AUTHOR: IVO MARTINS
EDITION: Guimarães Jazz Journal #18 - Câmara Municipal de Guimarães/ Associação Cultural Convívio/ A Oficina DATE: November 2023
If we really want to understand the jazz phenomenon, we have to frame it in the major social and musical currents of the twentieth and the twenty-first century, and not in the context of an analysis that stands outside of the reality in which it evolved. Through the observation of the changes that took place during that period we may establish connections between jazz and a myriad of other factors, thus creating new compositions as if these were a web of apparently unrelated micro-stories. Art, technology, culture, society (in short, the world), manifest themselves in different ways, in many cases without any articulations between them. In change there is always a random and unpredictable factor, re-founded upon the detailed and meaningful rapport of important, although generally undervalued, facts. Time and space are compressed inside an historical camp that unites thoughts, allusions, ideas, causes, consequences, reasonings, arguments, inventions, techno-scientific discoveries and power games. All these factors form an irregular and deviant material of undetermined direction. Themes are let by themselves, appearing, disappearing and reappearing within structural fields thar are neither linear nor chronological, thus revealing themselves to be, in a sense, anti-historical. The content of the countless stories comprised in the jazz phenomenon are thereby abundant in not always perceptible or calculated answers, making it impossible to integrate them into a coherent and conclusive idea. In order to understand it we must elaborate on some topics that come from a history that is multiple and fractal in its resonances and semantic consequences; the words “jass”, “jazz”, “pop”, “rock n’ roll”, “blues”, “ragtime”, “hip-hop”, “rap”, “recording studio”, “discographic industry” “sales chart”, “vinyl disc”, “cassette”, “compact-disc”, “internet”, “digital piracy”, “Mp3”, “sampler” or “streaming”, among many others that are commonly used to designate the different technologies of capture, storage or manipulation of music, are the components of a new language of cultural realignment that radically transformed the popular music of the twentieth century.
In 1957 the stereophony, an invention that introduced significant qualitative gains to the discographic industry, was launched in the market. Some years later, in 1980, another great leap took place, centered on the portable component of music, with the appearance of the magnetic tape cassette recorder. This innocent technological advancement provoked an automatic decrease in music albums sales. However, as it was later proved, such decrease did not harm the profits of the discographic industry. Meanwhile, other technologies of recording and reproduction of music continued to be released, such as the magnetic tape cartridge (which rapidly became obsolescent), VHS cassettes (that could also be used to record music), the mini-cassette, the minidisc and, finally, the CD. However, it was the massification of the internet that allowed the great leap in the unknown. At its first stage of development, the internet did not seem to anticipate great technical potentialities; there were no technical devices available capable of converting the songs of a CD or a vinyl disc into a digital file. It took a while before the invention of a file capable of archiving music; of a program capable of reproducing it; of a device capable of extracting the music contained in an analogic format and convert it into a digital format; and of the software capable of compressing that information and allowing its circulation through a digital network. It took many years of research in order to unite all these conditions; to move and to storage the file of an album via the internet, within a net of users that was increasing dramatically every day, presupposed the development of several technological solutions. The mp3 format and, later, the streaming, were some of the most recent inventions that allowed a fast and effective circulation and storage of music. Currently, the digital technologies have replaced traditional television, the vinyl LP and all the other devices for the reproduction and the recording of music. Beyond the pure joy of listening to music, these old formats offered the consumer a specific tactile pleasure that came from a sense of ownership of a concrete object. These analogic devices provided many different forms of physical contact with the objects in which music was archived. Nowadays, with the proliferation of new remote digital formats, reality became virtual and the listeners of music, having ceased to engage in direct contact with reality, inhabit an immaterial place. In this context, the listener is dispensed of the physical and direct contact with music and its reproduction devices, which are increasingly intelligent, multifunctional, portable, miniaturized and personal, following the users around as if they were their shadows or their ghosts.
