Collective Listening to Recorded Popular Music Marta Garcia Quifiones, University of Barcelona Paper presented at the 17th Biennial Conference of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music ‘Bridge Over Trouble Waters: Challenging Orthodoxies’, held in Gijén, Spain, 24th-28th June 2013. Abstract While a sense of collectivity is inherent in the concept of ‘popular music’, the everyday practices that articulate the social potential of these musics have been under- researched to date. Among them, practices of collective listening, ie. listening together with friends, relatives, neighbours, comrades, etc, to records, radio, jukebox, cassettes, mp3s.. have attracted less scholarly attention than live concerts or festivals, which undoubtedly convey a stronger image of the bonding powers of popular musics. Yet, collective listening to recordings or broadcasts provides occasions not only for sharing emotions, but also for interacting physically in a relaxed atmosphere that may be compatible with dancing, as well as for exchanging opinions and shaping individual taste in dialogue with others. In this paper I intend to discuss briefly how certain social circumstances, technologies and legal regulations have stimulated collective listening along history. But mostly I would like to offer some historical examples of how specific musics and musical communities have encouraged this practice, in particular during the Sixties and the Seventies. Maybe even nowadays, when ‘popularity’ seems to be defined by the sum of many individual listening experiences, we might be able to perceive signals of a return of collective listening. Before I start to discuss the subject of my paper, | would like to explain a couple of things that are important for what I am going to say. First, | would like to clarify that when I refer, perhaps a bit too pompously, to ‘collective listening to recorded popular music’, 1 am thinking of something so simple and common as people (normally friends) getting together to listen to any kind of recorded music (this paper will touch briefly upon different formats and playback technologies), and by‘collective’ I don’t mean necessarily a multitude or a big group of people, it could be just two people, a couple for instance—in other words, | am using ‘collective’ as the opposite of ‘individual’. In the second place, | want to make it clear since the beginning that what I will present today is not the result of a finished research, but this is rather a mostly theoretical and prospective piece, that is it is an effort to understand the potential and the difficulties of a subject that is in my opinion under-researched and that could be investigated in different historical and social contexts. I hope that what I am going to say will be interesting enough, and that maybe others will be able to use it as a starting point for their own research projects. In my opinion, two notions have hindered to date research into, generally, the social life of recorded popular music. One is the association of recordings with focused, isolated listening and the construction of a pre-history of audio reproduction that relates it to some professional forms of ‘privatized’ listening. As some or most of you may have guessed, I am referring here to Jonathan Sterne’s brilliant and groundbreaking book on the origins of sound reproduction, The Audible Past, where he not only makes a very strong and interesting case for that genealogy, but also argues for an almost metaphysical priority (‘metaphysical’ since it is not supported by facts, but presented almost as self-evident) of individual (or rather, individualized) listening over collective modes of listening (to recorded sound). He writes: Both mediate auscultation and sound telegraphy relied on the construction of an individualized acoustic space around the listener. The binaural stethoscope crystallized this orientation toward acoustic space in an artifact; we will see the same process at work in headphones and telephone booths. It is true that people often listened together to sound recordings and, later, to radio shows. Yet even these collective modes of listening already assumed a preexisting ‘privatized’ acoustic space that could then be brought back to a collective realm. As we will see, the construction of acoustic space as pi te space is in fact a precondition for the commodification of sound. This Is because commodity exchangespresupposes private property. Acoustic space had to be ‘ownable’ before its contents could be bought and sold. ‘As Michele Hilmes has pointed out, ‘many other ways of experiencing sound in this period existed and, whether individual or public, found different ways of entering into the market relations of modern Western capitalism’? Not only Sterne’s study, but also (I would argue) the continuity between some old (and current) professional forms of listening, mostly those using headphones, and the centrality of headphones in contemporary musical consumption has helped to establish an image of recorded music as something to be listened to mostly in isolation. Besides, in analysing songs, mostly through recordings, popular music