media industries

The loss of Phil Tarr / #MMC2012 / Of Teachers and Referees

Nothing else I write about this week has the gravity of the loss of a young artist’s life. The Cape Breton music scene was stunned this weekend when Philip Tarr passed away at his Sydney home at the age of 25:

Phil’s online obituary

The death is a tremendous loss to the community and its locally residing members could speak to it far more poignantly than I ever could, as they were present for his contributions and are thus most hurt by his absence. Tarr coordinated the Mess Folk outfit that put out a slew of MP3s and vinyl recordings in the past three years.

On a personal level, it was a reflection on my dissertation and personal transformation. My fieldwork was conducted in 2006 and Tarr and his brother James were but teenagers at the time, and not necessarily popular ones within the scene. They were agent provocateurs, if you would, rattling against the emo/screamcore trend of the day. Some of the posts on the CBLocals messageboard were under scrutiny for homophobia (the emo movement certainly bucked the masculine norms rock n’ roll sometimes presents) and disrupting the “signal-to-noise” ratio. Furthermore, the Tarrs were grindcore practitioners– or perhaps satirists of the amelodic genre– via James’ Canker project. They also formed a band titled The Abusive Stepdads.

Mess Folk steered more towards melody but it wasn’t necessarily greeted with open arms right away either. Philip famously called my hometown “a suitable hole to die in” in a Vice interview and MF’s content was occasionally inciteful on its face in the Stepdads vein (with song titles like I Beat My Woman Sometimes (And She Likes It)” and “Suicide Song”). The general arc of Mess Folk was exceptionally dark on its face but one reviewer noted, there was “a lot of snoot-cocking” in the band’s work. Tarr once told us through an online status that he feared ever living in the Brave New World; his music indeed reflected a lot of terrible misanthropic ugliness in the world.

Over time, however, Philip transformed into a scene notable. He likely won over several friends through work ethic alone (and his musical evolution to a 60s garage/punk throwback), but he also became a congenial peer and treasured friend to many. Only a few weeks before his death, he recorded an off-the-cuff track that is eerily autobiographical. It’s eerie to hear the line “I just want to be a musician” because it sounds like that was more of a struggle for someone who explored such dark subject matter while “just wanting to have some fun.”

It was a privilege for those who didn’t move away to get to know Philip on a level beyond his (alleged or not) “angry teenage troublemaker” days. If there were any demons haunting him in his life, I hope he had a chance to make peace on the way out.

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On a far less sobering note, here on the southern side of the border, reality hit me today that I needed to get my notes together for the GSU Modern Media Conference, which finally descends upon the school on Friday and Saturday. My students at The Signal dedicated an entire insert to the conference program in today’s issue. It’s an impressive lineup of presenters, to say the least.

My hats are off to the students doing all of the work to help put this together. A localized media conference is not an original idea of the current students; the Student Media department used to have “Media Day” back in the 1990s. It was an idea that was bandied about at meetings for years by several students and myself, but finally current Signal EIC Sabastian Wee said “hey, let’s do it!” And do it, we shall.

I’m flattered to be among those presenters…those notes I need because I will be conducting a panel on review writing. My students even did a spiffy write up on me in the insert…nice:

What a guy! :-p

If you’re a journalism/media student in Atlanta, we’ll see you this weekend, I’m sure that with the group of great professionals we have visiting, you won’t be disappointed!

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Fitting that it would be Wisconsin.

You might recall that Wisconsin is the state where the public employees protested a bill that would drastically affect teachers’ benefits (among other employees). Despite throngs of protestors descending upon the captial, public opinion polls indicated that there wasn’t a terrible wave of sympathy for the teachers. Several conservative critics framed them as nine-and-a-half monthers, cruising on blissful summer vacations and not working the full nine-to-five schedule. Others declared Walker’s eventual success pushing legislation through as a triumphant transfer of power from unions to elected officials.

