Hologram If You Hear Me: Putting the Aura Back In Digitally Reproduced Performances

After holographic Tupac crashed Coachella 2012, the buzz about holographic performances by dead musicians has breached the music blogosphere and hit the mainstream. Even Jezebel, which isn’t really a music blog, had a featured article about the topic. Sure, the hologram is innovative and futuristic and techy, it’s a little uncanny and creepy, and it pretty much asks for a quick Star Wars ANH joke (that’s “A New Hope,” or the original 77 film, for my non-geek readers). But why, beyond these superficial reasons, do so many people find the idea of “live performance” by dead-musician holograph so appealing? Or so creepy? Or both?


I think Walter Benjamin can help us out a bit here. His famous essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” argues that technology has shifted art’s “aura” from the work/object/performance to the artist. Mechanical reproduction (lithography, photography, pressing records, copying and distributing film reels, etc.) allows us to mass produce artworks. Sure, there may be a master copy of The Wizard of Oz, but you don’t need to see that “original” in order to view the film. In fact, most people don’t even view it on film anymore, but on DVD, Blu Ray, or digitally. And it makes no difference which copy you see, or what kind of copy you see (Betamax FTW!), the content is the same. Art objects are no longer unique snowflakes, uncopiable and irreducibly individual. Because anyone can easily (or relatively easily) access mass produced art objects, they no longer have an “aura” of either exclusively or originality. Benjamin defines “aura” as an art object’s “presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be” (3); location and provenance is important because “The presence of the original is the prerequisite to the concept of authenticity” (4). He then defines “the authenticity of a thing” as “the essence of all that is transmissible from its beginning, ranging from its substantive duration to its testimony to the history which it has experienced” (3). The “authenticity” of an artwork is really “the authority of the object” (3; emphasis mine)--it’s what makes it important, valuable, good, interesting, etc. With mass production/reproduction, no single work is “authoritative”.


Benjamin goes on to note that audiences still crave something like an aura to covet, worship, or fetishize. If they can’t locate it in the work, where do they turn? To the artist or performer him or herself. Film studios and record companies create “cults of personalities”--i.e., celebrity--as second-rate “aura” substitutes. As Benjamin explains,

The film responds to the shriveling of the aura with an artificial build-up of the “personality” outside the studio. The cult of the movie star, fostered by the money of the film industry, preserves not the unique aura of the person but the “spell of the personality,” the phony spell of a commodity. (5)

So, instead of worshiping artworks we worship celebrity-artists. The appeal of the holo-performance is that it brings the artist to us, on demand, not just his or her work.


Mechanical and digital reproduction and distribution allow us to hear anyone’s music, pretty much anywhere at any time. Pac, MJ, Strummer, they’re all long gone, but they’re all readily available to me on my iPod (I just listened to the Clash at the gym this morning). Music fans are used to hearing music more or less on demand. We’ve long had the audio technology to hear musical performances on demand, and we expect that audio performances don’t have any sort of aura that would tether them to a specific place or moment. But now we have the visual technology to see “live” musical performances on demand--not filmed/videoed recordings, but actual projections of an artist’s image, in a specific, concrete material context. By putting it in a specific historical-geographical context, we can put the provenance, and thus the ‘aura’ back in the artist (or rather, the artist’s image) Remember, Benjamin specifically contrasts live stage performance with film. Live stage performance has aura, film does not. But these holo-performances complicate things, b/c the performer isn’t the living artist. It’s a digitally reproduced recording of the artist’s performance.




So, I’m going to suggest that the real uncanniness (or uneasiness) generated by these holo-performances is not traditional “uncanny valley” reactions to posthuman doubles. Rather, the uncanniness comes from the juxtaposition of the aura-less recording with the aur-acular/aura-full “provenance” of the concert/stage performance. The concert is a ritualistic communal experience. If, as Benjamin argues, “the unique value of the “authentic” work of art has its basis in ritual, the location of its original use value” (5), then the holographic “live” performance puts a digitally reproduced cultural object right in the heart of the center of “authenticity.” If mechanical reproduction de-ritualizes artworks, holographic performance re-ritualizes the de-ritualized. In other words, the holographic performance collapses Benjamin’s distinction between the provenanced-object and the reproduced-object.

