By the time Borders Books closed their four hundred remaining stores in 2011, the bookstore seemed to be going the record store route — and the age of digital reading and listening was officially in full swing. But after the completion of The End of American Literature in 2017, I began to notice that the transition from print to digital had lost some of its momentum. So as I continued to write and research the transitions in the book industry and the philosophy of the book that underpins much of that discussion, I became interested in exploring parallel transitions in the record industry and the underlying philosophy of the record.
Vinyl Theory is the result of these explorations—though its central theses may be surprising to readers unfamiliar with the philosophy of recording and the political economy of music as defined by critical theory. The first chapter, "Late Capitalism on Vinyl," argues that we can see the decline and resurgence of vinyl over the course of the past twenty-five years as evidence of the resilience of neoliberalism. The overall aim of the chapter is to lay the groundwork for the biopolitics of twentieth-century music.
As we shall see, Adorno's reflections on the phonographic record cover a wide range of topics, including the listening habits of those who play records, the general character of the music put on vinyl, and the record as a product of the culture industry. One of the things I discovered while writing this chapter is that the authenticity issues I had with that KISS concert I saw in junior high have a long history in recorded music.
CHAPTER ONE
They are examples of how music and life can be considered as common and are illustrative of the extreme power of music over life. This particular politics is more attuned to the late seventies and early eighties biopolitics of Michel Foucault than to the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in the same period. The focus on the application of capital punishment is shifted from emphasizing the "magnitude of the crime".
He speaks of the body in terms of its ability to influence and be influenced. Attali's work thus points to a radical change in the biopolitics of music that took place with the advent of the gramophone. According to Attali, “The first iteration of all was that of the medium of exchange in the form of money.
Attali's comments here on the characteristics of the post-rehearsal world regarding music are tentative. Nietzsche's fear of the deadly effect of Wagner's music becomes the fear of all music under late capitalism.
CHAPTER TWO
For Adorno, the invention of the gramophone paved the way for the commodification of music through the gramophone record. Adorno's writing on the subject of the phonograph focused mainly on the negative aspects of music's adaptation to reproduction. To be sure, Adorno's most important philosophical reflections on the gramophone were completed in the era of the 78 rpm short-playing record and the non-electric spring-driven gramophone.
At the same time, he also launched an attack on the reactionary forces in the music world and expanded the magazine's scope to also include "light music" and kitsch. Adorno also recognized in this early work that considerations of the technologies of music cannot be neglected in the study of music. Although the technology of the medium had changed over time, the motifs he related to the phonograph in 1927 (and then again a few years later) remain unchanged in 1965.
The gramophone's technology is limited in its ability to perform the mirroring function. These mechanical limitations negatively affect both the gramophone's relevance and its ability to perform the mirroring function on a large scale. Thus, in the final analysis of the young Adorno, the "turntable of the talking machines is comparable to the potter's wheel".
In short, each of these six motifs are the heart of the young composer's reflections on the gramophone. The essay, "Die Form der Schallplatte," translated as "The Form of the Phonographic Record," was. It is here that Adorno establishes the role of modernism and modernization in the development of phonographic recording.
For Adorno, the record is one of the first of the technological artistic inventions of modernity. With the advent of the "writing" of the phonographic record comes Adorno's "hope that. Adorno's modernist perceptions of the gramophone record were formed relatively early in his life and his life.
CHAPTER THREE
Moreover, the line between knowledge of the past and its absence is largely marked by the ability to record sound. Nevertheless, it is a primary means of sound control and, if used correctly, a means of power, especially in the first half of the twentieth century. The record destroys the 'now' of live performance and, in a way, its 'here'.
The back of the album has the same word but much smaller in the lower quarter. Like the mono version, the back of the album has the same wording, but much smaller in the lower quarter. This two track recording was made at Studio A of Compaigne [sic] Phonographique Francaise, Paris, France.
So what is the real purpose of the information on the left back half of this album jacket. The diners listen with rapt attention, craning their necks to catch a glimpse of the singer. Another Victor performance equivalent to the Orthophonic instrument is the new Orthophonic Victor Record.
When Adorno wrote his first analysis of the phonographic record in 1927, he was also caught up in the mechanistic dimensions of the sound recording. As Sterne notes, the application of the term fidelity to sound was contemporaneous with the invention of the phonograph. It is only in the fourth stage, post-capitalism, where Attali finds any relief from the musical-social relations associated with the forgetting, believing and silence of the earlier stages.
Although sound control is not the theme of the film, it plays an important role in it. Radio Raheem turns off his music at the sight of the bat and continues with his order,. The changing volume levels of the song are dictated by the power struggle he faces at different points in the film.
The effect of "Fight the Power" in the film is not a passive response, but quite the opposite: everyone who hears the music performed live responds to it. He observes and comments on events and departures in the neighborhood from his control room.
CHAPTER FOUR
To say that the Who rejected the commercial aspects of the 1960s music industry is only partially true. It is also the case that aspects of the entertainment industry of the time rejected them. This is further complicated in the case of the Who because their first recording contract was a bad one.
Side one of the album mixes advertisements and jingles with songs and plays like an ongoing radio show. Many, too, are disappointed that the ads and jingles don't go through the entire second side of the album. No doubt these three songs set the stage for an escape from the corporate sound machine and rabid commercialization that is part of the music industry.
Those who are ahead of everyone!”27 However, Tommy was not a meta-musical critic of the music industry. It should be clear from my discussion of The Who Sell Out that this particular album offers a strange, albeit powerful, vision of selling out. But just as the Who did not act alone in their critique of the music industry, neither did Derrida act in relation to the philosophy industry.
But as we see in the case of the Who album and Derrida's early deconstruction, creating new identities with integrity does not simply mean rejecting musical and philosophical roots. The Death (or Possible Survival) of the Independent Record Store (2008; dir. Brendan Toller), From 1998 to 2008, over three thousand independent record stores closed in the United States. Blomster (1949; New York: The Seabury Press, 1973), with Stravinsky at one end of the spectrum and Schoenberg at the other.
Jacques Lacan, “The Stage of the Mirror as the Formation of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience,” in Écrits: A Selection, trans. One of the central questions of Plato's Theaetetus is whether knowledge is justified true belief. The image is of the first printing of We're Only in It for the Money from 1968 with the original insert.
For an excellent account of Frank Zappa's critique of the music industry, see Watson, Frank Zappa. As defined by some of the most popular entries for "selling" in the Urban Dictionary.
