Acting up, Talking Tech: New York Rock Musicians and Their Metaphors of Technology

Abstract

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. University of Illinois Press and Society for Ethnomusicology are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Ethnomusicology. Relationships between popular musics and technology, while commonly acknowledged in music scholarship, often have been limited to discussion of these musics as dependent upon large, complex industries whose ability to produce and reproduce a product is technologically based.' Only recently have technologies been scrutinized as lived and experienced, not just as the annoying tape noise in the background of daily life but tied to familiar and persistent cultural practices.2 Most pertinent here are technologies as they emerge in intentional linguistic and behavioral processes for rationalizing and dividing the world (see Penley and Ross 1991; Ross 1991) for local New York City rock musicians.3The close relationship between electronic technologies and the very concept of popular music in this century is affirmed each time we pick up an electric guitar, watch MTV, or purchase a compact disc. Thus it is not surprising that knowledge of music technologies and how to exploit, adapt, and resist them is essential to communities of rock musicians in New York, and elsewhere. Technologies also become bound to tropes within the lives of rock musicians and central to their existence as rockers. These tropesspecifically metaphors-are intricate, with patterns and meanings continually reformed through the social and technological encounters of musicians. Most explicitly for New York rock musicians, technologies and technological adaptations are tied to cultural practices that authenticate musicianship and signal alliances within and alienation among musical and social groups. Moreover, new technological adaptations offer openings for reconfigurations and new alignments of power for women rock musicians. ? 1998 by the Board of Trustees of the University of IllinoisAt the 305 Bar, a Chinese restaurant turned rock club near New York's Port Authority Bus Terminal, a rock musician friend criticizes another guitarist's performance by saying that he has "too many knobs between the guitar and the amp's speaker" (Jimbo Walsh, pers.com. 1989). This statement refers to the highly processed guitar sound the other musician had created with his considerable electronic gear: electric guitar, amplifier, rackmounted digital-delay reverb and a battery of effects pedals linked through a few feet of cables. My friend later explained that "every electronic thing adds some muck to the sound and deteriorates the fidelity, hindering the directness of the 'feel' of the guitar" (Walsh, pers.com. 1994).At the heart of the critique was a problem of obstructing musical communica...

Gear Acquisition Syndrome: Consumption of Instruments and Technology in Popular Music

“…Yet other times, it is a combination of various elements. For example, Gibson's Les Paul Standard, produced between 1958 and1960, is revered for the quality, rarity and symbolic value that iconic players like Eric Clapton or Jimmy Page have lent them (Gay 1998). These models are now worth about $225,000 to $375,000 (see also Dawe 2010: 28).…”

“…Besides the two main elements of making music before a recording can take place, performance and composition, sound quality has become increasingly important. As the mediating element, the sound transports the performed composition to its audience (Gay 1998). Théberge (1997: 186) goes on saying that 'a concentration on the "right" sounds for a given musical context can shift the musician's attention away from other, more familiar levels of musical form, such as melody, rhythm, and harmony'.…”

“…This concern is likely to be specific to digital keyboard instruments, guitar amplifier simulations, effects units and potentially electronic drum kits, as limited computational power and hard drive space negatively affect sound quality. With analogue equipment as guitar amplifiers or subtractive synthesisers, sound quality is negatively affected by a complex signal path; from a technical viewpoint, the quality of a simple signal path is superior (Gay 1998). Innovation rather concerns the adjustability of sounds, such as expanding the amplifier's filter section with resonance and presence controls, which were increasingly added to devices in the 1970s (Herbst 2016: 36).…”

“…In the rock context, the bass has traditionally been the instrument that made an otherwise purely male band most accessible to women (Carson et al 2004: 4;Gay 1998: 88ff) because, despite its fundamental musical role, the bassist is receiving less attention on stage and is less audible on the record. For the same reason are keyboard, string and wind instruments regarded as 'feminine' in a rock context (Gay 1998;Berkers & Schaap 2018). However, depending on the reputation these instruments enjoy in other genres, the opposite could be the case.…”

‘Living underground is tough’: authenticity and locality in the hip-hop community in Istanbul, Turkey

“…The approach I have taken in developing this case study draws from two parallel, if somewhat separate currents of research. Ethnomusicologists and anthropologically oriented researchers on popular music have, in the last decade, begun to explore how people make meaning through both the production and consumption of mediated musics (Cohen 1991(Cohen , 1993Stokes 1992;Larkey 1993;Thornton 1996;Fox 1997;Gay 1998;Porcello 1998Porcello , 2002Berger 1999;Diehl 2002;Maxwell 2003;Meintjes 2003). The strength of these studies lies especially in their being grounded ethnographically in the experiences and discourses of real people (not abstract categories such as 'producers' and 'consumers') in specific social situations.…”