Nostalgia, Authenticity, and the Postmodern "song reader"

            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. 3^rd 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.