Two birds, one stone: in the ongoing effort to re-host some adventures in riddim meth0dology, this post also continues the recent trend of recommending mixes well-suited to summering. (But plz note — I really do think of this mix as suitable for all seasons.) I’m very happy to (re)present: our Lemon-Red Mix!
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The Riddim Method is a collective of DJs, producers, and ass-shaking academics who formed like Voltron to embark on a group-blog experiment. After years of playing together in various configurations — from Toneburst days to present endeavors in Beat Research — the Riddim Methodists decided in ‘05 to share their musico-tricknological discoveries, creations, and conversations on the internerd, hoping others might add their two fifty cents.
From bases in Beantown and Oaktown, the six Riddim Methodists play local and link global. There’s DJ C, who, with remixes for Kid 606’s Shockout Records and for XL Recordings (on MIA’s “U.R.A.Q.T.”) — not to mention raggacentric productions for his own Mashit Records — has been burning up dancefloors on tour and at his weekly residency back in Boston. There’s DJ Flack, C’s co-host at Beat Research – a multimedia maestro who makes video music when he’s not making beats. Then there’s Ripley, rootical rallycry-roaring, breakcoring, copyfightin’, blog-writin’ DJ-slash-activist. There’s Kid Kameleon, a smash’n'mash mixmaster, globetrottin’ DJ, and music scribe (XLR8R, Grooves, Pitchfork). There’s Pace, the vinyl librarian and riddim networkian, a b-school b-boy with deep crates and nothin’ but L.O.V.E. And there’s Wayne&wax, hip-hop scholar since being knee-high to a duck, prolix mu’fucka, and all-around Boston Jerk.
For their Lemon-Red mix, the Riddim Methodists take turns connecting the dots between dubstep, hip-hop, dancehall, bass, merengue, soca, bmore, rai, dub, electro, doo-wop, ragga house, and boston bounce, among others–a genre-mashing jawn that can work in your earbuds and speakerboxxes alike.
Check the Method.
Check the method, but don’t believe the hype :P
Actually, speaking of hype, I would like to note that our mix even got a little Pfork love back in the day, c/o erstwhile (and missed!) music-writer Dave Stelfox. About the mix, Dave wrote –
Assembled by a team including Harvard musicologist Wayne Marshall, DJ Ripley, Kid Kameleon, DJ C, DJ Flack, and Pace, it could fit comfortably in any of Pitchfork’s specialist columns, needlestitching together an array of genres, from dubstep to Dirty South hip-hop, Egyptian shaabi to Baltimore club, reggae to techno. It’s an inspiring ride, cohesive yet omnivorous and proves there are no boundaries in music if you’ve got a little imagination and a whole lot of love for it.
Yeah, that basically sums it up. (For the record, though, I don’t think I could ever be accurately described as a “Harvard musicologist,” though I have done some teaching over there and I do hold a degree — in English — from the place.)
But seriously, this one was a double honor for me. First, it was a pleasure and a privilege to contribute to the illustrious Lemon-Red mix series. Many of us are still missing Lemon-Red. Or to paraphrase everybody’s favorite Guru non-sequitur (again): Lemon-red was a popular blog, and it still is.
For my money (or lack thereof), the L-R mix series, which popped off with DJ /Rupture’s stellar Low Income Tomorrowland, marked the beginning of a new era: the age of internet mixes. Ever since, my iPod/Phone has been filled with 15min to 2hr blocks of sound. I hardly ever listen to discrete tracks anymore, at least recreationally, as I much prefer going on a little ride provided by some careful curator. The two hallmarks of Chris Lemon-Red’s series were A) his fine choice of DJs — and I don’t mean this to be self-aggrandizing (I’m humbled to join the ranks) — and B) the relatively reasonable lengths of the mixes: at least for the first several, they tended to clock in at around a half-hour, perfect for a quick, music-addled jog around Fresh Pond. Of course, being a six person team, we couldn’t really deliver on brevity, but we were certainly inspired by the funky, chunky mixes turned in by the likes of /Rupture, Poirier, the Rub dudes, Cap & Jones, Emynd & Bo Bliz, etc. Fine company, fi true.
