Poptimist

Poptimist #25

Poptimist #25

by Tom Ewing, posted February 5, 2010
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"Not long ago a man who wrote a hit song could not only buy that house in the country but everything that went with it... now a man who writes a hit song is lucky if he gets his last year's overcoat out of hock with the proceeds." So wrote a spokesman for ASCAP-- the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers in 1932. Like industry voices today, he was complaining about technological change shaking up the economics of music: In this case, the collapse of the sheet music industry in the face of recordings.

The story of ASCAP's crisis is told in Elijah Ward's excellent recent book, How the Beatles Destroyed Rock'n'Roll. In an echo of recent spats between publishers and YouTube, ASCAP took action by jacking up the royalty rate on broadcast revenue for songs by its members. The broadcast industry retaliated, refusing to play songs by ASCAP members. Since this covered most of the last several decades of music, it amounted to the current pop repertoire being placed out of bounds. In the end ASCAP backed down-- even if they noticed, the public didn't seem to much care that disc jockeys couldn't play specific, established tracks.

The story fascinates me because it pitches the content of pop squarely against its use. ASCAP's belief was that listeners responded to specific content-- they wanted to hear "Begin the Beguine" or "Whistle While You Work". The networks, on the other hand, gambled that pop didn't need a repertoire, and that audiences would adapt to new music: it was the activity of listening to the radio and to music which they valued. They were largely right, and as Eric Harvey noted in last year's essay on MP3 culture, the unintended consequences included a new market for the marginalised styles that would converge to create rock'n'roll.

This dance between music and the use to which it's put continues to the present day. A pattern emerges, for instance, in the last decade's conflicts between the recording industry and assorted music sharing services. The biz comes down on a Muxtape or a Mininova. The site announces, with some defiance, that it will simply continue with a model based on non-copyrighted, unknown material; it fades rapidly from view. Here content is winning the battles against use, though of course the wider picture is of fans determined to share music and an industry scrabbling to retain some kind of margin while letting them do so.

A change in technology leads to a change in use which leads to a change in content: This seems to be the pattern, though it's obscured by the fact that the content is so interesting on its own. Harvey pointed out in his piece that "we've been conditioned for the past century to think about music as a commodity." But we've also been conditioned for the past half-century or so to think of popular music as art, a thing to be aestheticised and criticised. This shift away from disposability is part of why websites in 2010 find it a lot harder to cope with the removal of popular content than networks in 1940 did. Art and commerce-- whether presented as an opposing binary or as a balance of mutual benefit-- have become the lenses through which people understand pop. Abandoning the assumption that music is a commodity sounds healthy enough-- what about abandoning the assumption that it's art?

The move toward thinking of pop as an artform was also led by technology and usage, as Wald's book makes clear. The album-- split by necessity at first over multiple discs-- was format of choice for upscale classical music, establishing an early link between albums, artistry, and social class. Most of its buyers would never have bought single-song 78s. The invention of the one-disc LP in 1948 meant longer and linked pieces of music could be presented more easily, but its earliest applications in pop were functional: albums of "mood music" created specifically for use in particular situations. Frank Sinatra's records with Nelson Riddle-- Songs for Swingin' Lovers!, Sings for Only the Lonely, and the like-- were created in this context: artful and adult, yes, but their titles' claim to a use-value wasn't simply convention. From these functional innovations come the social practises and expectations-- the thoughtful listener, alone or in a small group, concentrating on the music-- that allowed rock albums to make sense as art.

Imagining the ideal listener and the ideal listening experience is where art and criticism meet. The composer and pioneering critic E.T.A. Hoffmann, writing in 1810 about Beethoven's 5th symphony, sets the tone for the next 200 years or so: "Radiant beams shoot through the deep night... and we become aware of gigantic shadows which, rocking back and forth, close in on us and destroy all within us except the pain of endless longing." The "we" here is not just the concert audience enjoying this physically shared experience, it's the conspiratorial critical we-- Hoffmann and his reader, who now has an idea of the sensations that await him.

