Saturday 18 July 2020

Mute Records: Artists, History, Business, Paperback




Last month, Bloomsbury Academic published Mute Records in paperback. I co-edited this book with my colleagues Zuleika Beaven and Marcus O’Dair. It was compiled in honour of Mute Records fortieth anniversary and as a tribute to Daniel Miller, the head and founder of the label, who acts as a visiting professor at our university. He is a great person. The new edition currently retails at £26.09, which, while still expensive for a paperback book, makes it more readily affordable than the hardback edition, which costs £86.40. According to the blub:
This edited collection addresses Mute's wide-ranging impact. Drawing from disciplines such as popular music studies, musicology, and fan studies, it takes a distinctive, artist-led approach, outlining the history of the label by focusing each chapter on one of its acts. The book covers key moments in the company's evolution, from the first releases by The Normal and Fad Gadget to recent work by Arca and Dirty Electronics. It shines new light on the most successful Mute artists, including Depeche Mode, Nick Cave, Erasure, Moby, and Goldfrapp, while also exploring the label's avant-garde innovators, such as Throbbing Gristle, Mark Stewart, Labaich, Ut, and Swans. Mute Records examines the business and aesthetics of independence through the lens of the label's artists.
I co-authored the introduction and contributed the chapter on Moby, which addresses his album Play and has received some notice in reviews. Writing for Punk and Post-Punk, Paul Hollins has described it as a ‘fascinating and important chapter’ that raises ‘disturbing questions of “truth”  and “illusion” though Moby’s “borrowing” and extensive re-use and re-purpose, without artistic credit, of sampled black voices of the deep South in the United States’. In her review for Popular Music, Veronica Skrimsjö states that this chapter is a ‘particular highlight’ and notes how I compare Moby’s use of samples to the tradition of blackface minstrelsy. For  Skrimsjö, This notion appears quite unique, but Osborne provides a very robust and convincing argument that, should one accept it (which this reviewer does), changes the discourse surrounding ownership and sampling considerably’.
           This chapter has a long history. Although it is now looking back on Play from a distance of twenty years, I began work on it when Moby’s album was still in the charts. The first version was completed in July 2000, as an essay for an MA in Popular Culture that I was taking at the Open University. I reworked it four years later for a course on metamorphosis at the London Consortium. It was at this point that I introduced the minstrelsy theme. One of the tutors, Colin MacCabe, liked it so much that he suggested I submit it to Critical Quarterly, the journal he edits. I reworked it again and it became my first published article. Finally (for now), it seemed apt to revisit it when my colleagues suggested compiling a book about Mute Records.
           Something remains missing, nonetheless. What none of the iterations capture is that, despite questioning Moby’s practice, I do like some of the album. There is a particular song on it that has always has stopped me in my tracks. I was going through a hard time when the record was released. Moby’s ‘Why Does My Heart Feel so Bad?’ captured my mood and helped to alleviate my pain. It still gives me the chills. This is one of the recordings that samples black voices, however, and it is indicative of the complexities and emotional power of popular music. While it might be necessary and even important to highlight instances of cultural theft, we are nevertheless all complicit in appropriation. The very act of listening draws us into other worlds and, at the same time, encourages us to situate those worlds within ourselves. There can be a fine line, however, between exploitation and empathy. And that’s what Moby sets in play. 
           

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