[Nettime-bold] Re: <nettime> Where Music Will Be Coming From - Kevin Kelly?

["Paul D. Miller" <anansi1@earthlink.net>]

Hey Derek, thanx for the post. All I can say is, well... it seems like the usual all Anglo-American take on music that we keep getting bombarded with in theory circles to me... sigh... a whole issue and article on this kind of thing, and no mention of stuff like early hip-hop mix tapes, no jazz, no mention of blues (except in a Euro style situation...) ... Nor a mention of the Lomax collection that under-girded Moby's last album "Play" which, amusingly enough, was based on cotton picking songs from plantation chants of African Americans in the Old South etc etc black pain still helps sell alot of cars etc etc but hey.... anyway - don't forget, I write this, ironically... when will the editors of these mags get into the 21st century? I guess you could call the phenomenon "Science of the Lambs" - play it again, Sam!  The clones and copies just float on by... It never ceases to amaze... Good article, but well... its a diverse world. I'd really love to see more dynamic and open ended, truly multi-cultural takes on this kind of thing. Kevin Kelly always has an angle on this kind of thing, but yeah, the "liberalization" of markets issue, and the whole deregulation thing, when you see him apply it to music, you just gotta wonder: how much longer can the same ideas be reprocessed. There was a conference on digital media and copyright law at Harvard University's Law School that John Perry Barlowe put together with Chuck D from Public Enemy, me, and various others on the future of copyright vs copyleft law etc etc and there's various papers and essays on the topic at the site
http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/events/netmusic_agenda.html


and there's another conference coming up at Duke University on a similar topic with Dick Hebdige and some other folks, all of whom are doing essays/articles etc etc on sampling & law issues etc etc too
http://WWW.LAW.DUKE.EDU/musicandtheft/


but the main thing is that they always look for a way to commidify what essentially is going to be an open source based system. They can't control it, but the illusion of control, still seems to carry water for that crowd. The thought of how Kelly can walk a fine line between the implications of his article and how he pretty much knows that most of what he's writing will be obsolete within a year or so,  makes one wonder at the irony of it all. There's an old story Buckminster Fuller used to tell when faced with the social engineering issues he faced when he was trying to push his dymaxion concepts: brevity is the soul of wit... 


Dymaxion = Dynamic + Maximum + Tension = 'Doing More With Less'

if you're going to be around when the conference happens, well... bring your I-Pod, I guess...
okay,
peace,
Paul


> A quite compelling response to this article showed up on the [microsound] list, 
> from Joshua Maremont. 
>
> 'scuse my monoculture :)
>
> best,
> Derek
>
> +++
>
> Date:  Sun, 17 Mar 2002 18:25:06 -0800 
> From:  Joshua Maremont <thermal@boxmanstudies.com> 
> To:  microsound <microsound@hyperreal.org> 
> Subject:  Re: [microsound] Where Music Will Be Coming From 
>
>
> An interesting read, yes, but the writer seems to couch his quite 
> valid reflections and predictions in a commercial-consumer model of 
> music which I find limited and backward in its struggle - mirroring 
> that of the MP3 and Napster litigations - to retroactively 
> recontextualize some of the most revolutionary aspects of digital 
> cultural creation and dissemination by way of a strained antique 
> economic model.  His analysis is right on the mark until he 
> lemming-trots into a wool-over-eyes future in which the current model 
> of musicians financially enslaved to a centralized system of 
> distribution and patronage is magically metamorphosized into what a 
> marketing consultant would surely name a "net-savvy" version of the 
> same arrangement (see:  SDMI and subscription downloads).  For me 
> this analysis - like those of the entertainment industry plaintiffs 
> in soft-music legal actions - misses (or deliberately hides) an 
> entirely different future of music in which the laws of musical 
> economics are not simply retooled or upturned (remember the New 
> Economy?) but completely discredited down to the validity of their 
> component terms and concepts.  This other future is one in which 
> profit and music are not likely to be mentioned in the same sentence, 
> in which music is made by those who now only buy it, and in which the 
> source of the audio data is less important than the experience of 
> finding and hearing and using it - one in which labels and stars lose 
> their centrality and priority and become mere nodes in a system they 
> no longer control.  And organs of the ever more loudly creaking 
> centralized system - like Yahoo or NTY or Wired - cannot be happy to 
> consider such implications of their own irrelevance.  I would retitle 
> the article:  Where Corporate Music Will Be Bought From.  I imagine 
> few here will be shopping at that mall, except for the occasional and 
> covert girl-/boy-band fix. 
>
> np - "Vertical Forms" compilation 
> -- 
> Joshua Maremont / Thermal - mailto:thermal@boxmanstudies.com 
> Boxman Studies Label - http://www.boxmanstudies.com/ 
>
> #  distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
> #  <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
> #  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
> #  more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body
> #  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net




============================================================================
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free...."
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe


Port:status>OPEN
wildstyle access: www.djspooky.com

Paul D. Miller a.k.a. Dj Spooky that Subliminal Kid

Subliminal Kid Inc.

Office Mailing Address:

Music and Art Management
245 w14th st #2RC NY NY 
10011