4 Regimes of Music
I need a post that doesn't require me to consume significantly large amounts of reading, even newspaper reading. Or think much. Hopefully this piece is it. Every day within about a fifteen minute time frame I encounter four different regimes of everyday music. This is due to passing through a number of shops at the student union during lunch, and their having store PA systems tuned to a variety of radio stations. The effect is not simply like spinning the knob on a radio tuner; though, each of these localities is a micro-culture all immersed in a music that shapes those who work there. At the Food Co-op it can be anything from growl core (pehaps not the technical term ) to Queen. The Food Co-op is the only stop where the workers program their own music. They never play much techno or folk there. It is a place where generally load fast, or at least inscrutable, rules. In fairness there is a sign by the cashier that states: "This music isn't playing for you" The lower level of the campus bookstore (a Barnes and Noble in disguise) is the next stop. Here I've heard Pink singing about Vietnam (Is that right, does Pink do a song about Vietnam? Are these my notes or did I pick up somebody else's again?). I've also heard the Talking Heads cover of Al Green's "Take me to the River. " A song I first heard while buffing a water emulsion waxed floor in a BEQ at NAS Key West. A good song to buff floors to. Oddly, one level up in the same bookstore - where it transitions into a U. Maryland branded UnderArmour clothing store - they are often listening to something different, contemporaneous and unmemorable generally. Although once it was Karen O explaining that "...they; will never love you like I love you." I nearly bought a red and white hoody pullover before the song ended. A turn of the corner and a few feet down the main hallway to the Stamp union convenience store and its Reggaeton, or one of the varying forms of latin hip hop. When lunch over its back to my quarter cubicle at McKeldin, where the sound regime is whatever WFMU is playing: the Melvin's Live at their All Tomorrows Parties gig in the Catskills by dj Liz Berg as it happens. Everything is back to normal.
The only other exposure to music culture I get is what tunes the television advertising industry has come across and thinks I might respond too. My favorites from this effort or at least ones I recognize: a techno version of the Church's "Under the Milky Way", I used to like that song. Similarly a techno version of BOC's "Burning for you". The car companies like the techno covers. Cadillac is hawking their SRV with Phoenix's 1901. Cat Stevens for the Google/T-Mobile Android phone. It's hard to miss boy is that commercial on the air a lot , but: "Be me...be you." What is he talking about? Makes Van Morrison seem sensible. Why haven't any of these microwave telephony companies gone with "Radar Love"? Or maybe the Jam's "Girl on the Phone."
I read recently that we could be paying soon, directly or indirectly, for those 30 second sound samples. This is the royalty rights group's latest gambit.
Songwriters want to get paid for 30-second song previews - Ars Technica Those snippets of a song you listen to before making a purchase need to be paid for as they constitute a "performance". The sense of entitlement here is truly astounding. If this overheated position is indication the IP (intellectual property) people around the music industry are genuinely and completely clueless.
A piece of mass-(re)produced pop music alone is only a thing of partial value as created. A burnt offering to the times. IP owners and managers impart little or no added value. Whatever part of a pop song's success is played by marketing capital at first, diminishes and disappears over time. Whose music is it really? Only when accepted by the public, becoming a marker of an age and outlook, part and representation of the culture it was born out of, does it have the associative power they desire. But never in guarded isolation, it has to get out to the people, out by word of mouth and organic process, dropped off between Clark and Hillsdale. Developing an independent life away from those who created or capitalized it. Pop music knicked by a thousand little cuts to produce a thousand little profit streams will die slowly, irrelevant and infinitely elastic. Its attempt to monopolize the category of music culture rejected.
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