scholars have sometimes addressed the (ideal or real) listener, but they have often considered her as a single individual that is able to focus on the music to the exclusion of context. Thus, we can find examples of analysis dealing with the ‘intersubjective production of meaning’ in songs, like Sean Cubitt’s analysis of Chuck Berry's Maybellene, but this intersubjectivity is conceived as ‘a meet 6 of two forces —song and psyche—,’ not as a space potentially opened to real Interaction among listeners? The second notion is the identification of popular music ‘audiences’ mostly with people attending live performances, in other words, the centrality of the live concert, the gig, as the main experience of musical life. While | don't want to deny the importance of live events, not only for popular music but for any kind of musical experience, the fact that in our cultural context most of them are (and have been at least since the second half of the 20th century) only accessible to paying audiences raises the question of what motivates somebody to buy a ticket to a concert in the first place -- in other words, how one becomes a ‘fan’ of a musician, a band or a musical genre. | think that the first paragraph of Keith Negus’s chapter on ‘Audiences’ in his book Popular Music in Theory. An Introduction is a good {Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past. Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction, Durham, Duke University Press, 2003, chapter 3: ‘Audile Technique and Media’ p. 155 {emphasis added) Michele Hilmes, "Is There a Field Called Sound Culture Studies? American Quarterly, vol §7,n1. 1, March 2008, pp. 249-59, at p. 253. » Sean Cubitt, "Maybellene’: Meaning and the Listening Subject, Popular Music, ol. 4: Performers and Audiences, 1984, pp. 207-224, at p. 223.example of the two ‘obstacles’ that I have just mentioned, namely the recurrent association of recordings with isolated listening (also, for analytical purposes) and the identification of popular music ‘audiences’ mostly with those attending concerts: With so many people participating in numerous musical events around the world at any one time, a chapter that attempts to introduce theories about music audiences will inevitably be highly selective, After all, the audiences for popular music can range from the thousands of people who gather in stadiums to witness performances by well-known bands and singers (and perhaps the additional millions who might be receiving transmissions of such events on radio and television) to those dancing to musicata wedding or_birthday party. Music audiences can_include people engaging in devotional activity, the crowds hearing a cacophony of different melodies and rhythms as they pass through a shopping mall and someone listening toa cassette tape on a Walkman while cycling through the countryside.* Although in this paragraph Negus mentions music used as background in a shopping mall, he deals neither with it nor with the practice of meeting for listening to records in the chapter. It is also telling that forms of collective listening are practically absent from the interviews of the Music in Daily Life Project, gathered in the book My Music,’ probably because many of the questions, particularly those that set the tone of the interviews (‘What's music about for you’, ‘What does music mean to you?’, ‘What kind of music do you like?’ etc.) are clearly oriented towards individual taste. Instead, I want to claim here that, while being sometimes a very intense and personal experience, music is only conceivable as part of the various social and affective networks in which each individual is involved. To explain how individual taste is shaped our interest must necessarily turn to first musical experiences, among which recorded (or broadcast) music normally features prominently. Probably biographies of musicians, interviews, reports of ‘ Keith Negus, Popular Music in Theory. An Introduction, Cambridge, Polity Press, 1996, p.7 (emphasis added) 5 Susan D. Crafts, Daniel Cavieehi, Charles Kell and the Music in Daily Life Project: My Music. Explorations of Music in Daily Lif, foreword by George Lipsitz, Middletown, Wesleyan University Press, 1993,common people, and even fictional books, are better sources than academic books for discerning those typical situations that are normally part of the development of somebody's musical taste and attitudes, e.g. memories of the recordings (owned by parents, grandparents, siblings, or other relatives) or radio stations regularly heard at home or in the neighbourhood, musics shared with friends in different occasions, the first purchases of music, the first gig... Encounters with friends to listen to recorded music occupy a critical place in that series of events, especially because it is something that, at least in our cultural context, people do more often in their teens and twenties, when they are normally more open to experimenting with their identities. These meetings may not be formally structured; they may be totally spontaneous or follow certain patterns; they may happen in a variety of places and for different purposes; they may just be microevents