The Removal of Approval

The technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition. By making many reproductions it substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence. And in permitting the reproduction to meet the beholder or listener in his own particular situation, it reactivates the object reproduced. These two processes lead to a tremendous shattering of tradition which is the obverse of the contemporary crisis and renewal of mankind.

Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1936)

For Walter Benjamin ‘that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art’. He believed that audiences feel overwhelmed and inhibited when in the presence of an original artwork. On top of that, they feel that curators and aesthetes are setting the conditions for their appreciation. In contrast, when dealing with a reproduction of the same artwork, the audience can have a direct and involved relationship. They meet it on their own terms. They choose the time and place in which to hear or see the reproduction. They don’t feel the need to seek approval for what they feel about it; they have their own jurisdiction. Benjamin argued that:

Mechanical reproduction of art changes the reaction of the masses toward art. The reactionary attitude toward a Picasso painting changes into the progressive reaction toward a Chaplin movie. The progressive reaction is characterized by the direct, intimate fusion of visual and emotional enjoyment with the orientation of the expert.

He was right. And that is why we keep going back to him. We also come back because his thesis includes some head-spinning stuff. Benjamin argued that reproduction shatters aura, but he also claimed that reproduction facilitates its return. Ramping up the complexity, he suggested that this return provides a different type of aura. Benjamin’s essay is focused primarily on film production. He noted that:

The film responds to the shriveling of the aura with an artificial build-up of the ‘personality’ outside the studio. The cult of the movie star, fostered by the money of the film industry, preserves not the unique aura of the person but the ‘spell of the personality’, the phony spell of a commodity.

This is the only time in the Work of Art essay that Benjamin discusses commodification in pejorative terms. Mass manufacture is liberating; mass promotion is not. It bewitches us.

These processes happen in music too. Records make music ordinary: they render expensive productions cheap and these productions become part of our everyday lives. The music industries want records to be un-ordinary. They want us to fetishise recordings so that we feel the need to own them (or at least this was the record business model in pre-digital times). They do so through their star-making machinery. They promote their performers because they want us to become invested in them.

Benjamin saw this much, but he was less alert to the fact that fans re-create aura too. His essay is centred on the idea that mass manufacture ‘reproduces’ original works of art. With recorded music, however, this soon ceased to be the case. As Sarah Thornton noted:

Initially, records transcribed, reproduced, copied, represented, derived from and sounded like performances. But, as the composition of popular music increasingly took place in the studio rather than, say, off stage, records came to carry sounds and musics that neither originated in nor referred to actual performances … Accordingly, the record shifted from being a secondary or derivative form to a primary, original one.

As a result, records ‘accrued their own authenticities’. Thornton claimed that:

Recording technologies did not, therefore, corrode or demystify ‘aura’ as much as disperse and re-locate it. Degrees of aura came to be attributed to new, exclusive and rare records. In becoming the source of sounds, records underwent the mystification usually reserved for unique art objects.

Although record companies eventually cottoned on to this practice, it was audiences who undertook this attribution first. They developed the art of record collecting.

A record embodies two creations: there is the creation of the sound recording and there is the creation of the product that houses the sound recording. Sound recording became ‘primary’ rather than ‘derivative’ and this is what prompted fans to restore aura. It was, however, the product that enabled this restoration to take place. The restoration of aura is therefore diffuse. It comes back via the worship of stars and via the worship of objects.

The restoration is also incomplete. A fan might be in awe of a star, but that aura is accumulated in the fan’s ‘particular situation’ – it is developed through the purchase of reproductions that are played in the fan’s own home. When a fan plays the record of a star they can indulge in a private fantasy of engagement; they do not have to suffer a public display of power. And when a fan attributes aura to a record they are not under a phony spell: they are restoring aura on their own terms. It takes the ‘orientation of the expert’ to develop a knowledge about record collecting. There is creativity rather than passivity in what is going on here. The shattered aura is re-assembled, but this building process results in something that is new.

