This Month's MSG meeting: Eric Harvey, Oct. 29
Mack Hagood
The end of the month is quickly approaching. As agreed upon in our
last meeting, we will try a switch from Wednesdays to the last
Thursday of the month, October 29th, at 7PM in Room 272, 800 East
Third Street. This month's speaker is Eric Harvey, CMCL PhD candidate
and writer for Pitchfork and his own marathonpacks blog. Eric will be
presenting on indie culture and mp3s, a vein he recently mined in "The
Social History of the MP3," available at http://pitchfork.com/features/articles/7689-the-social-history-of-the-mp3/
The Closer You Are, The Quicker It Hits You: Indie Culture in the mp3
Moment
Rising from the ashes of UK punk in the late 1970s, what we refer to
as “indie” music today has its roots less in purely musical notions
than in a particular understanding of proximity—a closeness and lack
of intermediation between artists and the ever-cheaper means of
musical production, and then between the artists and audiences who
enthusiastically take part in promoting them, attending their
performances, and so forth. Technology and attendant infrastructures
have thus always been tightly woven into understandings of this
particular musical genre and its focus on the “do it yourself” (DIY)
axiom. From small pressings of 7” records, cassettes and CDs to hand-
drawn flyers and zines and good old word of mouth—whatever “indie” is,
it’s typically been defined as localized-yet-networked, done on the
cheap, and driven by passion.
Over the past decade, however, the mp3 distribution format and the
digital networks that have been modified to carry them (peer-to-peer,
BitTorrent, the Web) have altered the landscape and possibilities of
indie more than the aforementioned
“physical” technologies ever could. To be brief (and a bit
provocative): It is not only unsurprising that indie exponentially
expanded along with these technologies over the past decade. Through
the affordances that network structure and digital music technology
provide for multiple, sustainable music publics, it's unthinkable for
things to have happened any other way. As one result, “indie” has
ballooned to encompass music ranging from ambient drone metal to
European microhouse, thereby losing its former cache as punk-derived,
white dude guitar rock.
Drawing on the last three years of his research and forthcoming
dissertation project, Eric Harvey will address the ways in which mp3s
coursing through the Internet and Web have altered many social rituals
within indie culture, particularly along the axes of time and place,
and with special attention paid to its circulation through and as
publics and markets. His talk, which will last about an hour (with a
half-hour for Q&A), will address how pre-release album “leaks” have
helped shift the ways many fans relate to music temporally, as well as
significantly dent music’s status as a commodity—not only are fans
proximate to the music, they often acquire and trade it well in
advance of its proper commercial status. Further, he will detail some
counter-rituals to downloading culture, which leverage nostalgia and
localism (two old-school punk/DIY ideals) to support localized “brick
and mortar” establishments, and attend concerts. Finally, he will
briefly touch on some ideas about music fandom in the mp3 moment,
illuminate some ways in which indie ideals are being refashioned in a
time of ever-emergent music laws and technologies.
Hope to see you there!
Best,
Mack
--
Mack Hagood
PhD Student, Associate Instructor
Department of Communication and Culture
Indiana University
800 East Third Street
Bloomington, IN 47405
U.S.A.