Just like we promised, here’s part two of our interview with Disquiet founder and the man behind Despite the Downturn, Marc Weidenbaum.
WAMM: When I first reached out to you about doing an interview, you alluded to a false choice that the recording industry is trying to propagate, one in which people can be either widgets (entertainers) or wallets (consumers). I don’t think all (or even most) musicians see the music business in these terms, but why is it important to question that false choice now?
MW: One of the main issues with the Atlantic article that I didn’t get into in anything I’ve written thus far about it is that by framing music as “entertainment,” the piece perpetuates the false divide between “audience” and “entertainer,” which is ultimately a blindly consumerist perspective, one that sees music as widgets and people as wallets, and fails to appreciate that people’s involvement in, participation in, music is much more complicated and nuanced. I understand that’s a go-to perspective when considering music from the perspective of the big-league record industry, but it’s the very perspective that’s causing that business model’s demise.
This issue is of great importance in music for many reasons. These are three that come to mind immediately that are particularly pertinent at this moment.
A recording of a song is not a song. A recording is a version of a song. Too much writing about the impact of the Internet on the recording industry treats the record industry as if recordings are songs, as if the record industry has always been around, as if it’s as old as the hills, as if Gutenberg and Edison had been college roommates, as if The Music of the Spheres had been Pythagoras’ first chart-topping album. The perspective in this Atlantic article on recording is the sort of culture-object fetishization that led to things like rampant lip-syncing by pop stars and the regimentation of beats by metronomes, because as time’s gone on, cause and effect got flipped. Recordings began as representations of live music, and in time live music became a representation of recordings. Now, sometimes the latter is very interesting, like with hip-hop turntablism and with laptop electronica and Brian Eno’s “studio as musical instrument,” but sometimes it’s really sad, like when you watch a top-selling pop singer — that is, an “entertainer” — on Saturday Night Live and realize she is utterly incapable of, well, singing.
Programmers are musicians, too. There’s a long tradition of mathematician-musicians, and the rise of code-based music is, I believe, producing a whole new area of interactive music making, in which tools are provided to general audiences — yes, through the iPhone, but that’s just one example — that let them express themselves and not just “listen.” In these cases, the programmers are meta-musicians, giving people tools to make sounds that are shaped by the programmer’s aesthetic and ideas. There’s a running joke that people are slowly realizing isn’t a joke at all, the idea that when we credit people for the creation of a song, maybe we should thank the software, the people who make the software. James Rotondi touches on this in the note he wrote for his contribution to Despite the Downturn. I think too much time is being spent eulogizing the death of the record industry, when there is so much new musical creativity occurring that deserves more coverage.
Music territorializes our minds. All art, all communication, territorializes our minds. That’s what riffs and hooks and melodies and lyrics do. I am going to see the musical based on Matthew Sweet’s Girlfriend, and I re-listened to the album for the first time in, easily, five years, maybe 10, and I still knew every single word by heart. And I could sing or hum along with every little lick that Robert Quine and Richard Lloyd played on their guitars, even these tiny filigrees that are little more than minor flashes of feedback.
The current legislation of copyright in regard to fixed recordings simply doesn’t allow people to access their own memories, literal and figurative. Rob Zombie tells a great story, a sad one really, about not being able to use Super 8 footage of himself and his brother as kids at McDonald’s in a music video because, well, it’s McDonald’s — and well, you know, it may be McDonald’s, but it’s also a kid’s memories, an adult’s memories of when he was a kid, and the laws as they’re currently enforced protect the interests of companies who actively territorialize our memories and then charge us to access them. Lawrence Lessig has done tremendous work in pushing to revise these laws, but we have a long way to go. Can you imagine how a John Coltrane or Charlie Parker would feel hemmed in today? “Oh, man, I felt myself wanting to drop in a little bit of ‘Tea for Two’ when I was soloing, but I was too worried some ASCAP or RIAA spy in the audience was gonna tap my wages. Glad I caught myself.”
Tell me more about the direction your career has taken. According to your wikipedia page, one of your first jobs was as an editor of Pulse!, which strikes me as a very appropriate vestige of the old music industry, as well as the aforementioned binary of widgets and wallets. Why has your career moved in the direction it’s moved in?
I’m happy to talk about myself, but whatever space you have, I’d love for the Despite the Downturn project to be the focus of this. I feel comfortable saying that every single musician involved in this project individually spent more time on it than I did — simply because composing music took them a lot of time — and it’s their effort I want to celebrate and illuminate.
I joined Tower Records shortly after college, and worked there for many years, and continued in a freelance capacity with the company until the magazines closed down. I wrote Pulse!‘s final cover story, on Missy Elliott — in large part because it gave me an opportunity to interview her friend and fellow producer, Timbaland. While at Pulse!, I co-founded its classical-music magazine and founded its email magazine, epulse, which started in 1994, pretty early on for web publishing.
Pulse! magazine, a vestige of a bygone phase in the music business
Tower was a vestige, a cornerstone really, of the “old music industry,” as you see it, but I just want to be careful about the world “old” — that industry, that part of the music industry, died young, never really had the chance to be old. For perspective, I joined Tower Records’ music magazine in 1989, just 20 years or so after Rolling Stone was founded, and it’s only been 20 years since I joined — that 40 years or so is, in essence, the entire life of the mainstream music magazine, but when people write in regard to the decline of print magazines about music, you’d think these were hallowed institutions that Charles Dickens and William Shakespeare used to serialize their work in. They were experiments, phases in culture. People made music and thought about music before them, and people will make music and think about music after them.
Then I left Pulse! to join a web company for several years, and then I joined a manga publisher, where among other things I edited its great magazines, Shonen Jump and the dearly departed Shojo Beat, which got a nice, posthumous shout-out recently in the movie Kick-Ass. (Working in manga was great for many reasons, one of them being that every time I went to Tokyo I got to catch concerts at SuperDeluxe and Loop-Line, and to see what’s on the walls of places like the Mori Art Center and the NTT ICC, all major nexuses of experimental music and media.) Now I’m president at a small brand-strategy firm in San Francisco.
I launched Disquiet.com in 1996, the summer I switched from Pulse! to the web company, though I’d hosted versions of the content earlier on generic web addresses, first at calweb.com, then at netcom.com. Initially, Disquiet was just a collection of work that I’d published in print and online elsewhere, but in time it became, in essence, its own publication. Eventually the word “blog” came along, so it became retroactively a blog. As for my “career,” I think I’m about as comfortable with the word as Stephen Malkmus is, but essentially I’ve followed what interests me, dedicated myself to it, tried to be helpful and innovative, and also tried to make time for projects on the side — writing, editing. I do some freelance writing about music, recently for Nature.
Finally, what interests you most now about the music business?
I’m interested in the business of music today for precisely the same reason that the author of The Atlantic article is, because there’s so much going on there, especially in how the tools of distribution are being democratized. The thing is, where McArdle sees a rapidly expanding graveyard, I see an intensely beautiful meadow with crazy new mutant flowers blooming every week.
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