Virtua EMP paper

Part 2: Economies of Shame

(read part 1)

Before we get into specifics, let's orient ourselves with a comparison or two between Economies of Shame (EOS) and Economies of Pleasure (EOP). A good example of a participant in an EOP would be something like an A&R guy or a DJ, whereas a good example of an EOS participant would be a poster on an internet message board or blog comment box, or, I dunno, a clerk at a record store or something. They're worth separating as markets because of fundamental differences in their functionality. An EOP is a gambler's market, with participants placing relatively few "bets" on individual acts and hoping those will pay off big. An EOS is more of a war of attrition (or, to be nicer, it's like owning your own small business), with the daily maintenance of capital through numerous small acts the norm, excepting the occasional well-timed big gesture, but even then, said gestures are really only effected when a participant has accrued a lot of capital in the market. In other words, where an EOP is about anticipating market valuation (and then working to manipulate that variation, but never so blatantly)--betting a work/artist is going to get yay high and then paying off if they hit the mark you've set--in an EOS, you work to impose your own individual valuation on the market, so your reward comes by changing market variance. In an EOP, the reward comes only if evidence of your involvement is absent, whereas an EOS requires your involvement to be as clear as possible, and thus pays off more constantly and in smaller increments than the all-or-nothing EOP. That's a big part of why the EOS is the much more common model.

The reason for this distinction lies in the common belief that your likes are your own, but your dislikes stem from the understanding and imposition of external standards.[2] Thus, in an EOS, cultural capital is primarily accrued through the rejection of cultural offerings, and, as stated before, not only the rejection itself, but the timing and nature of the rejection. Such a rejection is presented as a "once I was blind but now can see moment," an understanding of the truth that must, as the night follows the day, change your opinions about individual pieces of music; if this rejection is not made by others in the marketplace, such performative utterances attempt to dictate, then you are simply rejecting the truth rather than its implications. The nature of an EOS dictates that even utterances ostensibly meant to promote or embrace a given artifact are simultaneously rejections: you are claiming that said artifact has a value greater than its current market value, and that disparity is due to cultural capital being tied up in certain other, overvalued artifacts. So, for instance, championing Gang of Four in 1998 would have entitled you to a lot of cultural capital two or three years hence~, but not if you were doing it as a "Gang of Four fan"--you had to be doing it as a function of shame. Why weren't you listening to Gang of Four back in 1998 you fool, since they are so obviously great?[3]

The Essential Statement of an EOS is: "You don't like them, do you?" (This sounds pretty teenagery, and it is, but I think it's always there, if sublimated.) It works through assumptions, which is to say that it evokes the value of a particular work as something absolute and widely accepted, rather than in flux and contingent on the market in question--in other words you gain capital by convincing other people that the market value of a work is something other than what it actually is, and thus incrementally drive the value toward your own. The Essential Statement is not actually an argument, it's just opinion presented as observable fact, and indeed actual well-reasoned cases for the value of a particular object aren't really an efficient technique, economically speaking. If the market is well-balanced and large enough to contain so much capital that it would take a massive fluctuation to have any large-scale effects, then reasoned argument becomes a viable tool since the blunt object of scorn is no longer as effective, but as we'll see later, if the EOS is tied to a corresponding EOP, this actually diminishes the power of argument.

Once a given player in an EOS gains enough cultural capital, the game for them changes somewhat. For instance, where generally one of your primary goals is to avoid the appearance of ignorance, once you have a large enough store of capital you can "spend" it by expressing ignorance in such a way that it seems noble--"Well of course I wouldn't have heard of them, I don't deign to follow such trivial matters." If someone with that much cultural capital hasn't heard of them, how good could they be? Again, the power in an EOS comes from your (perceived) intelligence and the (perceived) strength with which you express it. There's a real man-standing-alone image, although that image is pretty dangerous, as we'll get to in a second. You deserve capital because you are clear-headed enough to reject what others are accepting, or vice versa. It's very oppositional.

