©2009 Justin D. Burton ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
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©2009 Justin D. Burton ALL RIGHTS RESERVED iPOD PEOPLE: EXPERIENCING MUSIC WITH NEW MUSIC TECHNOLOGY by JUSTIN DANIEL BURTON A dissertation submitted to the Graduate School-New Brunswick Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey In partial fulfillment of the requirements For the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Musicology Written under the direction of Andrew Kirkman And approved by Andrew Kirkman _________________________________ Floyd Grave __________________________________ Douglas Johnson __________________________________ Mark Katz __________________________________ New Brunswick, New Jersey May 2009 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION iPod People: Experiencing Music with New Music Technology By JUSTIN D. BURTON Dissertation Director: Andrew Kirkman The decade of the 2000s has witnessed the rise of the iPod, a well-marketed mp3 player whose massive storage capacity and ever-shrinking size has extended the boundaries of personal music players to previously unthinkable proportions. And as digital music has expanded its own boundaries, it has spilled over several others, allowing us the opportunity to reconsider many of our musical assumptions. Specifically, I examine the iPod in relation to production and marketing techniques, human-technological hybridity, music hermeneutics, genre distinctions, male music collecting stereotypes, and the urban experience in New York City. The major assumption from which this work proceeds is that the iPod’s relationship to culture is dynamic; the iPod doesn’t wholly shape culture, nor is it wholly shaped by culture. Rather, each influences and alters the other, as culture and product evolve alongside one another. The primary theme that runs through this study is the listener’s relationship to a listening device. How does a music medium affect the way we hear music, and how do our listening habits dictate the functions of an mp3 player? By keeping these questions in the foreground, I privilege contemporary listening habits in order to best understand not only the iPod, but also broader popular music culture in the early twenty-first century. ii DEDICATION AND ACKNOWLEGEMENTS To Kathryn, with the hope of better dedications to come… Chapter 2, “I’m an i.P.o.d: Technological Angst and Embodied Posthumanism,” is also published in Oxford Handbook of Mobile Music Studies, edited by Sumanth Gopinath and Jason Stanyek (New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming). iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract of the Dissertation……………………………………………………………....ii Dedication and Acknowledgements..……………………………………………………iii Introduction…………………………………………………………………………….…1 Chapter One: The iPod McDonaldized and Disneyized………………………………...23 Chapter Two: I’m an i.P.o.d: Technological Angst and Embodied Posthumanism……51 Chapter Three: Ordering Randomness: Considering Musical Meaning and Genre within the iPod’s Shuffle……………………………………………………………………...…81 Chapter Four: Wax Collectors v the iPod People: Reimagining Masculinity with Digital Music…………………………………………………………………………………...114 Epilogue: The iPod’s Urban Ethos………………………………………………….....147 Curriculum Vita………………………………………………………………………..177 iv 1 Introduction Technology is both blessing and curse in music, as it is in broader culture. It destroys and it saves, sometimes simultaneously. Before the automobile was de rigeur for daily transportation, it was decried as a menace to the streets, and, in many cases, its use was heavily restricted (Southworth 2003, 65). And before nuclear energy was sold to the American public as the future of efficiency and luxury, it was a mushroom cloud sprouting from two Japanese cities. In this most horrific of paradigms, we see all that technology can excite, both positive and negative. In the years following World War II, the atom came to represent the cutting edge of technological convenience, all with the long shadow of Hiroshima and Nagasaki looming over it. The potential danger of nuclear energy has never really subsided, as its central position in political debate illustrates. Likewise with the automobile, which is marketed with its most dangerous features—horsepower and size—foregrounded in a manner that adds ample allure and excitement to the prospect of driving fast cars. Our ambivalence toward technology stems from the alternating fascination and horror with which we behold its most dangerous potential. The same technology that can, when deployed 2 irresponsibly, sap the very life from us, can also, when handled carefully, invigorate us, partly because we are aware of its volatile nature, the possibility that it could, at any moment, blow up in our faces. In music, the danger is perhaps less obvious. Phonographs and electric guitars pose no appreciable threat to humanity, yet they have each been the object of a similar ambivalence. In Adorno’s 1934 meditation “The Form of the Phonograph Record,” he asserts that the phonograph privileges “things over people through the emancipation of technology from human requirements and human needs,” calling it the “antithesis of the humane