Scrawled in Wax

Clearly then, I am obsessed with Muxtape. But sometimes obsessions are good things - or, perhaps more accurately, recognising obsessions as such is a good thing. The recognition reveals something, it peels back the layers to get at the desire at its root. So, I am obviously returning to think about Muxtape. But why? Well, I am curious about two things: 1) First, why did Muxtape explode so quickly? 2) And secondly, why did Muxtape seem to fill a void, as if people had just been waiting for it before they knew it was something they wanted? So, some thoughts.

1) Let’s skip the usual “breakneck speed of information on the internet” bit to explain Muxtape’s ‘meteoric rise’ (that’s a totally fresh phrase right?). More interesting is the potentially circular, enclosed logic of Muxtape’s instant popularity: tech/web types spend an awful lot of time in front of their computers, and are, perhaps tautologically, more likely to use the Web as a social tool. So, an application comes along that lets you: a) express who you are; b) do so using the the contemporary cultural marker for the the overlap of culture and technology, digital music; c) share and compare, boast and roast (yes, that second one is totally my phrase). It spreads and is instantly popular among people (like me) who spend their time sitting in front of computers, listening to music and using those two things to connect with other people and mark out their position within contemporary culture. Positive spin: we are the bleeding-edge, on the cusp of the lightning-quick exchange of units of culture as we blur and destroy lines of separation in both physical space and consciousness, engaging with culture on a profound level. Negative spin: geek-hipster circle jerk.

2) In the transition between analogue and digital, what happens when the change is not about media but a cultural artefact? This, to me, is worth thinking about. A given object in culture (like the mixtape) gains importance because of its exchange value - when I give you a mixtape, I hand over a piece of my identity, marked out by certain cultural signifiers that individually have a value that works in relation to the broader social context; you receive it as such, giving it value for those same reasons. So, in the digitization of the mixtape - and here I mean digitization of the form (the online mixtape) and not the content (the music) - what happens to the ‘value of the exchange’? Is it reduced? Or morphed in some fashion? Is sending someone a link to your Muxtape the same as handing them an object? What does this have to with the fetish of the cultural object? And how is the system of exchange disturbed/changed/ruptured by the change in - well? - spatial relations, aesthetics, speed that come with digitization?

3) How are we to think of a piece of technology simply ‘making sense’? Or, as I said, why did Muxtape seem to fill a need that it itself created? There would be two views on this: the positive one would be that new media technologies reveal new forms of connection and expression that work in symbiotic relation to the cultural shifts that they themselves engender. New media changes how people relate to art, each other and themselves. As those avenues of connection and culture change, new forms and modes of expression and interaction arise. Thus, to deliberately be a bit circular, Muxtape works because it is part of the systemic, social changes that create a need for things like Muxtape. The negative spin would be the Adorno/Jameson take - that this is a system that fragments culture and turns cultural expression into a mode of distraction and sublimation. For once though, I think I buy the positive spin here.