All That Is Solid 03: Pandora Choose Your Own Adventure

All That Is Solid is an attempt to examine the relationships between popular music and global capitalism. Click here to access the archive.

I have solved one of the great problems of the 21st Century Music Appreciator: I have managed to devise the perfect Pandora Internet Radio station. I started off with Silver Apples. Then I added Velvet Underground, Suicide, Stereolab, Steve Reich, and Scott Walker. Sprinkle in a few ‘thumbs up' for the likes of Big Star, Kraftwerk, Love, Orchestral Manouevres In The Dark, and Terry Riley, and I've got a perfect radio station, one that plays only music I like, all the time. The ‘Silver Apples' station I concocted speaks directly to my own private rock cosmology. Here, finally, the influences most relevant to my taste inform every selection, according to specific Music Genome characteristics: Avant-Garde Leanings, Angular Melodies, Chromatic Harmonic Structure, Electro-Acoustic Sonority, Extensive Vamping, and Mixed Major and Minor Tonalities. That sounds just like me! High five, Pandora! But by now, you know what's coming: "What's the Tiresome Marxist take on music discovery software?" I'm so glad you asked.

To help me this week, I refer not to history's favorite dialectical materialists but instead to a pillar of American consumer culture. David Ogilvy became one of the most influential voices in advertising history by rationalizing the industry. He was among the first to use market research extensively in designing campaigns and insisted on gathering as much data on consumers as possible to guide his decisions. The results of all his research were quite different than one might expect. Primarily, he learned that consumers are not stupid and don't lack taste. "The consumer isn't a moron," he wrote, "she is your wife. You insult her intelligence if you assume that a mere slogan and a few vapid adjectives will persuade her to buy anything. She wants all the information you can give her." In his ad campaigns for the likes of Schweppes, Rolls Royce, and Puerto Rico (yes, the island), his aim was to speak directly to the concerns of consumers, focus on conceptual benefits, and to deliver some kind of a promise. The key to his approach was the recognition of what consumers really want: "I can make you read an ad that has 5,000 words in it. I can make you read any number of words, just by using the right headline. The headline would be ‘This Ad Is All About (insert your name here)'."

According to Ogilvy's formulation, Pandora fits perfectly into the contemporary mold of advertising for two reasons: it demands and holds your attention because, while it is a way to listen to music, its real subject is You; and by responding and shaping content based on user input, it becomes more effective over time as it gets to "know" you better. In this sense, Pandora is a long-form advertisement for the greatest, most profitable product of the 21st Century: Ourselves. The problem with this, as I see it, is one that I discussed in my last column. Capitalism is rightly seen by some as an emancipatory tool, except that what is truly "emancipated" boils down to identity politics, and the end goal of identity politics is for every one of us to be as fully and completely Ourselves as possible. We are each encouraged to construct our own history, develop our own cultural canon, and cultivate a political sensibility that is essentially private. We then use our well-cultivated, unique Identity to stage "intimate revolts" via consumptive practices, through which we can "beat the system" or at least "do our part" to improve the planet. To make myself clear, I'm not suggesting that we should avoid "socially conscious" products -- i.e. if you're going to drive a car, it is probably better that you drive a hybrid -- but it seems to me that the political and ethical efficacy of intimate revolution is severely compromised, as it mainly props up the dominant ideology of Capitalism -- the myth of the Actualized Individual. The more thoroughly we are able to differentiate ourselves from each other and the more entrenched we become in our private histories, the more alienated and atomized we are politically. If there is one essential criticism of the Left after the fall of Communism, it is that we are too caught up in defining our true Selves, and we are rarely involved in building communities with shared values, shared histories, and a shared sense of destiny. In other words, my perfect Pandora station, insofar as it defines me to a T, isolates my ethics and offers me a way to define myself outside of any community -- and me-outside-of-any-community is the ultimate Capitalist subject.

However, there's more than one way to eat a Reese's. My Silver Apples station may be so well-defined and specific that it speaks only to me, but I discovered something provocative when I created new stations that were centered on genres other than alternative/experimental rock. I made separate stations for Sly and the Family Stone, Marvin Gaye, Sharon Jones and Dap Kings, Curtis Mayfield, and James Brown; as you may expect, it is difficult to distinguish these stations, as the same characteristics and artists come up over and over again. In R&B, the canon is more universally agreed upon, the parameters of song structure are more consistent, and while there is tremendous diversity within the community there remains a greater sense of shared values, experiences, and meta-narrative. I imagine this is equally true of country, folk, and other more "traditional" forms (though, as in R&B, there are surely generation gaps). This speaks to what I was trying to elucidate last time when I discussed the Ethnic vs. Cosmopolitan sensibilities -- with the former, one finds a greater sense of continuity and more strongly held ethical/political stakes. In the alternative/experimental wing of Rock music, the tendency towards differentiation and atomization leads us to build private pantheons of Great Individuals that hold no cohesive sense of community values. In the name of urbanity and worldliness, alt/experimental rock appropriates the sounds and techniques of other genres with no sense of deference or adherence to the values that accompany them. The hybridity problem, then, is not an issue of creativity or intellectual property; rather, it is the postmodern problem of references that refer to nothing and techniques that don't mean what they mean -- Marx's exact image of the bourgeois epoch.

There is one ethical/political consequence of Pandora that I find attractive: it erodes the cultural capital involved in defining one's taste. Let's get back to Ogilvy, who understood cultural capital very keenly. Relating a story from his days as a Gallup researcher, he describes a survey he conducted about Gone With The Wind at the height of its cinematic popularity: "We polled people about whether they had read the novel Gone With The Wind, and a disproportionate number said ‘Yes' because they would have been embarrassed to admit they hadn't. We realized the numbers were bogus -- we extrapolated the data, only to find that the book would have had to sell at least ten times as many copies as it did for the participants to have been accurate. People were lying their heads off. So we went back and asked ‘Do you intend to read Gone With The Wind?' Then we found the real number. Most people said ‘Yes, I intend to read it' -- it got them off the hook -- and the ones who actually read it just said ‘No, I've already read it!'" The notion that we "should" like something, or that we are in some way better people for liking what we like, is one of the greatest incentives of American consumerism, and I am generally in favor of anything that deflates the value of cultural capital. The fact that Pandora is able to do much of the legwork of taste-making for you gets us closer to a more egalitarian understanding of taste: it's more of an algorithm than a reflection of one's character. This is especially true in an era where almost everyone can accurately describe their tastes as being "eclectic," which is what I want to discuss next time on All That Is Solid. In the meantime, let me know what comprises your perfect Pandora station -- the more atomized, the better!

For more on David Ogilvy, follow this link for an excellent interview from 1983. He also wrote On Advertising and Confessions of an Advertising Man.

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