This article is about object identification.
A lot of people download music. Whether legally, through iTunes and the like, or illegally, the fact that music is trafficked in a mainly non-physical format is a significant shift that has taken place largely within the last fifteen years.
This isn’t really news to anybody. Just looking around at the people on the street in downtown Toronto quickly reveals the fact that everyone has significant white earbuds stuck in their ears, and even if they’re listening to other headphones, odds are that they aren’t attached to a CD player or tape deck.
When the Compact Disc (and to some extent the 8 track and the cassette tape) took over as the dominant form of music distribution and consumption from the cumbersome vinyl of old, the middle class consumer who made up a good portion of the music consuming public decided to repurchase all of their old albums in the new format. It’s pretty obvious that this practice facilitated easier listening in say, the car, where the user gained greater control of consumption and basically just didn’t have to listen to the radio all the time. As a result, the late eighties and early/mid-nineties were the heyday of reissues and greatest hits compilations.
In 2010 reissues have become a culture all their own. Many labels spend time unearthing previously unappreciated releases from bands that may or may not have enjoyed any success in their time of existence. A good example of this is Drag City’s 2009 reissue of Death’s compiled mid-seventies recordings under the title …For the Whole World to See. It’s not likely that anyone other than Drag City’s already niche demographic of record buyers would be particularly aware of this release, or that Death would somehow spark a revolution in music today and enjoy any serious monetary or cultural success in its outcome. Something about making available more physical and non-physical copies of music in danger of falling off the map entirely seems important, but what is it? Why does Drag City offer …For the Whole World to See on vinyl as well? Is it merely an obsession with obsolescence or a romanticism of the experience of a certain kind of music listening? The endless cycle of writing and rewriting history, especially when it comes to appreciating art, says a great deal about the ongoing human project of identity building.
On the artists’ side of things, the idea of the album is as de-emphasized as ever. Formerly album-based artists are making the shift to releasing singles and compilations thereof in the place of albums. Canrap guru K-OS said in a press release:
"I'm not going to make any more albums... I think we're just going to drop singles for a couple years and see what happens. If those singles are successful, maybe put out a compilation of the ones that people like and call it an album, like what Elvis and The Beatles did. I've been [in the studio] for 10 years of my life. I kinda just want to stay immediate. I think with Lil' Wayne and our dude Drake, it's showing you don't have to make an album.”
The dissolution of the album on the mainstream pop front line pretty much results from our technological divorce from collections of songs and physical objects, on the both the production and consumption sides of the music industry. There are so many different kinds of music consumers that this doesn’t function as a totally blanket statement, but most North American people have music and albums, specifically vinyls or CDs or cassettes, that represent a whole life history of listening. Not all of us are excessive about it, fiendishly gathering after collectible after collectible attempting in vain to fill all the silence, but nearly all of us have memories like that one album you played every day for the whole summer. (Rick James? Sloan? Jon-Rae Fletcher? The Beatles? What was it?)
In Brett Milano’s book Vinyl Junkies: Adventures in Record Collecting, he states: “The urge to collect records begins with the fascination with the record as an object, going beyond a simple appreciation of the music” (18). Milano’s focus is oriented towards vinyl hounds specifically, “the type who think digital sound is flat and heartless,” but the general sentiment of object identification and the archival process that ensues and lives with us is applicable on a more general level. The art that we possess emotionally, physically and even culturally is a massive building block of our individual and collective identities: “And all the friends that you once knew are left behind they kept you safe and so secure amongst the books and all the records of your lifetime/ What will happen in the morning when the world it gets so crowded that you can’t look out the window in the morning?” (Nick Drake, “Hazey Jane II”). Possession of the physical object of music consumption allows for a tightly controlled documentation of identity and development, as well as a way of relating to a referential web of sonic emotional history that helps us to place ourselves in the now.
“Identification is known to psycho-analysis as the earliest expression of an emotional tie with another person…[it] is ambivalent from the very first; it can turn into an expression of tenderness as easily into a wish for someone’s removal. It behaves like a derivative of the first, oral phase of the organization of the libido, in which the object that we long for and prize is assimilated by eating and is in that way annihilated as such. The cannibal, as we know, has remained at this standpoint; he has a devouring affection for his enemies and only devours people of whom he is fond” (Freud, “Identification,” 105).
Our ability to identify with and relate to music on a level akin to other people is because, since the beginning of recording technology, music is in and of itself a sonic stream of human history that is essentially intangible. There are millions of reasons to love or hate a piece of music, to cannibalistically devour it and thus its creators and instruments and histories, but it remains the rope of sand that I referred to in my previous article; ungraspable, inexpressible, non-physical. It’s just that the objects that give us access to this non-physical stream become physical manifestations of what it means for us to participate in each other in this way. As the body is inextricably tied to Being, the record or CD or cassette exists as the body to music’s Being; a physical springboard into the cosmos.
So we’ve discovered why Drag City reissued Death’s recordings on both CD and vinyl. As a large part of the population favours the playlist and the album is dying a horrible, slow death, the fraction of vinyl hounding archivists (who seem to be increasing in numbers) move in precisely the other direction; bringing the non-physical into their bodies by dropping the needle in the groove, or pressing play on the cassette, or organizing hundreds of albums.
The fact is that even though every song contributes to the tradition, the stream, the One Song if you’ll get mystical with me, there’s absolutely no way to ever listen to the same piece of music twice. Even if you listen to the same album on the same stereo on the same couch, your ears have changed. Your mind has changed. You’ve thought a thousand things since last the music touched your brain. It’s the typical user as content, death of the author kind of reasoning; a dialectic relationship arises between the reader and the text, the listener and the song. Whether you feel that listening to an album on the original format of its release catapults you back in time to it’s conception or if you feel that every listening innovation followed carries us into the future by our ears, the fact is that every listen is a step forward into ourselves and Others and a greater understanding of the intangible totality of Being, even if we can’t express it.
Next month: From format to locality. Space is the place?
