Musical alphabet soup

[This post was written back in June 2013 - now less topical, but still relevant]

Comparing this year’s Glastonbury line-up with that of Barcelona’s Primavera festival, I notice an interesting difference. 

Glastonbury categorises the bands by the stage they’ll be playing on (therefore implicitly by genre), and within that, arranges them in order of presumed fame / importance.  Primavera on the other hand just list the whole lot in alphabetical order.

What’s the meaning of these two systems of categorisation / promotion?  And what do they say about the way we’ve started to listen to music in recent years? 

Festivals listing bands in alphabetical order is a relatively new phenomenon.  The first time I encountered it was about four years ago in the Field Day festival, which takes place in East London’s Victoria Park every May.   Until then, festivals had followed the traditional ‘Glastonbury’ approach. 

This was born of the pre-internet era, when people found out about new music through a small number of sources, mainly controlled by a handful of wealthy media barons and music industry big-wigs.  Accessibility of music was also dependent on what was in stock in record shops, so the most easily available records became the most widely heard.

This meant that the size and demographic of a band’s audience was fairly predictably connected to the extent and type of exposure they were afforded by this industry/media partnership. 

It also meant we searched for music not by using search engines, but with magazines and TV shows.  The format of these media is inherently geared to reinforcing hierarchies of fame, with the most prominent bands gracing the front pages of magazines, or the suspenseful finale of the weekly Top 40. 

(Who knows or cares about what’s in the top 40 these days?  Is it even still a thing?  The last time I heard the phrase ‘Number 1 In The Charts’ was when a pub quizmaster bemoaned how difficult it was to set music trivia questions for the last decade, due to the absence of quantifiably ubiquitous songs.)

These days, it’s far easier to find out about new music through peer groups online, and access almost any song in history (for free) on Youtube etc, as recommendations for similar artists.  We also search directly (and actively) for specific songs / artists, instead of waiting to the end of the chart show to be told who’s Number 1 that week.  (Of course there’s still a huge music industry pushing a few major artists on TV, online, in print, etc.  But the context is very different.)

We’re also now accustomed to personalised and self-selected content across many platforms, rather than ‘one-size-fits-all’:  Twitter timelines, Facebook feeds, RSS feeds, Last.fm scrobbling, Tesco Clubcard points for selected items, BBC iplayer, ‘build-your-own’ student prosptectuses and corporate reports – the list goes on.

In this landscape – notwithstanding  the fact that events organisers obviously make curatorial decisions about which bands are playing in the first place – why would it still make sense for them to choose for us which bands individual audience members will want to see?  Why would it still make sense to assume that the organiser has a better idea than the audience of who’s more famous within specific subcultures?  Or how that fame would translate in desirability?  It feels kinda quaint to be addressed in this way.    

Conversely, Primavera’s alphabetised line-up is the closest a poster can get to Google, in terms of how we seek information in the modern age.  So perhaps it’s also fitting that Primavera’s line-up poster is all sexy minimalism – sans serif, black & white, clean backgrounds – while Glastonbury’s graphic design has yet to emerge from the early 1990s.

Democracy 2.0?

However, I think it would be a mistake to view this shift in music consumption as a move towards the democratisation of music. 

Alphabetisation and equal font sizes appear to create a level playing field for artists, and recognise heterogeneity in audience tastes.  They may even indicate a move away from centralised industry control.  However, I wonder if this conflation of myriad artists and styles onto a single continuum also goes hand in hand with the flattening of music into an amorphous mush of commodity. 

The information age has widened accessibility, so everyone has the opportunity to be connoisseur.  However, it’s also enabled the exact opposite: a generation of people with no need or interest in cultural discernment.  In fact, we’re often (myself included) not only undiscerning about what we listen to, but don’t even know what we’re listening to at any given moment, nor would it occur to us to have any desire to do so.   

We have huge swathes of musical material with no barriers to accessing or selecting it.  We can build infinite playlists without taking action in between to change records, and we don’t have a radio DJ between tracks telling us what was just playing, or what they think of it.  (Though we have kept onto the tradition of being sold stuff in between songs.)

The ‘shuffle’ function blends all of our music collection into a morass of ‘stuff’.  Instead of selecting a song we want, we simply listen to ‘some music’.  The Schrodinger-esque iPod Shuffle takes this one step further, by allowing us to listen to a load of shuffled songs without even displaying what’s playing – so you can quite easily own and listen to a whole load of music without ever knowing what it is.  We’ve moved from a Newtonian musical age to one where our tastes are probabilistically distributed along a Gaussian bell-curve of Heisenbergian uncertainty.  (Physics fans:  yes, I know this is a crap analogy.)