Lo and behold, Wisconsin football fans- liberal, moderate, conservative and all points in between- were up in arms today as their pop culture darlings, the community-owned (imagine that) Green Bay Packers that were on the short end of an incredibly controversial ruling in Seattle last night on Monday Night Football. A controversial ruling that may never have happened if there wasn’t a lockout of the regular officials– normally the target of scorn, now suddenly the darlings of the sports fan set. It’s as if the karmic gods of organized labour decided to strike out at Governor Scott Walker’s biggest fan interests to spite him.

Suddenly Gov. Walker doesn’t seem to mind collective bargaining rights so much, something that one of his political opponents was all too keen to mention: “People end up thinking you can get good work for cheap, you can always find a cheaper way and it’s going to be just as good a result,” Larson said. “I would hope that Scott Walker is just as outraged about decreased quality of teachers that we’re going to get as he is with replacement refs in the NFL.” Of course, Vice-Presidential candidate Paul Ryan decided to steer it in the other direction, correlating throwing the “failed” replacement officials out to throwing out incumbents.

That football could become a political…football in this way is a pretty fitting commentary on political discourse. More than one Grantland reader wrote in that Romney or Obama could seal the election by bringing the NFL’s officials back and there doesn’t seem to be a hint of irony in what they’re saying. Wisconsin teachers– you know, the people who have stand in front of dozens of heckling adolescents every day in the hopes of shaping their future– could apparently disappear tomorrow and not garner as much sympathy as a crew of people who measure ball distances at sporting events for a group of million-dollar athletes.

It’s unusual because sports fans, many fiscal conservatives among them, seem to be judging the current officiating fiasco by the standards of community interest rather than by the cold, hard bottom line that they judged the Wisconsin situation. While the NFL is a non-profit, its shutting out of the officials is at the behest of 97% privately owned teams that rake in hundreds of millions of dollars who provide a service that directly affects a fraction of the lives that teachers directly affect.

One would assume the community logic would apply to the public employees, not the wealthy businessmen. No one’s arguing that teachers and firefighters’ worth are measured by how many beer commercials a school can sell. The NFL , however, conducts business for the private owner’s profits and isn’t one logical tenet of late capitalist logic that you’re worth what the market says you’re worth? That being the case, the locked out referees aren’t worth that much: ratings are as high as ever.

The locked out officials can make somewhere between $25-70,000 but without benefits, something they want so they can drop their other jobs. This is for significantly less than nine and a half months of “official” work. Yet when teachers walked out to attend a protest, it wasn’t spun by fiscally conservative critics as the government’s fault that the quality of education might suffer, it was the teachers’ fault. They had to think about the economy, not the community. Whereas in 2012, it’s not the referee’s fault that their absence is hurting the quality of play, it’s the NFL’s…even though the NFL has no economic impetus whatsoever to change their stance. Apparently, the quality of NFL officiating is a community, not a capitalistic, concern.

And here we are, with Wisconsin at the center of the discontent. A strange, but not-so-strange, world indeed.

“World”-labelled music, “Punk”-labelled protest, “Student”-labelled journalism

I flipped the switch to CBC Radio on the way to work Wednesday and caught a spirited debate between British writer Ian Birrell and Toronto-based producer/director Derek Andrews on the subject of “world music.” Namely, the subject was “is this a useful term anymore?” and “might it be that this term is even just a tad bit offensive?” Birrell says “yes.” Andrews says “no,” although his argument seems pretty vague other than a rather half-hearted “how else are you going to describe (Artist A)?” near the end of the interview.

Birrell’s argument is a little bit of the old, a little bit of the new. For the old part of his argument: the “world music” term colonializes all that is not American (or alternately, Western) and essentially exocitizes all music is that isn’t the familiar “4/4 intro-verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-lead-verse-chorus-outro” as some foreign “other.” It’s a fairly racialized concept: as white is the “default” setting, so too American and European music essentially become “default” when we place anything that Westerns remotely find “exotic” into a world bin.

