Mark has been talking interestingly in reaction to Paul Morley's 7"-vs-iPod head-to-head. Mark does alot of reacting these days, I think he's mapped it onto and perhaps invokes it as validation "the derrive" (is that spelung korect?) which is Derrida's digression wotsit. He's making an art-form out of it. I get frustrated by digressing myself. Even frustrated by feeling impelled to contribute to a debate!
I wonder what Reynolds thinks about mp3s? I have a queer feeling he's avoiding broaching the subject like an arch politician. I picked up alot of antipathy towards the digital media in Joy's recent piece on digital publishing, maybe that's the house-line? I really felt Mark's elegant point: "And will people pay for Pop if it is 'just music', without staging, spectacle?" because that's the balance I try to address here. With the evaporation of all music's attendant trappings I feel bound to vainly re-apply all that's lost. Maybe that's the drive behind all this rabid on-line theorising too? It's incredibly myopic of the music industry to assume all they're selling is music. Recent incorporations of tiny amounts of image data into mp3s doesn't really help.
However I do think mp3s are valid, though I'd naively concieve of them as a taster of "Real Product", certainly that is how i've always used them, even when sanity dictated otherwise. I've yet to develop a data fetish, and after 3 years of downloading mp3s it seems unlikely I'll foster one. Will hardware replace the content as the object of fetishisation? Unlikely given that no-one can afford to buy a string of them, you know, "keep topping up their iPod collection."
Posted by Woebot at August 17, 2003 07:57 AM