Fear of Musicking

There is a bias amongst some popular music academics. They are for musicians and they are against songwriters. This is not borne out of a need to venerate the incredible playing ability of certain artists, quite the opposite in fact. The desire is to move away from the idea of ‘artists’. Musicians can be viewed as workers. Theirs is a job of honest graft. In contrast, it is songwriters who carry with them the bourgeois notion of the creative genius, operating at a remove from society. This viewpoint is made clear in a recent call for papers for a ‘Working in Music’ conference:

As with any artistic production, music is also - and perhaps mainly - work. Such an idea is opposed to the romantic mythology from the 19th Century which conceives of artistic activity as coming from transcendental inspiration, impossible to rationalize, and of the artist as an exceptional being whose ‘talent’ would be irreducible to sociological analysis.

What we should value is the work (the physical effort that is expended in making music) and not ‘the work’ (the musical product that is credited to an author). Christopher Small, with his neologism ‘musicking’ is key to this notion. He believes that we should think of music as a process - and thus a verb - rather than as an object - get rid of that noun!

To music is to take part, in any capacity, in a musical performance, whether by performing, by listening, by rehearsing or practicing, by providing material for performance (what is called composing), or by dancing. We might at times even extend its meaning to what the person is doing who takes the tickets at the door or the hefty men who shift the piano and the drums or the roadies who set up the instruments and carry out the sound checks or the cleaners who clean up after everyone else has gone. They, too, are all contributing to the nature of the event that is a musical performance.

I’m in agreement with much of this. Music is social; we should take genius down a peg or two; songwriting should not be placed above performance in the musical hierarchy. This outlook generates some questionable claims, however.

            First, there is the idea that the practice of musicians is out of step with the legal and commercial perceptions of music. Simon Frith has recently argued that ‘The law treats music as a work, a commodity, intellectual property, something that can be owned and exploited’, whereas ‘Musicians think of music as a process’. But do they always think in this manner? The recording industry may have declined in recent years, but the goal for many musicians is still to make a recording. They also want to have credit for it. These musicians do think of music as a noun. Frith once described the process of popular music as resulting in an object:

The ‘industrialization of music’ can’t be understood as something that happens to music but describes a process in which music itself is made – a process, that is, which fuses (and confuses) capital, technical, and musical arguments. Twentieth Century popular music means the twentieth century popular record; not the record of something (a song? a singer? a performance?) which exists independently of the music industry, but a form of communication which determines what songs, singers, and performances are and can be.

I would argue that this still remains the case, regardless of the academic vogue for musicking.

            Second, there is the desire to conflate music-making processes. It is argued that the division of labour into composition and performance is a classical music conceit. Popular music, in contrast, witnesses a confusion of these roles. Musicians compose as they are playing; songs are produced communally. Frith stresses this point in his recent article, stating that ‘The law assumes music is authored, created by named individuals’, whereas ‘Musicians know that music making is an essentially collaborative, a social process [sic]’.

            Music making is certainly collaborative and the divisions between composition and performance can be blurred. This does not mean, however, that they are the same thing. Few popular music songs are notated, but most of them are written. This is most obviously true of the lyrics. The words are honed and they are crafted, and it is usually an individual who does this. It is also true of the music: chords and melodies are usually developed by individuals or by small teams of writers; they seldom emerge whole during the rehearsal process.

            There is, of course, the question of whether the chords and melody should be valued above other elements of music, such as rhythm and the timbre. Frith believes not. He argues that ‘The law describes music in terms of notes and tunes’, whereas ‘Musicians think of music in terms of sounds and textures’. Again, though, do all musicians think in this way? There are a lot of performers who still believe in songs, and there are many who believe (perhaps conservatively) that lyrics, melody and harmony should be given greatest compositional accord.

            The idea that performance and composition take place simultaneously is in some ways outdated. It harks back to the idea of the rock group: a band of musicians who work up their material in rehearsal or in the recording studio. This is not modern practice. Most contemporary hit records are made by solo artists or by collaborations between solo artists. These musicians usually have a hand in writing their songs, but they do not write them on their own. We live in an era of professional songwriters. Their job is to work on the notes and tunes. It is somebody else’s job to work on the performance.

