History is Bunk

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

I have a new Pitchfork column up - if it seems like ages that's because it's been ages! (not their fault or mine - standard skip week plus festival reports pushing things back).

This one is about pop, history, and what a history of pop should or shouldn't include (hint: no actual music).

http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/article/feature/142636-column-poptimist-17

It was born out of listening a lot to the new Girl Talk album, though as is the way of these things Girl Talk then vanished from the piece completely while I was writing it.

Comments

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

the dub thing required editable electronic recording audiotape as a medium, as opposed to analogue groove-recording (but obviously these both fall under "recording", so it doesn't make you wrong)

and "microphone" has to include the whole technics of electronic amplification, not all of which works from translation of sound-pressure waves into electrical impulses (a guitar pick-up is strictly speaking a bit different from a microphone) (which is why you can't usefully sing into it)

with those provisos i think you're right -- digitisation has allowed a reach of vertical and horizontal integration of information that probably does have qualitative effects, but i think they're still all second-order

stockhausen had an interestingly dotty -- and unprovable -- theory about the time-lengths we favour as listeners, (hich i think he called temporal octaves): i should look it up

other books i should possibly finish: my history of music and technology :(

[koganbot]

The way I'm loosely defining "recombinant dub" is "you scoop out the front and center of the music and insert anything else you want without necessarily reestablishing a center." I assume one could do such "scooping" - and that some Jamaicans actually did it in the '50s - simply by lifting up the needle or turning off a switch while making some other sounds in some other way. I wouldn't be surprised if there were other equivalents of getting rid of the center in other musics I know less about, jazz and "serious," for instance, and probably some equivalents in the visual arts. You'd know this a lot better than I.

I think the distinction I'm making is "what would have been done anyway" (even if not so easily) versus "stuff you hadn't even realized you wanted to do" or the doing of which was generally considered subordinate to more central stuff. I might have to give some thought about what I think it is that falls into the category "stuff you hadn't realized you wanted to do" that microphones and sound recording opened up. Musical equivalents to the close-up in the narrative film, for instance, or the ability to shift scenes.