Second, it was a blast to collaborate with five of my favorite DJs in the world — and to attempt to stitch together a coherent mix out of a half-dozen different visions. Given our asynchronous exchange (combined with a few realtime building sessions), I think it holds together pretty well. (And Jake, aka DJ C*, deserves some credit for doing the work of pasting things together and smoothing over the edges.) I ended up with the slightly dubious honor of closing out the mix. Dubious only because it takes almost an hour to get to my wee 6 minute section. But it was definitely fun to cook up a climax! For that reason, way back when and again today, I’m also offering up a standalone mini-mix of my contribution:
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(You can read more about the mashing up of Lil Jon, Del Shannon, and some bubbling loops here.)
* FYI — DJ C will be returning to Beat Research, the night that he founded some six years ago, this coming Monday, July 26, to rock alongside Flack (and me) just like old times. Come help welcome him home for the evening!
Next week’s Postopolis! DF happening is shaping up to be super stimulating and utterly exhausting. The schedule has been posted, and it boasts an array of guests that range from art/design-world titans to a dude who’s been diving DF sewers for three decades, and pretty much everything between and beyond.
The diversity of participants is really quite stunning, and I’m especially looking forward to encountering perspectives and practices well outside my typical spheres of interest. Should be a mind/myopia-blowing event in that way. But I’m also excited, obv, about some of the guests that strike closer to home, such as those invited by Jace, to whom readers need no intro, or by Daniel Hernandez, a DF-dwelling journalist who writes an excellent blog and is just finishing up a book, which I’m keen to read, about the “emo riots” that went down a couple years back. (In fact, I think I discovered his blog because of his coverage of anti-emo violence in Mexico.)
I’m very interested in the way that something like “emo” (especially broadly construed) or, closer to the heart of this blog, tecktonik or jerkin find their way to Mexico, not to mention how or why they resonate and what kind of cultural work they do. I would have loved to find the right person to represent TCK MEX or even some Zócalo flaneurs to come down to El Eco and, come se dice, baila bn chidO xD
I didn’t have much success there, however, maybe because, basically, TCK has already come and gone. (Ah, the ethnography of ephemera!) Also because YouTube mirrors are not great gateways to actual people. And perhaps p/q this too: despite bloggy appearances, I still really need to work on my chatroom Spanish. At any rate, I’ll be keeping my eyes and ears out while there, and I can’t wait to pick Daniel’s brain about how the discourses and practices of “emos” and “tribus urbanas” in DF might shed some light on how YouTube dance culture is itself received and reshaped in La Ciudad.
That said, as I reported in a previous post, I did manage to find a great group of people to come and share some of what they do with us. Allow me to recap and expand on that initial announcement, complete with dates & times for those of you who will actually be in town.
Tues 6/8 (7-8:30) — At some point during the kickoff evening, alongside my fellow blogger-curators, I’ll talk briefly about my blog and how it relates to what I do. Among other things, and speaking abstractly, I plan to highlight my interest in local institutions and translocal exchanges, the interplay between material and virtual cultures, and how various kinds of architectures and arrangements support and constrain the work my guests / collaborators / consultants are doing. More concretely, I’ll likely show some screenshots and YouTubes and talk about floggers and hip-hop.
Wed 6/9 (6:30) — In the first of two local hip-hop related panels (mil gracias to my man on the ground, Camilo Smith), I’ll be talking to DJ Alí, who puts on a lot of shows around town and runs Masare Records & Tomás Brum Álvarez, who puts out a rad hip-hop mag called Rayarte and is responsible for producing and releasing DF hip-hop.
Thurs 6/10 (4:00) — I’ll be talking to two visual artists, Wendell McShine and Saner, both of whom mix media and Mexican iconography (among others) in distinctive and provocative ways, as well as Lili Carpinteyro, one of the people behind Upper Playground Mexico, an interesting instantiation of an international venture that collides curated, contemporary art with cool commerce.
Fri 6/11 (5:30) — In the second DF hip-hop session, Camilo and I will chat with longtime local (but Chicago deportee) 2phase about making hip-hop happen in Mexico City, with a focus on spaces and access to resources and such, but also aesthetics no doubt.
