DJ Shadow speaks to the camera as he is filmed in the record-filled basement he describes as his âlittle nirvanaâ:
Itâs just an incredible archive of music culture and thereâs the promise in these stacks of finding something that youâre going to use. In fact, most of my first album was built off records pulled from here. So, it has a Karmic element you know. I was meant to find this on top, or I was meant to pull this out âcos it works so well with this, so itâs got a lot of meaning for me personally. Me and my buddy Stan that I used to dig with, he was a graffiti writer, we used to come here looking for things like you know, âIncredible Bongo Bandâ and stuff. Every now and then weâd buy things and Ed or Mark or someone would say, âoh yeah we got a tonne of these in the basementâ, or you know, âyou should see the basement if you think this is somethingâ. So, after five years of hearing this, I just decided to just ask, can I just take a look? And we came down here and I couldnât believe that there was still something like this. A cache this large and the fact that it is relatively untouched. (DJ Shadow in Pray, Blondheim, & Meza, 2003)
The wonder is in the potential treasure and the agentive possibilities within and of the collection. He is âexcavatingâ and âminingâ a relatively untouched resource to find hidden beats. He believes in the power of objects. He didnât select records by accidentâhe was directed to the ones he âwas meant to pull outâ by the records themselves. His words perfectly encapsulate the core concerns of this book (Track 1).1 This book is about the social life of sound. It is about archiving and curating music culture. It is about digging for records and making beats. It is about renewing the sounds and, frequently, the agency and personhood of artists who recorded those sounds years earlier. It is about the agency or, to use Shadowâs words, âthe Karmic influenceâ of old records, to draw people to them, and reciprocally, the agency people exert on music through reissuing records and sampling. It is about the way sounds âworkâ with other sounds. It is about the tensions between the art of renewing sounds and the impacts of law, economics, (sub)culture, ethics, and technology upon that art. In short, this book approaches such musical practices with the intent of revealing the social life of recorded sounds in order to better understand the relationships, which shape music and the people who make it.
In recent years, the emergence of cultures and practices of music-making associated with new music-making technologies has generated controversy and conflict, being both variously embraced and vilified. Just as some are determined to explore the possibilities that these technologies afford for the reuse and recirculation of music, others have been determined to regulate such practices through aggressive assertions of ownership over sounds. Central to these controversies is a deeper question concerning the nature of musical sounds and their relationship to the people who produce and work with them.
The US Copyright Act of 1976 protects âoriginal works of authorshipâ, where authorship is the capturing of sound in a tangible medium and thus effectively fixes it in time (Schumacher, 1995, p. 254). The opening excerpt from DJ Shadow reflects the practices which have led to the increasing tensions between law and music-making and which destabilise this legally âfixedâ musicânamely, the collection of records with the intention of sampling from these records in order to create new musical works. DJ Shadow âentroducesâ and reappears throughout the stories in this book. He embodies the culture that has provoked regulatory reform and court challenges, yet which has also reinvigorated and renewed older music styles, and frequently, the careers of the original musicians, showing us one way in which the social lives of music and people are interlinked.
In order to explore this issue, this book develops a new conceptual framework for thinking about the social lives of musical sounds. Drawing on concepts from material culture studies and feminist philosophy, the book critiques traditional conceptions of musical sounds as the property of a possessive individual and offers an approach that seeks to better appreciate the complex relationships between sounds and people. This framework is applied and further developed across a series of case studies, which take an ethnographic approach to following the eventful biographies of selected pieces of music. These ethnographies trace the ways in which legal, ethical, economic, and cultural concerns about the ownership of music are navigated in the practices of people who sample, collect, and reissue music. In tracing how these practitioners work with musical sounds, the research also uncovers the ways in which musical sounds work on those practitioners. In the process, these sounds develop a social life of their own and become âmultibiographicalâ, drawing together a range of actors and distributing their personhood and agency across space and time.