The technological developments generated by these diverse and important inventions foreshadowed the worst for the discographic industry as it was until that moment. The musical production in digital format contributed to transform popular music at a global scale, converting it into a wide, democratic and egalitarian, although unpredictable in its cultural consequences, product. Nowadays, music interferes in all sectors of life and in different areas of our daily routines. The online world is made of many actors, each one represented by a specific intention. In 1995, however, the cyberspace was an immense archipelago, dispersed through many islands with countless domestic servers that did not communicate between themselves, an elitist territory where only the enthusiasts and the specialists in computation operated. In the following years, nevertheless, the development of these equipment took place at an impressive rate; its technical and performative capacities grew enormously and, at the same time, the number of those who had the skills to dominate the computer was increasing exponentially. The cybernetic technology thus became a simple, accessible and powerful machine of information processing, improving the operational capacity and solving the problems of communication which, according to Paul Virilio, define an entity devoid of special extension and inscribed on a singular temporality of an instantaneous dimension. The computer would become an irreplaceable machine and the lives of all individuals were strongly affected by this transformation, since the computer was rapidly transformed into an increasingly effective and portable multifunctional equipment, and by extension the individuals also changed the way they interact with music.
The musical context was radically affected by the consequences provoked by all these changes. Albums of every musical genre started to become available online, complemented by complete and meticulously documented discographies. Powerful search engines allow users to find instantaneously all sorts of information, organized by musicians, themes, versions of each composition, albums, playlists and artist profiles. In this new reality, the listener becomes nomadic, a fully independent and autonomous being, culturally omnivorous and subjected to the dispersion of intentions and will. In the digital world people have total freedom of movements, creating personalized lists based on the choice of themes that are later annexed to specific files which can be listened to when or where they want, independently of the network. Each user can sequence several files in many different orders, according to his musical sensitivity. The listener thus became a builder of sounds, a creator of new sound realities expressed by lists. The ordering of the themes, outside the frame of the album to which they belong, generates in itself a new way of listening to music. The possibilities opened by these tasks introduce the user into a much wider field of action, devoid of an intentional or unequivocal structure. Therefore, music became the subject of a nebulous atmosphere of indirect influences, way too diffuse and contingent.
In result of this new paradigm, the listener is less and less motivated to search in the market for musical products in physical format, giving preference to sensorial experiences. In virtual reality people do not contact with tangible things, but rather with stimulus interfering with their attention, that being the reason why cultural consumption, the adoption of new lifestyles, the urge for sophistication, the exploration of sexuality, the exponentiation of communication and the definitive implantation of the empire of audiovisual realities, among other tendencies, became some of the most sellable topics inducing experimentation. Or, as Mark Slouka wrote, the individuals were “transformed into consumers of their own lives”. The amplitude of the cyberspace was invested of an additional significance, since it allows fast movements to every place of the planet. People did not remain indifferent to this new reality and the emergence of new and increasingly advanced, sophisticated and practical systems for the sharing of digital archives generated its own cycle of self-reproduction. Such circumstance reveals the importance of speed when we are dealing with cybernetic operations, allowing the resurgence of an old concept developed by Michel Foucault: through the reinvention of the self the individual becomes himself a true work of art, the creator of new lifestyles for himself. Some years after its enunciation, this way of understanding human existence was granted an unexpected confirmation: at this moment, we may ask: what is exactly the present? Actuality is so elastic and comprehensive that it pervades everything; the past is pushed beyond the visible horizon, and time is reduced to a single present. In fact, the most pressing question of our time is to know who is at the command of events. In this doubt implicitly lies the problem of how art is currently managed, what is the role of the agents, of the intermediaries, of those who detain the means of production, of the institutions, of the audiences and, finally, of the artists themselves, a process of questioning of the survival of art that lasts since the time when the walls of Altamira were first covered by drawings. In this sense, the dispute between the users and the legally contextualized creators and all the others, i.e., those who are marginal to the system, constitutes a much wider problem than it seems. Can culture survive degradation, decline and loss of eternity? The movements of the market are extremely capricious and transitory, and are usually saturated by false affirmations, wrong prognostics and equivocal judgements.