Sat 6/12 (12:00) — My final guest is definitely one of those last-but-not-least guys: Said Dokins, among other things, makes public interventions in the shape of giant paper airplanes admired abroad as “street art at its best.” He’ll be talking about his recent piece el Avionazo of course, but also about something he calls “La máquina distópica de habitar,” along with some thoughts about graffiti, calligraphy, and calaveras (namely, how skulls stage death for the establishment of political regimes), or so he tells me.
If that’s not enough, I’m also going to be playing music no fewer than 4 times over the course of 5 days. Sounds nutso, no? But when you’re asked to warm up rooms (or calentar motores) for DJ /Rupture at various clubs in and around Mexico City, alongside other good friends who are great DJs, you just don’t say no. At least, I don’t. So here’s how that’s breaking down, FYI –
Tues 6/8 — Postopolis! opening party hosted by Noiselab at Rhodesia, w/ Rupture & local guests
Thurs 6/10 — I’ll be joining DJ /Rupture and N-RON, again at the pleasure of Noiselab, at the CCE (Centro Cultural España)
Friday 6/11 — A non-postopolis party in neighboring Toluca w/ Rupture, N-RON, and Dutty Tally
Saturday, 6/12 — After all is said and done at El Eco, where some of us will throw down some tunes for the closing party, I’ll be playing a later-night party alongside Rupture, N-RON, and Taliesin again, this time in DF (place TBD)
And that’s it. ¡El fin! Not sure that I’m going to be able to do much of anything else, much as I’d like to explore new corners of DF once again. Oh, there’ll be some fieldtrips for breakfast and lunch and such, but, man, this is gonna be one tight schedule. ¡Vámonos!
Since I’m not on Facebook, you may not know that today’s my birthday. I’m 34, so I’ve now spent more time on Earth than that sexy guy from Nazareth.
It’s a little unnerving, finding myself undeniably in my mid-30s. It’s not quite “middle age,” despite what my father just said on the phone, but I found some new gray hairs yesterday which pretty much confirm that I’m on a slow slide back to dust. This morning I tried to explain to Nico how many more birthdays I’ve had, compared to her, and I nearly ran out of breath counting across my fingers.
Enough sadsackery, though, it’s good to be alive. Earth strong, seen.
In a nod to my posts for 32 and 33, I could go ahead and say I’m Paul Pierce today, but the Celts’ loss last night puts a little damper on that one. (Plus, I’m really more of a throwback fan than a fairweather fan.) Looking back at those posts, I realize that I missed my 33&1/3 day this past September, which is too bad. But we don’t need calendrical coincidences for an excuse to play some hot vinyl, do we?
Looking into numbers on the internet is a funny thing. Google Images reveals lots of weaponry (tanks, glocks, planes) associated with the number, as well as an Australian highway, and third-trimester bellies.
34 is the ninth distinct semiprime and has four divisors including unity and itself. Its neighbors, 33 and 35 also are distinct semiprimes having four divisors each, and 34 is the smallest number to be surrounded by numbers with the same number of divisors as it has. It is also in the first cluster of three distinct semiprime, being within; 33,34,35, the next such cluster of semiprimes is; 85,86,87.
It is the ninth Fibonacci number and a companion Pell number. Since it is an odd-indexed Fibonacci number, 34 is a Markov number, appearing in solutions with other Fibonacci numbers, such as (1, 13, 34), (1, 34, 89), etc.
This number is the magic constant of a 4 by 4 normal magic square:
The Losties out there may appreciate my ultimately frustrated search for meaning in numbers. (Also, the notion of a “magic constant.”)
The /b/tards and ROFLconners will no doubt be quick to remind of the infamous “Rule 34,” but, c’mon folks, this is a family function.
i totally forgot to send you some tracks i worked on in late 2009 that were bubbling but influenced by dominican music. like perico ripiao, bachata or dominican dembow. i had these finished but i was working on a whole concept thing there.