            There is, however, one modern example where the lines between performance, composition and recording are truly blurred. This is the lone, electronic artist who writes, edits and records their material on a digital audio workstation. Ironically, this type of music making is the least social or collaborative of all.

            Finally, we come to attempts to solve the legal dilemma. If the law is an ass when it comes to performers, how do we make it into something better? One proposal that has been put forward is to regard performance as composition. Richard Arnold has argued for this. He believes that ‘in the field of popular music many works are created in performance rather than being written down first’. Lionel Bently’s solution is to forgo the conventional compositional copyright for popular music and instead have a copyright in the ‘original work of sound’:

The effect of this would be to save copyright law from being asked to invent ‘musical works’ (and, indeed, ‘performances’) in circumstances (as in much of rock and pop – but not all) where the musical artefact is created in the recording studio (and subsequently marketed, appreciated and consumed) by way of such recording.

This idea is problematic in two respects. First of all, it ignores the fact that many songs are not written by the recording artists. As noted above, it is rare today for hit songs to be worked up in a studio like this. Bently’s idea is also unworkable in respect of cover versions: artists whose songs have been covered are not likely to welcome the covering artists as co-composers. The second problem with this proposal is that it posits composition as the desired musical goal. Copyright will give due respect to performers, but only if they cast themselves as writers. Isn’t this where we came in?

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.  

Pop Modernism

Pop modernism operates as a lobbying body within popular music. It is not the mainstream, but can enter the mainstream at periods of peak activity. For some, it is pop’s preferred state. It embraces the spirit of modernism outlined by Robert Hughes in The Shock of the New, expecting ‘cultural turmoil’ to foretell ‘social tumult’. Here, ‘music heralds’, fulfilling the purpose that Jacques Attali outlined for it:

Music is prophecy. Its styles and economic organization are ahead of the rest of society because it explores, much faster than material reality can, the entire range of possibilities in a given code. It makes audible the new world that will gradually become visible, that will impose itself and regulate the order of things; it is not only the image of things, but the transcending of the everyday, the herald of the future.

Pop modernism first surfaced in the late 1960s, as rock music attempted to splinter from pop. Although it inherited characteristics from fine art philosophies of modernism, it rested primarily upon ‘low theory’, as Simon Frith terms it, theory that was

developed out of day-to-day practices of pop itself . . . confused, inconsistent, full of hyperbole and silence, but still theory, and theory which is compelled by necessity to draw key terms and assumptions from high theory, from the more systematic accounts of art, commerce, pleasure and class that are available.

From the higher theorising of art, pop modernism has taken ideas of onward progress, originality, formal experimentation and technological fascination, a belief that you should reject ‘the current state of things in favour of the new’. It has also inherited an occasional snobbishness, a belief that progressive art should stand above ‘the realms of mass culture and everyday life’. Rock ideology, for example, included a rejection of the singles charts, as its ‘artists’ put their faith in albums instead. Speaking in 1967, Eric Clapton believed:

Singles are an anachronism. To get any good music in a space of two or three minutes requires working to a formula and that part of the pop scene really leaves me cold. I hate all that rushing around trying to get a hit.

There were technologies and institutions that helped rock artists to achieve these ends. Vinyl albums operated in a different manner to vinyl singles, both as objects and in the way that they functioned in the marketplace. Radio also helped to uphold the rock/pop split. In America the former genre was found on FM stations, while the latter remained on AM. In Britain, meanwhile, rock was the preserve of ‘specialist’ shows, broadcast in the evening hours. The two forms of music were also written about in different forms of print media, and there were different conventions when it came to playing live. It was not possible, however, for rock music to make a complete break from pop music. Unlike modernist fine art, rock music had been born within mass culture. Moreover, it was not always desirable to stay removed from the singles charts. Financially, rock artists needed to release singles in order to promote their albums. Artistically, some of them welcomed the challenge of bringing diversity to the charts. Marc Bolan declared, ‘me getting into the Top Twenty – as a musician alongside the pop stars – opens up a great thing’.

