Charlie Keil’s ineffable train of thought delivers ideas for post-capital marketing of your band. Harmonic Dissidents invites you to send us your own thoughts on how money affects your band dynamics, for our Spring 2010 issue. ~ed
by Charlie Kiel
For a long time I have been looking forward to the disappearance of music the object as property (see Music Grooves 1994: 227-237; 314 ff., and earlier mutterings), hence a profitable commodity. My Hatto Potato collection resisted collectivization (no collaborators accepted my invitations to further playful debunking of written and recorded music, perhaps because for those who agree with me, it has already been sufficiently deconstructed and I’m beating a dead horse with a straw man), but it makes the point that are there are now no perceptible “differences that make a difference” in much of the recorded “legacy musics,” e.g., “classical” piano performances. Big chunks of recorded-commodified-objectified music-for-sale are probably “meaningless” or “undifferentiatable” (it doesn’t matter which people make it, or whether people or machines are ‘producing’/ ‘creating’ it) in today’s overmediated and hyperalienating world. Some find meaning or project meaning into “it,” some don’t, but “it” doesn’t really matter, except as a distraction from reality: the co-evolving diversity of species and cultures (our life-support system) currently being destroyed by militaristic and capital accumulating civilizations. Since fall 20082 the accelerating or autocatalytic aspects of this threefold destruction [increasing human population, increasing technology, increasing arrogance] has been thrown into question but the destruction continues apace, in tempo; we are losing many arthropods and other species ‘unknown to science’ while increasing ecological imbalance every day.
Now I am listening backward and I think it has finally happened. Music as profitable object is winding down; musicking as prophetic and local-healing process can unfold in all its splendid diversity once again. The “2nd lines” are joining parades again in New Orleans, 62 “social aid and pleasure clubs” sponsor 42 Sunday afternoon parades in the cooler months. The HONK!Fests continue to grow, new bands springing up amid the detritis of western snivelization. The technical objectification of musical objects, “studio audio art,” as Tom Turino calls it, will continue for quite some time, and there will be some profit in it for individuals who can attract viewers on the Web, but we the people will now continue to reclaim musicking from the commodification forces and make it work for individuals and groups as “play” in every locality. Nothing keeps us from doing that except garden variety or quotidian, unthinking adherence to antiquated aesthetics, enslavement to technology, media, consumerism, star and celeb fetishism, the many brain-numbing tech games that still pass for “pleasure” or “leisure” or “fun for the feeble-minded” in Babbleon. Lasting pleasure, deep enjoyment, jubilation as a foundation for living, were always live and in person, face to face, in community, up until very, very recently. In the future, joy will be more and more local and live . And mediated music will become more and more of a bore, an archive, a museum filled with objects gathering dust. Culture, live and local, is winning; snivelization is losing, bankrupt, going broke. Full participation in life is more fun than slow death by alienation! Duh. Hot happiness melts the cold evil of technococooning! Simple.
Money? I’ve done some poems about inflation, deflation, Ezra Pound, the money question; a few are in Hatto Potato (currently available for a buck or two of “printing & postage money” to Box 511, 06039, see Harmonic Dissidents # 1 for an excerpt.) and some are at the peacepoetreeparty.info website where I continue to crawl very slowly for Congress. My “art currency” is still for sale at the 12/8 Path Website, but so far, the crisis is not deep enough for anyone to have bothered turning in stale and declining US dollars for fresh “drop its” and silver equivalents. (My father invested in Borzoi’s “Globes” and “Constants,” pieces of silver to be backed by a “basket of commodities” back in the day, and now, as “collectibles” those pieces of silver may be worth 20 or 30 times what he paid for them.) Please think about issuing your own “tokens of value” as part of a nascent, growing, brass band hedgemoney (hard edge money? hedge against inflation money? dominant or hegemonic money?). What “tokens” of esteem would you like to receive from people hearing, dancing to, and otherwise enjoying your musicking? In the spirit of Swami Beyondananda, dues unto others as you would have them dues unto you.
Each band has to decide for itself what to charge or exchange for which services, if anything. My only strong urge at the moment is that the language of catallactics – [an alternative term for what is commonly called economics-ed] “exchange,” “circulation,” and the hope of turning enemies into friends (see “Austrian economics” poem – entitled “no idea but in dance” at http://peacepoetreeparty.info)—might gradually replace the language of “political economy,” “free market,” “fair trade,” “GNP,” “GDP,” “GOP,” etc. – and the usual unintelligible shabble dabble about how to extract some more coin from the rabble to pay for our wars and bailouts for the super-rich.
Until bioregional and local alternative currencies take hold, until barter and exchange become the norm, until “social aid and pleasure club” parades become weekly and pay bands creatively and well in your vicinity, I think it would be wise for every Path band and HONK! ensemble to increase cash flows, diversify sources of income, in whatever currency, by:
1) calling funeral directors and offering very reasonable rates for “a few horns” playing hymns and anthems as people assemble for services and memorial services;
2) notify clergymen and justices of the peace that wedding processions, receptions, send-offs, parties, are not complete without a brass band presence of some kind;
3) send flyers to fraternal organizations and all local charities offering to play one “set” for free if there are worthy-cause events outdoors that would benefit from a brass band;
4) contact local firehouses and police departments and offer to play at one of their outdoor functions; ETC.
Drum Corps of the 61st New York Infantry, Falmouth, VA, April 1863
I think the reinvention of brass banding throughout the USA will be hastened if we take steps to solicit all the forms of work/service that used to be done by brass bands a century ago (anyone have a list of what brass bands did in 1910?), and then invent new forms of “play,” “rites of passage,” “seasonal events (solstices, equinoxes, wiccan calendar events, full moons, etc.)” “rent parties,” “sub-prime parties,” to cope with the very high levels of fear, anxiety, alienation, anomie, “bowling alone” syndromes, of every shape and size. Think of your services as healing, medicinal, curative, and available to everyone on a sliding scale.