and the artistic” (2002, 277-78). At the same time, Adorno credits this very dehumanization with a reinvigoration of music. Because musical performance without recording technology is fleeting, we are allowed by phonographs to revisit once-living musical performances, albeit in a petrified state (279). Adorno’s ambivalence to phonograph technology allows him to describe it as simultaneously capable of killing and reanimating musical performance. Thirty years later, Bob Dylan appeared onstage at the Newport Folk Festival with an electric guitar and an electric blues band backing him, and retreated after three songs in a hail of boos. At least, that is the story as it is popularly received. In reality, the booing was probably directed at the event itself, which only allowed Dylan a short timeframe for performance. But the legend still shimmers seductively for most, embodying a discomfort with technology as it penetrates the acoustic world of the folk revival. For many, the appearance of Dylan with an electric guitar has represented the invasion of technology in all walks of life, and the alleged booing of him and his guitar has become a generation’s rejection of dangerous technology. 3 Around the same time, in a screed against popular listening habits, Adorno defends structural listening, where the large-scale form of the piece holds one’s attention. Its antithesis is “atomistic” listening, which is characterized by an obsession with individual themes with no attention to their development over time. Here, Adorno evokes that thrilling yet terrifying post-War technology—the atom—to decry the habits of popular music enthusiasts (2007, 318-22). Even when addressing musical attributes that do not owe an obvious debt to technological innovation, the specter of technology and its opposition to humanity hangs over every word. While it is clearly not as pressing as the physical danger wrought by nuclear energy or automobile crashes, the metaphorical dehumanization performed by technology through music is a persistent motif that colors music scholarship. The British rock band Radiohead is a favorite subject of this line of inquiry, as both Curtis White (2005) and Joseph Auner (2003) have dedicated essays to the exploration of the band’s use of technology to problematize the existence of humanity alongside technology. More than forty years beyond Adorno’s “Little Heresy” and the events of Newport ’65, electric guitars are not nearly as controversial as we imagine them to have been for Dylan’s fans. They have become the standard-bearer of nearly every subgenre of rock and, in the last decade, have become prominent sounds in hip hop samples, as well. Yet, as with cars and nuclear energy, electric guitars retain the presence of something discomforting. The mild outcry following Prince’s overtly phallic performance at Super Bowl XLI (4 February 2007) may have resulted simply from a performer referring to his penis in front of tens of millions of viewers. But in headlines like the one found in the Associated Press’s report of the incident—“some are 4 questioning whether a guitar was just a guitar”—a general unease with the attachment of something as integral as one’s sexuality with an electric guitar becomes evident (AP 2007). The electric guitar has long represented masculine virility, but it has also connoted a deficit in humanity for many rock bands, problematically overpowering voices and serving as the artifice opposing the acoustic guitar’s authenticity. Just as with technology in culture broadly, music technology excites listeners both positively and negatively. Tracking a consistent or smooth trajectory from anxiety over a piece of technology to its acceptance proves nearly impossible. Technology is always blessing and curse, a complex interplay of exhilaration and anxiety that lends it a double existence, a hybridity. This idea of hybridity shapes my study of the iPod. As the latest dominant medium for music consumption, the iPod offers an opportunity to glimpse not only the state of digital music but also popular music culture as a whole. In order to best understand the iPod, I situate it within the two overarching and overlapping discourses introduced above: technology and hybridity. The iPod behaves much like other music technology in the twentieth century. It is alternately received as blessing and curse, and it is the site of a variety of hybridities. It is produced and marketed as at once a familiar, non-threatening device and a new, exhilarating innovation; its use combines the human and the technological in a way that blurs the distinction between the two; it features a shuffle option that randomly orders songs with no regard for genre distinctions; it fits neatly into the masculine music collector stereotype while also inviting a broader consumer base that would include pre- Gen Xers, women, and gay men; and it enjoys cache as a chic accessory in New York at 5 the same time that non-iPodders in the city blame it for the very undoing of the moral fabric of society. In short, the iPod is a mercurial device that freely transgresses boundaries, and in this study, I will cross borders alongside it to better understand its shaping of (and by) broader popular music culture.