In an oft-cited 2000 essay on the subject, ethnomusicologist Steven Feld captures much of this angst towards the “world music” label and even takes issue with the fact that I would categorize him as as “ethnomusicologist Steven Feld”:

“The relationship of the colonizing and the colonized thus remained generally intact in distinguishing music from world music. This musicology/ethnomusicology split reproduced the disciplinary divide so common in the academy, where unmarked “-ologies” announced studies of normative Western subjects, and “ethno-” fields were created to accommodate the West’s ethnic others. Even if little of this was terribly contentious in the academy of the 1960s and 1970s, it is nonetheless remarkable that the valorized labels ethnomusicology and world music survive with so little challenge at century’s end.”

Furthermore, he argues the term allows for global music to be neatly subsumed into the “market logic of expansion” and that “the dream desires of technological and artistic elites are jolted by market cycles of agitated wakefulness. Then, blanketed in promotion, they are once more cradled and lulled on a firm mattress of stark inequities and padded mergers, and nurtured at the corporate breast.”

The newer part of Birrell’s argument– and one that inadvertently compromises Feld’s argument– is that we “live in such a mashed up world” that what we understand as contemporary Western pop music is wearing the influences of what “world music” was coined to describe many eons ago (K’naan occupying much of this particular conversation), so what’s the use anymore? All this label is doing, he maintains, is steering people away from what could easily pass as a pop hit because it’s that “other,” it’s world music.

I’m a bit torn because my first instinct as a cultural critic is to completely support Birrell (and Feld) and say “hey, this ‘world music’ term isn’t just colonialist orientalism, it’s flat-out outdated.” However, I can’t help but feel that Andrews left out a pretty good counterargument, which is that there is some validity to seeking out a world music experience. Getting rid of “world music” might get rid of the “other,” but might it also be a “padded merger” of our listening experiences into something akin to “ah, it’s all just pop music?”

Ethnic Studies professor Roshanak Kheshti is critical of the “culture-vulture” fears surrounding “world music” labels describes “world music” as more of affective phenomenon than a tangible music genre. Is this the intended fantasy effect of a culture industry? Perhaps, Kheshti concedes. However, she also argues that to give up “world music” would be also to give up the aural imaginary pleasures the genre provides:

“There is a tension here that I am unable to negotiate between the pleasure offered by listening to the musical other, performing the musical other, and the discursive, imaginary, and political-economic formations that have structured me in relation to that object and the pleasure it affords…scholarship on world music, then, should aspire to not only critique the social structures that distinguish the bodies who produce affective labor from the bodies who consume it but also elucidate the psychic and affective processes that draw the bodies together in the first place.”

Kheshti’s idea of “touching sound” might be too estoeric to really sway Birrell but there is some validity to the idea of an aural imaginary. After all, music is so ridiculously subjective that you can’t deny the imaginary’s impact on how we receive it. Think of those terrible pop hits from your high school days that you “know you shouldn’t like” and that you’d probably hate if they came out ten years after you graduated…you like them in no small part because of the imaginary (but once real) world you’ve constructed around them. By removing “world music,” we may nobly avoid orientalizing the music of Asia, South America and so on and so forth, but we might also completely disassemble all of the different places in our mind that music can take us. After all, if the only imaginary we can construct around ANY music is a North American dance floor ready made for Feld’s “corporate beast,” are we any better off?

I do know that this interview has compelled this steak-and-potatoes college radio guy to seek out Tribe Called Red.

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Speaking of music, terms describing it and those terms’ implications…

I was intrigued by Melena Ryzik’s NY Times piece on the movement to support the Russian punk band Pussy Riot. Ryzik immediately touches a chord in rock fans by bringing up the whole “when did punk die?” trope which is pretty much a rite of passage for anyone professing to be a fan of loud music that starts with a ruffian screaming “1-2-3-4!” A prerequiste for many punk purists is that the music being played carry with it a certain sense of danger, a certain sense of unrefined amateurism, and a certain sense of agitation: we will disrupt so that something might change because of this music. And that last part in particular is what Ryzik argues has been missing from anything claiming or claimed to be punk…until now.

Ryzik is right about this much: Pussy Riot’s actions certainly were calibrated to be punk as defined by the aforementioned terms. There was an instant sense of danger as authorities descended upon them to prevent their actions. The music was loud and certainly required practically no training to perform. Most importantly, it was a blatant agitation intended to create change.

