31 August 2010: "A Newspaper does in depth interview with ‘the guy who screens album submissions’ @ a radio station"

This post is about axiology. In his epochal 1757 essay "On the Standard of Taste" Scottish empiricist philosopher David Hume writes of the difficulty of finding true critics:

Thus, though the principles of taste be universal, and, nearly, if not entirely the same in all men; yet few are qualified to give judgment on any work of art, or establish their own sentiment as the standard of beauty. The organs of internal sensation are seldom so perfect as to allow the general principles their full play, and produce a feeling correspondent to those principles. They either labour under some defect, or are vitiated by some disorder; and by that means, excite a sentiment, which may be pronounced erroneous.... Strong sense, united to delicate sentiment, improved by practice, perfected by comparison, and cleared of all prejudice, can alone entitle critics to this valuable character; and the joint verdict of such, wherever they are to be found, is the true standard of taste and beauty.

Carles clearly has this passage in mind in his assessment of Eric K Lawry, a radio-station employee entrusted with sorting through music submissions and nominating certain recordings for broadcast airplay. Carles wonders if Lawry is doomed to "seem like ‘a pretentious ass hole’" because of the discriminatory powers invested in him by virtue of his privileged position relative to the means of media broadcasting.

Carles recognizes that "it all starts with this bro. The gatekeeper 2 the buzz economy," but he wrestles with the implications of the systemic concentration of power in the hands of one particular node in the networked libidinal economy. The critical question for Carles is not merely whether the position within the hierarchy constitutes the tastemaking power of this particular functionary, or whether Lawry's prternatural grasp of aesthetics allowed his to mount his own sui generis perch within the culture industry. Rather Carles is concerned with how the power to judge and disseminate a particular ideology of the aesthetic manages to circulate and legitimate itself.

For instance, Carles asks: "Do people who are ‘relevant tastemakers’ listen to the radio?" The import of this question is twofold. (1) what modes of mediation substantiate the social construction of relevance, and how immanent are those tasked with the construction of the field of relevance? Is relevance a tautological proposition? A clever piece of epistemological legerdemain? Can one decree relevance without presupposing the very concept one seeks to promulgate? Is the power of the broadcast medium itself an index to relevance or can media be invested with a relevance proportional to the message and its capability to trace or even circumscribe social imaginary at a given constellation of influences at a specific moment of time and space? (2) What is the proper way to analyze the experiential process of listening? Is a standard stimulus-response model appropriate, or has it become outmoded in an era of quantum approaches? Does the act of listening transcend the mere property of being struck passively by aural waves constrained within certain frequencies? Are there other organs with which one can listen? Is taste merely a matter of measured oscillation?

All of these inquiries open of course on Carles's more encompassing question: "Do people still listen to radio?" The critical distinction between "relevant tastemakers" and ordinary, run-of-the-mill "people" rests in the choice of the word "still". Radio as a medium, Carles implies, imposes passivity on auditors after repeated exposures; it ingrains receptive posture. Radio listeners expect to be inculcated with taste. Tastemakers, on the other hand, redefine the principle of listening along the lines of Hume's ideal, "tuning in," as it were, the disposition appropriate to the dispensation of aesthetic norms but taking pains to avoid being co-opted by their own instruments of dissemination.

Hence the first two criteria for receiving critical approbation are: "1. Make it personal. 2. get experienced." The effortless synthesis of the personal and and the empirical, Carles implies, abstracting from Lawry's remarks, forms the basis of aesthetic judgment, of enabling a critic to assume to appropriate critical posture with a minimum of self-consciousness. If the critic is brought to bear his critical posture awkwardly, the resulting judgments will be burdened with this awareness and discreditable. But this harms not the critic but the listeners who reap the benefits of his sacrifice only to that extent that his judgment appears natural and not labored, that is to say, disinterested.

Thus when Carles sardonically declares that he "Might just give that bro a call, and ‘demand to know’ why his ‘goddamn radio station’ hasn’t played my chillwave fuzzy buzz lofi sound project," he is calling our attention to a more specific meaning of fidelity. What is "lofi" is not the project but the transmission channels between critic, artist, and audience, which have become calcified with "buzz". The word "Buzz" implies the loss of fidelity not merely aurally but morally.