Munchi – Dominican Bubbling Battle 2009
Didnt have a name for it so i called it like that. Sampled and cutted up a perico ripiao song, vocals from dominican dembow and with the oldskool bubbling taste. this kind of oldskool bubbling was my favorite, all over the place and so much going on going from slow to fast. made this right after i saw a bubbling battle video from 1995.
And here’s the video in question. Inspiring indeed!
Seriously, what a style! Dude gets LOOOSE. He’s totally syncing with bubbling’s distinctive double-time/half-time herky-jerk, and, like the genre, seemingly drawing on two kinds of raving at once: of the dancehall reggae sort, and of the hardcore techno sort. I like the nods to robot-style popping-and-locking, the plasticman wobbling, and all the transmuted bits of bubbling — and that’s bubbling in the original Caribbean sense. Butterfly, butterfly, mek we do the…
Munchi also shares a couple of tracks that seem to spring uniquely from his Dominican-Dutch circumstances:
Munchi – Mambo Con Sazon
which he describes as
Bachata guitar with also the bachata percussion and the familiar bubbling slowing down and speeding up. I was plannin to put a female reggeton artist on this track she would fit the track perfectly with the energy she brings.
And here’s one more to round things out. Munchi sez:
I made this in 2007 and its mostly bubbling but it flows into baile funk and reggeton
and it got me a bit of exposure back then lol.
Munchi – Nex Aan Te Doen Prt. 1
If it wasn’t clear in my previous post, I love the way that Munchi’s productions are so situated in the particular musical-cultural networks (actual and virtual) in which he finds himself situated (and actively situates himself, as with such keywords as “baile funk” and with, y’know, enthusiastic emails to bloggers like me and Dave Quam).
In light of these latest, I’ve been thinking about Munchiton — a genre all Munchi’s own (even though he’s personally embracing the moombahton tag) — with regard to a resonant quotation from DJ Earworm in that “borrowing culture” documentary I shared last week:
…in the future, when people listen to music, everyone’s gonna have their own custom remix … You heard that new song, yeah, check out my version. Oh yeah, check out my version. That’s not gonna be DJ culture that’s just gonna be culture.
In an age of FruityLoopy GarageBands, I think we’re just about already there. Sometimes this is called “remix culture,” sometimes “participatory culture,” sometimes “read-write culture,” sometimes “free culture.” Before too long, though, Earworm’s right: we’re going to stop thinking of remix practice as the exception, instead realizing that the 20th century’s “read-only” broadcast culture was an anomaly in human history and embracing the imperative to mix-and-mash all the stuff around us as what culture’s really about.
Along these lines, I’m enamored of the idea that not only will everyone be enmeshed in collectively, co-creating culture, right down to versioning the latest global (or local) hits, but that these efforts, in any particular instantiation (e.g., Munchi’s work), might yet coalesce into something even more unruly and awesome: genres of our own. New whirled music. Munch, crunch, mulch. Repeat.
Squaring unprecedented opportunities for music distro, sobering visualizations, and tweets for mpfrees asks for tricky math. I’m not sure we yet have the tools or the data. But we get more of each every day.
It seems safe to say that the explosion of online tools for distributing music, whether for a fee or free, has allowed independent artists of all stripes to reach vastly wider audiences than was possible just a few years ago. At a moment of turbulence and transition in the mediascape, independent producers appear to be experimenting with and, in many cases, eagerly embracing a variety of platforms and approaches.
The profusion of “web 2.0” style sites for distributing music — including SoundCloud, Fairtilizer, and BandCamp, but also MySpace and YouTube — offers a number of options for those operating outside the traditional “music industry.” These services generally provide tools for facilitating “discovery” (or, the use of social networking features to help one’s music find listeners, and vice versa), distribution, robust forms of tracking, and in some cases, sales.
It’s clear — simply scanning my inbox — that lots of artists and independent labels/collectives are employing mixed methods for distributing their work and attempting to seek or share compensation with audiences and “peers” of all sorts (including DJs, bloggers, and journalists). It would be quite a feat simply to enumerate the various channels/methods now available for circulating musical recordings (and various related artifacts, from stems to videos); it’s another thing altogether to attempt some sort of analysis.