            A modernist spirit has been present in popular music at several times since the late 1960s. It has not been consistent, however. There have been particular periods when pop has become more openly questing, and there have been times in which the conditions have been ripe for this impulse to be maximised. Technology has been one driver for pop’s expansion. Synthesisers, sequencers and samplers have each helped to push the music forwards, as have new recording formats, notably the 12” single. Drugs have been another prompt. LSD and MDMA are among those to offer enhanced horizons. Pop modernism can arise when the interplay between the major labels and the independent sector is in productive tension. Separate sales charts for alternative music and dance genres have helped to foster scenes; dedicated radio support has also been essential. 

            Many of those who complain about a decline of innovation in popular music have been involved in pop’s modernist spurts. Simon Reynolds is a prime example. He has stated:

When I started taking more than a passing interest in pop, as a teenager in the post-punk seventies, I immediately ingested a strong dose of modernism: the belief that art has some kind of evolutionary destiny, a teleology that manifests itself through genius artists and masterpieces that are monuments to the future. It was there already in rock, thanks to The Beatles, psychedelia and progressive rock, but post-punk drastically amped up the belief in constant change and endless innovation. Although by the early eighties modernism was thoroughly eclipsed within art and architecture, and postmodernism was seeping into popular music, this spirit of modernist pop carried on with rave and the experimental fringe of rock.

Pop modernists such as Reynolds hark back to the vital periods of their youth; they are nostalgic, as Svetlana Boym puts it, ‘for a prenostalgic state of being’. They yearn for an era when neither they nor the music they loved were retrospective. One of the prompts for this nostalgia is that it feels as though we should be experiencing radical musical innovation: we are living through a period of major technological and infrastructural change. However, we do not appear to have many new styles of music. Contrary to Jacques Attali, it is not music itself that is heralding a new economic order; it is instead the economic organization of music that is operating in advance of other markets. 

The First Ear, the Second Ear and the Final Good Ear

When record producers listen to music, how do they listen to it? In Performing Rites, Simon Frith suggests that they have an ‘imputed audience’ in mind; they are obsessively worrying ‘what does the listener want?’ Frith writes about the people who do this successfully and repeatedly, broadening out his scope to include other record company personnel, such as the staff from A&R and marketing:

There is a touching faith in the industry in anyone who can claim to read the audience, to be in tune with public taste (the usual measure of which is a previous success); such people carry a special authority in in-house arguments; they have a “good ear,” and it takes many failures to offset the original success.

In America, such people used to be known as ‘record men’ (women, apparently, did not have great ears). Back in the 1970s, to have this sense and to use it well was a criterion for helming a record label. Mo Ostin at Warner Bros., Clive Davis at Columbia, Ahmet Ertegun at Atlantic and David Geffen at Asylum were all record men. Ertegun explained their particular talent:

You have to develop a second ear. The first ear is your private taste, which is what moves you personally. The second ear is one that, when you listen to a piece of music and you personally think it’s terrible but it’s a hit commercially – the second ear has to say, ‘This is great!’

Is this the heart of the popular music process? Record company bosses and producers aren’t interested in art; they are instead trying to predict the debased tastes of the public. Frith suggests that this is one of the reasons why the ‘industry’ is frowned upon. Obsessed with hits, these people are seen to ‘“interfere” in the proper communication of musician and audience’. Music is meddled with as it is mediated. It loses its initial sense of contact and meaning.

            Frith doesn't buy this line of reasoning. He suggests, instead, that it is the ‘record men’ of the industry who make communication between performers and audiences possible. I would go further than this. I believe that popular music is mediated music. Music doesn’t exist in a pure state at one end of a process, waiting to go through the wringer of the record business before it reaches the audience. It is created with production processes in mind. Virtually all artists will have first experienced popular music via its mediation. They encounter it through recordings and through broadcasts of those recordings. And they will create their own music with recordings and broadcasts in mind.

            But what about audiences? They’re not blind to mediation either. In fact, it can excite them just as much as performance can. Audiences imagine themselves in a number of situations. They picture themselves in direct communication with artists. They also picture themselves as artists: the air guitar might well be the most widely-played instrument. But they also place themselves at the heart of the mediation process. They imagine what it feels like to be in a studio as a record is mixed. They also listen to music with the ears of a ‘record man’. Industry bosses aren’t the only people with second ears, and they aren’t the only ones to get excited by terrible records either. There’s a little part of each of us that thinks we can predict a hit. And this is one of the reasons why we admire one when we hear one. Not all of our popular music pleasures are centred on music that moves our hearts and our minds. We also enjoy being a part of the game.

