more writing

Music: Judas Priest: Defenders of the Faith (2002 remaster)

Well, the work of a scholar is never finished, not even on the holidays. I suspect I'm not alone when I say this: over the break, marooned in Hotlanta with no work to do, I felt somewhat lost. So, it's nice to be back in the saddle of projects, even if I'm constantly running behind deadlines.

Good news: the masturbation essay has received a provisional acceptance with minor revisions. I'm a bit confused by this, because neither of the reviewers requests revisions, and both seemed quite pleased. I may not generate flawless submissions (who does?) but I do think I can revise well. Anyhoo, I asked Diane Davis (the wickedest smartest postie this side of the Rio Grande) to give a look over and she had some suggestions, so I'll revise to those and get it back next week. Woohoo! Now with this and "ShitText," I have no more taboos to violate in academic publishing. Yippee! Now I can retire.

Oh, but I want to write three more books. I have them in my head already. I just need to research them. Oh, and write them.

And I have more revisions to finish. Proofs for "Hystericizing Huey" arrived today, and Mirko and I have a "revise and resubmit" essay on the iPod to overhaul. I started overhauling today. Both the editor and a review did not like the theory-then-application structure of the original, but wanted a continual application as theory rolls-out sort of thing. So this requires a reframing. Here's a very drafty version of the new introduction:

Today it is difficult to ride in or traverse any peopled, public space without becoming witness to someone's musical enjoyment. Increasingly the devices enabling such pleasures are of a kind: Apple's personal music gadget, the iPod. Although the iPod has sold well ever since Apple CEO Steve Jobs unveiled it on October 23, 2001, nearly 60 million of the 90 million iPods sold since that time have been in the last two years, signaling a previously unimaginable ubiquity.[2] Originally the iPod was a digital version of the portable CD player, however, since 2001 Apple has introduced a number of updated versions of the iPod, including models that display photos as well as low-resolution videos. The iPod (which is currently bundled with a popular, cross-platform software program and online music store titled "iTunes") has garnered over 70% of the market share for all types of portable media players, and 90% of market share for portable hard-drive based media players.[3] At the time of this writing, the current, fifth generation iPod comes in both white and black with chrome backing, and features a vivid, color screen (see Figure 1). With 20 to 60 gigabytes of memory, iPods are capable of holding tens of thousands of songs, photos, and videos that are selected and played back from a rotary wheel, which the listener uses by selecting on-screen menus and pushing the middle "enter" button. iPods are shipped with white-chorded earbuds that are inserted directly into the ear canal.

For a number of cultural critics, the direct insertion of the earbuds into the ear canal betokens "a form of accompanied solitude" that is rude and offensive.[4] "When you plug into your iPod in a public place," writes Armstrong Williams, "you are basically telling everyone else that you do not want to interact with them."[5] Owing to the flexibility of MP3 technology, which has resulted in an "unparalleled access" to one's entire music collection on a device the size of a credit card, iPods have been at the center of an expanding culture of mobile listening that replaces chance conversations with the musical "company" or "occupancy" afforded by the iPod.[6] Critics of the device frequently describe the false solitude of users as a narcissistic and self-indulgent one, as if using the gadget in public is an inappropriate, masturbatory event.[7] In fact, related to this caricature of the iPod user is a warning analogous to going blind: frequent and prolonged use of the iPod causes hearing loss. Audiologists have warned that, because the iPods earbuds are directly inserted into the ear canal, they literally focus sound directly to the eardrum at six to nine decibels louder than open-air sounds.8 Advances in music recording techniques and technology have also almost eliminated the hiss or "noise" discernable in older, "analog" recordings that contributes to distortion at high volumes.9 Consequently, the discomfort or "pain" one would usually feel from older recordings is not experienced by an iPod user when listening to music at high volumes. The consequence is that loud iPod music can traverse the threshold of pain and still sound "good" as the listener slowly goes deaf.

In this essay we argue that the association of the iPod with both masturbation and pain is not coincidental, but an overdetermined cultural relation owing to its status as a fetishized object or gadget. From a psychoanalytic perspective, gadgets are devices fabricated expressly for stimulating various human desires or "drives," sometimes by direct insertion into an orifice, but also by inviting the attention of the eyes (e.g., television) or ears (e.g., the sound of a portable alarm clock). Analyzing the iPod as a gadget in this sense, we argue, helps to explain both the pleasures of using the iPod, even beyond the threshold of pain, as well as the discourse generated about the device, or what we term "iPod rhetoric." To this end the essay is divided into two sections in which we focus on the experience of the iPod and the rhetoric of that experience respectively. First, we describe the psychical apparatus central to our understanding of the appeal of music in general, the drive to listen or the "invocatory drive," which is what the iPod is primarily designed to stimulate. Then, we detail the relationship between the libidinal and symbolic economies of exchanging meaning in musical experience in terms of a crucial concept, the "sonorous envelope." Finally, we illustrate our psycho-rhetorical theory of popular music by examining more closely the promotional and critical rhetoric surrounding the device. We conclude by detailing the political dimensions of the public enjoyment promoted by the iPod.

