This is not Art.

Is there a point in speaking about original, fake or authentic when it comes to music these days? Before you roll your eyes and look for the exit button, you might want to read this post. It led me to realise that some debates which were hot when postmodernism came out of the oven are still relevant. A good take on this matter is Ted Cohen’s reflections on the notorious debate about art:

Although I have participated in discussions of what are is, I have always been in a negative position, arguing that someone’s attempt to say what art is fails, and until recently it did not seem to me that I had anything to say about what art is. And that was because, although I could think of reasons for denying what someone says art is, I could think of no way to begin thinking about what art seems (at least to me) to be. Now I have begun to find a way, and I am finding it by trying to understand why I (or anyone, for that matter) would ever seriously care to assert or deny that something is art. (Cohen, 1998: 154).

This blog post describes the art of music spammers who operate within the Echonest platform. Throughout the article you will have a tour, inviting you to walk the line that marks undesired and unwanted musical aesthetic and practice. According to the post, these musical spammers are using different methods for various reasons and are portrayed as hazards to the system. For example, they make a ‘fake’ piece of a hit song that hasn’t been officially released, they change names of various songs, they repeat the same few hundred songs in various combinations, or create “a clone of a song based around a single big riff which gets that big riff completely wrong”. These musical outlaws are then added to a ban list which will consequently mean that they will not receive recommendations from Echonest clients’ services, or in their apps. The main reasons they are banned is that they “could potentially slow or confuse our system; if it were music we needed to know about, that would mean it was time for some clever engineering to solve the problem — which we are perfectly willing to do when the situation calls for it — but for spam, why even bother? We leave most of them out”.

These allegations sound like all the previous accusations made towards spammers, for example Gy¨ongyi and Garcia-Molina argue that the definition of spam is ”any deliberate human action that is meant to trigger an unjustifiably favorable relevance or importance for some web page, considering the page’s true value” (Gy¨ongyi and Garcia-Molina, 2005: 2). Although the blog post indicates that “[t]his isn’t a matter of taste (so Coldplay and Raffi are in no danger). It’s because those banned artists are spammers”, it seems to me that it is very much about what constitutes ‘proper’ music and a ‘correct’ musical practice.

Back in the 1980s, when hip hop and electronic music started to bubble and take shape in accordance with postmodernism aesthetic sensibilities of the collage and remix, many musical purists claimed (some still do) that it’s not music at all but just a copy and paste of original music. Hey, even “Bill Cosby publicly criticised young people in the hip hop culture for their use of Ebonics instead of edited American English” (Price, 2005: 56). Hip Hop also brought to the forefront other forms of art such as graffiti which were initially banned (some still are), considered as a crime, and plainly bad style before they were sold as legitimate artefacts for $600,000. In both of the art forms we see similar strategies where art is stretching the boundaries of the appropriate place, shape and essence it should be delivered.

The segregation instigated by Echonest also puts me of the examples Sarah Thornton provides in her famous book Club Cultures: Music, Media and Subcultural Capital about how specific songs (The Beatles – A Day in the Life – 1967, Donna Summer – Love to Love You Baby – 1976, The Sex Pistols – God Save The Queen – 1977, Frankie Goes to Hollywood – Relax – 1984), which were prohibited from the BBC radio and received huge success because they were glorified as underground. The difference though is the fact that all these artists were identified, marked and framed as artists to begin with, and therefore the disappearance of their music was more noticeable and transformed into a promotional tool. But what happens when you are tagged as ‘non-artist’ or spam from the beginning?

Spam takes us to a rabbit hole trip to the binary realm of modernism where one must decide if a form of information, in this case a musical piece, is spam or not. This coalesces with the Internet design that shoves everything “in the language of discrete, continuous, and binary attributes (alive=1, dead=0)” (Fuller, and Goffey, 2012: 94). So who has the authority to determine what is ‘proper’ and ‘right’ music? Spammers are usually perceived as pranksters, tricksters and cheaters, but what if this practice could actually be considered as a form of art? In a way, both hip hop and electronic music have already crafted a form of art around reconfiguring/editing/remixing/shuffling by creating a different sort of musical amalgamation from pre-existing artefacts. So how do we distinguish between musical artefacts and what the blog posts terms as: not quality, not authentic and just plain awful? Would the creation of my friend Mise en Scene be considered as music or noise? Are we bound to be trapped in a black and white movie that doesn’t realises that there are 50 shades of grey (even if you think it’s awful), and maybe even some colour? As Finn Brunton argues in his book about spam:

[I]t is at once an exploit in the system, a specialized form of speech, and a way of acting online and being with others. It acts as a provocation to social definition and line drawing—to self-reflexivity and communal utterance. It forces the question: what, precisely, are we doing here that spam is not, such that we need to restrain and punish it? (Brunton, 2013: 14).