But let's get out of all these semantics for a second and talk about the basis of all this: shame. This probably stems from the fact that we start talking about music in a way that's key to our identities as teenagers, which is a stage of life when we're ashamed of lots of things, few of which we can actually control. And the process of becoming a music fan involves gradually realizing how little you actually know, sort of like being a monk, except instead of being a religious devotee, you're ostensibly a free-thinking rebel, so willingly sublimating yourself to a master feels like the wrong way to go, even if we end up doing that anyway. I feel at this point I don't really need to point to the mountains of evidence of shame as a motivating force in music listenership, from the simple fact that people have "guilty pleasures" (yes yes I know) to people judging other people on behalf of their music collections to people actually making moral claims about music, with such moral claims rarely being positive. And I don't say this as someone who himself is trying to situate himself outside the dynamic, looking in and saying "tsk tsk tsk" to the participants. When I started writing my blog, avoiding the shame dynamic was a big motivating factor: I wanted it to be, like pop, a big inclusive tent, where if you didn't know something, that was cool, because there's lots of stuff I don't know, and let's talk about it, hey. But as I've become more enmeshed in the music nerd community, I've found myself, and found others with ostensibly similar views on inclusiveness, nevertheless resorting to shame as an easy tactic, no matter how hard I might resist it. And this, in turn, has made me think about how shame can actually be a productive force in some circumstances. [4]

That said, it can also clearly be a negative force, and one particularly glaring example of this is what I'll call a deflationary spiral~, when an EOS market actually "crashes." As I say above, two characteristics of an EOS market are that shame is regularly invoked to acquire capital because it is more efficient than reasoned argument, and there's a persistent image of "standing alone" that is economically productive to cultivate. By itself, this combo is fine. But add in the fact that there's a low cost to entry~ in an EOS, i.e. that even actors with little to no cultural capital can nevertheless have an effect on the market, and you get what the internet has helpfully termed "trolls." Put in terms of the language we've been using, what a troll does is come into an EOS market and make a statement about a particular object "totally sucking," which of course amounts to "everyone is wrong but me." Now, while this is obviously wrong (it's positing the value of the object at 0, which is true for basically nothing, and it's positioning the speaker as the only one to hold such an opinion, which is also almost never true), it's also a pure expression of the way an EOS creates capital: it opposes the actual market valuation of an object. But whereas normally there would then be a counter-opinion introduced, with the resulting exchange actually producing capital for both parties, there is no possibility of discussion, because to admit any flaw in the original statement would violate the "standing alone" stance, which is the only way the troll can get any capital.

If the troll is ignored, then nothing happens. But if they are engaged, the only possible counter is not to oppose, but to join in with the denunciations, creating a kind of post-revolutionary fervor of purity. At first, this is productive: it's like a breath of unambiguous fresh air to the constantly hemming-and-hawing EOS market. But after a while, the market will start to run out of things to denounce, so as the aggregate value of all objects in the market declines, so does the store of cultural capital in the market, since it's something that if not maintained is lost. The market's supply is choked off, and it either dies or descends into a forum solely for trolls.

The funny thing about an EOS is that everyone in it is willfully (and, I might add, productively) ignoring its contradictions: it's a community, but made up of people each with their own strong opinions that derive solely from a clarity of vision uninfluenced by the community; it's a game of shame in which one way of winning is to be unashamed. Take a look again at that Essential Statement: "You don't like them, do you?" We've focused here mainly on the first clause, but it's that little turn at the end that makes an EOS market work. The first part posits the existence of shame, but the second part presents a way out of it, thus making yourself subordinate to the speaker, but also (so the assumption goes) boosting your store of capital and thus your position in the market overall. Every statement of shame is also, oddly enough, a pandering statement, meant both to question and to confirm the listener's assumptions--"you are wrong about this, but you are a smart, thoughtful dude, so you see that, right?" It's this pander that fundamentally separates an EOS from pop, which is inclusive, rather than pandering. But, like lotsa stuff, we'll get to that later.