The history of recorded music has been a series of steps-- first preservation, then privacy, then portability-- each of which has enormously increased the options of when, where, and with whom you can hear the stuff. The range of contexts for any given music-- the experiences you can have with it-- has vastly expanded. This might make judging music a lot more difficult, except we've stuck with the critical we, where the critic is listening by themselves to music and immersing themselves in it and the reader can take that for granted.

Break from this default experience, though, and it's not the music's fault-- it's yours. As Hoffmann put it in 1813, "How does the matter stand if... it is your fault that you do not understand the master's language as the initiated understand it, that the portals of the innermost sanctuary remain closed to you?" Most critics aren't as tough on disbelievers as Hoffmann, but his romantic ideas die hard. It's not hard to find modern rock writing which assumes the effort to "understand" music is a virtue, and that the non-initiate can be safely dismissed.

In fact when a critic openly rejects those ideas, it can misfire horribly. Nick Hornby's notorious New Yorker review of "Kid A" was one of a few which panned the record for its experimentation. But only Hornby rejected not just the specifics of the experiment but damned the entire principle of it, creating a bizarro world framework where only 16-year-old boys had the patience for difficult music, and everyone else had better things to do. "Anyone old enough to vote may find that he has competing demands for his time-- a relationship, say, or a job, or buying food, or listening to another CD he picked up on the same day. He may also find himself shouting at the CD player, 'Shut up! You're supposed to be a pop group!' (The music critics who love Kid A, one suspects, love it because their job forces them to consume music as a 16-year-old would. Don't trust any of them.)"

I'm quoting Hornby at length not because he's wrong about an old record, but because his grounds for dismissal are quite interesting. All criticism implies an ideal listener but Hornby is unusual in defining one, and his certainly isn't a Hoffmann type. It's more like our buyer of early-50s mood music, who wants a record to perform a function and whose time and money will be wasted if it doesn't. Hornby is declaring that the use of music ought to inform the content. Essentially, he's treating an album as a device that can create art-like sensations in its owner when used, and woe betide the manufacturer should it malfunction.

So the binary lens this criticism looks at pop through isn't art vs. commerce but art vs. usage, a twist on what had been at stake back in the ASCAP crisis days. Because Hornby is acting the gleeful philistine and treating an album like a commodity, it's easy to associate his standpoint with the record business. But in fact commercial interests don't really have a dog in this fight. Of course records that efficiently slot into someone's life and do their job make money, but on the other hand the ideal of the discerning individual listener is a very precious one to the record industry: As part of the 1950s consumer boom, it helped the LP become the biggest moneymaker the business had ever seen. Lifetime consumers happy to develop their individual tastes and display them through purchase-- you are what made the industry great!

Luckily there are ways of taking music's usefulness into account that are more entertaining and sympathetic than Hornbyism. London critic Dan Hancox penned a "Buffoon Empiricist Manifesto" last May, one brief shot in a wider debate about how club music should be written about. Point one is "Thou shalt go to raves." The idea, though, isn't that the raving is some useful source material for the real work of individual contemplation and judgement: The raving is itself the judgement and its documentation an enjoyable project emerging from that.

Buffoon empiricism isn't the most serious manifesto you'll ever read, of course, but it's right to identify the use of music as a central issue for would-be critics. If all music has to do is be art, that makes my job as a writer a great deal easier. I can learn from how film, book, and theatre critics approach their subjects and not worry about how beer, crafts, videogames, and fandom writers have to deal with theirs. But to think of music as only art is to narrow it.

As Eric Harvey's piece concluded, the fallout from the current shifts in music distribution and economics will need to involve a redefinition of music's value. The recorded music industry is waning, and we're passing through an inflection point as stressful and crucial as the 30s and 40s, when publishers and musicians took their stand against "canned music." As it wanes, the modes of thinking it's generated-- of individual engagement with its product as the default form of listening-- will also become less important. The social, useful life of music-- sharing, dancing to, mixing, playing, playing with it-- will be the most fascinating and fertile part of it, for writers as much as for businessmen and musicians.

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