There’s no denying the disruption of this performance, which puzzles many that are critical of the outpouring of support. The most disruptive element of the performance is that it pretty blatantly violates the freedom of religious assembly frequently defended and cherished in the Western world. Its true disruption, however, is indicated by the punishment: if you broke into my church and disrupted service, I’d reserve the right to kick you out…you might get charged a fine for petty disruption. Not two years for hooliganism.

That last bit of sentencing detail is why columnists such as Rachel Marsden miss the mark on the whole Pussy Riot affair. Marsden writes “The longer game of subversion would have required them to spend years working to get into a key position within the power structure, then influencing and subverting the system to change what they don’t like. The effects of such an effort would have been more organic, credible and durable.”

Well, that wouldn’t be very punk, would it? Most subculural scholars agree with Dick Hebdige’s assessment that “Subcultures represent ‘noise’ (as opposed to sound): interference in the orderly sequence which leads from real events and phenomena to their representation in the media. We should therefore not underestimate the signifying power of the spectacular subculture not only as a metaphor for potential anarchy ‘out there’ but as an actual mechanism of semantic disorder: a kind of temporary blockage in the system of representation.” Pussy Riot was out to make noise and they made it; I’m not sure that anyone– critic or supporter– is “duped” by any of this.

Marsden further remarks that the band would have gotten further if “they intelligently addressed Mr. Putin’s policies without breaking any laws, or associated themselves with a larger group of activists known for flaunting it relentlessly and treating it as a joke.” This is familiar railing against the “carnival of protest”. I’m critical of when the carnival takes over for any valid political discussion but the fact that Pussy Riot’s actions have raised a spolight on the issue of censorship in Russia is, in and of itself, a sign that their critics are wrong. Surely there are some in Russia that are working within the power structure for the aforementioned gradual subversion, but expressions of “noise” often provide the spark that allow those on the inside to instigate change.

And it also continues the great punk tradition, which I would argue predates the term “punk” in the musical sense: demystifying the process and telling kids not to be intimidated by those that say you can’t. As the late Martin Rushent once said, “Go up there and make a hell of a noise. And make sure you play music your parents don’t like.”.

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It looked as though the Red & Black furor had reached a comfortable detente (and victory for the students). I was heartened to see the students stand by their adviser Ed Morales, someone who is well-respected and liked in the adviser community, and the general consensus those students had was “this wasn’t Ed’s idea and we know he supports our journalistic freedoms.” The Red and Dead website issued a “final statement” on Monday which seemed indicate that this was the end of it.

Yet it’s evident there are some bruised feelings– no longer from the students, but from some of those that sit/sat on the board. Board members are resigning and it’s not entirely clear why– unless it’s because they’re uncomfortable with the students having final say over the content. I’d like to think that’s not the reason. Ed Stampler’s resignation at least seemed thoughtful…almost an apology-resignation hybrid with a bit of recognition that stepping aside would be right for both him and them. However, Charles Russell’s resignation is a bit more cryptic, referring to something that the paper “is about to do” moreso than what it’s done.

It’s good news that the students’ grievances were addressed so quickly, especially when it’s considered a flagship for what student journalism should be. It’s bad news if any lingering ill-will should overshadows and/or extinguishes the ultimate lesson: Letting the students have their say is a good thing.

Red and…Dead? – The *Best*/*Worst* Selection Ever – Inevitable Politicelebreality

Georgia is one of those weird (to me) places where school comes back in August and in Athens, it came back with a bang for student journalists.

In a missive directed towards its “Board of Directors,” Polina Marinova stepped down as the Editor-in-Chief of UGA’s student newspaper, The Red & Black, and led a walkout. The cause? Marinova asserts that the recent wave of hires of permanent staff is a thinly-veiled attempt at prior review and/or prior restraint. Most reaction from the student media world is restrained until all the facts of the story can be verified, although not everyone is waiting to throw their two cents in.