[2] Whether this understanding is true or not is immaterial, and is the subject for another discussion entirely.
[3] A great, admittedly self-conscious example of all this was something Simon Reynolds would do from time to time: create a kind of "market snapshot" of bands it would be a good idea to "back" (particularly as an up-and-coming musician) if you wanted to score points in the coming year. Regrettably, I can't find this anymore, which makes me wonder if I'm imagining it, but it is interesting that he hasn't done it in a few years, basically since he stopped being particularly enthusiastic about modern music; if he did it now, it would come off as either self-parody or bitterness. Seems like when he doesn't have something to boost he moves from an EOP market to an EOS market, and maybe others have moved with him, but this will all be covered after I get this paper finished.
[4] This statement in and of itself will probably cause some people to wish shame on me, but just wait and see where I'm going with this in a subsequent part.

...to be continued in part 2a.

But first, a graph:



1-2: Market is somewhat stagnant and getting worse. General listlessness all around.
3: Trolling begins, with the market being too weak to oppose it. The value of objects decreases but capital shoots up as it is freed up and becomes falsely productive.
4: Value and capital cross at such an angle that a crash is almost inevitable, especially following (as it does) a slight dip in the aggregate capital.
5-6: Value and capital change in inverse proportions, as participants go on a denouncing frenzy and milk all value from the market.
7-8: Value comes close to bottoming out and capital, consequently, begins to fall. Realizing this, a market correction is attempted, but it fails.
9-10: Value and capital reach their lowest point and, lacking new supply, the market dies. Start over.
posted by Mike B. at 1:29 PM 0 comments

Sugar we're coming up

Spotted in a catalog of Miss Clap's, a catalog in which you will also find girls in tank tops holding ukeleles on the beach:



Oh, things have changed, haven't they?

Maybe there's something to the whole "this generation's Nirvana" thing after all, although judging from what I hear around my neighborhood, this generation's Nirvana would seem to be Dipset. They aren't, but still.

posted by Mike B. at 10:34 AM 0 comments

Such high standards



Presented without comment, because oh how it will tie in to some upcoming things:

Point blank: Has the 5, 8, 30-year old discussion around popism and rockism helped us establish an aesthetic practice and discourse that changes the world for the better?

Answer: Nope, it hasn't done shit.

So I've figured out it's pretty much a waste of my time.

- Jeff Chang (author of Can't Stop Won't Stop)

posted by Mike B. at 10:27 AM 0 comments

Thursday, May 11, 2006

Virtua EMP Paper, Part 1

(Disclaimer: this is a quick pass at what would have been my EMP paper, had my proposal been accepted. As such, it does not incorporate all the various readings and research I would have done had I had an actual conference presentation to get me to do it, to say nothing of the $50 I still owe the library that would've allowed me to get books out again. So anyway, there are some parts that I am going to go ahead with even though I don't know if they're true or even necessarily what I'm talking about, and I will indicate such parts with the following symbol: ~. This is meant to represent the twirly motion you do with your forefinger by your temple to indicate that something or someone is crazy, because I believe in academia this is referred to as "hand-waving" or, once a few drinks have been consumed, "talking out your ass." But this could be listed as a skill on my resume, so whoopdeedoodle.

On the bright side, I can now focus less on the one section I was going to limit myself to for EMP and present the theory as a sort of broad-based whole. I'm sure you are wetting yourself with anticipation, so, without further adoo...)

"Why Would You Like Them?" : Performative Speech in an Economy of Shame

At this particular moment in history, arguing about music is as American as apple pie, or at least as American as "Cherry Pie," and as much a part of growing up as pimples and hormonally induced manic depression (but not hormonally induced "Manic Depression," which only afflicts a certain segment of the male population generally known as "shredders"). We discover music, we find artists we like, and then we argue about their worth and the worth of other artists, both with those we agree with (the "Metallica vs. Megadeath" argument) and those we disagree with (the "punk sucks vs. no it doesn't" argument), repetitiously and vociferously. We continue to do this even beyond the heady years of adolescence, not only as listeners with emerging sensibilities (i.e. college students) and full-fledged music geeks, but as casual listeners; even people with a minimal music collection are likely to have an opinion on the suckiness of Coldplay or the awesomeness of Johnny Cash. At first glance, the reason for this might seem to be obvious: we do it to define our identities. But this merely explains the possession of taste, not the arguments about it. After all, we don't feel the need to argue about our clothing with other people (though of course we will pass judgment on others' decisions, because this is fun) or to loudly declare how a particular model of car is not really a true hatchback. (Unless we are nerds, but this caveat applies to everything.) So what is the point of all that arguing?