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In its essence the cyberspace is not a field susceptible of being fully directed but, nowadays, there are valid reasons for concern about the effects upon its control. The information that circulates in it is not organized in a common continuity, and it can either occupy or de-occupy that same space. However, the internet, being a territory that is fertile in anonymous intelligence favoring the creation of new systems, either inside or outside the preexistent ones, comes across as intrinsically almost impossible to control. Such features of ambivalence and diffuse permeability cannot be replicated in the real world, even though we know that technology constitutes a prothesis, an extension of the human body, that reflects the potential of subjectivity. In this sense, the digital web may be perceived as an intelligent unfolding of a singular and particular world where opposite forces intersect. The true computational specialists are an elite and hold an undeniable power, since they move under false identities through nebulas of data and within virtual spaces that are in themselves mutant and unstable. Through the use of pseudonyms, a single user can wear many different masks, thus hiding behind a cryptic language that makes it harder to monitor their movements. The subversion practiced by those who position themselves outside of the system causes a mutually reinforced effect, as exposed by the theory of the “schismogenic chains” of Gregory Bateson. For example, if a given behavior does not generate a symmetric opposite response, inducing submission instead, there is high probability that such acceptance will promote a more affirmative action: the chain repetition of this reaction will, sooner or later, lead to the rupture of the system. Outside the realm of the material, and isolated in places devoid of any social meaning, many youngsters still continue, uninterestedly, to work daily and clandestinely on new and better software. Such anti-neighboring attitude immunizes them against interferences upon their secret game and contributes to the perfecting of the systems that have already been invented through the addition of new concepts and devices conceived on an elusive and invulnerable place. Their skills and efficiency, both in regards to searching capacities as well as in terms of storage, are the motto of a frantic individual construction where the pods where they live in and the cyber playground upon which they project their creative endeavors have become almost indistinguishable.
Each attack against the established order promoted by the discographic industry is also an act of counterpower, translated by the fact of someone anonymously accomplishing, in a simple and direct way, the task that should be assumed by every individual if the artificial difficulties imposed by the mechanisms of the system did not exist. Bureaucratic pulsion generates obstacles that are constantly being renewed and prevent those who want to do altruistic work to gain access to the system. Therefore, whoever develops an independent and autonomous strategy, opposite to the logics of the market, is bound to suffer a traumatic shock with bureaucracy. This clash is followed by an evanescent sense of pleasure based on denial that is only partially achieved because, after the effect of liberation, everything goes back to normal. To challenge the system implies the return to a daily normality; however, the event leaves many traces on those who are willing to keep that secret. In the beginning of digital technology, it was due to the activity of cybernetic pirates (the hackers) that we began to develop a better understanding of the great potential of the digital files, such as the mp3, and that programs such as “Napster” were invented, thus allowing a disruption of the internet’s protocols of use and paving the way to the creation of alternative and yet to be regulated devices of sharing of music and art. This new situation created a problem that was neither technical nor legal, but eminently political and ideological – those who invented programs for the archival and sharing of files, programs that were capable of sabotaging the operational systems of management of authorial rights, exhibit a proclivity to defend a free internet, a concept that clashes with the dominant capitalist views. The “Napster effect” became an example of egalitarianism and cooperation that shook the system; after its first impact, and although when the more exalting phase of its ecstatic energy faded most people quietly returned to their daily routines, many unpredictable things had already happened and left their marks – as always in history, each structural crisis is followed by a sort of social hangover, but nothing remains quite the same. The “new normality” that is eventually established will always differ from the previous one, and so the internet changed and became an infinite field for new experiences. The appearance of tribal digital communities revealed to everyone who wanted to know the new reality that the social field cannot be totally captured by the economic apparatus or integrally regulated by the state. The countless efforts exercised by the different organisms of power in order to control the cyberspace only motivated the internauts to learn how to surpass the obstacles and to survive in fluid virtual environments. The circulation and the sharing of music is an integral part of this general movement impacting everyone’s life.