Music Geek-Out #6

The next track on my dinner playlist is one of my favorite songs in this group. It's the Afghan Whigs "Rebirth of the Cool". This was a remix of their song "Milez is Ded" (and the title thus a play on Davis's "Birth of the Cool"). It was a hidden track on their "Uptown Avondale" album.





The Whigs were THE Cincinnati band in the 90s--they were the most popular and successful beyond the local scene (The Breeders and Guided by Voices were both DAYTON bands, not Nati bands.) Greg Duli is, well, a misogynist, and I've always been somewhat ambivalent about his work for this reason. This track, however, is the one Whigs track that really compels me to be more than ambivalent in my liking of the band. This is probably because it samples the Stone Roses and has more of a Madchester feel to it (or, well, maybe more like a Charlatans feel...).
 

Music Geek-Out #4

[This is a series on my setlist from philoSOPHIA 2012.]

From "My City Was Gone" to Siouxie's "Cities in Dust".  



 In a way, these are both about rust belts--Hynde is talking about the US Midwest, and Siouxie is referring to post-industrial Britain (South London, Manchester, etc.). It's really interesting to think about the geographical, politico-economic, and, above all, musical parallels among Manchester, Detroit, and Chicago: all three are non-capital, second-tier, "midlands-y" industrial cities whose disused factories and warehouses sprouted globally significant electronic dance music scenes in the late 20th century.  

This song, with its guitars, its melodious lines both vocally and instrumentally, that chime hook, it just SOUNDS like a paradigm of 80s British Indie...by which I mean, what all the modern rock kids listened to pre-Nirvana.

Also worth noting: Siouxie (and Billy Idol, and Sid V) were part of what was called the "Bromley Crew," a bunch of punk kids from the South London burb of Bromley. Interestingly, there is a south Cincinnati (i.e., Northern KY) burb also called Bromley, probably after the UK version. [My mom and dad grew up in the town next to Bromley, Ludlow.]

Music Geek-Out #3

[This is part of the series where I blog about my setlist from philoSOPHIA 2012.]

Second is The Pretenders' "My City Was Gone," which I only recently learned is not titled "Back to Ohio":



The Prestenders' lead singer, Chrissy Hynde, is from Akron (known for making tires). She moved to the UK and was a fixture of the early punk scene in London. But she, like me, occasionally goes back to Ohio. Oxford/Miami is in Butler County; Oxford is in the northwest corner of Butler County, I grew up in the southeast corner (West Chester). This song pretty much sums up what has happened in/to Butler County since I graduated Miami in 2000: as Hynde sings, "the farms of Ohio have been replaced by shopping malls." (Or, for Oxford, "Stewart Elementary has been replaced by a shopping mall.") So, I chose this song not only because of Hynde's connection to Ohio, and the fact that the song is about Ohio, but also because it pretty accurately reflects the recent history of Oxford and the surrounding area.

Music Geek-Out #2: philoSOPHIA

I had the privilege of "curating" the setlist for dinner and dancing at last weekend's philoSOPHIA meeting. (I say "curate" rather than "DJ" b/c they couldn't get the appropriate equipment, and I was not going to pay to fly my mixer out as checked luggage...) I got a lot of positive feedback about both the dinner setlist and the dance-party selections, so I said I'd post on my blog about it. I'm hoping to be able to record an actual mix of the dance party setlist once the semester is over; when that happens, I'll post the full mix on the blog. 

However, there was also the dinner set, which was actually specifically tailored to Oxford, Ohio. Oxford used to be home to a Great (capital G) modern rock radio station, 97X WOXY ("BAM! The future of rock 'n' roll"). So, I culled my dinner setlist from WOXY's Modern Rock 500 lists. I chose songs that were specific to Cincinnati, to Ohio, and to the WOXY aesthetic (which was something like: British Indie mixed with US Modern/College Rock mixed with some Reggae, House (XTRABEATS was a favorite show of mine, and the location btw Detroit and Chicago was a bonus), Blues, and World Beat). I also tried to choose musically Great and musicologically/music historically important songs.  So, because there's something to be said about each of the songs on the dinner playlist, I thought I'd post a song a day, with commentary, culminating in a complete playlist on the last day of the series. For a while, I'll transform my "music geek-out" series into a geeking out over the songs on this setlist.

So, first in the set is Patti Smith's "Gloria." 