Fig 1: The "Shredder," here pictured in semi-repose.

Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron have this widely-known theory~ of cultural capital, you see, the idea of which is basically that some kids do better than others in school because of the particular familial, i.e. cultural, background they come from: because of your parents' place in the culture, they have instilled in you certain values that confer advantages other people don't have.

This is nice, and apparently very useful, but I think it's unfairly claiming a really useful term. And they're doing it inaccurately, too--one of the main characteristics of capital is that it's fluid, but "cultural capital" as conceived by Bourdieu and Passeron can neither be traded with another person for goods or services, or accrued in greater amount by a given individual through participation in a given economy. I think it's much more interesting to conceive of cultural capitalism as the arty cousin of Richard Neustadt's (god rest his soul) theory of political capital ~, a term that was, unfortunately, introduced into the popular vernacular by our current President.[1] Like that slogan for that game ~, it's a concept easy to understand but difficult to master. In brief, political capital seeks to explain why a particular actor in a particular position can sometimes get what they want and sometimes cannot. It encompasses variables like favors owed to and from, public image, the party's strength, the actor's strength within the party, a general sense of inevitability, etc. and etc. and etc. It's very interesting but we're just going to get bogged down.

What, then, do I mean by "cultural capital"? An easy but misleading shorthand would be "cred," but given that disowning "cred" is a great way to accrue cultural capital in this day and age, it's probably the wrong tree in terms of barkability. Basically, it's a representation of the fact that some people's opinions have more force than others', and an attempt to track why, exactly, that is the case. Cultural capital is primarily gained and lost through speech acts, which makes these speech acts, in the context of cultural capital, performative speech, like the courtroom pronouncements of judges, another useful holdover from politics. You can't assign a numerical value to it, but hell, since when was economics about actual numerical values?

Where things start to get interesting is when you notice that an actor's cultural capital is actually tied to the cultural capital of particular art objects. After all, people might disagree about the worth of, well, pretty much every piece of art ever created (except for Prince's "Kiss"), but that doesn’t mean we can't assign a particular value to it. Thus, people accrue cultural capital based on what art objects they back, the absolute value of that art object, the change in value of the art object over time, the time period in which they choose to back the art object, and how they actually go about backing said art object. But the value of different art objects is different in different cultural markets: the Beach Boys, for instance, will have a widely different value depending on the group of people making the valuation, as would Tupac Shakur, although the accrual of individual opinion, depending on the cultural capital of the individuals, can drastically change the valuation of a given artwork in a given market.

But given all these givens, let's talk a bit more abstractly, and focus on the two basic marketplaces of cultural capital: economies of shame (hereinafter referred to as EOS) and economies of pleasure (hereinafter EOS).

[1] He said this after winning the election of 2004, but what he really meant was "I have a mandate," which is one of the ways you can have political capital but by no means the primary one, and even then it still wasn't true. It would have been far more accurate to say that he had a near-monopoly on political capital after 9/11 but blew through that in two years and was now back in a competitive market, with his stock being particularly volatile, with allegations of accounting irregularities surrounding it. But now we're just getting baroque.

...to be continued in part 2.

But first, some illustrative graphs.



This graph illustrates a typical value cycle in a "mixed economy," i.e. one neither shame nor pleasure based and of whatever genreic affinity. The cycle in question is one familiar to most of us: the process wherein a song, having languished in obscurity, is discovered by a small set of tastemakers and then enthusiastically embraced by the market at large, followed by a falling-off in value as the market begins to regard the work as "played out" or "dated," and ending up in the settled value position of a classic, although I am being a bit generous here, and it can easily fall off even farther. (See: Langley Schools Project.)