Claiming that sound, or music, is social requires elaboration. Readers may guess that the inspiration for this idea was the classic work by Appadurai (1986) and Kopytoff (1986), whereby they espoused that things have a social life and biographies. Things can be social if, in the circuits of exchangeâwhether gifted, stolen, or commoditisedâthey accrue value, and that construction of value is political. And by focusing on things or objects being mobilised, rather than the function of exchange itself, we can reveal more about these social lives and their political consequences. To quote Appadurai directly, âThis argument, âŚ, justifies the conceit that commodities, like persons, have social livesâ (1986, p. 3). I ask readers of this book to also entertain the idea that things, and in particular music, can have social lives.
The ability of contemporary music-making technologies and practices to release and repurpose âfixedâ sounds necessitates a re-evaluation of sounds and music from being the property of select individuals or groups to being a thing with its own social life and biography. From this perspective, sounds have multiple identities, which change depending on context and spatio-temporal positionâmuch like the ways in which people negotiate different social contexts. Soundsâ changeability suggests that movement in context, ownerships, objecthood, and subjecthood can be traced. I use biographical methods to pursue these movements and demonstrate that despite legal and subcultural constraints, sounds are subversive and do not always act as they supposedly should. By chasing sounds as they rebel against their fixity, I not only critique Western ideologies of unity, wholeness, property, and personhood, the relevance of which will be iterated throughout this work, but also demonstrate how both people and sounds are already currently subverting these restraints on creative possibility despite their powerful influence.
Critiquing Western personhood and property is necessary to give voice to other subjectivities and the many possibilities of being, as feminists have long recognised. In the process, I critique Western notions of property from a cultural lens. Framing the issue through such a lens is necessary in order to understand the ideological foundations of systems that demarcate the boundary between people and things. And by understanding the origins of these boundaries, the possibilities of transgressing them become more visible.
By acknowledging the agency and mobility of sounds, we must consider an idea of ownership that moves beyond exclusive possession through control to an identity of sound that exists through connection and relation. Emphasising connection rather than control accommodates multiple authorships and subjectivities, something that is necessary if the tensions between music renewal and property regimes are to be resolved. By implication, this provides greater insight into issues of contested ownership and the way that property structures divide subject from object and separate the wider network of relationships that go into producing music. To achieve this sound will be viewed both as an object and as a subject. Before we continue our attempts to understand the socialising of, and with, sound, it is necessary to sketch out key definitions and terms which reappear throughout, and to outline the following chapters.
Defining Sound
At this point it is relevant to define the sound object as it is used in this book. What exactly is the sound object referred to and what does this mean for doing a biography of sound? Is the sound object music? The âsound objectâ is defined as any original performance that has been produced, recorded, distributed, and consumed over a variety of media, and reissued, sampled, and sometimes appropriated within other music and media pieces. It can be a copy of the original performance, for example, a cover version, or it can be a composite part of it, such as a sample. The various routes, changing materiality, and media through which sound travels, are experienced and influence other uses of itself, can be traced and culminate to form the biography and social life of the original sound. By the bookâs conclusion, having demonstrated the agency of sound, I remove âobjectâ and refer only to sound. The process of moving from sound object to sound relies on two key concepts: understanding sound as material culture, and object biographies.
Sound as Material Culture
The notion that sound is material is central to my argument and requires further elaboration. This is particularly pertinent if we are to regard people and things as mutually dependent and interdependent because âwe need to show how the things that people make, make peopleâ (Miller, 2005, p. 38). I am conscious that my discussion on the materialisation of sound might give the impression that I view âmusic as an object to be analysed âin relationâ to other thingsâ, something less promising than writings which conceive of âmusic as a medium through which social life is made and can be knownâ (Smith, 2000, p. 617). However, a focus on materiality is an accessible way of understanding the intangibility of music (Bødker, 2004, p. 5), and understanding soundâs immateriality and consequent intangibility is important. The challenge of understanding sound because of its intangibility is expressed in the common reluctance to attribute value to music outside of its fixation in concrete, social forms and the preoccupation with the way music is mediated (Attali, 1985; Hennion, 1993; Straw, 2002).
Sounds are materialised through the process of objectification. Identity is understood throug...