I consider the R&B‘s Ed Morales a valued peer and want to hear his response and that of his co-workers before reacting too rashly. ***UPDATE The SPLC just posted a story about the controversy in which Marinova states that Morales approached her directly about the alleged review/responsibility plan. Suwannee Patch is reporting that the Board will meet to discuss these resignations.*** That said, if the allegations that the Board intended to exercise prior review and to enforce a rather dodgy definition of “good” and “bad” news, then colour me profoundly disappointed.

I understand that there’s fewer things professionally that require more emotional restraint than advising student media. Professionals screw up a lot so what chance do students have to make it through with a perfect record? Your job is tell them what they could do better, point them to resources that can help, then cross your fingers every week that it will have an impact.* One thing your job isn’t is to step in and write the paper for them, but historically there’s a lot of pressure from adminisrations for advisors to do just that. I say it everywhere I speak: There’s yet to be a campus I’ve ever visited where anyone is ever fully happy with the student newspaper. They’re always convinced that all of the other student newspapers in the world are mildly competent and theirs is the only one in the world screwing it up.

* = crossing of the fingers is actually not part of the job description. Sometimes I wonder if it ought to be.

What’s particularly interesting about the R&B case is that whereas many student newspapers are departmentally-based and others are based out of student activities, the R&B is neither. If ever a student paper should be devoid of administrative pressures, the Red & Black should be. Furthermore, the paper is usually held up as a beacon of excellent student journalism. When they switched from a daily to a weekly-with-digital-daily last year, it was considered big news. And that’s only because the paper had earned the reputation for its changes to matter significantly for the rest of us.

This is the type of change, were it to be true, that would matter significantly in a very, very bad way. There are always administrations in North America are always looking for ways to monitor what the student watchdogs say about them, using the flimsy pretense of quality control as an excuse. What’s even more disturbing, however, is that even if quality control was the concern, the word “control” gives away every reason it’s wrong. Every student is entitled to the best student journalism they can receive: if the best student journalism isn’t good enough, so be it. There will be plenty of other avenues to get professional journalism, there are certainly much fewer ways to get student journalism.

I’m hoping the backlash will result in a change or clarification in policy that will allow UGA students to do what they’ve done for over 100 years: let the students bring the news to their peers.

Meanwhile, back in my world, my students are back to work, though secretly they never stopped. The Signal and GSTV will be co-sponsoring a two-day conference at Georgia State that I’m very excited about. Tim Harrower, Jovita Moore, Scott McFarlane, Doug Richards, several people from the CNN/HLN family, it will be an amazing learning experience for the students. And you won’t view journalism the same once you’ve experienced the wrath of Michael Koretzky.

I’m looking forward to a Signal on Tuesday, my GSTV students prowling the campus with their cameras looking for projects and stories and a new edition of New South in 4-5 weeks. And none of the aforementioned headaches going on up the road.

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Our good friends at In Media Res are discussing political polarization this week (including an an entry on the previously discussed Chick-Fil-A furor) and it’s probably no better time than right after Mr. Romney selects his Vice-Presidential candidate. The immediate effect of polarization on American politics is never more evident than in the blogosphere/Facebook wall/Twitter universe than when a VP candidate is selected. The rush to instantly proclaim the selection as shrewd or a flop is often political marketing disguised as observation. You will instantly be told within minutes, depending on the company you keep, that this is an absolute disaster of a selection or an incredibly shrewd selection. Of course, neither may be true, but users want to get the word out this is the impression going around so that you might believe it too.

It’s akin to when people try to imply some sort of zeitgeist by saying “this is the most important Presidential election in our era.” If I were to believe this every time I heard it, it would mean the American zeitgeist has been every four years because people are in a hurry to judge the importance of the present to the future in the present. The idea is that civic engagement will be boosted by an appointment with nostalgia for the present: We will remember this election, which I’m sure is what people told everyone who doesn’t remember the name of the Democratic presidential candidate in 1988.

Of course, there’s a kernel of truth in this: every election is important and it really seems trivial to compare the importance of one to the other. However, there’s less kernels of truth in much of the post-Ryan-selection “observations” if they are simply personal endorsements masked as observations of how he might impact the polls.