I. Experiencing (with) the iPod

A number of scholars in the fields of musicology, communication studies, and cultural studies have taken to explaining in detail how the formal elements of a musical text communicate meaning in seemingly non-discursive ways. For example, in his classic study of music education, Christopher Small argues that the central logic of western music is formally telic. The evolution toward functional harmony in the history of western music created a kind of musical gravity that depends on feelings of expectation and satisfaction.[10] The sonata form that resulted from these manufactured feelings (variously represented by AABA or, as a certain group of Swedes made famous, ABBA) underlies the structure of most of what we characterize as "popular music," from the Beach Boys to George Gershwin to Frank Zappa.

This notion of a drive toward the tonic, or the beginning key or note of a musical composition, is not merely an aberration or circumstantial event, but one that is overdetermined and ripe with cultural and ideological influence. Consequently, in addition to analyzing and critiquing the sensory effects of tonal music in the west, many scholars have also been tracing the persuasive or "rhetorical" dimensions of formal musical structures and their relationship to the social.[11] Scholars in the field of communication studies have contributed to this effort in a number of ways. For example, Karen Rasmussen has drawn on semiotics and Kenneth Burke's theory of form in order to show how Leonard Bernstein's Kaddish Symphony encapsulates a formal struggle between tonal and atonal compositional motives, which serves as a rhetorical inducement and reckoning with a Jewish struggle outside of the symphony's narrative.[12] The mediation and rhetorical or suasive effects of the social also figure prominently in Theodore Matula's schema for analyzing popular music, which stresses the interplay of text and context at multiple levels of abstraction. This approach better specifies an individual's listening practices as a complex amalgam of personal life-experiences and ideological influences.[13] Dissatisfied with the focus placed on meaning "intrinsic to the musical event" and the attention given to the "internal relationships of the [musical] composition," Robert Francesconi has argued for a "rhetoric of musical style" that emphasizes social frames of interpretation.[14] Although far from exhaustive, these three studies help to demonstrate how almost every attempt to specify a "rhetoric" of music forwards a strategy to help navigate the object of the "musical text" and the historical, social, political, or cultural context of its reception.

Whether one studies the critical object of a speech or song, the key theoretical difficulty of any interpretive schema is the tension between an individual's personal experience of a text and the external forces and discourses mediating and influencing her experience of that text. Of course, any framework for understanding the desirous act of listening should help to specify the interplay of listener, text, and practice. In theorizing this nexus, psychoanalysis focuses on both the individual, subjective experiences of the listener as well as cultural and social forms of mediation.15 Psychoanalysis is not some provocative "literary-metaphorical project of textual exegesis,"[16] but rather provides a number of compelling, explanatory tools for answering questions concerning subjectivity, affect, and desire. A psychoanalytic approach to music suggests that although the "suasive" influence of music can be explained with reference to the ideological and political norms encoded in formal musical structures (e.g., the tonic, timbre, timing, lyrics, and so on), the fact remains that different kinds of music appeal to different kinds of listeners, and consequently, any explanation of the suasive appeal of a given song or genre of music based solely on musical structures cannot account for the idiosyncrasies of individual enjoyment. The subjective psyche of a listener must be taken into account. Why does techno music cause a person to tap along to the beat, even when she hates techno? Why do some people enjoy country music when others despise it? We believe that the answer to these and similar questions has something to do with infantile experiences and libidinal energies that reside and emanate from the unconscious, something that an analysis of the iPod helps us to see.

We submit that the appeal of a given song or genre of music resides in the dynamics of two interwoven, psychical economies: one that is libidinal and concerns pure kinetic rhythms (the psychical and experiential); and another that is linguistic or representational and which involves the relationships between sounds and their culturally defined meanings (the rhetorical). Because communication scholars have tended to focus on the latter at the expense of the former, one of our goals in this essay is to supplement extant rhetorics of music keyed specifically to cultural representation and mediation with a theory of desire--or an explanation for what attracts a listener to a given musical object. Understanding how music attracts listeners experientially will help us, in turn, better understand the appeal of discourse about music and its modes of address-that is, the rhetoric of music.