[First, I need to apologize for the poor formatting in this post–I’m on vacation and working from an old iPad, which is doing wonky things to the WordPress interface.]

I’ve been chewing on some thoughts about this summer’s big musical releases–Jay Z’s Magna Carta Holy Grail (MCHG), Kanye’s Yeezus, and Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines” (and somewhat relatedly, Miley Cyrus’s “We Can’t Stop”). All of these records and singles used technology and social media in new-ish ways (or rather, ways relatively new to major-label releases and big hit records) to distribute, market, and generate buzz about the work. MCHG was released first as what Chris Richards calls “a data collection exercise disguised as a smartphone app,” and Yeezus’s “New Slaves” was debuted at guerilla listening parties across the globe, accessible via interactive map on his website (kanyewest.com now features an different interactive media object, the video for “Black Skinheads”). In an attempt to draw significant mainstream attention to mid-career artists who either never had or lost that sort of visibility, Thicke and Cyrus made sexist and/or racist videos to generate buzz on teh interwebs. (What’s new here is that sex and racial non-whiteness are no longer inherently outrageous and offensive to mainstream (white) taste–in post-feminist, post-racial America, that level of offense is reserved for certain types of misogyny and racism performed by people who supposedly ought to know better. This is a really interesting line of inquiry, but not, ultimately, the one I want to follow in this post.)

Sasha Frere-Jones has a provocative new piece about Jay and Ye’s new albums up at The New Yorker, so that spurred me to make my questions about these two albums a bit more choate. Frere-Jones’s article itself deserves careful analysis and discussion, and not only because he compares his disappointment with Jay Z’s politics and performance to his disappointment with the George Zimmerman verdict. (I’m happy to have that discussion in the comments here; I hope to have something up on my personal blog in the next week.) Here, however, I want to follow Frere-Jones’s general strategy of thinking about the broader social implications of MCHG. 

Most early reviews of the album focused on its marketing and format innovations. A week before the album was officially released as such, Samsung made a million copies of the album available via an Android app. So, before it was even an album, MCHG was a smartphone app…an app that wasn’t just music playback, or even an interactive musical/visual/textual/gamified experience, but an app that tracked and logged massive amounts of user data.

Tom Ewing, a very smart music writer who also knows more than a thing or two about big data, has a particularly nuanced read of the MCHG/Samsung deal. The album release was a way for Samsung to “do something social,” i.e., to do a social media branding/sponsorship campaign. While most critics focus on the data-collection part of the project, Ewing re-centers the analysis to focus on the social part of it. “If you do something social these days,” he argues, “it’s easier to collect a ton of data than not.” Here, Ewing implies that that the data collection was a side-effect, or at least a second-order function subordinate to the app’s primary intent, which was to be “social.”

Why is music, a hip hop album, the means for a tech company that makes the devices we all access social media on, to “do something social”? What specific social relations does this app facilitate? Or, what concept or structure of sociality does the app assume?

These are all open questions (which I hope we can discuss below in the comments). I have what I think is a partial answer, but I’m also quite certain that this is just the tip of the iceberg.

Cultural theorists have used the concept of commodity fetishism to explain the social function(s) of commercial music. When music is a commodity (that is, an object valued purely for its monetary or “exchange” value, its value vis-a-vis other commodities), it functions, socially, as a fetishized object. Fetish objects are replacements or substitutes for some other thing, which is usually absent, mythical, or otherwise “unreal.” Fetishized commodities are substitutes for social relations–or, in more classically Marxist terms, relations among commodities substitue for relations among people. For example, the brands one wears or doesn’t wear can signal social class, race, ethnicity, subcultural affiliation, regional affiliation, and other markers of social identity.

But MCHG isn’t a commodity–or rather, when formatted as a smartphone app, the musical work MCHG isn’t a commodity, even though it is also formatted as a traditional album that is sold, for example, on iTunes. When music is shared data, it is not a substitute for social relations, but instead a measure or index of the quality of social interaction. Instead of being the medium through which we transact social relations (or, inded, the message), music is the “market index” that lets us take the temperature of already-existing social relations. Social relations aren’t about exchange (as, for example, in social contract theory: I trade some freedom for some security), but about momentum or intensity. In its app form, MCHG is not only or primarily the material substrate for our social relations, it is what reveals them to us—it collects our data-sociality for our data-selves.

As a datafied performance index, MCHG collapses the distinction between records and record charts–this record functions like record charts themselves. Record charts express the intensity or momentum of a record’s saturation in society. According to French economist and cultural theorist Jacques Attali, charts (like Billboard’s Hot 100) present records’ value as both (a) stockpiled consumption-time—the number of “listens,” and (b) stockpiled market activity. With respect to (a), because charts measure radio plays, internet streams, YouTube plays, and other “free” audio transactions, record charts are particularly clear examples of the commodity’s obsolescence, both as an object and as a medium for market transactions. With respect to (b), Attali thinks record charts aren’t that different from the DOW, CAC 40, or FTSE: “the hit parade system advertises the fact that …an object’s value is a function of the intensity of the financial pressures of the new titles waiting to enter circulation,” which makes charts “the public display of the velocity of exchange” (Noise 107; emphasis mine). Intensity and velocity measure quantities in time; they are statistical approximation of how much of X in given time window Y (e.g., how many listens per week).[2] Value doesn’t express the useful qualities or compare quantities, but measures the intensity and velocity of the transaction. That is why “hit parades…play a central role in this new type of political economy” (Noise 170) and exemplify a general shift in the production and conception of value. In Attali’s view, record charts already in the mid 1970s explicitly worked like then-contemporary neoliberal economists wanted and hoped society would work: they measure the intensity of investment in stockpiled human capital.

So ultimately what I’m arguing is that MCHG, especially in its app format, is a really neoliberal record. It facilitates the kinds of social relations and subjectivities that neoliberalism idealizes: a quantified data-self who measures its human capital in financialized terms (investment, intensity, velocity, etc.), social life as a competitive, deregulated market, and so on. In this light, Jay Z’s claim that his presence is itself charity makes a lot of sense: if we’re all just stockpiles of human capital, then Jay’s presence is itself a donation of the only value that matters. This reading of MCHG also helps explain why, as Britteny Cooper argues in Salon, Jay Z needs a better race politics. Cooper rightly identifies Jay’s “presentism” as a contributing cause of his worldview, a worldview in which presence is charity and black critique is passé and obsolete. If we follow Attali’s analysis of neoliberal political economy, time isn’t something that moves forward or backward (future progress, respect for elders’ struggles), but something that exists solely to be stockpiled and, perhaps, charitably donated. When we think about the political implications of MCHG’s format, we need to consider what it does, socially. Moreover, when we discuss the social implications of MCHG, we need to talk about its form and format, not just its lyrical content.