A Great Friggin' Swindle? Sex Pistols, School Kids and 1979

I mentioned in an earlier post that I have written an article about the Sex Pistols for the academic journal Popular Music and Society. It is now available via this link. The article looks at the popularity of the Sex Pistols in 1979, a year that is still overlooked in favour of the headline-grabbing punk year of 1977. In many ways this is unjust. In Britain, there were more punk hits in 1979 than any other year; there was also a new, younger generation of fans who were getting into the music. These schoolchildren discovered the Sex Pistols via Sid Vicious rather than Johnny Rotten, and their rebellious anthem was 'Friggin' in the Riggin'' rather than 'God Save the Queen'. They heard The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle before they heard Never Mind the Bollocks. I know, because I was that schoolchild. The article locates the teenage appeal of 'Friggin' in the Riggin'' in its themes of swearing, sex and piracy. It also explores the media infrastructure that enabled young adolescents to access punk music. It then looks at the legacy of the Sex Pistols', charting the triumph of Johnny Rotten's narrative over that of Malcolm McLaren, and argues that The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle fell prey to notions of coherence, canonicity and - dare I say it - authenticity.

And Now This is Me

Authenticity. Oh dear. It makes me wince to write that word. It is the most over-used and over-valued concept in popular music studies. And I stress studies rather than popular music itself. I’m sure that authenticity exerts a greater pull on scholars than it does on artists or audiences. In the UK, at least, there is a long-standing tradition of theatrical pop music. The country is home to cracked actors and pantomime dames. The focus in this instance is not on keeping things real.

            This is not to say that authenticity doesn’t matter. It does form a part of popular music’s pleasures. Most regularly, it resides in a singer’s voice. It is here that we locate a purity of expression and artistic earnestness. Above all, singing is the prime means of measuring an artist’s soul.

            But singing is a technical skill. What’s more, this skill is emphatically displayed in vocalists who come from the rhythm and blues world. They are making the voice do extraordinary things. And whatever it is they are doing, it is a long way from the vocalist’s everyday patterns of speech.

            In this sense, singers have a lot in common with impressionists. They are able to imagine their voices into the places where they want them to be. They can manipulate them and mangle them and squeeze them somewhere new. In fact, there is a trade off between the two practices. Many of the best impressionists are also adept at singing: Rob Brydon; Steve Coogan; Jane Horrocks; perhaps even Mike Yarwood. Many great singers are good at accents. There was, after all, a whole generation of British vocalists who located themselves in the mid-Atlantic. And there are numerous singers whose singing voices bear little relation to their spoken ones. This applies as much to Prince and Amy Winehouse as music as it does to Geddy Lee or Bryan Ferry. There are also singers who have numerous voices. Marvin Gaye and David Bowie, for example, will assume a number of different characters on the same record. 

            And yet we rarely talk about the authenticity of impressionists. Mimicry is one of the few practices not to have been described as ‘the new rock ‘n’ roll’. Mike Yarwood attempted to show us why. In his programmes he would make a sharp distinction between his impressions and his singing. Breaking the fourth wall at the end of his shows, he would turn to the camera and say ‘and now this is me’. He would then sing a song. His impressions, he was telling us, were of others; his singing represented his true self.

Things are more complicated than this. On the one hand, the singer could be regarded as just another of Yarwood’s routines. On the other, are people really being false to themselves when they adopt a persona? Costume can be a way of finding something deep within. This is one of the legacies of minstrelsy. It’s also something that Barack Obama indulges in.

            He’s one of the great orators. He also probably has the best singing voice of all US presidents. And he indulges in impressions. All three were in evidence in his eulogy for Rev. Clementa Pinckney, who was gunned down in his church in Charleston, South Carolina, along with eight of his parishioners on 17 June. Obama delivered a powerful speech about race and about resistance, as well as about the symbolism of the confederate flag. He concluded with a decent version of ‘Amazing Grace’, bending the notes in the appropriate vernacular. What was most starting, however, was when this vernacular appeared in his speech. The eulogy was patterned on the rhythms of a minister from a black southern church. As he became more impassioned, Obama got more deeply into character. His accent became southern. This was most notable after he concluded his hymn and sermonised that each of those shot down had ‘found that grace’. As he wound up this litany it was almost as though he had to shake off the southern preacher in order to return to his everyday voice.

