"What gets recorded is what gets remembered."

  Blog #7               “What gets recorded is what gets remembered.”

   "What gets recorded is what gets remembered."  

This axiomatic phrase is loaded with a spectacular galaxy of minefields, and should be entered with

 appropriate trepidation - because of its truth, its untruth, and its slippery ambiguity. If the common 

assumption is that this blog should represent the three readings relevant to the present class project - about 

Country music also having black roots (Gidden); about a white academic chronicling black music 

(Lomax); and the changing access of digital information availability to academic institutions (Hoek), then

 we can follow a very neatly compact satisfaction of easily predictable conclusions and morals:

1) that blacks in the US can be "written out" of their own historic musical roots (at least partially, with a view to country music) due to marketing factors that may have segregated "white" and "black" tastes going back to the '50s.

2) That anthropologists can be criticized by future generations by imposed peer-review on their choices of what they've chosen to document, in addition to what they've chosen not to document (as if such field recordings were a matter of a multiple-choice test), regardless of whether such material ever existed.

3) that EULAs will continually react in favor of a positive business environment at the expense of the university procedures and formats, which may (or may not) have a long-term influence on whether materials will even be library-accessible to future students.

While each of these constructs are valuable in attempting to teach equity and equal access to culture and/or access to markets, each of these "conclusions and morals" has a deadly Achilles' Heel attached.

1) If there's a silent assumption that access to marketing memes and campaigns are somehow part of a white-power conspiracy to rewrite the black narrative(s) for marketing purposes - although that may be reprehensible - blacks also have the power to reconstruct and redirect their own narrative(s). Bill Cosby as a comedian may seem to have been a pawn in the hands of CBS, which marketed his 8:15 and 12:15 comedy routines in the 1960's. But with his ever-growing popularity and financial power - ranging to become a billionaire - he certainly had the power to rebrand the black narrative as part of a multi-media redesign of the story well before the beginning of the 21st century. And the same with Oprah. Recording executives will brand product as they believe they can best sell - to maximize the profit of the company. The idea that these companies - country, jazz, rock, classical or whatever - would do something or anything in order to remain "historically authentic" is widely unrealistic, if there's a chance the bottom line would be jeopardized. Historical revisionism is a form of repackaging the narrative - and is to be supported. But it's not a replacement for expansion of market share for the companies whose share price depends on a steep ascent. Expect resistance. "What gets recorded is what gets remembered."

2) To break away from the black experience (or, if you will, Black experience), one can easily look at the field recordings of Moshe Beregovsky, a talented musicologist who, in the 1930's, decided to document and record all the Jewish Musics within the Soviet Union of his day. His recordings were supported by the Soviet government as a form of buying into the propaganda that culture was the great savior of the ideology, and to win the hearts of the millions of Jews in the SU, "capturing" their music was an important step. But that didn't long remain - as Jewish cultural legacies were being documented, the Soviets changed their position on Jews with the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. Beregovsky's thousands of recordings (including cylinders) and interviews of hundreds of klezmer and Yiddish artists were impounded and taken out of circulation. Beregovsky was sent to a work camp. Even after Stalin had murdered Yiddish poets, and had passed away (after the so-called "Doctor's Plot" in the early '50s), the Soviet authorities were unwilling to let the Beregovsky collection circulate in the hands of the world's musicians - from fear the music would stoke "Jewish nationalism." The common excuse given was that the Beregovsky collection - an entire peoples' musical collection sequestered and saved - as if Beregovsky knew that 10 years after his documentation, the Nazis' destruction of the Jewish world made his research all the more important - was destroyed in the bombing of the Kiev Library during the end of the war. This wasn't true, and people in the know knew that the authorities were hoarding the collection - in order to collect a ransom. In the 1980's, they allowed 1/5 of Beregovsky's treasures to be published in the West - after the fall of Communism in 1990, researchers were allowed to examine the rest of the original collection to the delight and relief of Jews worldwide. "What gets recorded is what gets remembered."

3) It's clear that the digitalization of the world's culture and knowledge is increasing exponentially, and has certainly made many inroads since this article was written, supposedly in 2011. As we see, Napster is only one star in the firmament, and iTunes has been replaced by Apple Music. Perhaps Professors who find that they can't assign musical works to their students - using the costless approach of library books - may need to accept a business model, much as previously students were obligated to purchase textbooks, which they promptly resold after usage - the used textbooks even had a "blue book" market value, based on condition and edition. If a piece of music (for example, in Apple Music) needs to be downloaded for 1 cent - or even 10 cents - it seems to me that pittance is well worth the access. And if - for the subscription price of $10/month (approximately), then the student should - IMHO - be able to bear that. The notion of jettisoning the material because of the EULA seems to me to be arcane and simply wrong-headed. Could a school decide to jettison laptops in favor of printed books? Me thinks not - nor could they legislate our way back to Shakespearean rhyme. If the pittance paid is the price of love of music, play on. The music company has invested in the music and making it available digitally, and findable through their search engines - if the student needs to "own" the music - as one once upon a time owned one's own books. So be it. Let it be. "What gets recorded is what gets remembered."

~ Alex Jacobowitz ~