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Lecture 9: Religion and Popular Culture
From : CHEN JUNMING MELVIN
Date : 18-Mar-2008 11:18 PM
Topic : Radiohead - goodwill gesture or gimmick?

Hi:

Radiohead famously released its recent album, In Rainbows, as a digital download. Customers were allowed to pay - before you could even start saying 'symbolic interactionism' - whatever price they wished for downloading the tracks. The lines between producer and consumer were blurred - because Radiohead are not part of a record label (hence separated from the global commodity chain and the nefarious world of media conglomerates), they own the distribution rights to their own songs. Radiohead seemed at that time, with its iconoclastic gesture, to jettison the assumptions of commercialized pop culture, transcending the mainstream (the laity) towards an epiphanic, Platonic ideal of the Form of Good: pure communion between producer and consumer, untainted by pecuniary concerns. Some might even claim (rather perversely) that the act of consumption is being ritualized - as in churches, where tithes and offerings are given according to how much the believer wishes to contribute, the Radiohead fan has the carte blanche, his conscience the sole guide. Better yet, Radiohead may even be construed as messianic music-makers whose money-spinning careers have placed them in the privileged position of offering music gratis to their most underprivileged fans.

However, as with every other product of mass media, there are qualifications. Radiohead offered an alternative package, a 40-pound discbox complete with artwork and extra features. Freed from the straitened rules of record labels, Radiohead creates content and delivers it in a variety of forms, not unlike the conglomerates it has a virulent aversion towards. Radiohead's use of the Internet, a site for globalization, implicates it as a member of the global commodity chain. Radiohead has used its name-your-price download scheme, as critics will aver, to gain free advertisement (hence constituting itself as a free rider of the influential power of the mass media), while at the same time perpetuating commodity fetishism (Marx): Radiohead becomes a commodity that the consumer can unashamedly throw money at. Those sold on the 40-pound package worship the money they were affluent enough to be able to throw at Radiohead.

Music is a resource capable of being infinitely reproducible in this digital age, whereas value and scarcity go hand-in-hand. Therefore, the 40-pound package is a cleverly disguised means to a capitalist end, a deliberately contrived scarcity which is positioned adroitly beside infinite reproducibility (downloading via the website). Radiohead may thus be seen as exploiting the mechanics of desire-production and capitalism to maximal advantage. In packaging themselves as postmaterialist and non-mainstream, they have unwittingly commodified themselves on exactly those terms. Radiohead, in the ultimate gesture of irony, has commodified its own exclusiveness (as an alternative act that religiously shuns popular drivel), and is haunted by the materialism it ostensibly seeks to negate by offering an illusory form of transcendence. The proof of the pudding is in the eating: when the album was released in retail, it topped various charts and garnered critical acclaim. In an age of perpetual novelty, excruciatingly short attention-spans (zero-consciousness) and collective amnesia, Radiohead's In Rainbows, far from venturing into new ground, is precisely the novelty act that the media circus was baying for, a self-conscious, self-aggrandizing materialism which posits itself ironically as anti-materialist. Lavartus prodeo - as Radiohead advances, it points out its mask.

Regards,
Melvin

(P.S.: For what it's worth, listening to Radiohead's music is a transcendental experience, and Thom Yorke is pure brilliance, but this takes nothing away from my view that the name-your-price scheme was nothing more than a clever marketing ploy -> Sociologists must set aside personal biases...lol)

Rant 2:41 PM of Azmie
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