Steady Diet of Nothing: Affinities, Sacrifices, and Change at Record Fairs
Society for Ethnomusicology
SEM, Honolulu, Hawaii, November 19, 2006.
This paper’s title is taken from an album by Fugazi.
Abstract
How can participating in a record fair as a dealer alter one’s attitude toward music, recordings, and fandom? In his 1991 Cultural Studies article “Systems of Articulation, Logics of Change,” Will Straw recognizes an overlap between members of alternative rock cultures and collectors interested in the historical documentation of popular musics. Indeed, record fairs attract both collectors largely uninterested in current music and younger fans newly negotiating historical archivism as a cultural value. Navigating between a continually discriminating level of connoisseurship on one hand and a consistently shrinking secondary market for vinyl records on the other, dealers must strategically rotate their stock to cater to fans of many genres. As events, these record fairs occur at large temporal and geographic intervals, yet dealers regularly travel hundreds of miles to attend fairs with little promise of financial remuneration. At what point does this repetitive participation become quotidian?
How does the shift of recording as artifact to commodity affect dealers’ identity as fans? What sacrifices must dealers make as they continue participating in record fairs? How do relationships among dealers differ from those between dealers and customers? Building on Straw’s confluence of cosmopolitanism (“attentiveness to change occurring elsewhere”) and connoisseurship in his study of communities within popular music, this paper explores issues of everyday practice and changing identity through an ethnography of record dealers—individuals who act both as mediators and audience members within popular music exchange—using record fair events as the primary public cultural space.
Part of the organized panel Event — Identity — Experience. Panelists:
Luis-Manuel Garcia
Andrew Mall
Greg Weinstein
Panel abstract
The notion of “event” has been a popular unit of analysis for ethnomusicology, which shares with anthropology a long-standing interest in ritual practice (e.g., the work of Victor Turner and Ruth M. Stone). This field of study comes into tension with theories of everyday practice (e.g., DeCerteau, Bourdieu, Seremetakis) and raises important questions about how events participate in the everyday. These questions hinge on issues of frequency and familiarity. How often must an event be repeated before it is routinized as quotidian practice? What is the relation between specific events and general practice? Of what use, then, are case studies? What marks the temporal and spatial limits of an event, and how does repetition affect its temporality?
Although varied, the contributions to this panel share a common interest in exploring the continuities between the specific and the general, rare and common, salient and unremarkable. As an extension of these concerns, these papers share an attentiveness to how the repeatability of events interacts and/or interferes with the performance and sedimentation of identities. Rather than produce three theoretical, “what is event?” papers, Luis-Manuel Garcia, Andrew Mall and Gregory Weinstein each approach a different archive of events (queer punk/rock nights, record fairs, blues bars). Additionally, these projects vary in the challenges they pose to a theory of the event: Garcia focuses on repeated events at one site, while Weinstein considers a network of localities, and Mall works with a series of events that deal with recordings rather than live performances.