The Must Have Trade Show Checklist – Your “Gang Box”
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The new issue of Catalyst is out now. Back in April, one of my favorite minor internet celebrities, Hennessy Youngman, announced his foray into deejaying. Excited, I downloaded the mix and put it on my iPod to enjoy on my commute. What was going on here? I should have been more prepared: His Art Thoughtz video lectures mix street slang with High Theory jargon, trade show necessities by sherrie with blunt and possibly blunted detachment and cartoon-character baseball caps.
Hennessy draws from the eighties soft rock ubiquitous in checkout lines nationwide: What was it that made such a golden age for middle-of-the-road parental jams?
The music industries were undergoing dramatic changes that would continue for decades. Most importantly for our story, the deregulation of radio ownership, which would reach a crescendo in the Telecommunications Act, kicked off in According to a report by the Future of Music Coalition.
Untilthe FCC required stations to vary [their] programming each week, including establishing time for community affairs programs and opposing voices.
After a rule change inhowever, diversity was defined merely by the number of stations. True diversity, it was argued, was achieved through a multiplicity of sources, rather than within each source. In other words, the FCC removed diversity requirements, presuming that if one company owned many different stations, market mechanisms would kick in.
Station owners would naturally want to diversify their assets, giving listeners a range of options the way God and Reagan intended: Local stations, a crucial part of any regional music scene, were gobbled up by large media conglomerates, and programming increasingly centered around big-budget major label stars.
The consolidation of radio ownership accompanied other forms of restructuring. InBillboard, trade show necessities by sherrie company charged with tracking music popularity, altered the way they calculated the Adult Contemporary chart.
Instead of using a formula derived from record sales and airplay, the AC charts would only factor airplay into popularity. This gave the record industry a much tighter grip over what charted: Severing record buyers from the Adult Contemporary charts had demographic implications as well.
Record buyers were predominantly young and predominantly male. An airplay-only chart would, according to industry theory, reflect the tastes of an older demographic that skewed female. Such an audience would be a marketing sweet spot. Since trade show necessities by sherrie early twentieth century, marketers understood that women were responsible for the vast majority of purchases of consumer goods.
Adult Contemporary, which had already absorbed Easy Listening, was thus poised to take over the playlists trade show necessities by sherrie grocery stores and pharmacies everywhere. In doing so, it supplanted the long-reviled Muzak originally conceived not only as part of the architecture of shopping but also as a balm for unhappy workersimbuing the soundtrack of mass-market consumption with that bit of edge that baby boomers, now pushing shopping carts and strollers, had long been accustomed to associating with authentic emotion.
The idea that radio reflects audience taste is largely bullshit; instead, radio playlists are, like much of the music industry, a bunch of middle-aged men constructing an idealized fantasy listener whose tastes they then must appeal to. In this way, Adult Contemporary became the musical equivalent of the Silent Majority, those magical white middle-class millions whose supposed interests, though never vocalized, must always be appealed to.
Hennessy makes this racial coding explicit in his mix: Making fun of big-hair corporate pop from a generation ago is hardly a challenge for a critic as incisive as Hennessy. But CVS Bangers is not really a skewering of Adult Contemporary; indeed, there is a lot of gentle, even begrudging affection for this cheese, from listeners and Hennessy himself. Ina hip-hop album went to trade show necessities by sherrie one on the charts for the first time. These three acts have four of trade show necessities by sherrie top ten best-selling hip-hop albums of all time; Eminem holds the top two spots.
This switching of black faces for white ones which, I want to stress, should be blamed on the industry, not the artists has only intensified.
Music styles that, like hip-hop, are connected to some kind of grass roots, are fluid, with constant incremental changes building into epochal ones. But here is where a kind of misrecognition occurs: Genres cease to be grassroots social worlds, and instead become something more like brands: Instead of having any real connection to the communities that develop musical styles through the dialectical movement between music makers and their core audiences, an outside producer just has to have a decent set of ears and a computer, and can start cranking out reasonable facsimiles, like factories in Trade show necessities by sherrie churning out fake Coach purses indistinguishable to everyone but connoisseurs.
Even if you can tell the difference, the functional parts are close enough. EDM is now the branding initiative accompanying the latest wave of the mainstreaming of electronic music in the US remember electronica in the late nineties? As you might guess, EDM trap has little to do with the off-the-books hustles of the urban poor. EDM trap is mostly instrumental. By dispensing with the rapping, EDM trap effectively silences the black voices that kept the style connected to the stories of the American lumpenproletariat.
Hennessy is hip to the easy appropriation that characterizes EDM trap: So, to put it most unkindly, trap is the adult contemporary for the prosumer age: While AC continues to do the vital work of soundtracking our shampoo purchases, viral video crazes like the Harlem Shake become an important part of austerity-era work discipline: For me, this raises an interesting problem: Sure, we can trade show necessities by sherrie our tastes and social networks in any number of directions, espouse any number of subversive political positions, make radical art.
But when it comes time to meet necessities, we all rely on lowest-common-denominator mass production and mass consumption. Subcultural capitalism seems less like an alternative to corporate capitalism, and more like its arts district. According to a report by the Future of Music Trade show necessities by sherrie, Untilthe FCC required stations to vary [their] programming each week, including establishing time for community trade show necessities by sherrie programs and opposing voices.
The Health of Nations Issue The First Red Century Issue By Taking Power Issue Journey to the Dark Side Issue The Party We Need Issue Rank and File Issue Between the Risings Issue Up From Liberalism Issue Uneven and Combined Issue Struggle and Progress Issue Ours to Master Issue Paint the Town Red Issue A World to Win Issue Alive in the Sunshine Issue Misery Index Issue Assembly Required Issue 9: Modify Your Dissent Issue Phase Two Issue Liberalism is Dead Issue 2: And Yet It Moves Issue 1:
