Radiohead and Philosophy - Brandon W. Forbes [59]
Since then, of course, many things have changed. The movie studios have had to open up to indie films and alternative entertainment options, and the whole game will undoubtedly change even more in a couple years when the YouTube generation takes over. The monolithic system of record labels, radio stations, and payola has been broken, and, while a great many cultural choices are still in the hands of a very few huge corporations, finding alternate media outlets is becoming easier and easier. Despite this, Adorno and Horkheimer’s fundamental point is as relevant as ever: as long as cultural products are industrial goods, they will be basically inhuman and dehumanizing. They wrote then that “personality scarcely signifies anything more than shining white teeth and freedom from body odor and emotions.” As long as we continue to confuse self-identity with brand-recognition, even something as personal as our experience of music will suffer from a fundamental disconnect.
But alternate, less industrialized ways of making and enjoying music are becoming more prominent, and, even though Adorno and Horkheimer might not have been too hopeful about what this might mean, I think it might offer us a way towards a healthier relationship with art. Let me tell you why.
House of Cards
With digital media, it’s become possible to encounter music in many different forms and contexts. From streaming media and MySpace to leaks and BitTorrent, the context of record label-based centralized sales distribution is being torn down at every front. The days when it made sense to think about music as an object for sale (an “album”), just like an apple or a pair of pants, are long gone, and the RIAA’s ad campaigns will never bring them back.
We post songs on our Facebook pages, we share tracks with our iPods and Zunes,39 and, yes, we illegally download. In a way, musical recordings are becoming more like what they used to be—one of a number of different ways that different forms of music and performance enter our lives. Regardless, the CD is becoming an increasingly unimportant site for us to encounter and enjoy music.
There has always been a kind of basic tension here, though. Music is expressive, and the idea of transforming something fundamentally communicative into a commodity for sale has always been a bit of a house of cards. For example, consider what’s happened in print publications. There’s a similar tension there between information as commodity and as communication, and with the new opportunities for self-publication and open access, a great deal of the material which used to be bought and sold is now downloaded or accessed online. Think of all the books that Wikipedia—for better or worse—has replaced in the life of the average student!
And even within a purely market-mediated experience of music, the fan has always encountered music as an expression and a communication—from the fan-perspective, music as a commodity has always been only a necessary evil and an unwelcome precondition. In musical subcultures, economic factors are usually viewed as directly hostile to what listeners perceive as the “real” value of music. Otherwise, the charge of having “sold out” wouldn’t make any sense—after all, shouldn’t we be happy that musicians who we like will be able to enjoy a larger following?
Once there was a glimmer of hope that this evil would no longer be necessary, listeners, unsurprisingly, rushed to embrace these alternate, de-commodified modes of listening to and enjoying music. At the turn of the century, the sudden freedom from economic constrictions opened our desktops and playlists to a virtually limitless world of new and exciting sounds, and although things have certainly changed since those heady days of Napster—and most music fans today continue to regard commodification as a necessary evil—still, the public perception of the role of economics in music has been permanently altered. I think there’s something to be said for comparing the current digital rights management (DRM) efforts to trying to get the toothpaste