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. 

           

Love of Labour

These days people hark back to the mixtapes and describe the creation of them as a labour of love. In doing so they emphasise the wrong part of this practice. There has been a large body of writing about the romantic aspects of creating these tapes; compiling them as love letters to the person you wanted to date. In my own experience romance was only a small part of mix-taping practice. Sadly, perhaps, I was more likely to make mixtapes for my mates (what does this say about my sexuality?). Most often I made them for myself (admittedly, I did have a fairly isolated upbringing).

            And I made a lot of mixtapes. In fact, just about every vinyl record I bought, as well as any pre-recorded cassettes or CDs, was reconfigured and re-contextualised as part of a tape compilation. This didn’t represent a labour of love, but rather a love of labour.

            There is a type of listening practice that is idealised above all others: dedicated, motionless listening, preferably through headphones and better still in the dark. This is the pop equivalent of the classical music concert: listening that supresses bodily activity. As with so many aspects of classical ideology this needs to be countered. Simon Frith has made a strong argument for dancing as an ideal way of listening. This is a political move. He wants to overturn the idea that rhythmically-focused black music should be reduced to ‘feeling’ while harmonically-sophisticated white music is the bastion of ‘thought’. He argues instead that ‘dance matters not just as a way of expressing music but as a way of listening to it, a way into the music in its unfolding – which is why dancing to music is both a way of losing oneself in it, physically, and a way of thinking about it, hearing it with a degree of concentration that is clearly not “brainless”’.

            In black culture there is a dynamic cluster of meanings around the word ‘work’. When you are ‘working’ you might be doing your job. The term is also applied to dancing and to dancing’s great correlate, sex. This metaphorical usage stretches from Hank Ballard’s ‘Work with Me, Annie’ through to Michael Jackson’s ‘Working Day and Night’ and beyond.

            Returning to the subject of mixtapes, I want to raise a less titillating equation between working and absorbing yourself in sound. Another great way of listening to music is to turn it into a job. For me, the making of mixtapes wasn’t romantic; it was an industrial process. In my own vainglorious way I was imagining myself as a producer or engineer. I was selecting, sequencing and editing. Like dancing, this changed listening from a passive process into an active one. It was also a way of getting closer to the music. I have written before about the reciprocal relationship between recording personnel and the public: producers mix recordings with an imagined ‘ear’ of the public; one of the ways that the public listens to music is by imagining the scenario in the recording studio. There are all sorts of ways of miming along to the records we play and there various locations that we can picture ourselves in – the air guitar and the live concert are not the only games in town. In fact, one of the best ways of locating ourselves in recorded sound is to configure ourselves as engineers. And this, as much as courtship, is where the mixtape came in handy.