A few months ago, well-known music writer Sasha Frere-Jones wrote a column in the New Yorker about cell phone ring tones. At first, this was not a topic I construed as particularly interesting. I mean, it's a ring tone-two or three seconds of digitized noise meant solely for the utilitarian purpose of alerting you that someone's calling.
Well, at least initially ring tones were meant for that purpose. Oh sure, they let you know your boo is getting in touch or that your momma wants a word or two, but utility is now almost secondary to ring tones as indicators of individuality.
One element that has accelerated the ring tone/individuality nexus is ring tones in the form of samples of pop songs are readily-and cheaply-available to download onto cellies. So instead
of the now-considered-lame electronic "ring-ring," you can use snippets of 50 Cent, Beyoncé, Snoop Dogg, Green Day, Gwen Stefani-you get the idea-as an alert.
One of the things that's so interesting-surprisingly-about Frere-Jones' column is his description of the technology that makes this possible. When customized ring tones were less popular, they were rudimentary computerized imitations of songs and didn't sound anything like the real thing they were imitating. Now, software advances allow for actual, fairly high-quality sampling of songs, and they sound much better coming out of a tiny phone speaker. So, voilà-rise in technology=rise in popularity=cultural imperative.
In Frere-Jones' opinion, such technological influence on the culture of popular music is, at least in this case, not a bad thing. He argues that two-second ring tone samples distill pop songs into their most pure element: a riff, a quick jingle, a single moment of undiluted catchiness.
This is where Frere-Jones departs from many other music thinkers on the topic of technology. Take, for example, writer/musician Mat Callahan, who will be in town Sunday to perform songs from his new CD
A Wild Bouquet
and sign copies of his book,
The Trouble with Music
at Evangelo's (4:30 and 8 pm, Sunday. 200 W. San Francisco St., 982-9014).
A must-read for any musical thinker,
The Trouble with Music
is a well-researched, well-conceived and well-thought-out treatise. Callahan begins by pointing out that music is ubiquitous. OK, at first this may seem obvious, but think about it for a minute. Music is omni-present and not just in expected or traditional forms like radio or a home stereo. It's also an unrequested background for our lives: Muzak, commercials, video games, it's piped in everywhere, every minute of the day, to the extent that we don't even notice it anymore. Thus, Callahan says, music loses its significance as influential, as a creative force, as life-changing. Callahan calls this phenomenon "superabundance." This abundance is made possible-made easy, in fact-due to advances in technology.
I suspect that Callahan would put ring tones in the category of superabundance, and he would have a point. He touches on the idea that technological advances in the arena of quick reproduction is detrimental to the soul of music in his chapter "Leo Fender, Gottfried Silbermann, Ambrose Fleming and Digidesign (Technology and Music)." "In the century since mechanical reproduction was introduced," Callahan says, "we can see clearly that the overall result is redundancy. Copying. Waste." These wasteful things (which take on many forms, including an overly copied bit of music) lack value, he says, and "Valueless objects or expressions need to be invested with 'meaning,' 'originality,' 'authenticity' in order to attract a public who will value them…what emerges from the rubble of the titanic struggles of the last one hundred years is that the sacred people actually seek anything that is beyond the clutches of capital. Anything without a dollar value."
Well, ring tone samples are definitely redundant, perhaps wasteful and thus, according to this argument, their value is false, only gauged by the capital it takes to buy them and the capital produced by their purchase. To the "sacred people," i.e., those who really care about music, they have no true intrinsic value.
It's a thoughtful and attractive populist ideal, especially when Callahan sprinkles it with copious amounts of Marxist theory. At the same time, Frere-Jones' argument that ring tones are pure pop mini-moments lends credence to the idea that technological advances can actually bolster traditional, populist concepts of what music should be and what it should mean. Technology, for example, was a huge factor in the prolific pop output of Motown singles, some of the most catchy and well-loved music ever produced. In fact, one could argue that many of the singles produced during the label's heyday were perfect pop moments in their own right, albeit three-minutes' worth instead of two-seconds' worth. Yet they were populist too, speaking a language everyone understood. And there's no doubt in my mind that, had cell phones existed then, The Supremes "Stop in the Name of Love" would have been the number one download.
The point is, it's easy to fear the new (it's one reason I still don't have an iPod), but to investigate these things beyond the surface is essential to our survival as music lovers. It's an issue Callahan delves into thoughtfully and deeply, even if I disagree with him sometimes. So if you're at all interested in the modern status of music-even if manifested in cell phones that sound like "Candy Shop"-head to Evangelo's Sunday and check it out. Just make sure you turn your phone off first.