Given that so many tools are now available, what’s really missing from any such analysis is data. I’ve seen some stats and heard some hearsay, but I’d love to hear from the thoughtful enthusiasts & practitioners who drop in here from time to time, especially independent artists and/or labels. Anyone have strong preferences for one of these emerging methods/sites over another? Success stories? Surprises? I’m not asking you to divulge your brilliant strategery or anything, but I’m keen to hear about what’s working and what’s not, which features appeal and which don’t, etc. Got any anecdotes or pithy quotes? Major or minor figures you’d care to share?
I’m sayin, especially if you’re one of those folks who’ve sent me a link to your distro site, how’s that open-exchangey thing workin’ for ya?
(Incidentally, I’d love to hear from “purely” listeners’ perspectives too, or from bloggers, journos, etc.)
& feel free to hit me offblog: wayne at wayneandwax
Tomorrow I’ll be joining the fine folks from the Music and Sound Studies Colloquium Series at the University of Minnesota to talk about the synaesthetic publics addressing each other via skinny jeans, electronic dance beats, and wonky shuffle steps. I’m pasting the title and abstract below. As you can see, I’m flogging some familiar, but hardly dead, horses: social media practices and aesthetics, public spheres in a networked age, and platform politricks (and, yes, I still have a mega-blogpost in the pipeline that examines the latter in some detail), especially as illuminated by youthful YouTubey dance exchanges. The event is open to the public, so if you’re in the Twin Cities and want to join us, click here for deets –
The Sound of Skinny Jeans: New Media, Networked Publics, and Affective Labor
In recent years, the rise of so-called social media has been propelled rather remarkably by the music-centered affective labor of young people. Using corporate hosted social-networking platforms like MySpace, YouTube, imeem, and Fotolog, teenagers in such far-flung cities as Buenos Aires, Los Angeles, Paris, and Melbourne have shared photos, music, text, and video (especially of dance) with their local and networked peers and, inevitably, with the wider world. In the process, these everyday acts of publication and recirculation, enabled by the radical reconfigurability of digital artifacts, have facilitated the emergence of vibrant, youthful counterpublics. The conspicuous presence of day-glo colors and skinny jeans across these disparate if loosely connected scenes offers a synaesthetic way to hear how sound and image intermingle in the brave new worlds of network culture.
Sometimes it really does feel like I’m in Oz, some Wizard behind a curtain producing lifelike YouTubes of my swirling musical obsessions — or like that cartoon kid Simon for whom the things he drew came true
No, this post is not principally asking about things I should go see at SXSW next week, though I am eager to know about promising parties and awesome acts to catch. Holler if you’re gonna be in town or have a tip. (I can safely predict I’ll be unable to avoid the Tormenta Tropical tractor beam.)
Mainly, I’m posting to seek a little crowdsourced feedback. I’ve been invited to SXSW to speak on a panel about the history of music recommendation, or to put it another way: music “discovery” in (and before) an age of algorithmic “recommendation systems” and socially-networked music apps. Or: how do people find music today — or how does it find them — and how does that compare to times past?
Here’s how the convener of the panel, Michael Papish of Media Unbound*, only slightly cheekily frames the conversation:
Mention “music recommendations” and talk of algorithms, genomes, visualizations and widgets ensues. But, the concept of making music recommendations is far older than the tech industry can imagine. Beginning with traveling minstrels of the middle ages … to legendary freeform DJs of the 60s, we present a history of the music recommendation.
1. How did people ever learn about music without the Internet? Is this even possible?
2. What was the role of music performer in introducing audiences to new music?
3. How can songwriters teach listeners about music?
4. What is the place of the “cover version” in song discovery?
5. Was there a time when terrestrial radio helped people discover music? What different radio formats worked best for music discovery?
6. What is the current state of music discovery via radio (terrestrial, satellite, internet, interactive, etc.)?
7. Can record labels and music publishers create trusted relationships with listeners that allow them to find new and interesting music? Has this worked in the past? Are there groups doing this successfully today?
