Beck Hansen, the acclaimed
songwriter and artist better known as Beck, recently announced the release of
his upcoming album, “Song Reader”. This album will not feature any recorded
tracks by Beck, rather it is comprised of twenty pieces of sheet music. The
post on Beck’s website states that it is “an experiment of what an album can be
at the end of 2012” (“Beck”). Simon Reynolds notes the fetishization of past music
formats such as vinyl and the cassette, and Beck takes this nostalgia back
even further to a pre-recording format of music (87). Beck’s new album exudes
materiality and the very idea of it necessitates some form of physical contact and
connection with the album; the reader must learn the songs in order to hear the
songs. How might our experience of the album change when it does not contain
the very thing which we expect from it: a recorded track that can be copied,
shared, and stored? While the material album will not contain any tracks, the
aim of the project is that the listeners and fans will create their own tracks,
will read and record the songs, which will circulate as reproducible tracks on
the Internet. In this sense, Walter Benjamin’s idea of the aura becomes
increasingly complex. Does the work of art’s aura lie in the paper album or
does the album only, in a sense, become once the reader has interpreted and
recorded the track? Furthermore, because of these multiple layers of interpretation
and creation, questions of who owns these tracks- Beck or the readers who
record them- are brought to the surface. This album provides a space of intersection
of the tensions between past-present, absence-presence, original-reproduction,
and owner- object, all of which evade discussions of the current state of
popular music in the age of digitization and are significant tensions for the
postmodern listener and reader.
The
write-up for the release of “Song Reader”, states that this new album, “comes in
an almost-forgotten form” (“Beck”). In the way of a Benjamin-esque heroic
collector who, “rescues” the “lonely and abandoned” object and “give[s] it freedom”
(“Unpacking” 489-90). Beck has
reached into the past- way into the past- to resurrect this “almost forgotten
form”: the form of music before recording. This album, which features 108 pages
with original artwork by more than a dozen artists, a hardcover carrying case,
and 20 separate booklets for each song (“Beck”), is very much an aesthetic
object- an object steeped in nostalgia for the “glory days of music” (Sottek). In what Reynolds would
call an age of the “glutted” listener this album requires connection and
concentration (127). As Daniel Lopatin states in Reynolds, “rapid-fire
capitalism is destroying our relationship with objects. All this drives me
back, but what drives me back is a desire to connect” (83). Perhaps the work
that must be put into accessing the music on this album, the “deep emotional
commitment” (North in Reynolds 121) it requires, will help feed the appetite of
the listener who “get bored in the middle of songs simply because [they] [can]” ( Starr in Reynolds 121). Bringing
these tracks to life requires the time, dedication, and creativity of the
readers.
While the album as object
situates itself in the past, the album as a concept is very much in the
present, and perhaps looks towards the future. After Beck fans complete the
creative process of bringing the tracks to life, the album as an aesthetic object
will most likely be forgotten and circulate the web as dowloadable pdf files. Furthermore,
what will exist are an enormous amount of interpretations of Beck’s tracks
circulating the Internet as downloadable mp3 files. Pinning down where the “authentic”
music exists- whether in the album object or in the endless different versions
on the Internet- becomes increasingly difficult. Furthermore, it becomes
complicated to situate Beck the artist within these multiple layers of creation
and interpretation. Beck will have written the songs; however, they will not
become listenable, accessible music, until the “song reader” interprets and
records them.
The
difficulty in trying to pin down who is the artist of these songs leads us to the
significant question of where the original, authentic work of art lies. The
recordings of Beck’s written music (which have already begun to circulate on
Youtube and a tumblr site run by Beck's label) embody these tensions between
art-artist and original- reproduction. It
is at this moment where Benjamin’s “aura” becomes increasingly complex. For
Benjamin, the aura is the essence attached to the original, unique work of art in
its authentic state of the “here and now” (“Work of Art” 254). Benjamin states
that, “[b]y replicating the work many times over, it substitutes a mass
existence for a unique existence” (254). In the case of the tracks of “Song
Reader”, multiple renditions of each song exist with no “original” or
authoritative version, but rather the new album will be “played by anyone but
the man himself” (Sottek). Because there are no tracks recorded by Beck on this
album- no recording set in the “here and now”- this album refuses to be fixed
at a certain place and time. It is no longer a static album, but one in constant
creation. Furthermore, this album complicates issues of ownership and authorship. Beck's album invites, rather than discourages the listener to create their own versions of these songs. Perhaps this is Beck's idea of the possibilities of the album in 2012 ("Beck"): an album that incorporates these tensions surrounding ownership and authenticity and opens up new spaces for the postmodern reader and listener.
The "song reader" of Beck's album must piece together the fragments of tracks scattered
around the Internet in order to get some sense of this album as a whole. In this
way, “Song Reader”, as album and concept, is representative of the postmodern
reader and listener who is “lost in the shuffle” of popular music (Reynolds
86). Frederic Jameson proposes that the postmodern subject often find
themselves in “space[s] which [they] are unable to map (in their minds) either
their own positions or the urban totality in which they find themselves” (89). Beck’s
album offers a sort of map in its sheet music, inviting the reader to delve
beneath the surface and decipher the music. Perhaps Beck’s album, in a
Barthesian sense, is representative of a new space for the postmodern reader.
The “death of the author”, or rather the absence of Beck’s voice in these
recordings, makes way for “the birth of the reader” or listener (1258). Beck’s
website states that this alternative form of an album “enlists the listener in the
tone of every track” (“Beck”). The listener can be at once, the reader, the creator, owner,
and navigator of this unrecorded album.
Works Cited
Barthes, Roland. “The Death of the Author.” Critical Theory Since Plato. 3rd
ed. Hazard Adams and
Leroy Searle. Boston, Massachussets. Thomson Wadsworth, 2005. 1256-58. Print.
“Beck &
McSweeney’s Present Beck Hansen’s ‘Song Reader’ Coming in December 2012. “Beck. n.p.,
n.d., Web. 02 October 2012.
Benjamin, Walter. “Unpacking my Library.” Selected Writings. Ed. Howard Eiland and
Michael W. Jennings. 4 vols.
Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 2003.2.2: 486-93. Print.
---.“The Work of Art in its Age of Digital Reproducibility
(Third Version). ” Selected Writings. Ed.
Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings. 4 vols. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard
UP, 2003.3:251-83. Print.
Jameson, Frederic. “Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of
Late Capitalism.” New Left Review 146 (1984): 53-92. Print.
Reynolds, Simon. Retromania:
Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past. London: Faber, 2011. Print.
Sottek, T.C., “Beck’s New Album, ‘Song Reader’ Actually 20
Pieces of Sheet Music.” The Verge, Vox Media, 9 August 2011. Web. 10
October 2012.