Was any of this false? I don’t think so. If anything Obama was more genuine when he was in character as the preacher than he was when playing the president of the United States. He was responding to the situation, feeding off the cheers of the parishioners in the assembly hall and the words of endorsement from the clergy who were lined up behind him. At the end of the speech, Obama looked almost surprised at what had happened to him. He had achieved some sort of transcendence.

We don’t find authenticity by keeping things real; we come closer to locating it when we let ourselves go.

The Collaborators

I have written an article titled, ‘A Great Friggin’ Swindle? Sex Pistols, School Kids and 1979’, which is due to appear in Popular Music and Society towards the end of this year. 1979 was the year of the Sex Pistols’ greatest chart success. They had their biggest selling single in the UK (‘Something Else’ / ‘Friggin’ in the Riggin’) as well as three top 40 albums. It was also the year of their demise. Johnny Rotten had left in 1978, but effected the end of the group by taking his old manager, Malcolm McLaren, to court in February 1979. This was also the month in which Sid Vicious died.

            Rotten and McLaren fell out badly. In the song ‘Low Life’, Rotten refers to McLaren as an ‘egomaniac traitor’. In the film The Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindle, McLaren calls Rotten a ‘collaborator’. In his view, Rotten had stopped fighting the record industry and had become part of the system. He was being courted by Richard Branson of Virgin Records and was accepting his advances.

            In 1979 ‘collaborator’ could only have been taken as a term of abuse. Although punk sneered at hippie values (‘we mean it, man’), it too retained a distrust of ‘the man’, particularly when he was working for a record company. In the song ‘EMI’ Rotten claims an authenticity straight from the rock textbook. He boasts that the Sex Pistols are ‘for real’ and denigrates the record company for thinking the band were just ‘faking’ or ‘money making’. He later wrote, ‘big business is very wise/I’m crossing over into enterprise’, a lyric that should not be taken at face value: Rotten critiqued the idea of ‘careering’.

            Fast-forward to today and everyone is collaborating. Hits Songs Deconstructed have published an e-book that provides a statistical analysis of the songs that reached the top 10 in America last year. Their conclusion is that ‘Above all, 2014 was about collaboration’. 59 songs made the top ten, but out of these only 12% were written by solo writers. The rest were written be teams: 20% by two writers; 19% by three writers; 8% by four writers; 5% by five writers; 10% by six writers; 5% by seven writers; and 7% by ten or more writers. What’s more, these teams work in different combinations. Max Martin, who had a composing hand in eight top 10 hits (including four number ones), worked on different songs with Dr Luke (who had four top ten hits as a writer, two of which were written with Martin, two with other composers), Cirkut (four top ten hits; two with Martin, two without), Savan Kotecha (four top ten hits, all composed with Martin), Katy Perry (three top ten hits; two with Martin, one without), Shellback (three top ten hits; two with Martin, one without), Iggy Azalea (three top ten hits; one with Martin, two without), Taylor Swift (two top ten hits, both with Martin), Sarah Hudson (two top ten hits; one with Martin, one without), and Nicki Minaj (two top ten hits; one with Martin, one without). Writers such as Ed Sheeran, Benny Blanco, Jimmy Napes and Sam Smith – each of whom had three top ten hits – cast their own collaborative nets.

            It’s tempting to say that we are discussing different sorts of collaboration here: McLaren and Rotten were talking about collaborating with the record industry, while these modern songwriters are collaborating with each other. The writers are nevertheless supporting the industry’s aims. As I have written elsewhere, collaboration gives the record companies power. It can best be organised by them – they are the matchmakers and they are the gatekeepers - or at least that’s what they claim. IFPI, the trade body that represents ‘the recording industry worldwide’, produced another of its promotional Investing in Music reports in 2014. These documents make the case for the continuing importance of record companies, stressing that artists need their support if they want to make it big. Record companies offer finance and they offer ‘a network of connections’. They can introduce you to the ‘best producers, sound engineers and session musicians in the business’; they can alert ‘other players in the industry, from songwriters to record producers’ that you have made the grade. You need to collaborate with them if you want to collaborate with others.

