With a scholar’seye, Selling Sounds moves with thegrace of a good storyteller’s ear for aural culture in America.Replete with solid research on everything from Tin Pan Alley song pushers toSupreme Court rulings that defined music in ways that both preserved theartist’s rights as well as dismantled the oral process of folk music, this textprovides us with all of the paradoxes that come with popularity or, rather,commercialization.
Perhaps the mostintriguing area of the book is the history of Black Swan Records, the firstlarge, black-run recording business. Suisman writes that in the 1910s and ’20sthe music industry “achieved a certain invisibility…[that] was activelycreated. It grew out of the production of commodities particularly well suitedto becoming fetishes.” Music became a commodity in the form of sheet music,piano rolls and phonograph records: “As music-producing objects, their verypurpose was disembodiment: the sundering of body and voice.” From its inceptionin 1921, Black Swan was a “radical attempt to confront, challenge, and disruptthe invisibility of the modern music industry.”
Black Swan sought tobuild the case that black recording artists deserved the same entitlement aswhite artistsand were not merely rural, bumpkin and outsider participants.“The short history of this one small company says a great deal about the musicindustry and its relations with society at large,” Suisman writes. If a song bya black artist caught on, Tin Pan Alley churned out countless variants. Theoriginal was inconsequential or at best limited to a narrow audience. BlackSwan was determined to issue music it considered better than that of what nowis deemed as folk-oriented, oral tradition music (i.e. the stuff seriouslisteners of Americanalove in the 21st century). Although the label went under in 1923, the victim ofan overall drop in record sales caused by the popularity of radio, the BlackSwan projectwhere the careers of Fletcher Henderson and Ethel Watersbegandemonstrated that reconciling lofty, high-culture music and mundane,low-culture music was much more complex than imagined.
Selling Sounds explores the idea that the music industry will artificially stimulate agenre whether there is musical content or not, turning the sound object into afetish in complete disregard for the music or artist. It’s not as simple aspure marketing or, better yet, branding voodoo, but rather the invisibility ofthe machine that introduces its assembled parts for sale. Commerciality aboveall else becomes better than serious listening. The end result is pop genreupon genre, empty of anything but sonic posturing that falls on ears deaf tomusic.
By now, high culturehas mimicked low, and there is no middle ground upon which to standartistically if one is to be commercially viable. We are searching for rootsand doing so in confusion over what began as “authentic folk music” versuscommercial product. In writing about ’60s rock, Suisman wisely notes that“recordings had always been artificial creations, but never before had theartifice been so conspicuous” and that nothing symbolized this more than“decisions by musicians…to abandon live performance in favor of themanipulation and control of magnetic tape and multi-track recording.” In theprocess we have become more oblivious to the difference between music made forhire, not desire.%uFFFD%uFFFD%uFFFD%uFFFD%uFFFD%uFFFD
