yes, man

Been obsessed with the eMusic and Bleep legal download services lately. Between the two of them, you have your indie necessities pretty much covered. Plus, you actually get to own the digital file, unlike iTunes protected files which can't be burned to CD and are limited to 5 licenses. It amazes me how often this is news to folks.

Bleep's only drawbacks is that tracks are more expensive and there is no wishlist function to save things for later. (Somewhere, a future post will explore what I like to think of as the "virtual ownership/ identification" function of wishlists. As in the oft-repeated exchange: Q: Have you seen Constant Gardener yet? A: No, but it's in my Netflix queue...)

eMusic, meanwhile, has an amazing selection of music across genres, and for incredibly cheap. Notwithstanding my "implied fair use" ethics of downloading (see below), I've found myself paying to re-download things I may already have gotten elsewhere for free (like Calexico's staple Black Light record). The subscription pricing schemes baffle me though, since I know the owners get paid more per track than the average price paid by the consumer. So is the whole catalog functioning as a virtual, temporary, digital loss leader in order to increase its subscriber base?

On the subject of loss leaders in the hard goods retail world, and its ramifications for indies, read on.

killing sound

I walked into class this morning, my coffee still too hot to sip on. The senile tenured professor was playing with knobs at the lectern. One of them turned on his mic, which began to feed back. It modulated, rhythmically; its loudness and beauty woke me up. I didn't select this on my iPod, as it were -- I didn't choose it, but I liked it. In small doses.

The professor walked out to get help and a student got up and turned it off. The professor walked back in and started lecturing. I turned my laptop on and tuned out, clicked a link I'd been emailed in response to last week's post. Apparently, "they get lemon-baked fish" at Guantanamo. And that's not all.

They're also tortured with sound. Specifically, Yoko Ono, et al. There's so much to unpack here. Where to begin?

This is just one instance in a long history of weaponized sound. What is the pragmatic thinking behind this? In the spectrum between pure noise and semantic communication, what's the most effective? And why?

One way or another, somewhere in that spectrum is Delaney's Babel-17. An alien culture hacks into the empire's system and transmits their language as computer code into the empire's ships, causing malfunctions. They're labelled terrorists. The protagonist looks again, and finds that the "code" is actually a fully-developed language. It's poetic communication. The malfunction is just a by-product, or is it?

Unintended or not, this weapon is written though, not uttered. To inject it in a human, and cause harm, is actual sound required? What about defacing or destroying written language? The infamous Koran-pissing incident comes to mind. This could be done silently, and still penetrate the psyche of the prisoner who holds the text sacred. What about Serrano's Piss Christ? It certainly inflicted injury on Giuliani and others. But visitors to the Sensation show were hardly prisoners...

Other questions prompt a look at Attali's Noise. His thesis that history traces a line of music's commodification holds true if defense spending is the shaky foundation of US economy. What is the army's music budget? And how was the Yoko Ono record acquired and billed? Do they stock this at the PX in Cuba, alongside Kelly Clarkson, Christian metal, Ice Cube? Recouped by now, she's getting royalties on the sale in any case (unless they Limewired it...)

What else? if we were in France, could she sue for moral rights - i.e. does Yoko One have a cause of action for torture use of her music? And what about performance rights - do ASCAP and BMI collect from Guantamo Bay? If this is such a prevalent technique, couldn't they commission such weaponized noise works for hire to avoid these questions? But who would sign up for such a project? Are some musicians that hungry?

-left.

24/ HOUR/ NEWS/ NETWORK

Zizek has pre-empted the thing I've been bubbling on for a minute, and then some, which makes me grimly glad. But let me pull up.

In social and academic contexts in the last couple years, I've been blown away by the proportion of my peers who've verbally backed torture "when justified." Articulated as such or not, the main rationalization for torture is generally the "ticking bomb scenario," i.e. you have someone in custody who knows the location of nuclear bomb located in the subway. Do you advocate torture and save a million lives?

But as activist and lawyer Clive Stafford-Smith has pointed out, in his documentary faux naively titled "Is Torture A Good Idea?", and elsewhere, this scenario never actually arises. The entire edifice of torture is effectively built on a non-existent cornerstone. Indeed, in that, doc, which I caught on the BBC this summer in London, between one set of bombs and another, an FBI agent and "torture expert" cops to its improbability.