But there are other ways of spamming which deliberately misuses the communication channel. I have written before about the way artists buy their own music on Beatport in order to be ranked higher among the top selling artists, and also artists who tampered with the Top 100 Dj’s competition using their big families, Eastern geeks and bots. Those malicious interventions were made by those who are perceived as legitimate artists, who wanted to trick the system and receive more visibility which will consequently benefit their career. But the privileged position of the owners of various communication platforms also grants them the power to determine what they see as the true nature of a specific form of information. As Jean-Francois Lyotard argued “[t]he decision makers, however, attempt to manage these clouds of sociality according to input/output matrices, following a logic which implies that their elements are commensurable and that the whole is determinable… the legitimation of that power is based on its optimizing the system’s performance – efficiency” (Lyotard, 1994: 27).

Since music is a form of art, there might be a stronger tendency to be concerned from this process of tagging the right from the wrong. However, this incident, and the concept of spam in general, is an opportunity to question the way in which different institutions and platforms, around us categorize the information we are exposed to, the meta-narratives if you like, and invite us to challenge our approach towards junk/waste/noise. Reality is much more complex than rigid binary classification and coding as a form of language is a clear indication of the gaps of representation and the limits of computer language. As they say ‘one man’s waste is another man’s treasure’.

Elinor Carmi (@pinkeee_) is a PhD candidate at Goldsmiths College, writer, journalist, radio broadcaster and an electronic music addict. She blogs here.

 

Bibliography

Brunton, F. (2013). Spam: A Shadow History of the Internet (Infrastructures). MIT Press.

Cohen, T. 1998: “High and Low: Thinking about High and Low Art”, in: Korsmeyer, C. (ed.), Aesthetics, The Big Questions, Maldon, MA: Blackwell, pp. 171-177.

Fuller, M. & Goffey, A. (2012). Evil Media. MIT Press.

Gyongyi, Z., & Garcia-Molina, H. (2005). Web spam taxonomy. In First international workshop on adversarial information retrieval on the web (AIRWeb 2005).

Lyotard, J. F. (1994). The postmodern condition Jean-Francois Lyotard. The Postmodern Turn: New Perspectives on Social Theory.

Price Jr, R. J. (2005). Hegemony, Hope, and the Harlem Renaissance: Taking Hip Hop Culture Seriously. Convergence38(2), 55-64.

Thornton, S. (1996). Club cultures: Music, media, and subcultural capital. Wesleyan.

plastic-surgery

Following Evgeny Morozov’s interesting article on Silicon Valley’s “pervasive and dangerous ideology” of fixing our reality with a simple click in order to perfect it (based on his upcoming book To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism), I could not help but wonder if this is a ‘new’ phenomenon after all?

Morozov’s notorious criticism towards the utopic discourse which hails from the ‘sunny side up’ area is accurate and sharp enough to expose how fake this silicon really is. He introduces the concept of solutionism which according to him is “an intellectual pathology that recognizes problems as problems based on just one criterion: whether they are ‘solvable’ with a nice and clean technological solution at our disposal”. The argument Morozov presents indicates that this is a relatively new phenomenon which has been made possible by technological innovations and applications, such as Google Glasses and even new start-ups that promise to make people Superhuman.

Google Glasses augmented reality

It seems to me that that the overemphasis on ‘new’ technological applications shifts and blurs the way in which various ideas have such prominence in our everyday lives, including surveillance, monitoring and Morozov’s solutionism. Women, for example, and especially women’s bodies, have been subjected to observation, regulation and perfection technologies for the past few centuries, in what Foucault would broadly call biopolitics (Foucault, 2007, 2008). This concept signified the transition from societies of discipline to societies of control, where the human body was the focus of technologies of power and knowledge which was portrayed in the concept of the normative ideal. The female body is subjected to these technologies, while performing ‘self-management’ which includes various strategies to adjust according to a norm, usually directed by a specific motif. However, the norm in this case is much more ideal than realistic; almost every female representation on media is modified to be thinner, taller, have perfect skin (preferably white) and no wrinkles through the constant refining/editing/patching of Photoshop (in order to become “Superhuman”). Photoshop (first appeared on the market in 1989) can be seen as the easy tool that allows solving the problem of what has been gradually understood to be a deviation from the norm, an anomaly.