so completely embedded in everyday life as to become almost indistinguishable from it; they may mingle with dancing, as in parties, and certainly they do not necessarily imply focused attention, as the music can also be there occasionally as background, as a form of (borrowing Anahid Kassabian's term) ‘ubiquitous music’ However, what distinguishes these occasions is that they offer us the opportunity not only to talk about the music, what is always a challenging endeavour and something that even influences the way in which we listen to it, but also to simply (I owe this observation to Franco Fabbri) point at sections or particular aspects of a song that we would hardly be able to describe. It is that ‘Let me play it to you!” that Simon Frith introduced in the opening scene of his book Performing Rites, and that he mentioned again in the keynote speech he gave on Monday, or rather that ‘Listen to this’ that so aptly summarizes the notion of listening as an education of attention. A second interesting aspect of collective listening to records is the way in which music is involved in different chains of emotions, and how often in trying to decide whether we like it or not—and possibily, why—we get trapped in the dichotomy between wanting to connect with our friends, liking what they like, ultimately being like them, and wanting to distinguish ourselves from them, becoming ourselves by disagreeing with their 5 Simon Frith, Performing Rites. Evaluating Popular Music, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1996, p. 3taste. In that dichotomy between imitation and distinction music can even function as an environment to which we may want to adapt or not, but in listening together with others the details of that adaptation are negotiated through many specific, face-to-face gestures, eg, our posture in listening, our readiness to tap to the rhythm of the music or not, the adjectives with which we choose to describe it, our appreciation for the artwork of the recording (in the case of LPs or cassettes), etc. Yet, in discussing collective listening to recorded music as a category of events, I do not want to present itas if it was independent from music technologies and formats, music genres, geographical conditions, social and political circumstances, and generally from history... Far from it. When I compare my own music experiences as a teenager (in the 1980s) with the experiences of older friends that grew up during the 1960s and early 1970s, I can see how the accessibility and ease of circulation that cassettes allowed to us came also with a price: dialogues about favourite songs, new artists, great albums... often happily ended with the promise to pass on the music, what normally happened, eliciting eventually new dialogues and exchanges. But the fact that the music could simply be recorded at home and handed in made meetings superfluous... Though people also met to listen to music occasionally, there was no urgency and no material need for it. By contrast, in the 1960s LPs were the most popular music format: they could not be duplicated, and the state of the recording market, particularly in Southern European countries, was such that import LPs were a scarce material. Under those circumstances, in an economy of scarcity, many expectations were built around the moment in which one would be able to finally listen to a certain new album by a certain band. As I have learnt from my friends, to attain that moment it was important to be friends with the person who could get hold of that new album, so that one would be invited to his or her apartment to listen to that record, maybe in exchange for other favour, Obviously, not only that listening experience, but also the conversations that were articulated around it, among friends, were invested with a sense of gravity that was mostly alien to those that, like the youngsters of my generation, could play once and again the same cassette tape at home.In that sense, it is interesting to observe that two of the characteristics of cassettes that—as Laura Jordan has noticed—made them particularly apt to circulate clandestinely between potential listeners as a form of resistance against Pinochet's dictatorship in Chile,” namely the ease of access to blank cassettes, and what she has called their ‘malleability’ (the fact that they could be recorded and re- recorded at home by anyone), fostered forms of private listening also in contexts in which gathering to listen to recorded music was not potentially dangerous. On the other hand, the difficulty in finding specific tracks and sections of tracks in playing cassettes posed a problem to those that wanted to turn the attention of other listeners to specific aspects of a recording, Certainly, political, legal and social contexts necessarily have an influence on the relevance of forms of collective listening in each historical moment, in the same way as the music itself may be considered more or less suitable to be listened to alone or with others. Again, the 1960s and early 1970s come to mind as, possibly, a kind of ‘golden age’ of collective listening. Not only for the reasons that I mentioned before, that