Record Collecting 5: Mystery

In recent interview Jack White has stated, ‘For me, vinyl is a MacGuffin. It’s something to lure you in, and at Third Man vinyl is a MacGuffin for a mechanical, romantic relationship with music’. MacGuffin is a term that Alfred Hitchcock popularised. It is a plot device that lures you in to a story, one that gets the mystery going, but it is of no overall importance.

            It’s interesting to hear Jack White talk in this way. One of the world’s leading advocates of vinyl is suggesting that, ultimately, it’s not vinyl that matters. It’s what vinyl signifies that counts. And what is that? The idea of a ‘mechanical, romantic relationship with music’ is an odd one: the romantic and the mechanic were traditionally supposed to be at odds. But I think I know what he means. Mechanisation no longer stands for the robotic and the modern, but instead for a time when things were tangible and you could engage with them. It is traditional values that are being held up here.

In the preceding blog entries about record collecting I have been focused on the idea that vinyl is collected because of what it is not. People are operating in a dialectical manner. They are collecting vinyl because it is old, not new; because it is analogue, not digital; because it is physical, not intangible; because it is independent, not corporate.

            And yet, there’s always been more to it than this. There has been a fascination with analogue records that is in excess of that for other formats. What’s more, this fascination was in place before some its rival formats existed. People didn’t need the CD to feel that the analogue was special (although the CD certainly helped). They didn’t need retromania, nostalgia, the desire for the tangible, a need for authenticity, or a search for truth to fall in love with analogue records (although these aspects have helped as well).

            Writing as early as 1934, Theordor Adorno was transfixed by a shellac record’s ‘thingness’. He was drawn towards the record’s grooves and the links that they provided ‘between music and writing’. In his 1959 novel. Absolute Beginners, Colin Maccinnes outlines his hero’s love of LP sleeves, calling them ‘the most original thing to come out in our lifetime’. Growing up in the 1960s, Stuart Maconie was fascinated by label designs:

Daft Ken Dodd bore the deep royal blue of Decca, Elvis wore the coal-black livery of pre-Seventies Orange RCA, the John Collier Theme still had its laminated sleeve featuring a giant Trilby. My favourite, though, the sight of which always quickened the pulse a little, was the very emerald green of a goalie’s jumper, the word Columbia grandly embossed in silver about the little hole.

For Roger Manning, keyboard player with Jellyfish, it was the scent of records that was intoxicating:

What really got me was the smell of the records I grew up with – maybe it was the pressing plant they used, for some reason records on the Casablanca label had a smell that blew our minds – when you smell that, it brings you right back to childhood.

Each of these writers returns us to a theme that these entries have been circling. What is it that we love most about analogue records: is it their ‘thingness’, or is it the music that they contain, or in what way is it a combination between these two elements? This dilemma is as old as sound recording itself. Writing in 1919, Rainer Maria Rilke recalled his first impressions of the phonograph:

It must have been when I was a boy at school that the phonograph was invented … At the time and all through the intervening years I believed that that independent sound, taken from us and preserved outside of us, would be unforgettable. That it turned out otherwise is the cause of my writing the present account. As will be seen, what impressed itself on my memory most deeply was not the sound from the funnel but the markings traced on the cylinder; these made a most definite impression.

Ultimately, it’s too easy to say that people are attached to vinyl records because of what they signify or how they can be articulated. There is something inherent in vinyl records themselves. What exactly this is, though, is the biggest mystery of all. 

Record Collecting 4: Space and Time

Record collecting isn’t only about scarcity and obsolescence; it’s also about space and time. Shellac and vinyl records – as both objects and music formats - have provided means for transportation. The sounds that records emit can carry listeners from their own confines to the location of the artists, whether that be the Metropolitan Opera or the Mississippi Delta. It can also bring the artists to them. The records themselves are both temporally and spatially marked. Their designs show evidence of where and when they were made; their analogue nature means that they wither in time, just as their owners do.

