Music Commodity: Setting-up my Project
My project is divided into three chapters with an introduction and conclusion, a number of images, a glossary, my album credits complete with lyrics, and an extensive bibliography. There is not a true linear argument developed across these chapters, but they are meant to inform one another in the order in which they are presented.
Beyond the writing, I wrote, recorded, performed, and produced an album. It is scheduled for release Spring/Summer 2017 on a label I started also while working on this project. The contemporaneity of the founding of this label and the making of this joint project call for the label’s mentioning here. The label is called Dots Per Inch Music, and it is a label that aims to shine more light on artists’ images than typical labels might, and the roster suggests as much. The label, whose creation is loosely tied to this project, will release my album, which is central to this project. This label might call for, but does not receive, a chapter of its own, a lost fourth one at that.
My first chapter serves as my theoretical framework. Here, I open with my central question regarding the sociality of albums and shortly thereafter begin with a history of ‘buying’ music within the music industry. This history aims to provide an essential background establishing the grey areas in copyright, recording industry terminology, and the odd kind of consumer “ownership” that is somewhat unique to the economics of the recorded-music-industry. After identifying the particular kind of ownership legally awarded to the purchasing consumer, I will then consult Jean Baudrillard’s idea of primary and secondary functionality, which explodes the commodity-form into two somewhat distinct things: one part useful and another part social. The social function of the commodity is here argued to be key in understanding recorded music because the packaging of a record is at once all the purchaser formally owns and is understood by the producer as a site of relationality and the complex intimacies of consumption.
Later in the First Chapter, I will explore such functionality as it relates to sociality within identity-formation, giving particular attention to a number of interviews I had with friends and associates regarding this project. Herein I employ the writings of Arjun Appadurai to explore the affectivity of commodities within their environments of exchange. In this section I briefly go into representations of recorded-music-listening as portrayed in the media which more concretely make the case for a two-way sociality among people and things/media.
I close Chapter One by “setting the stage” for the kinds of experimental approaches to sociality in commodities that are explored in chapter two. By referencing the sites of consumer ownership created within industrial models of music distribution, I argue that, in this site of ownership, some recording artists seize the opportunity to communicate via the medium that stores their work in addition to communicating via their records’ recorded-musical contents.
In Chapter Two I explore three “case studies” of commercial recorded music releases that are exemplary of the kind social engineering I explore throughout Chapter One. These three releases are Kanye West’s The Life of Pablo, Bow Wow Wow’s ‘cassingle’ C30, C60, C90, Go!, and The Beatles paradigmatic work, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Particular attention is given to Pablo. The aim of this chapter is to provide the reader with concrete examples to which my theoretical framework can be applied. This chapter also aims to set up the following chapter in which I imagine three provisional media for the release for my own project.
Chapter Three is divided into four parts. The first part explores the idea behind my record, each other part is dedicated to exploring a particular kind of release for three different mediations of my album. The first part is an exploration of vinyl, which aims to communicate a feeling of property, ritual, and distinct presence in space. The second is an exploration of streaming, which aims to aid in emphasizing the sensation of having borrowed a music in recorded form from the artist(s) responsible for its making. Finally, the third is an exploration of flexidisc, across which I hope to communicate a intermingling of the qualities of the two other media aforementioned. Each section in this chapter will feature artwork and other archival documentation of each particular mediation.
* * *
These three chapters will wrap up in a brief conclusion which is followed by a glossary of relevant terms, the full credits and lyrics for the album I made, and a works cited. The glossary was compiled over the course of writing and resultantly contains some terms that are now outside the scope of this endeavor, but which are included still as they might be useful to the reader just as they were useful to me.
This project will distinguish the package from its contents in regards to recorded music so as to explore the importance of the sociality suggested and communicated in packaging. I hope to draw attention to the fact that album-making and music-making should be considered interrelated but distinct practices in most discussions surrounding albums-as-art. The album-as-art project rests both in making music and in making an object to store that music. There is no such thing as a passive mediation, and without attention given to the medium, a music can be substantially distorted in its path to the consumer in ways beyond the artist’s intent. Such distortion might occur in a poorly outlaid particular “musicking” for the record in question. The recording artist, like most any musical artist, must respond to their listeners just like their listeners respond to the music. When a mediation is required, as it obviously is in recorded-music-making, a musician’s choices regarding how their music is represented are of great consequence. This is because their project can only be represented.