Words and Music: Doing the Splits

In his book Performing Rites, Simon Frith tells the story of a correspondence between the novelist/lyricist Margaret Radclyffe-Hall and the publishers Chappell and Company, which took place in 1918. Radcylffe-Hall had written the words to the hit song ‘The Blind Ploughman’. She had not received any royalties, however, and wrote to the publishers seeking redress. William Davey, the chairman of Chappell, excused his company’s parsimony on the grounds that:

Unfortunately, we cannot afford to pay royalties to lyric writers. One or two other publishers may, but if we were to introduce the principle, there would be no end to it. Many lyrics are merely the same words in a different order and almost always with the same ideas. Hardly any of them, to be frank, are worth a royalty.

He concedes that he has ‘admiration’ for the words to ‘The Blind Ploughman’ and offers her a one off payment of 20 guineas for her troubles. Frith states that Davey’s ‘letter is interesting in a number of ways, not least for its revelation that Chappell was, apparently, routinely breaking the law – the Copyright Act of 1911 included lyricists in musical composition regulations even though music publishers had campaigned against this’. Frith is alluding to clause 19.2.b.ii of the Act, which states, ‘a musical work shall be deemed to include any words so closely associated therewith as to form part of the same work’. Here, British law was following the Berne Convention of 1886, which sought copyright protection for ‘musical compositions with or without words’.

            Frith is right. It is interesting that Chappell were refusing to pay Radclyffe-Hall. What’s less clear is whether the publishers were breaking the law. If the issue was to do with sheet music, then presumably so: Chappell would have been printing copyrighted words without permission. If the issue was to do with royalties for public performance or for the sale of records (the mechanical right), then things are more complicated. It is mechanical royalties that clause 19.2.b.ii is referring to. Despite the 1911 Copyright Act's recognition of the integral importance of lyrics, however, it set no value on what they were worth. In fact, as far as I am aware, British copyright law has never determined what portion of a song’s performance or mechanical royalties should go to the lyricists and what portion should go to the musical composers. The responsibility for determining these splits was first taken on by music copyright societies. France took the lead here. It established the world's first collection society in 1851. It is of consequence that this society was formed jointly by a lyricist, a composer and a publisher, a partnership that is reflected in its title: Société des auters, compositeurs et éditeurs de musique (SACEM). It was determined that these three parties would share copyright money in equal proportions. When the UK eventually set up its own Performing Right Society (PRS) in 1914, the same split was adopted. Other countries have used different methods, however. The German society, GEMA, originally determined that publishers could have no more than a 25% share. Moreover, while France has retained is three-way split, other countries have moved towards a model where the publisher has a 50% share and the songwriters split the remaining 50% between them (albeit that in private the publisher might also give the songwriters a portion of their share).  

For much of the 20th century, whatever the size of the remaining portion, its most common allocation was to be divided equally between a lyricist and a composer. It was in the inter-war period that much of the ‘Great American Songbook’ was composed. Many of these classic 1920s and 1930s songs were written by partnerships: Harold Arlen and E.Y. Harburg; George and Ira Gershwin; Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart; etc. and etc. In each case the former wrote the music and the latter wrote the lyrics, and in each case the composers and lyricists were allocated an equal split of the royalties. The Brill Building songwriting teams of the 1950s and 1960s also operated according to this split, as did the songwriting partnerships in British beat groups. It has been prevalent in musical theatre and has been used by classicist indie songwriters. The idea of a divided split between lyricist and composer is also maintained in much copyright advice.

