kogan's DDR paying for itself and blah

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

i. from 1983 to some time in the late 90s (when its management team bought it from its owner) the wire's (probably substantial) tab was picked up a sugar daddy who liked the idea of owning a fancy music mag -- basically everything i did there was tossing this guy's money down the drain (hurrah!)

ii. open question: w!re's current editorial team's mortages ride on the continued success of the mag -- does this tend to limit its freedom to play with any idea, any approach? i say yes

iii. the tale of the music papers, uk and us, is a complex hitched ride on an ad-fuelled gravy train -- the industry in the 60s needed to know "what's good?", as all around the "rules of the good" were apparently being broken by the kids, and magazines which discuss this is a way to research same, the trade-off being that you're paying for writers to say YOU SUCK (or to write stuff which is of marginal interest to you but keeps them happy and "working for you") -- in fact, "the kids" also, for the usual reasons of gang-formation, needed to know what was good and what wasn't, a self-doubt which extended from post-beatles music to post-vietnam politics, with these two constantly melting into one another

iv. does this gravy train even function now? the kids be downloadin -- hence written discussion of "what's good" is these days more like a salvage operation for i. what got lost, and therefore ii. old-skool consciences than anything trend-congealing -- what added value does writing bring? (i'm asking this feeling fairly strongly that e.g. simon reynolds's pitch for the importance of critical rumination is MISSING SOMETHING; which is why he sounds like grandad telling the kids to get off his lawn)

v. the closest thing i think currently exists to frank's dream is the us netroots -- the centre-leftish network of blogs and semi-online mags which are fighting to drag the democratic party out of its stasis and alienating dependency on big money (these taken, by the netroots, to be the same thing): they survive by a mix of reader donation -- there are constant fund-raising drives -- and ads (there's a politically simpatico group of liberal advertisers evolved, selling books, T-shirts, cmapaigns, TV shows etc). The money coming in pays the wages of the people running the sites (including, importantly, the fund-raisers and ad-managers). Daily Kos, which is the main hub for the netroots, gets half a million hits a day, sez kevin drum, with the next in line (atrios? hullaballoo? tpm? yglesias? drum himself?) getting closer to 150,000 pd or less. There's a fight on for who else can join this krew though -- some newcomers regard it as elitist and self-perpetuating, cynically operating a shut-out as its power within official dem circles grows. Atrios argues that if you write well, the readers will come (eventually). In the end, the fuel in this entire zone is liberal self-defence and self-definition, intensified by anti-bush anger -- old-fashioned politics in fact. As per net commonality, most readers probably freeload on the generosity of a few...

vi. if we took ilx etc as the DDR-feedzone, is there something in what DDR offers that's big enough and strong enough to coalesce into a drive (rather than a diversion)?

vi. in particular, can the immanent politics of the music -- i myself wd just say "of music" -- be brought back to the surface in a way that attracts rather than repels? (youtube posting has been a telling phenom in the netroots recently: "the music", cheerfully argued over, is certainly taken as a shared taste and pleasure) (also of note: atrios, i think korrektly, refers to the anti-war netroots as the "dirty fucking hippies", reclaiming as a proud self-labeling the terms of dismissal directed at anti-war commentary by the MSM liberal establishment)

vii. academia -- as frank notes wrt classical music depts -- is hugely on the defensive, as regards old-skool humanities/liberal arts ideology and "pure" research

viii. the early 70s and 80s saw a number potential new cross-disciplinary fields emerge (eg women's studies, af-am studies, queer theory, post-colonial studies, cult stud, media studies, film studies, critical theory...): this coincided (in the uk) with a huge drive to expand tertiary education -- the effects of this are complex, as, since the 80s, there have also been intense budget-tightening and rationalisation drives, in particular as regards budget oversight and measurable success... more students means more money; more departments means (in principle) more students; but also -- realistically -- more modes of potential value that can't be reduced to tabulated figures

ix. the effect of this, as aelxt noted, is a tendency for departments to reward projects which are good for the growth of the department, rather than projects which deliberately hunt in interstitial zones

x. meanwhile the academy's publishing departments are hungry for BOOKS WHICH SELL, ideally BOOKS OF QUALITY WHICH SELL

xi. 9 and 10 are a good example of the contradictory drives of commodification btw, marx-fans

xii. it seems to me that the DDR, to establish itself on-line, needs to be able to pay a wage for AT LEAST three people -- frank, as presiding spirit, provocateur, interlocutor, MC etc; the person structuring the fund-raising systems; the internet systems admin

xiii. (but i actually think it wd need an "editorial board" of more than just frank, to provide dimensionality and/or respite)

xiv. one potential route to funding no one has so far mentioned is SUBSCRIPTION -- the goodwill gathering in advance of THOSE WHO WOULD LIKE TO SEE THIS SUCCEED (and are willing to see it thrash about a bit till it finds its rhythm)