            Record collecting was originally focused on space but it has become more interested in time. The playing of records was once marketed as a means of geographical transplantation. In the early 1900s the advertising of companies such as Victor and the Gramophone Company was focused on the idea that, by purchasing records, you were inviting the artists who had made them into your home. It was suggested that, if you played the finest records, it was the equivalent of entertaining elite guests. Consequently, their marketing was focused on the output of operatic ‘celebrities’, such as the early recording star Enrico Caruso. These records were demarcated with special ‘Red Seal’ labels so that your more quotidian visitors could, at a glance, see the standard of musical company that you had been keeping. It has been suggested that the displaying of these records took on more importance than the playing of them. Louis Barfe has stated, ‘Later collectors noted the preponderance of mint single-sided Red Seals and were led to conclude that they were rarely if ever played’.

            Consumers weren’t necessarily encouraged to keep hold of their records, however. Prior to the First World War the attention among gramophone enthusiasts was as much on the advancement of sound recording technology as it was on the musical contents of the cylinders and discs: this was an era of upgrades. Neither producers nor purchasers believed that record collecting would be a worthwhile practice. Why hoard records if they were only going to degrade or if a new one would sound better? As late as 1923, the classical music journal Gramophone was noting that there is ‘no need to be too careful of the life of records, you can wear them out and get the latest’.

This neglect of records nevertheless helped to make them collectable. They became scarce and valuable, something to hunt down. Time was also waiting in the wings. In their search for older records, collectors were able to transport themselves (or the people who had made the original discs) temporally as well as spatially. Both factors were of importance to early jazz record collectors. Melody Maker reported in 1933:

It is apparent that quite a number of dance-music students jealously guard their collections of early ‘hot-jazz’ records as much as they do their more contemporaneous ‘New Rhythm’ styles, and, as a fellow fanatic, I can well understand their hobby … The collection of old-time records is a fascinating one; I personally get as much thrill from the capture of an original ‘Dixieland’ disc as a philatelist does from some scarce foreign stamp – and I might say that there are so many like me that the price is soaring, and even a very worn-out affair costs more than the latest Ellington. (Butterworth 1933: 183)

Many of these ‘hot jazz’ records were being re-issued, often with more accurate label information than on the first issue, but collectors still went in search of the original releases, even if scratched and worn. Stephen W. Smith commented on the practice of some of the earliest American jazz collectors: ‘There are those who will have nothing but the original label, and who will turn down a clean copy of a record in preference to one in bad condition because the latter has what is known to be an earlier label’ (1939: 289–90).

There were acoustic justifications for such behaviour: Smith argued that in the dubbing of jazz reissues the high and low frequencies of the original recordings were usually lost. There were also extramusical reasons for searching out the first issue: it could locate the purchaser there, at the point of origin. In response to the mass reproduction of records there was a desire amongst some collectors to escape the ‘commercial’ and find the ‘authentic’. The record posed the problem, but it also provided the solution. What better than if non-commercial music – rendered so by both its origins and its age – was housed on a ‘non-commercial’ disc? Forget the major-label reissue (which came out when everyone was buying this music) find the original release on the obscure label, whose original audience was the 'race' or country market (transporting you back to the record’s pre-mainstream days).

According to Smith, America’s first collectors of jazz records came from the Princeton and Yale universities. Similarly, in England, Melody Maker could point out ‘How the Varsities Pioneered Jazz’. These enthusiasts wished to travel cross-culturally in space as well as time. Smith states that:

Many of the collectors’ items were originally issued purely for Negro consumption and consequently were sold only in sections of the country which had a demand for them. Copies which found their way into private homes were usually not given the best of care since many of the Negroes, for their own reasons, did not care to change the needle frequently enough to save the record surface.

Here we witness one of the stereotypes of the record collector. The white, middle-class male who is immersing himself in music that another culture has neglected, both physically and temporally. It remains to be asked: why this class and why this gender?

