Brandon,

Since I have ten other things I should be doing, I took a peek at your blog
only to find--voila--that you had been super active since I last seen it.
Tell your boss you need more work!

Anyway, I was thinking about your theory of rock music (which you have
doubtless by now long forgotten), which I think is interesting but wrong.
Nonetheless, more interesting than wrong.

You compare the advent of recorded music with that of photography, and
consider that rock and roll is analogous to
expressionism/nonrepresentationality as a new genre built on the base (as
it were) of the new technology.

I wonder, though, if you'd do better to rewind to the printing press
analogy, which I think is much more apt for rock music. In the bad old
days, a professional scribal class copied manuscripts for religious and
aesthetic (etc) consumption. They worked really hard, and copying took a
damn long time (and they had to practice their penmanship...do you think
any of us today could hold his own in secretary hand? Anyway, as a result
of the technological bottleneck of manuscript copying, texts were quite
expensive and hard to come by, and literacy was only really useful for
people whose economic station allowed them to consume manuscripts.
Moreover, the high overhead of producing any given text meant that only the
most valuable ones were preserved--unless you were a courtier with a lot of
free time on your hands, in which case you might have the opportunity to
circulate manuscripts of your own verse, etc....but I digress.

With the advent of the press, the economic bottleneck around reproducing
texts virtually disappeared, so that a) more people could afford texts (and
thus found it worth their while to be able to read them). Partly from the
cheapening of reproduction, and partly from the democratizing effects of
(a), a greater variety of texts came into printed circulation (notably
broadsheets), fulfilling functions that had previously been taken care of
by oral culture. Surely there are creaky points in this historical sweep.
But to hold the pieces together...

Rock and roll is not an outgrowth of western classical music. It *is* and
outgrowth of European and African (or Euro-American and African-American)
folk musics--and its availability as cheaply reproducible and consumable
mass culture renders it analogous to the early modern broadsheet--a piece
of popular culture appropriated and transformed by capital and reproduced
for mass consumption.

Of course, what I'm saying does not touch on the Clement Greenberg side of
your argument, that recorded music might somehow express a different set of
musical qualities by the virtue of its medium. I heard someone argue that
music in the 20th century has been not about melody or harmony or even
rhythm (let's face it; the sexiest rock and roll or funk rhythm is not a
particularly striking formal advance from the west african folk musics that
contributed to it), but rather timbre--since particular tonalities can be
reproduced in recorded media, tone color becomes the pallete of choice.

I actually think this cuts an interesting swath across the oral/print
culture picture as well. Print allowed the extensive reproduction of music,
so long as it was codified in a relatively simple design space (see Harvey
2002). I imagine that folk musics that were relatively outside this cycle
of print circulation and music education via print culture could rely more
heavily on timbre. The combination of a) mechanical reproduction of
folk/popular music for mass consumption and b) a continuous rather than
discreet mode of recording music seems to predict an environment in which
timbre is given much play. So Phil Spector or Sonic Youth are the (a
posteriori) predictable products of such a music media culture.

A propos of hip-hop, I think it has *everything* to do with recorded sound,
in its historical development if not in all of its formal elements. Hip-hop
is the collaging of already-produced sound (beats, dub versions of tracks)
with "live" vocal performance--mc'ing, etc. It is the means of
(re)production reappropriated in a popular music practice and resituated.

I keep thinking 'means of production', anyway, when I think about the
relative democratization of the recording industry that has been occuring
at an exponential pace--4 track recorders, sequencing software, etc. Print
culture never underwent such a democratization (until today, perhaps, what
with relatively cheap word processing, production software, internet
publication, blogging, etc), so it's much harder to make analogous
predictions. Any hypotheses?

PJ