It has, however, been challenged in a number of ways. One of the problems that traditional splits have presented for self-contained groups is that they are equitable for some members, but not for others. The songwriters will end up richer than the other performers in the band. In many cases the high earners will be the guitarist (who is receiving royalties for writing the music) and the singer (who gains royalties for the words). This disparity has caused bands to split. Alternatively, they might amend their ways. Queen used to allocate songwriting royalties to the principal songwriter of each song, but by the end of their existence were splitting shares for all songs four ways. The Clash were another group who progressed towards presenting their songs as group compositions. Other groups, among them some of the longest-lived, have decided from their inception to allocate shares equally to all members. U2, REM, Coldplay and Elbow all operate in this manner. Others devise more complicated methods. Each member generally receives a royalty share for every track, but these are not allocated equally. The most ‘important’ members (still commonly the singer and the guitarist) will receive a larger allocation. These practices aren't limited to ‘authentic’ guitar bands, either. Some pop acts, such as the Spice Girls and the Sugababes, split their shares between writer/producers and the singers in the group, and the same is true for many solo artists who work with songwriter/producers. In the pop world, too, there is a wide variance in shares. Sometimes they will be split equally, other times more complicated divisions are devised.

Songwriting spits have also been complicated by the practices of sampling and interpolating. Hip-hop tracks, in particular, are a mess of credits. Many, in fact, remain perpetually unresolved. Hip-hop and dance music have also turned traditional musical hierarchies on their head. Where it used to be the case that a song’s melody and words were deemed to be of most value, these genres have seen more credit accorded to the beat. This could be considered an ironic outcome for hip-hop, the most word-based of all popular music forms. It was this genre, however, that shone a light on how unfairly some copyright allocations had been devised. The raps of hip-hop have traditionally rested upon sampled drum breaks. The drummers who devised these breaks have failed to see any royalties for their work. Clyde Subblefield played the famous 'funky drummer' solo, but it's composition credits go to the composer of the song's 'melody', James Brown. Gregory Coleman devised the 'Amen Break', often considered to be the most sampled drum solo of all, and yet the royalties go to Jester Hairston, writer of 'Amen', the song that Coleman's band, the Winstons, were covering. Fewer drum breaks are sampled today. Rhythm tracks are instead created by producers, who will then send these beats to other songwriters so that they can be completed with melodies, harmonies and words. As if mindful of the past injustices meted out to drummers, these producers will demand half of the songwriting royalties. Correspondingly, there are now songwriters who specialize in writing only one part of the song, whether that be the hook or an eight-bar of rhymes.

 There’s something good about these changes. The complexity of pop composition is being recognised and more of the interested parties are receiving some shares. It is also good that popular music copyright is no longer in thrall to classical conventions, with their emphases on melody and harmony over rhythm and timbre. Nevertheless, if the old melodist/lyricist split represented an unfair reflection of the contributors to a work, the new methods fail to bring us any closer to knowing exactly who did what, or towards an understanding of what any of it is really worth.

They also have another consequence. In many cases it is rhythm that is on the rise. When it comes to rock music, the bass players and drummers in bands now appear on more songwriting credits. When it comes to dance music, the producers of rhythm tracks are often the ones who are determining the splits. It is generally assumed that this is happening at the expense of the other musicians, and it is true that many guitarists and keyboard players now receive a lower share of the royalties. There is, however, another activity that is getting squeezed. On the surface, lyrics are still worth 50% of the songwriting shares. If you look at the credits for any song, at least half of the writers' income is going to somebody who is credited as an 'author'. When it comes to popular music, however, few of these writers are only responsible for the words. Most are instead listed as 'composer-authors', meaning that they have an input into both the music and the lyrics. The complicating factor here is that it is not just the main lyric writers who are adopting this credit, in many cases it is being applied to all of the members of a band. It is also being applied to all the members of songwriting teams. And it is being applied no matter how great or small the contribution to the lyric writing is. In fact, there's really no way of checking whether these numerous composer-authors actually contributed to the lyric-writing process. As a consequence, the author who was responsible for writing the majority of the lyrics might well end up with less than 50% of the songwriting share. The composer-author title is reflective of modern songwriting practice. At the same time, it allows songwriters to circumvent the strict 50/50 lyricist/composer split that some of the collection societies require. It has also had another consequence: the composer-author credit has helped to provide longer-lasting copyright protection. But that’s another story for another day . . .

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. 

I Am a One in Ten

On Saturday 12 April I spoke at the conference in honour of Simon Frith at the University of Edinburgh. My theme was success ratios in the music industry, focusing on the regularly repeated statistic that only one in ten artists/records succeeds. My paper is available here. 