1-2: Obscurity.
3-4: Discovered by a small, generally "elite" segment of the market, and passed around for consideration; value within this mini-market has already hit a high and will enter its falling-off period about twice as fast as it does within the larger market.
5: The work's "IPO" if you will into the market, with near-universal awareness acheived through the means of its prominent use as a sample, its placement on a well-known MP3 blog, its reissue on a prestigious label, etc.
6-8: Value falls off, initially merely as a function of wider penetration (the plateau), but then steadily downward as early adopters see later adopters taking up the work and viewing it through the prism of their own familiarity.
9-10: Value falls / levels off to its "normal" level given near-perfect knowledge.

Which leads right into the next cycle:



The previous cycle is an exceptional one, but so familiar to us as a perceptible process that I thought it might be a useful initial example. In slight contrast, this one can be encountered at any point in a work's life cycle, assuming a certain constant level of regard.

1-2: General respect, but no particular attention paid; somewhat forgotten and thus useful to bring up if it has not been brought up in a while; a pleasant surprise.
3-4: Sudden spike in value as it becomes a common reference point for artists who themselves are ascendent or already at a high level of value, or as it is used in a well-respected movie in current release, or as it is otherwise embraced actively by the market for whatever reason.
5-6: Steep dropoff as it is now a "dated" reference, fixed in time by its value-spike rather than its actual date of release.
7-8: Languishing, which allows it to retain its previous value as a constant of constant quality.
9-10: Back to normal.

posted by Mike B. at 5:34 PM 9 comments

Tuesday, May 02, 2006

Kind of crickets on the novelty stuff right now, which is fair enough, but while you're, um, "digesting," let me point you toward Tom Breihan's most recent post, which is about hip-hop and Frank Kogen and immigrants and dovetails nicely with the novelty stuff, I think.

For these guys, having an opinion on hip-hop is directly contingent to being hip-hop, and being hip-hop depends on adhering to certain aesthetic and cultural codes. A term like hip-hop means more than a term like rap music. Rap music means music with rapping on it. Hip-hop means burned-out Bronx tenement houses in the mid-70s and climbing fences into train yards and stealing electricity from street lights to fuel open-air DJ parties and Busy Bee battling Kool Moe Dee and KRS-One pushing Price Be offstage. The term has baggage, and that's why I don't use it.

Next up...well, I'm not sure. Maybe I should take a poll or something. But right now I have to go do some guitar edits.

posted by Mike B. at 5:19 PM 1 comments

Monday, May 01, 2006

Creativity introduces novelty into the content of the many

A few other thoughts about novelty songs, a bit more more broad-view this time. Note: includes Ghostface content.

What exactly is the "normalization" process that turns novelty songs, which are explicitly comedic, into "straight" pop, which is generally tragic or epic? In the podcast, I touched on two explanations. One is that of maturation, demonstrated both by the transition from Spike Jones' childlike mouth noises and bangs to the restrained sexuality of Aaliyah and by the more literal growing-up we hear of the child's voice in Lil Markie -> Daniel Smith -> Jack White; kids are silly and weird in part because they like things that are silly, but also because they have not fully socialized and are a bit more willing to let their strangeness out to those close to them, and so as we normalize and become older and become more fit for public consumption, so does novelty become pop: it grows up, but it still retains that inherant, particular strangeness, which differentiates it from everything else and thus provides a hook.

The other was that of ambiguation, if that's actually a word. What most people call novelty songs are songs that are blatant about being different from non-novelty songs, whether it's the clear silliness of "Cocktails for Two" or the vocals on "Diary." The best test for whether or not something fits the conventional definition of a novelty song is if you can remove the novelty parts and still have a song left. You can take out the baby noise on "Are You That Somebody?" or add more instruments to "My Doorbell" and still have roughly the same song, but you can't do that with the Jones or the Markie. More than anything else, this has to do with the lyrics, since, after all, few pop songs are particularly ambiguous musically. Instead of being literal about the connection between the music and the words, there's more a channeling, as both the White Stripes and Danielson songs are much more concerned about expressing the feeling of a particular age than talking about being that age. This is pop's universality at play: by making things more ambiguous, you broaden your appeal.