Comments

Netroots

[dickmalone.livejournal.com]

(I got confused as to which post on the Netroots to reply to, so I'm just doing a new one, sorry all.)

I cringed a bit when I saw the netroots comparison, I think because they seem like the opposite of good writing to me, they seem like lazy groupthink polemical-for-the-sake-of-polemics assholefest 2007. They are basically Stereogum, and I don't think we want this to be Stereogum. Very much about self-reinforcing opinions, and no one else gets in.

But, more importantly for the case at hand, they are able to function so well monetarily because people in the US have come to the opinion that the only way to get what you want in politics is to make sure there is a lot of money raised for it, an opinion which has the added advantage of being largely true. In music right now, almost the exact opposite is true--having money just means you have money to lose, and people would seem to prefer that the things they support have as little money as possible. This may be a bit cynical, but it's certainly true that they're not going to give a mag or a band more money just to make sure they have enough money. There needs to be something like a medical crisis or an impending closure in order for that to happen.

So what to rally around? I think dubodee was gesturing at this with #6, but maybe veered away from it. Is there a way of coupling the politics of copyright, which does garner a LOT of support online right now (see boingboing), to musical analysis? Or making it a central part of a site that also did musical analysis, even if it was only connected to the politics by locality? That seems to have the best chance of drawing money in.

Re: Netroots

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

yes, it's true that appreciation of high-quality writing is by no means a key to netroots membership! kos is largely an info dump, dealing w.info not easily available elsewhere (and certainly not gathered into one place) -- a bit liek the way listings used to be the gathering pretext for the inkies

i think the communities gather round the various specific net-pundits i mentioned do so for more writerly-readerly reasons (ie analysis, and the generation of arguments-as-weapons): including critique of cliched arguments and the analysis of what's structurally wrong with other forms of media (how it produces bad politics)

essentially what i'm interested in i guess what how broader communities can motivate and shape themselves -- in that sense i think there is a structure well worth looking at, not least bcz its (self-inflating) success is recent, very much bound into the nature of the available technology, and a harbinger of changes in the funding of extant media

as to the last bit, the material technicalia of producing music (and the whole question of IP generally) is something that ought to be built somewhere into music analysis from the off, so i am VERY keen to see if a structure could be fashioned like this, where the relationship was just a click away and updates in the central info-spine generated discussion and analysis

(i TOTALLY take the point abt political assholery: but frank's central commitment is that eg thoughtful new yorkerish belle lettrism, by cutting itself off structurally from schoolyard jerkishness a la meltzer, is doing itself a disservice as regards CONTENT, and the style suffers too -- so i think firewalls are in principle ruled out -- there's a fair variation in the content-quality of the comments threads to the pundit-sites) (some are routinely so primitive i don't even bother; others have regulars who i think are worth reading and create zones of genuine debate)

Re: Netroots

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

kos is largely an info dump -- i mean the bit that isn't, as you say, merely a space for self-reinforcing opinions (to be fair, such spaces are of course what political movements are by their nature and purpose)

Re: Netroots

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

also: (vi) is my under-explored get-out clause, since i guess i am trying to get "the immanent politics of music" to manifest er "unrepellently", at the some time as invoking -- cf youtubes games on atrios -- something even less clearly defined, viz the er "immanent music of politics"

transgressing notions of the ordinal

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

haha oops i mean the SECOND vi, dickmalone means the first!!

Re: Netroots

[dickmalone.livejournal.com]

Oh, OK, so you're saying that in the context of politics, music can be a neutral field for debate, so if these larger issues are there, we might be able to discuss art in less-fraught/ideological terms than we currently do, which is sort of the goal. Maybe? I guess I don't understand what you mean by "get-out clause."