Do You Remember the Days of the Old Schoolyard?

Musical taste at school is dynamic. The popularity of any band or any genre can go from being cool to being embarrassing; woe betide any student who doesn’t keep up with what is in and what is out. There are shifts in taste in each school year. There also differences in the ways that each school year uses its music. But are these differences caused by psychology, aesthetics or political economy? And do they hold true at different periods in time?

In 1972 Simon Frith surveyed a school in West Yorkshire. He found that, as pupils grew older, they moved away from the mainstream towards the underground, and away from group consensus towards greater individuality of taste. Fourth formers had ‘maximum involvement in youth groups’; fifth formers ‘emphasised beat and sound in their tastes rather than meaning’; sixth formers scorned ‘“commercial” tastes’.

In general, this remained true at my own school in the late 1970s/early 1980s. We were the punk generation. At first, there was mass consensus that all punk was a good thing. Then, in later school years, there was greater discernment: some bands were in (the Fall) other bands were out (the Boomtown Rats). There was a shift from chart punk released by major record companies (the Clash, the Stranglers), to more obscure punk released by independent labels (Discharge, Crass). By the time I left school I was ordering albums from America so that I could get hold of records that no other students owned.

Two of my nieces are currently at high school and their taste is just as nuanced and distinct. A couple of years ago they were into One Direction. They were displaying their ‘maximum involvement’ by following Britain’s biggest boy band. This year One Direction are out. My nieces are now fans of K-pop. Although their musical taste might seem far removed from the punk that dominated my school, their reasoning is not so different. My nieces are not into Psy; what they like is the more obscure K-pop. They told me they like it because it is not written about in the mainstream press. They are displaying excellent scorn for commercial taste.

And yet I’m not sure that it’s quite so easy to wrap up the tastes of school years and put them into boxes. There are factors that make these groupings unstable. One is the role of other family members. When I was at school there were fourth formers who already displayed refined taste. The common factor amongst them was that they had older brothers or sisters. These siblings gave them advanced warning of the rules of their own school years. While I’m sure this dynamic remains in place, there is now further family intrusion. The taste of parents used to be something to rebel against, but this is no longer always the case. Some ‘cooler’ parents insist on taking up the role of older siblings; they advise their children about what is and what is not to like. From what I have seen, it is as children get older that they are coming into closer alignment with their parents’ tastes. Fourth formers are still winding up their mums and dads by insisting that chart pop is amazing; but today’s sixth formers are asking their parents if they can borrow their old vinyl LPs.

Music also plays apart. There are always acts and genres that are aimed specifically at school kids, but this music varies in both quantity and quality. Some of this comes down to demographics: when there are lots school kids around the music industry aims a lot of music at them. Some of it comes down to luck. Bliss was it to be young in the late 1970s when punk held sway. This music was aimed at children, but it was also complex. It felt important at the time and still feels important today; it informed the philosophy by which I live. While I’m an arch populist and an out-and-out lover of hits, I struggle to find similar significance in One Direction.

The media infrastructure also changes from generation to generation. When I was at school the move away from the mainstream was largely a game of one-upmanship. It also wasn’t that hard to escape mass media. Although there was a greater presence of popular music on terrestrial television in those days (Top of the Pops was being broadcast to 15 million viewers each week), the music was hardly touched upon in the daily papers (it wasn’t until the mid-1980s that both the tabloids and the broadsheets gave it greater coverage). As such, it wasn’t difficult to access ‘obscure’ music (listening to John Peel’s radio show or buying Sounds would do the trick).

Things are different today. My nieces aren’t just turning away from chart pop out of a desire to refuse mainstream taste; they are also turning away from it because its depressing to be confronted with the antics of today’s pop stars in the mass media. It’s simply not safe to be a fan of Rihanna, Rita Ora, Justin Bieber or the other performers who receive media saturation. Who knows what they’ll do next? Their disrobing is embarrassing and their antics are stupid. And so instead my nieces are putting their faith in K-pop acts about whom we know nothing and who chose to say nothing in the press. Although there is wisdom in this, I’m not sure that it’s a design for life.