The phrase ‘one-hit wonder’ used to be a derogatory phrase applying to bands with only one famous song, rather than a whole well-known body of work.  But nowadays it wouldn’t even make sense to deploy such a term, let alone as an insult (“You had a hit?  Well done, you’re famous and talented!”), because we recognise the complex and arbitrary way that information, fame and memes spread, and how short our attention spans our.  (On a related note:  music is still written and distributed in the album form, but rarely listened to in the same format – when is the mode of music production and distribution going to change to reflect this?) 

This isn’t an old-person call for a return to the days of John Peel and Melody Maker.  But I do think that the connotations of the alphabetised playlist has some liberatory potential, whilst also conversely embodying the commodification and homogenisation of culture in late modernity. 

Watermelons and apolitical politics

Politics and the climate debate

James Randerson’s recent Guardian article discussed the public suspicion of ‘watermelon’ environmentalists – people who are ‘green on the outside but red on the inside’, ie who use climate change as an excuse to advance a socialist political agenda. 

During the debate that followed, some commenters accused leftists such as George Monbiot of being ‘watermelons’, whilst others, including Bob Ward, conversely accused right-wingers of doing the same thing.  (Conveniently for conservatives, no one has yet identified a fruit that’s green on the outside and blue on the inside.  Except maybe a mouldy blueberry, but that doesn’t have quite the same ring to it.)

Randerson himself argues that climate change has been seized on by people from all across the political spectrum to suit their own, pre-existing, ideological standpoints.  To address this problem, he urges that “the political poison be drawn from the debate”, adding, “the reality is that atmospheric physics does not care which party you vote for.” 

Not all carbon is born equal

This appeal to an incontrovertible ‘reality’ is appealing, and at first glance seems straightforward.  If the problem is too much CO₂ in the atmosphere, all we need to do is get rid of the CO₂, right?  However, framing the issue in this way masks an important debate about whose interests are being prioritised by different policy options to manage climate change. 

Larry Lohmann argues that by focusing our discussions too heavily on carbon itself – an inanimate molecule – we run the risk of imagining that all policies to reduce carbon are equivalent to each other, and that their success can be measured purely by how effective they are at minimising atmospheric carbon – regardless of their social and economic implications. 

Can we really equate petrol consumption by American SUVs with, say, planting eucalyptus monocultures in Indonesia that will (temporarily) absorb CO₂ but which may have undesirable impacts on the way local people can use their land?  Is funding a windfarm in Kent the same as funding biofuel crop production in developing countries, which may restrict local food production?  Is (fossil-fuelled) economic development in Britain equivalent to that of developing countries whose own development has been harmed by Britain’s own history of colonial domination? 

I’m not disputing that CO₂ is indeed causing climate change, and I agree that the atmosphere doesn’t care which political party we vote for.  But I also think we need to pay close attention to whose interests are served by particular policies, and the processes that shape those policies. 

Whose interests get heard?

For example, Private Eye reported in August 2013 that a group set up to advise the government on fracking – the ‘All-Party Group on Unconventional Oil and Gas’ – was funded by a number of fracking companies, and receives admin support from Edelman, a lobbying firm that represents frackers. 

The Group does include a range of (non-paying) stakeholders including environmental NGOs – as was clarified in the following edition of Private Eye (#1348), following (tellingly) a joint complaint made to the Eye by MPs and Edelman.  But do these stakeholders have as much influence over policy makers as the companies that are funding the Group?  Indeed, why would Cuadrilla et al fund the Group if they didn’t think it would buy them influence?  And whilst the fracking companies undoubtedly have a wealth of valuable technical expertise to contribute, with the best will in the world it’s hard to imagine them as neutral, unbiased observers.

Apolitical politics

However, Randerson’s injunction to ‘draw out the political poison’ suggests to me a desire to make decisions that are somehow the logical result of rationally evaluating evidence of a range of social, political, economic and environmental factors, and then agreeing on an objectively optimal course of action.  This implies that political disagreements have the potential for a ‘correct’ or ‘neutral’ solution, as long as we have an honest debate about the issues at play. 

My own feeling is that politics is messier than that.  The very essence of political debate is that different individuals and social groups have directly conflicting interests, and people have vastly differing opinions, and yes, ideologies.  Although we try to debate, compromise, agree on solutions to problems, these underlying tensions will never go away.  For every policy decision – whether it relates to housing, transport, or chicken-farming – some people will think it’s too right-wing, and the other half will say it’s too left-wing.  The climate change debate is no different – and we should embrace that diversity of opinion, not try to ignore it. 

I admire the consensus-building impulse implicit in ‘removing the poison’, and share the wish to honestly debate politics, and dispassionately weigh up evidence.  But I think that this will only be done by openly acknowledging and discussing the intersections between science and politics, and negotiating ways to make them work together – not by trying to separate them.