What is known is that Ryan was likely picked at least partially for his Tea Party credibility. Which is perhaps unusual on its face, given that it seems to have suffered a post-2010 slump in public approval. It looks like a pick very much in the Al Gore vein in both that Romney and Gore seemed to go for a candidate to temper whatever extreme one is seen to be possessing or lacking. Gore picked the right-leaning Democrat Joe Lieberman, allegedly to distance himself from Bill Clinton and make moderates comfortable voting for him. Romney, on the other hand, has been accused of being not conservative enough by many in the Republican camp. Ryan is seen as the yin to Romney’s more moderate yang, a yang that Republican candidates seem keen to avoid, exemplified by Newt Gingrich’s mea culpa.

Despite a slim plurality, Gore’s strategy didn’t pan out. The Romney-Ryan ticket feels potentially counterintuitive in these polarized times. The Obama-Biden and McCain-Palin tickets appeared to be “doubling down” tickets (Obama doubling down ideologically, McCain doubling down on “maverick-ism”). Romney’s challenge will be to craft a platform that straddles the line between moderate conservatism and staunch conservatism, but perhaps in these times, that will satisfy no one.

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Speaking of the In Media Res series, Sue Collins’ first entry in the polarization series analyzes the Republicans’ continued attempts to play off of assumed anti-Hollywood sentiment in voters. John McCain bet on such sentiment and four years later, the strategy remains resonant in many conservatives’ minds.

John Street has long advocated for the positives of the marriage between popular culture and politics, and moreover argues that the marriage is not as new as everyone portrays. Certainly the suspicions towards Hollywood from conservative critics goes back to the Hollywood Ten of the 1940s. Collins wisely points out that if Obama is a “celeb-president,” this should hardly be a surprise given how current American political campaigns favour the “pop TV format.” Neil Postman might have been surprised to see the Republican side of the aisle trying to point out any inherent downfall in this reality, especially given how they’ve capitalized on it in the past, but neverthless here we are.

On the surface, this appears to be merely be a criticism of what is alleged to be an artifice of the opposing candidate. In other words, it’s not “Obama is a celebrity therefore he is a bad politician” but rather “we believe he is a bad politician who has blinded you with celebrity.” Beneath the surface, it’s consistent with the conservative strategy of planting suspicion with “liberal media” amongst voters by creating a full-circle: celebrities are too liberal for you, they like Obama an awful lot, Obama is not like you.

Street defends pop culture as a way that young people are able to make sense of politics and of the authenticity of their everyday experiences. He disputes the idea that it’s merely a way for people to vote their way their celebrity idols tell them to, and much of the affection for the The Daily Show and Colbert Report is that it points out the comic absurdity of how politics works which hopefully will motivate viewers to be more thoughtful about their conduct within that arena.

So with that being said, I wonder if the “anti-Hollywood” strategy has any more ceiling for the Republicans. Certainly those who are offended by celebrity involvement with politics have already cast their lot away from Obama. Those who, as Street argues, “make sense” of politics through popular culture are probably unlikely to be moved by such arguments. Celebreality is now the political language they speak. Telling them their language is wrong, though perhaps an admirable attempt to make political discourse more erudite and less “fluffy,” is not likely to sway them come election day.

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Already going through that withdrawal period where you go home expecting something Olympics-related on my television but not finding it. After my retrospection and lamentation last week, Diana Matheson scored arguably Canada’s most dramatic football goal in 26 years. It was fitting that this was the most memorable moment for Canada this Olympics since the event was covered in bronze for the maple leaf.

Maybe I’m in “Olympic Hangover” mode. I’m living in a city 16 years removed from the Olympics so there’s a bit of a perpetual hangover from people living here longer than me. But it’s funny that CBC would report about that given that they’re already counting down to Sochi, where Canada’s broadcast rights will return to them. With a record gold medal haul in 2010, it’s safe to say that the winter version will yield more metallic variety for Canada the next time around.