Why this track? Several reasons:
1. It's a great first track. It starts slow and soft, and then speeds up and gets more musically intense/dense. It eases us into the set.
2. It's a great song. It's also one of the most iconic tracks on the one Patti Smith album that most people who have only one PS album own (Horses).
3. Smith was close with Robert Mapplethorpe, whose artwork spurred one of the most important things to happen in Cincinnati in the late 20th century--i.e., the obscenity trial.

Record Store Day: Myth & Enlightenment

Today is “Record Store Day,” a day dedicated to the celebration of authenticity: the “realness” and warmness of vinyl records (which were often recorded w/digital equipment--remember DAT?), the “authentic” face-to-face sociality of the record store itself (somehow the IRL experience of record-store-clerk-condescension is preferable to online trolling?), etc. Interestingly, this celebration of authenticity, the attempt to resist alienation and forge real, human connections with real, human musicians (or at least real, material objects) takes, as its very premise, the fetishization of the record as commodity. This is Record STORE Day, remember. So Record Store Day encourages us to use one of Marx’s primary examples of alienation, commodity fetishism, as the very means to overcome (digital) alienation.

 
What’s interesting here is that Record Store Day’s use of alienated social relations to supposedly overcome alienated social relations exemplifies, quite nicely IMHO, what Adorno & Horkheimer posit as the relationship between “enlightenment” (i.e., Modern rationality/scientificity) and “myth” (pre-Modern “magical” thinking). Though we are encouraged to treat myth and enlightenment as opposites, A&H argue that they are actually two expressions of the same underlying phenomenon--i.e., they are the dialectically related as thesis and antithesis. For example, they argue:

the prime cause of the retreat from enlightenment into mythology is not to be sought so much in the nationalist, pagan and other modern mythologies manufactured precisely in order to contrive such a reversal, but in the Enlightenment itself when paralyzed by fear of the truth (DE xiii-xiv).

 
Myth, here, is contained within and springs from Enlightenment--it is enlightenment skepticism turned back upon itself. Similarly:

False clarity is only another name for myth; and myth has always been obscure and enlightening at one and the same time: always using the devices of familiarity and straightforward dismissal to avoid the labor of conceptualization (DE xiv).

 
Here they say that Reason itself involves mythification and falsification (echoing Nietzsche, anticipating discourses on “epsitemologies of ignorance”). The claim for absolute “reason” is itself an ideology/myth, so watch out for people who claim they’re absolutely rational and unbiased, because in this claim lies domination.[2]  Domination masks itself as enlightenment/liberation.




 
With this idea that domination masks itself as liberation, I’d like to return to Record Store Day. This celebration of authenticity via fetishized commodity presents itself as resistance and opposition to digital/info capital: Screw the big corporations, support your local record store. Screw the major labels and their Bieber-ification of music, support your local artists. Etc. But, what we are told is oppositional and resistant actually plays into and supports hegemony. How does Record Store Day actually bolster white heteropatriarchial capital? Here are a few ways, expressed in the form of questions (b/c I’m a philosopher and I like questions):

• What is the role of whiteness here? “Authentic” and “underground” hip hop, to say nothing of major-label artists, have long used a mixtape economy, distributing new work in networks that don’t rely on the record store. So, “Record Store Day” really means “white music/musicians day”...?

• Wait, I thought the “new” Web 1.0 (P2P) and Web 2.0 (social networking) modes of distribution were actually better for musicians than the traditional record contract? Record contracts are notoriously exploitative. The self-production and self-distribution made possible by postmillennial advances in consumer tech let musicians avoid recording studios, distribution practices, and many of the main reasons to sign to a label in the first place. So, does RSD encourage us to celebrate a form that is actually more exploitative of the musicians we supposedly admire and want to support?

• What is the role of masculinity here? Record stores are bastions of a certain brand of machismo. I can’t remember the exact article (I think it’s a chapter in Shelia Whitley’s “Sexing the Groove”), but feminist scholars of pop music have identified various practices often exhibited by record store clerks and consumers (e.g., the I know more obscure facts/bands/etc. than you) as part of masculine identity construction. TO what extent is RSD about performing masculinity (or subcultural masculinity), demonstrating one’s opposition to a feminized mainstream music scene (or rather, feminized music consumption practices)?

• I’m sure there are more things than can think of right now. Thoughts? Suggestions?

Video of my talk "If you hate Justin Bieber, patriarchy wins"

The wonderful crew at Ignite Charlotte have made videos of all our talks. Here's mine. It's only 5 minutes, so you really ought to watch it! I welcome your thoughts in the comments.