From the jovial sexism of Afflatus writing in Sound Wave in the 1920s (‘has the gramophone enthusiast any room or time in his life for a wife?’) to the gloom of High Fidelity (‘men, always young men’), record collecting has consistently been portrayed as being a male activity. This has been backed by empirical research. At least 95 per cent of those who volunteered to take part in the film Vinyl, Alan Zwieg’s 2000 study of record collecting, were men. The respondents to Roy Shuker’s 2004 survey were also largely male. He discovered that both males and females viewed record collecting as being primarily a masculine hobby:

Most [64 out of 67] of my respondents, especially the males, drawing on personal observation, argued that record collecting is largely a male activity. Conversely, the majority of women collectors [7 out of 11] are conscious of being a visible minority.

And yet, when it comes to collecting in general, Frederick Baekeland has argued that ‘Girls are more likely than boys to collect at all ages’. In his study of the gendered aspects of record collecting, Will Straw indicated that ‘were one presented with statistical evidence that the typical record collector was female, one could easily invoke a set of stereotypically feminine attributes to explain why this was the case’. Straw, therefore, struggles to find an explanation for the gender bias. His own conclusion is that it reflects a masculine need to order the world: ‘the most satisfying (albeit under-theorised) explanation of the masculine collector’s urge is that it lays a template of symbolic differentiation over a potentially infinite range of object domains’. In Straw’s opinion the male collector is a ‘nerd’: his expertise fails the ideal of masculinity because it is ‘acquired through deliberate labour of a bookish or archival variety’. However, he can counter this behaviour with ‘hipness’ if his collection is cultivated with ‘the air of instinctuality’.

Straw argues that another way in which the record collector can attain hipness is through a desire to ‘refuse the mainstream’. Elsewhere Matthew Bannister argues that ‘To resist the passive consumer/fan tag, male record collectors often adopt a bohemian, anti-commercial stance, typically by “valorising the obscure” and transgressive’. This chimes with the jazz collectors, introduced by Smith above. For those middle-class enthusiasts, black American jazz was both obscure and transgressive. Smith’s text indicates that the origin of at least one strand of record collecting lies in cross-cultural immersion, in the need for an ‘other’. This helps to explain its gender bias: such immersion allows the nerd to unveil the hipster within. This is largely a male preoccupation, as Simon Frith has pointed out:

To understand why and how the worlds of jazz (and rock) are young men’s worlds, we have to understand what it means to grow up male and middle-class; to understand the urge to ‘authenticity’ we have to understand the strange fear of being ‘inauthentic’. In this world, American music – black American music – stands for a simple idea: that everything real is happening elsewhere.

I would add that, equally pertinent, is the idea that everything real has happened elsewhere. Music can provide a link to this past. The original record can go further still: it is an artefact that has been retrieved from this domain. As the cartoonist and collector Robert Crumb pointed out: ‘Somebody of that era bought it and listened to it, and that record carries that aura from whoever else had handled and appreciated that object’. It is the record label that offers proof. It is no coincidence that many American independent labels have retained strong regional associations (Sun in Memphis; Chess in Chicago; Philadelphia International – a label name that neatly combines localism and globalism – in Philadelphia). Through these labels elsewhere can enter the home.

            Vinyl continues to be one of the totems of authenticity. There are modern collectors who focus on the music of particular regions and from particular times. It is the case, however, that vinyl now more broadly now symbolizes the past. It is a relic from a time when people did things differently. The past, as everyone knows, is a foreign country. It is also one whose vast spread tends to blot out any other regional boundaries.

            This is the source of John Harris’s complaints about Record Store Day. He argues that the event is a ‘benefit for a struggling musical genre’, one that uses vinyl as its appropriate emblem. The format, in his reckoning, is a rallying point for those who wish to keep faith with outdated, guitar-driven rock music. He also suggests that:

Record Store Day may be a collective rejection of what technology has done to music, but it is not immune from its effects: indeed, in the panoply of specially reissued records that puts the Sex Pistols next to the Grateful Dead, there is a very modern sense of music being completely uprooted from its original context.

He depicts old and new record collectors and old and new vinyl records all lost in a haze of nostalgia. The contemporary record collector doesn’t care where their vinyl records have come from, what’s important is that they have come from the past. In this scenario, space is no longer the place. Ladies and gentlemen, we are floating in time.