8. What about movie soundtracks?
9. Do people actually read music criticism?
10. What is the history of listener-to-listener music sharing?
I’m especially interested in the final question Michael poses, wondering about the ongoing history of listener-to-listener sharing (as opposed to artist-(industry/label)-listener models). I know that, for my part, I still tend to find most of the music I come across through directly interpersonal means. These days, that can be both in person (especially at gigs), but also, increasingly, via email or Twitter. And of course, in terms of seeking things out (which I do less and less, so much being pushed at me), I still find music blogs the best place to go to — as opposed to “music journalism,” which I seek out less and less — and reading other people’s blogs also feels like a listener-to-listener model.
I’m definitely curious to hear any anecdotes that readers would like to share. Given the open-eared, active connoisseurship which animates a lot of friends of W&W, I suspect that most of you still have plenty of traditional, interpersonal, offline/nonalgorithmic ways of finding new music. But I’ll be just as eager to hear from you if you happen to think that Pandora is the bees’ knees.
Of course, I’ve been thinking about songs as shared things for a little while now. And I’d love to be able to put that into broader historical context (and that’s largely gonna be my job at SXSW). I think that volumes like My Music as well as Tom Turino’s new Music as Social Life help to offer useful perspectives, and I love when little gems like the following leap out at me from music books otherwise concerned with other matters:
[Moses] Asch arrived at school [in Germany] in 1922 and discovered that the students, who came from all over the world, liked to swap songs from their countries. (86)
This sort of socially-guided music discovery is, essentially, one of the main things that DJs do (whether on the radio or in the club). And there are lots of continuities we could draw between music discovery in pre- and post-Internet time.
But I’m particularly curious to know what has changed, if anything, about our patterns of music discovery, and which recommendation “engines” we find most useful / awesome. Among other changes, musicologist Mark Katz suggests that the advent of unparalleled accessibility of music online has engendered (or at least strengthened) what he calls a “divergent approach to discovering music”:
Instead of seeking out particular pieces (a convergent approach), one initiates an intentionally general search in hope of broad and unfamiliar results. A search until the term “cello” yielded not only the expected (Bach’s cello suites), it introduced me to Nick Drake’s haunting “Cello Song,” the works of Apocalyptica, the Danish cello quartet known for its Metallica covers, as well as to the riches of Annette Funicello. What by all rights should be condemned as a poor search engine served as my trusted guide into the musical unknown. (167)
Adding to the pile of data & interpretation, a recent sociological study by Steven Tepper and Eszter Hargittai uses a sampling of college students (from 2003-05, unfortunately — given how much has changed in the YouTube era) to investigate “pathways to music exploration in an environment that offers numerous choices for discovery.” Considering the roles of cultural capital and social status as well as massive technological change, their findings suggest that,
While students certainly get some recommendations about new music through digital media, traditionally important factors such as recommendations from one’s social circles and mainstream media continue to be the most important means through which students learn about new music. (245)
Allow me to quote them at somewhat greater length, as the authors attempt to place their critical questions into historical context:
Prior to the digital revolution, discovering new music required an array of resources. Two decades ago, the expense and time required to discover new artists, especially for young people, was considerable. Music ‘‘mavens’’ often had to own their own cars and had to travel regularly to inner-city neighborhoods to patronize record stores that were off the beaten path. They invested significant sums buying dozens of albums every year in search of new unfamiliar artists. These ‘‘opinion leaders’’ and discoverers had to rely on broad social networks – family and friends living in other cities and countries, who would regularly send them music that was not available locally. They would have also spent time and money listening to new local bands in music clubs in the city. And, they would have subscribed to high-priced magazines like The Wire, where they searched for reviews of non-mainstream, cutting edge artists. In part because of issues of access and expense, past music mavens and opinion leaders have tended to come from the ranks of the elite.