Photoshop magic

The ‘normal’ female body in Western society is an imaginary and perfect – and mostly impossible to reach – fantasy. Luckily, there are many technologies besides Photoshop (because we need to solve the problems off screen as well) offered to women in order to solve their imperfection such as plastic surgery, whitening of the teeth or face, and even the simplest thing such as putting on makeup. In fact, it is almost impossible to find any woman who is not young, pretty, thin, white and without wrinkles in any media (mostly popular culture) representation (as was already eloquently elaborated by Naomi Wolf in The Beauty Myth How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women 1991). In that respect, how are “Silicon Valley’s technophilic gurus and futurists” any different from producers, copy-writers, label managers and literally anybody from the entertainment industry (Film, TV, Magazines, Music, to name a few)? Angela McRobbie has answered this quite accurately, that in fact “The media has become the key site for defining codes of sexual conduct. It casts judgement and establishes the rules of play” (McRobbie, 2004: 258). McRobbie discusses the movie Bridget Jones’s Diary as an example of yet another popular representation of this self-manageable female body:

Bridget portrays the whole spectrum of attributes associated with the self-monitoring subject; she confides in her friends, she keeps a diary, she endlessly reflects on her fluctuating weight, noting her calorie intake, she plans, plots and has projects…These popular texts normalise post-feminist gender anxieties so as to re-regulate young women by means of the language of personal choice (McRobbie, 2004: 261).

Bridget Jones work out!

An interesting case study in this respect is the massive amount of criticism that the TV series Girls (HBO) has received, since it was one of the first times on screen that a female heroine, who was not skinny and pretty, received massive success. It was also one of the rare times on screen that real, intimate, humiliating and awkward experiences of sex were shown (much more grim than what the gitzy Sex and the City tried to exhibit). This was especially refreshing since according to Hollywood and the porn industry (which is synonymous with Silicon Valley and by that justifies its plastic name) we are all coming together and are extremely satisfied during and after having sex. How’s that for solving all sex problems and complexities of the female body?

Reality, as we experience it through the media, is already like a euphoric app, we only see an ideal, polished and moulded figure of a woman, and need to adjust ourselves accordingly. Luckily, like Google glasses, we are offered with many augmented realities which offer to solve our problems: Botox, hair rejuvenation in Melbourne, gym, diets, plastic surgery, push-up bras, varnishing, liposuction – which are meant to solve problems which were described as such, and then packaged as priced solutions. This eternal chase for a better figure has even inflicted actual pathologies which did not exist before such as bulimia and anorexia.

In addition, Women are also products offered to solve sexual problems or occasional problems of lack of entertainment; they can be bought as prostitutes (if you have a problem getting sex or not satisfied with what you have at home), strippers (if you have a problem of entertaining your buddies at your bachelor party), online entertainment and satisfaction (if you care for a morning glory) and a touristic venture (if you want to solve the problem of finding an interesting thing to do in your vacation e.g. – Pattaya). Therefore, women are not only offered many solutions to the problem, which is their imperfect body, they are also solving men’s problems, and that is hardly a new phenomenon.

Biopolitical technologies deployed on female bodies is a paragon example of how solutionism has, in fact, been part of our cultural practices and discourses throughout history, but there are other examples (see for instance Eva Illouz’s argument about psychology and the way in which from the 1920s it penetrated every social sphere and portrayed itself as the ultimate problem solver of the human soul, with a price, of course). Therefore, solutionism can be seen as a direct continuation of privileged people (usually white men) conquering social, biological, cognitive and physical spaces. It is also closely linked to neoliberal consumerism which offers to easily buy solutions for various problems, while artificially framing problems as such in order to capitalize on people’s desires, hopes and goals.

Imperfection is a price many women pay on a daily basis (physically, emotionally and economically); by modifying our bodies, by being modified in order to create an illusion in the media of a perfect idealized body, or selling our bodies as a product to solve someone else’s problem – women’s lives are being intruded upon from the moment we emerge into the world. Morozov mentions that “with Silicon Valley at the helm, our life will become one long California highway”, however, using the future tense, Morozov forgets that a large amount of Western population has already been driving this highway for quite a while, while wearing very different set of glasses.

Elinor Carmi (@pinkeee_) is a PhD candidate at Goldsmiths College, writer, journalist, radio broadcaster and an electronic music addict. She blogs here.

Refrences

Foucault, M. (2007). Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977-78, trans. Graham Burchell, Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Foucault, M. (2008). The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978-79, trans. Graham Burchell, Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Illouz, E. (2008). Saving the modern soul: Therapy, emotions, and the culture of self-help. University of California Press.

McRobbie, A. (2004). Post‐feminism and popular culture. Feminist media studies, 4(3), 255-264.