But it's also fair to say that the novelty to pop transition is also one of increased professionalism. Aaliyah's voice is so good and the production is so sonically perfect that she probably could sing about being aborted and still have it work in a much different way than the Lil' Markie does. A key aspect of novelty songs' weirdness is that they do things differently from how you'd expect them to, and indeed, it's precisely the unprofessionalism in "Cocktails for Two" that is the novelty, that great comic eruption of noises and shouts, the cool restraint of the crooner loosed into cartoonish mayhem. Pop demands professionalism, both in conception and execution, which is what makes the Danielson Famile indie rather than pop. Professionalism is the unity here, combining strangeness and the ambiguously familiar by smoothing out the edges, touching up the trim, making it sound like something you've heard before even if you haven't.

Taken together, this is the way I think novelty models and creates pop. Pop's story is one of continual consumption and assimilation, and people talk about there being some sort of pop "formula," but I used the word "mystical" up there at the top for a reason: it's almost impossible to apply a formula successfully, because combining the strange and the normal in a way that doesn't abandon either is incredibly difficult; if you try and do it with a formula, you get something that sounds formulaic (which no great pop song ever is, at heart), and if you focus on the novelty, you get, well, novelty. Not all successful pop songs are novelty songs, except in very limited ways (none of U2's recent hits are novelty songs unless you've never heard U2 before), but it's the way novelty is incorporated that grants the aura of unfamiliarity to those that are. (Traditional novelty songs are new but familiar, in that they're pretty obvious about their oddity.) How do you make the repeated sound of a baby cooing not sound jarring and out-of-place? How do you make piano, unconventional drumming, and high male vocals lyrically and melodically harkening back to the 40s sound like something you should play on the radio? There may be answers to each of those questions individually, and they are actually just the kind of questions I like thinking about, but I think it's nearly impossible to generalize any particular techniques to a general philosophy. It's just very useful to look at novelty when you're looking at pop.

A great place to see that in the here-and-now is on a track from the new Ghostface album: "Whip You With a Strap," which has novelty in fucking spades: starts out with a siren, then builds itself around a sample of a soul singer from the 70s saying "take my across her lap / she used to whip me with a strap / when I was bad" and the the vocalist starts talking about getting beat when he was a kid and how kids these days are spoiled. Take just that description and there's no way it could be anything other than novelty, whether unintentionally like Lil' Markie or otherwise. But it works. Partially it does so for the reasons above: he's not talking in the voice of a child and indeed is explicitly speaking from a position of experience, the tale he's telling is complex and detailed, and it's all tied together with a familiar, professional style: take out the lyrics on the hook and it's a regular ol' rap song.

That Ghostface is able to do this so successfully and so easily for something that's not even going to be a single (probably) points toward an explanation for why hip-hop has the amazing cultural energy it does right now: it's the best right not at turning novelty into pop. This is hardly surprising. The first hip-hop record, after all, was regarded as a novelty song, and not without reason: it was a bunch of dudes talking bullshit over a disco record, and while this kind of thing is hadly unprecedented in terms of the crap they put out on vinyl, in its place and time, it simply didn't sound like legitimate pop. Hip-hop's more partisan historians are careful to present its origins as rooted in social injustice and subcultural eruptions and all like that, but then there's the new LL Cool J song, which somehow manages to do the "sound like how the band makes you feel, not like the band itself" thing despite actually sampling Afrika Bambaataa; perhaps this is because it does duplicate the feeling of Bambaataa while actually sounding sorta like "Funky Cold Medina." And if this all doesn't sound like novelty to you...

All genres that take temporary posession of pop begin as novelty; it's just been to hip-hop's advantage that it depends on novelty for its continued existence, with samples and voices as fuel for that particular fire, and now that it's gotten so professional about its sounds, ironically enough it can actually assimilate things much more easily. As any number of producers have demonstrated of late, you can put the right drum sounds behind anything and make it sound like a track. And while this can be formulaic, it's also liberating, since much of pop's history is the search for more efficient ways to unite the strange and the familiar. We all notice the weirdness of pop songs, but we don't seem eager to unite them in the way we'd see the other elements as part of a whole. But there is a unification behind all those noises and samples and weird voices, and it's called novelty.

(title's from the quote here, by the by, which synchs up amazingly well, considering that it's about, uh, math)

posted by Mike B. at 4:09 PM 1 comments