In theory, the digital revolution and the arrival of new technologies should democratize the discovery of new music and the capacity for individuals to become opinion leaders in culture. More people have access to a greater variety of culture than ever before. The digital divide creates new inequalities, but as this divide closes, as some commentators contend that it will, more citizens will be able to discover new music through a variety of online services. If discovery and opinion leadership are sources of status, then new technology might serve to flatten hierarchies and cultural advantage. It is beyond the scope of this paper to sort out the relationship among technology, discovery, opinion leadership and status. But, we can answer the following more descriptive and more limited questions: First, does new technology facilitate discovery of new music for college students? Second, is everybody using new technology to discover new music or just some students? If there are variations in this activity, are there identifiable status differences between users and non-users? Additionally, are users more likely to be opinion leaders? If so, what are the distinguishing characteristics of opinion leaders in the realm of music exploration? Are such opinion leaders more omnivorous in their tastes? Are they pre-disposed toward experimentation? (230-1)
While I find Tepper’s & Hargittai’s narrative framework above to correspond to my own intuitive sense of how — if you will — things done changed, I also find it somewhat wanting in grain of detail. Unfortunately, it’s not as easy to go back and survey “music mavens” and “opinion leaders” in the 80s or 90s. And this is where you come in.
In other words, I ask you, dear reader, to please help us out. Leave a comment indicating what, if anything, has changed in your own processes/practices of musical discovery/recommendation over the last several years. If you have a particularly illuminating bit of historical context to offer, as always, I’m all ears!
…
* Full disclosure: I worked as a lowly data-processor for Media Unbound, a modest but awesome music meta-data company (which was very recently acquired by a larger one), between 2003-4, grooming info fields for reggaeton artists and British boybands alike. It was a trip, and it helped pay the bills while I was writing my dissertation.
In my recent post on “Watagatapitusberry” I wondered aloud, in so many words, where “the text” in question might reside, given that most people have been exposed to an intermediary “fan”/peer-produced text (a video) more popular than the original “text” (a recording), tho perhaps soon eclipsed by a new “official” video with potentially greater reach (I’m sayin: Pitbull is second only to Miley Cyrus for most viewed music video, all time on YouTube). That said/wondered, I was happy to stumble across Henry Jenkins’s recent interview with Jonathan Gray in which they discuss the notion of the “paratext.” As Gray explains:
I draw the word from a book of that title by Gerard Genette, a French literary theorist. He was interested in all those things that surround a book that aren’t quite the “thing” (or “the text”) itself. Things like the cover, prefaces, typeface, and afterwords, but also reviews. His subtitle to that book – “Thresholds of Interpretation” – is the intriguing part, since it suggests that meaning might be constructed and might begin at these textual outposts, not just at the site of “the thing itself.” And that in turn offers a pretty radical proposition, namely that the item that we’re studying, whether it be a film, television show, book, or whatever, becomes meaningful and is interpreted in many sites, some arguably even more important than the site of thing itself. The purpose of the book, quite simply, then, was to examine those sites.
I prefer the word paratext precisely because it has a pretty academic background, and from within textual studies at that, and thus isn’t encumbered by a lot of the connotations that surround many of the other words that we usually use. Your readers may be more familiar with “hype,” “synergy,” “promos,” “peripherals,” “extratextuals,” and so forth. But hype and synergy frame paratexts too definitively as wholly industrial entities. Certainly, paratexts are absolutely integral in terms of marketing, and in terms of grabbing an audience to watch the thing in the first place. But we’ve often stalled in our discussion of them by not moving beyond the banal observation that hype creates profits. What I wanted to look at is how they create meaning, how our idea of what a television show “is” and how we relate to it is often prefigured by its opening credit sequence, its posters, its ads, reviews, etc. Meanwhile, “peripherals” belittles their importance, since they’re not at all peripheral, at least in potential. “Promos” is fairly innocuous, and yet I’m interested not just in how the things that surround a film or show create an image of it before we get there, but also in how reviews, DVD bonus materials, fan creations, and other after-the-fact paratexts might change our understanding later on, so that too seemed inadequate. And though I like “extratextuals” (the title of my blog!), “extra” means “outside of,” whereas “para” suggests a more complicated relationship to the film or show, outside of, alongside, and intrinsically part of all at the same time. Hence my fondness for that word in particular.
Interesting stuff, though I’m not sure — thinking through several musical examples I’ve had on my mind lately — that the notion of the paratext can be so easily ported over to the messy, p2p musical culture we witness on the web. Rather, it seems a better fit when we’re talking about mass media broadcast models (TV shows, films, books), where it is relatively easy to posit a central text and peripheral (if also crucial) ones.
