Hi Everyone!
Welcome back to the newsletter.
It’s definitely been one of those…distracting news cycles lately. And honestly, it can be hard to know how to approach writing/thinking in, amongst, and (ideally) against it. At least domestically, the spectacle is so much of the point that there is something to be said for just sticking to your guns and continuing to do the type of critical work that we strive for here at Money 4 Nothing. But on the other hand…you don’t want to be the ThisIsFineDog.JPG, you know? And we definitely have no time for the “life is grim, here’s a distraction” approach. That’s what sports are for, or reality television, or the “Department of Actual Music.”
So, instead, we’re going to think through some of the broader implications of our recent interview with Toby Bennett about his wonderful book “Corporate Life in the Digital Music Industry,” and try to understand what its acute analysis of the relationship between work, subjectivity, and capitalism can tell us about our present—increasingly precarious—moment.
In a lot of ways, I read Toby’s book as a critique of a descriptive mode that we (and honestly, lots of commentators) have a tendency of slipping into, one in which we discuss culture industries as if they were principally comprised of companies, not of people. Which, at some level, is true—companies own IP, companies exert monopolistic pressures, etc. But while those companies do seek to act in their own self interests, the way those interests are understood, and framed, and executed—really, the basic material out of which those interests are constructed—is of course produced by people. More specifically, people doing work.
So, obviously, if there is a major change in the basic orientation and operations of an industry, it should be reflected in the lived reality—the material ground—of the people who work there. Not just in the tasks that they do, but in the way that they understand those tasks (and then understand themselves in relation to the tasks). Vinyl records, and the structures of the businesses that sold them, created one type of music business and one kind of music business person. The turn towards streaming, by definition, required a different one.
What Bennett does in the book is to look at the new type of record industry person that started to come into being during the years between 2005-2015, a period when the major labels transformed themselves from “dying” dinosaurs into the IP overlords we know today. Embedded in this Obama-era environment, his writing recovers how a new understanding of music was created from the intersection between large-scale changes (gentrification remaking the landscape of London, tech’s celestial jukebox transforming the accessibility of recordings) and hyper-specific contingencies (his description of the spiky relationship between hipster culture and pre-fandom poptimism is not to be missed).
The trend that I’ve been thinking about the most comes at the end of the book, when Toby explores how the music industry began to back-propagate the changes brewing in their front offices, collaborating with educational institutions to create programs that sought to produce the type of workers they believed that they needed for the new digital economy. The results—a generation of self-described “creatives” who see the intricacies of the music business as an art in-and-of-itself—are readily recognizable among both label employees and, increasingly, artists who have (happily?) assumed the burdens of entrepreneurial self-management. What’s fascinating about this argument is not just the idea that industries seek to create the workers they need to create the industries that they want to be (true since at least Ford). It’s the clarity with which the record labels seem to have embraced this task—demonstrating a remarkable ability to invest in a future organization simultaneously identical-with and substantively-different-from the one doing the investing.
The ability to—and perhaps the necessity of—shaping citizens in order to create a functional polity has been a concern since Plato, if not before. Doing so within the boundaries of contemporary democratic discourse feels…a little uncomfortable to talk about, however. At a minimum, it requires a fairly brutal degree of instrumentality, one that pushes the limits of consent to their breaking point.
“Just more education,” is of course a widely accepted solution, but…maybe not a very satisfying one—especially given the current “problematization” of the academy by the global right wing. Habermas’ suggestion of holding a large-scale rational discourse in order to structure the application of resources is another nice idea, although it does have the problem of temporality (i.e.—the folks who live in the world that gets made don’t get a vote in its construction.) This is not to mention, of course, the fact that pragmatically, anything resembling a functional public sphere feels impossible in a world of algorithmically structured media.
Just letting the issue drop—hoping that the question of what kind of people we will be in the future will just sort of resolve itself—is also not an option. Rightwards radicalization is all too real, and increasingly rooted in a widening set of educational practices. So—what’s the positive vision? How do we build those kids (or, given the pace of culture change in the short-form-video-era, literally ourselves) a future that’s not just brighter, but more aligned with…I dunno… a critical project of historicization, and all that it entails?
Exploring the issues of value and struggle and consent that these questions necessitate—thinking about how to create the material & ideological conditions for a world that will be both identical-to and different-from our own—feels like an almost utopian topic these days. But it’s one that we’re going to have to deal with, if we get through these next (weeks/months/years).
You can listen to our interview with Toby here.
Department of Actual Music:
Saxon: Heard this sleazy electro house banger recently from the hey day of cobra snake and angular bangs and it still hits.
Sam: The older I get, the less these guys sound threatening, and the more tuneful and charming the whole thing becomes. Barely held together drums, great melodies, and lyrics that I’ve been singing to myself for the past 20 years.
Saxon & Sam