Or maybe it does happen? At least on TV. A ticking bomb scenario happens practically every episode on 24, to the point where it becomes commonplace. Is this part of why a classroom of otherwise "liberal" law students outnumbered me and one other naysayer 100 to 2 in a Criminal Procedure class this past fall? (That other naysayer pointed up the other fallacy in torture apologias: it's just not statistically effective when it is employed).

I'm going to go out on a limb and say yes. And say that the efficacy of 24 (and various news shows) in normalizing torture is stunning. The show, with it's "tragic-ethical grandeur," as Zizek says, is incredibly compelling. No one needs to be reminded of FOX's politcal bent (or perhaps they do), but the sheer craft of this brand of propaganda is astounding.

How do you combat that? Dialogue by dialogue is my best guess.

-left.

visualize music

ok, i don't normally cross post, but this seems right on for undivided blog as well. consider it a reblog...

since L.A. MOCA tried a hand at visualizing music (a rather psychadelic approach towards more traditional work this summer) and so many technofilic djs and computer heads try neato 3d stuff with big interactive whooshes (there are plenty of sites and bad interactive displays dedicated to this....) I thought I might mention one approach that seems radically honest.

I don't normally go for screen based media, and even less for flash, but this music map just seemed like a nice use of the internet. as mike from stamen mentioned, it would be great if last.fm was integrated as well, but for now, this is just slick social software.

--dp

add it up!

Recently on mudd up! Jace named the top 10 reasons to sell out. That's settled, we all agree we should take what we deserve.

But i'd like to finally sideswipe the ever widening discussion of rights. On The Wire stream the other day, i heard Steve Reich chatting about how licensing of work must be done strictly on a case by case basis...
And as a worker who makes his living through creative production, I am forced to agree. Still, my feeble attempts at following the legalitites in the ever-shifting planes of audio and video and print reproduction have encouraged my belief that something radical must be done to refigure the entire notion of property as it currently stands.

Is freedom = choice? Are property rights the solution?

What would 40 acres and a mule look like in the land of the downloadable streaming identity crisis?
A new publication merits note: Contested Commons, Trespassing Publics: A Public Record from the folks at sarai.net. I checked the heck out the audio of the presentations from the conference. Didn't clarify, but did problematize. No conclusions here, but I'd love to bring up these problems in a more public way...

And for the record, my work is still for sale. An artist's gotta eat somehow I guess.

cross posted @ http://www.dpblog.danielperlin.net

mind over matter

Before Reasonable Doubt, rapping primarily about money and power was barely on the map, but now it's de rigeur, to say the least. You can knock it as one-dimensional and over-materialistic, or revel in it, or revel in it ironically, or refuse to take it seriously, or just dismiss it, but whichever way, there's more going on.

For one thing, baller rap outlines a kind of counter-causality. Rich Boy, e.g. must've written and spat lyrics about being rich before ever getting a record deal. So did rapping like he had cash make it come to him, or was it the other way around? And is this a paradox, properly speaking?

There are of course urban legends galore about rappers and entrepreneurs who who first made their money as dealers (I'm going to stick with "legends" because I haven't seen the pertinent audits). But there must be hordes of unknown MCs who have fronted on record and stage about spinners, chains, and fronts -- and the paper that buys them -- before they had any to speak of, as it were. So is it an unwritten rule for the up-and-comer to talk he has it? And is this in order to get it? A variation on: act like you know.

This would parallel the logic of prayer for some christians and new age-ers, and magick as expounded by Morrison, et al. This flouting of normative cause-and-effect must be compelling to exist in so many divergent cultures. Is it the fact that it emphasizes will over circumstance?

Schopenhauer, please holler. Statisticians, what's the rate of success of such practices?

-left

oxymoron symbiosis

For those of us with stakes in musical copyrights, yet download with abandon, a minor crisis persists. How to shoulder AND champion mp3s as marketing tools, not viruses or looting? Some colleagues and I have been tossing about a form of ethical download practice: if we like what we hear, we buy it on wax, and if we have it on wax, we download mp3s. The former part implies we delete what we don't need in our crates, and contribute to putting money in the artists' and labels' pockets, for a form of marketing they may not be directly involved with. The latter we justify as a form of "implied" fair use, though it's analog has been explictly rejected by courts. We are feeling it, nevertheless, and are amped it's been put forward (scroll down some) by the Merge label -- home of some artists I can get with such as Third Eye Foundation and it's alias Matt Elliot (who played a gorgeous set/ meditation at this years Sonar).

The obvious problem is, our type consumer is mad niche-y, so it doesn't ease much except our conscienses, but it's something.