is the complications in getting hold of certain LPs, but also because that was the era of the album and stereophony. We may also wonder whether specific genres that were popular at that time like progressive rock, whose grandiosity required often a certain level of loudness and probably some company, or later the polyphonies of folk rock, which evoked also the strength of human collectives, were particularly suitable for collective listening. In comparison to the circumstances and the music of those years, it may seem that we live today in an age of individual listening, or rather in an age in which the co-presence of people and music in a certain place, at a certain moment in time, is not necessarily perceived as an event. The ideal of portable and wearable players, listened to through headphones, consists in that the music be at the same time perfectly heard by the user, and virtually inaudible to anyone else (perfect isolation). Besides, the primacy of individual songs over albums does not seem to favour particularly collective listening. Yet, I would like to finish this paper ? Laura Jordin Gonzélez, ‘Clandestine recordings: The use of the cassette in the music of the political resistance during the dictatorship (Chile, 1973-1989)’, Situating Popular Musics: JASPM 16th International Conference Proceedings, IASPM, 2012, pp. 307-315.by showing how this view of contemporary listening practices is being challenged by different types of events and initiatives that may signal a return to collective listening under new forms. The first type are series such as the Classic Album Sundays, organized monthly by DJ Colleen ‘Cosmo’ Murphy initially in London (at The Hanbury Arms pub), but later also in other towns, e.g. Edinburgh, Glasgow, New York, Boston, etc. ‘This series proposes the uninterrupted, collective audition of some of the most canonical albums of Anglo-centered popular music, a few widely recognized jazz albums, and even some classical music works. It adheres almost totally to the idea of audiophilia: return to vinyl, good hi-fi equipment, and rules such as no phone calls, no texting and mostly no speaking during auditions. Although it encourages conversation, it does not seem to create an environment similar to that of meetings with friends, as it also stresses educational context (they might include contextual auditions previous to the main audition, and occasionally also introductory remarks by guest hosts). A second, less structured type might be so-called ‘listening parties’ or ‘record listening parties’, which are really friendly events that just happen to be planned. Contrary to a series like ‘Classic Album Sundays’, listening parties may be focused on songs or playlists (played from CDs or digital music players) rather than vinyl albums, and may encourage the auditory display of exotic or eclectic tastes, though they might also follow some rules. ‘The same term, ‘listening party’ can be applied to a type of event organized by a recording company or a band or artist to celebrate the launch of an album, or to imitate the ‘first auditions’ that companies organize exclusively for music critics. However, in this case we could consider it rather as a marketing strategy, and the result may have almost nothing in common with a real ‘party’ or meeting with friends, Finally, we have those attempts to bring the experience of collective listening online, that is to allow users not only to share their music selections and opinions, but also to listen to the same music simultaneously. The web application Mixapp, which unfortunately is not active any more (it closed in August 2011), was a good example of this. Mumuio is a similar project, and is still active, Pehaps moresignificantly, a recent application for iOS called Mystream makes possible for users that are close to other user, and are recognized by him or her as buddies, to listen to whatever music he or she is listening to through their own players. This application, and other equivalent ones of which I might not be aware of, certainly break the conventional representation of the headphone listener as the lonely inhabitant of a sonic bubble, and at the same time create new forms of social sharing that are more effectively inserted in existent everyday routines. To conclude, let me just notice that the importance of something apparently so banal as meeting with friends to listen together to records, cassettes, iPods... can be fully appreciated if we approach popular music not from the perspective of the industry, with its three sequential stages of production-distribution- consumption and the various processes associated with them (a perspective that is very much familiar to popular music scholars), but from a developmental perspective, that is how a certain person gets in contact with popular music (or with music in general, though the stakes are high that most of it will be popular music), how she learns to like it (or not), develops a certain taste, and adopts certain musical attitudes and practices that may also change along life. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. 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