Re: Netroots

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

haha i meant my "get-out-of-jail-free card" card i think -- ie in ref.yr point (abt assholism) i wz saying IF we could bring to the fore the "immanent politics" of music, keeping it political yet also non-repellent, then we would bring something of (huge?) value to discourse generally (along w.good writing etc etc) (and including POLITICAL discourse)

it's certainly not that music is a neutral field for debate -- more that music's lines and divisions (by large but largely unconscious social choice?) gather communities-of-passion in a difft way to how politics works? but i think that i think this bcz i am aware that music has become a meeting ground for feelings and affinities that get left out of the structures which form round politics and round what frank's defining as standard-issue intellectual activity

unfortunately i suspect the "underpants-gnome phase 2" stage of this argument is the definition of "immanent politics of music", which i really ught to go away and worry at a little!

Re: Netroots

[dickmalone.livejournal.com]

Well I think the netroots sites put up their own, probably stronger, firewalls. If there's argument it never seems to be internal argument, it's always against outside sources, and going against certain received opinions (which, even worse, seem to be received via catchphrase) gets you shouted down. I guess it's better (or used to be, I haven't been in years) at Yglesias' site, but the others, shudder. I see what you're saying about it being a way to build up a strong reader-writer relationship, but I think they've done it by taking these absolutist positions that would be death to artistic discourse, let alone the kind of exploratory thing Frank's talking about. They also seem to be telling people something they feel they're not getting from the mainstream media, so the only way to get a Atrios-style musicsite would involve taking on the kind of opinions that seem to crop up in opposition to say PF's year-end lists which include hip-hop and major-label artists and like that. Strongly you-know-what-ist. I'm on the fence as to whether or not pop-tim-ism is really the consensus among critics, but whenever it ventures into the outside world it's met largely with confusion, which I don't think was really the case with the netroots' opinions. Also, resistence to authority whereas in music there's no clear authority right now etc.

Anyway, you're certainly right about the model and it's not necessarily a bad one, I guess I just disagree that it's applicable to art right now. Of course, the netroots grew up along with the emergence of a lot of books making similar arguments (Franken, Chomsky, others I am forgetting); maybe if fully-formed examples of DDR-style rhetoric started making it into public discourse via books, these sorts of things could spring up. Publish or perish!

Re: Netroots

[koganbot]

(A) Mark was bringing in netroots as a model for making money, not a model for how to conduct discourse (it was in his response to my asking whether netroots was any good that we started talking about the value of its discourse). But as you point out, netroots gathers money from people who share (or think they share) common goals and assumptions; whereas a department of dilettante research approach to things would be more like: "I wonder how evangelical Christian home-schoolers respond to Aly & A.J.'s 'Not This Year,' in which Aly & A.J. upbraid themselves for their own hypocrisy at pretending to Xmas cheer when they don't feel it? Well, let's find some evangelical Christian home-schoolers and bring them into the department. And once they're in, I can find out what they think about Roger Williams (Protestant theologian who was the first to formulate the principles of separation of church and state but did so on the basis of theological ideas that actually might make sense to some of the evangelical Christians, even if the evangelicals think differently on the issue of church and state. And while we're at it, I might want someone who really knows his Roger Williams, since I was basically distorting his work for my own purposes when using his story as I (mis)understood it to formulate my concept of Superwords." One of my reasons for using the word "dilettante" is that everyone would get to talk equally, as it were, about Williams or evangelical Christianity, etc., even if some of us are fundamentally ignorant and would be talking out our asses. But I'd want someone there who wasn't talking out his ass on those subjects, as well. And he would have the opportunity of talking out his ass on the subjects I knew well.

(B) Therefore, I don't think I'd want the "department" to have a specifically musical focus. Otherwise it's just like saying to the evangelical Christian and to the Williams scholar, "Well, you're in the discussion as long as you address my interests, but as soon as you put the focus on your own and start following your own questions, you're out of here."

Re: Netroots

[dickmalone.livejournal.com]

Just from my PBS watching, ironically enough, I know there are a few organizations that fund specifically cross- enterprises. There's one that's like "to foster greater understanding of religion" and another that I think looks to promote depicitions/considerations of science outside science itself, i.e. I know they've funded a few movies with science themes. So, I dunno, possibilities.