Let’s take “Watagatapitusberry” yet again as our object of analysis: what’s the text and what’s the paratext? Can we really say so clearly that the pseudo-”Official Video” made by a group of NYC teens is simply a paratext when it’s the version that most people have engaged as “Watagatapitusberry”? When we behold that so many other “Watagata” videos — including, notably, the slick new production ft. Pitbull and Lil Jon — seem to take their cues from those dudes dancing in their kitchen, their high school, their backyard and bathroom, who will make the argument that it is nevertheless a paratext? Does the concept of paratext prove useful in this instance, or does it in fact — for all the useful intellectual/cultural work it might do around TV or Hollywood — prevent us from apprehending something even more radical about the ways that texts are co-produced and circulate, with value added, in today’s media ecologies.
(Perhaps it goes without saying, since this is common for any popular song these days, that “Watagata” has also been remixed widely, e.g. by Toy Selectah, Allen Cruz, A.C.T., and no doubt many more. These are perhaps more easily subsumed under the notion of the paratext — so long as they don’t end up more important to people’s interpretation and engagement with “Watagatapitusberry” than “the text” itself, whatever that is.)
We could add to “Watagata” the example of “You’re a Jerk” (as my previous post also suggested), a song which, as the New Boyz have recounted, jumped from MySpace to YouTube and inspired dozens of people to dance along in their own videos (many of which are now muted/missing), all of which positioned the New Boyz to sign a deal for major production/promo/distro, which produced, eventually, an “official” text of its own (which includes a glossy video but should maybe also entail the audio-ID fingerprint which Warner Bros adds to its takedown-DB). Indeed, as far as Warner is concerned, the audio-ID fingerprint may as well be the text (which they can monetize), and everything else just a paratext — some more parasitical/piratical than others.
Of course, the template for “You’re a Jerk” is “Crank Dat,” which perhaps best illustrates the problem with trying to apply a theory of para/texts to music culture in the age of YouTube. Really, re: “Crank Dat,” which is the text and which are the paratexts? Is the text itself the song that Soulja Boy recorded (relying heavily on Fruity presets)? Or is it the easily-mastered set of dance steps so crucial to its spread? Is it the initial video that made the rounds featuring SB’s friends doing the dance in their living room? Is it the white-out-on-my-sunglasses tutorial-in-a-pool that SB put out there to help people learn to do the dance (and spread the song)? Or is it the official video / release? What about the dozens, if not hundreds, of other versions of people dancing to or mashing up the song? What about the dozens of “Crank Dat” spinoffs? I realize that as I go down this list, things can get more and more para/meta, but the first few questions, to my mind, show how hard it is to locate “Crank Dat” in any singular instantiation.
Or, take, “Super Freak” & “U Can’t Touch This” (which I discussed a ways back) — whose text has merged with whose? Which is now primary and which is para? It’s not simply a matter of which came first. And who can ever say when it’s all been settled? Don’t count a good paratext out. Ever.
Against this backdrop, I find more persuasive the idea that a musical text is less defined by a textual object per se and more by a set of relations, ever reconstituting themselves. Along these lines, I’m eager to hear more from Georgina Born, presenting at a symposium in which I’ll take part at Princeton next month. Born seems to be arguing — in proposing what she calls the “provisional work” — that the notion of the “assemblage” might better describe how musical culture works, at least in certain realms of creativity and collaboration. From her abstract –
it is possible to discern an alternative ontology of music to that historically enshrined in intellectual property law … the ‘provisional work’ … To grasp the alternative ontology requires us in turn to engage analytically with music in the expanded sense of the assemblage: that is, as a constellation of mediations – sonic, but also social, material and technological, discursive, corporeal and temporal – that together constitute what ‘music’ and musical experience are held to be.
If this is like the Death of the Author all over again, maybe it’ll go down easier this time?
We can reify all we want. In the end, it’s all music as social life. And that’s irreducible.
musicologist, internet annotator, and rapper-ternt-blogger.