Some of the individuals who inhabit the internet are, in a sense, the heirs of the old anarchist idea of decentralized communities which, by functioning in a direct and transparent way, are able to survive without structures of representation. Nowadays, whoever lives and acts on the internet is not that different from those who lived and acted on the “real” world of the past; if some desired to organize their lives according to a system of direct democracy, working for the collective good, other were more aggressive, competitive and ambitious, and did not hesitate to engage in dysfunctional or criminal attitudes in order to achieve their goals. The digital web is simultaneously an open and obscure space where all sorts of individuals and contexts coexist, and that is why its romantic side, reflected on a network at the service of cooperation and collaboration, is currently going through a serious existential crisis whose future is difficult to anticipate. The anxious determination of the consumer or, in other words, his target and desire, is the subject of multiple distortions and, in that process, it becomes understood as part of the property of the desired good. On the digital web the logic of such illusion is stretched to the limit, since the difference between object and subject are permanently confounded, therefore making us aware that no one exists outside the frame of a fetishist deception. However, no one is entirely opaque to himself, just as it is impossible for an individual to completely know himself, to the point of understanding his own generative self. If we follow this line of thinking, and assuming that every form of knowledge presupposes rational thinking, we come to the conclusion that the internet is not necessarily favorable to this kind of approach. Reality is always limited and defined within a global context where cognitive self-references occur in a dark well whose model is always transparent and pre-conceptual; considering this limitation, we may affirm that to feel oneself means to be a part of an immediate and naïve, thus non-reflexive, daily experience.
The transparency claimed by the anarchist heritage presupposes a self-governed society, a web of mechanisms functioning invisibly and without opposition or problems. Such society, however, is not possible, nor the internet can be an integrally non-alienated channel. Its forms are revealed through the complex structures of replacement that make it work, that being the reason why its organization will never be able to operate according to a model of self-management, at least in the short or medium term, and, in this sense, it is impossible to perceive it as a space of total freedom and autonomy. Perhaps the best option is to approach it as an inevitable form of alienation and make an effort to guide it towards a less problematic and conflictual way of functioning. The market will remain at the internet and will explore all its potentialities, since it is impossible to escape the predatory logics of capitalism; however, it would be wise to give more space to non-alienated solutions whose freedom and autonomy may help supporting spontaneous communities who, through their aspirations, desire to establish uninterested relations based on freedom to cooperate and collaborate without restrictions. In a society based on extreme individualism, where everyone is responsible for himself only and is willing to exploit and neglect the others, the market will always prevail, and the cyberspace is no exception to this paradigm. Virtual reality projects the individual into a world devoid of stable references in which traditions either disappear or are destroyed, thereby favoring an exponential growth in consumption. In this context, the market causes panic and insecurity because the market itself is not immune to its own crisis and operates on the principle of the empty chair of command: without someone to blame, power will always be exercised in a vacuum.
Perhaps we may discover in jazz a plausible answer to this stalemate. The suffering caused by processes of control and exclusion is inscribed in the genesis of this musical genre and still remains as one of its strongest identity features, since it was founded upon efforts of, simultaneously, liberation and negation of desires. At the core of jazz there is essentially a search for integration and cooperation between different cultures, gathered around a musical whole that we call “the world”. Thus, to listen and to create jazz means to react and resist against all sorts of difficulties, face the unknown, penetrate the mysterious and conceive resistance as an inversion of our own impotency in regards to the immense field where music is manifested. The social system from which jazz descends is contaminated by the force of a redeeming negativity that transforms it into an art which perceives itself as having the mission of exposing uncomfortable truths, of making subliminal denouncements, of negating erasures, segregations and divisions. This musical genre is composed of countless messages against decadence, cynicism and deception, and those messages were at the same time the catalysts and the reflectors of many of the most important political, economic, social and cultural events of the twentieth century. While acquiring the force of historical document and element of memory, and having being projected into an ideal communal reality rooted in its origins, jazz attained a universal anthropological dimension invested of a significant symbolic meaning. By having being able of affirming itself as a strategy for the agglutination of communities and the protection of their respective traditions, jazz discovered an indirect process of building its own identity, formed not by abstract values but by concrete elements which were the incarnation of a dense web of daily ordinary routines. This is perhaps the most important lesson that this musical genre has to offer in the context of digital deterritorialization that characterizes the contemporary ethersphere: the idea that we need something much more radical, a sort of Brechtian distancing supported upon a difficult, cruel and profound existential experience, through which it may be possible to rediscover the foreign in us. Communal visions will never be sufficient; it is necessary to recognize what we are and face the fact that each one of us is, in his own peculiar way, an eccentric lunatic in urgent need of finding a form of tolerant coexistence between countless different lifestyles and world visions. This assessment implies the surpassing of tribal separations and the search for a collective compromise, in a long process of universal solidarity towards the consolidation of a cause strong enough to intersect different worlds and ways of life.
TRANSLATION: MANUEL NETO
