Kyle Devine - Decomposed: The Political Ecology of Music

When he was about my age, my dad started building signs for a living. You know the ones. Think flickering neon letters in a diner window, or blinking bulbs chasing themselves around a marquee. Think fluorescent tubes and backlit lightboxes at malls and gas stations. Think LEDs and jumbotrons, Times Square and Shibuya. Think Vegas.

At the outset, my dad had never built a sign. To figure out how, he decamped late one night, climbed a freestanding sign, unscrewed the thing, and peeked inside. The anatomy of an electronic sign, it turns out, is not so complicated. But it takes a lot to put one together and keep it glowing.

Ive worked in the sign businessalbeit occasionally and part-time, to earn some pocket money when I was in school. I helped build signs in the shop. I remember the sheet metal breaks and huge spools of plastic, the smell of hot steel and spray paint, the impossibly bright blue flashes and strangely robotic gurgles of the arc welder. I also worked on the cranes, installing new signs and fixing fried filaments. And I spent time in the office. There I learned about international materials shipments and industry suppliers; about national systems of classification and certification; about local permits and electricity grids; about municipal variance meetings where urban planners and sign manufacturers brawled over their divergent visions of the cityscape; about tensions between the sign industrys main goal (to get your attention) and government traffic safety regulations (drivers must not be distracted). Knowing something about all the people and things that had to align in order for a sign to exist, and seeing that signs were everywhere, it intrigued me that other people hardly seemed to notice them. Even though electronic signs are advertising media, and so nothing if not visible, somehow they also fade into the background of the everyday.

Through college and university, I kept working at the sign company from time to time. When I wasnt sweeping the shop floor, changing lightbulbs around town, or updating databases in the office, I was in the classroom learning about notes and chords. As the curriculum advanced, I also learned to see music as a cultural phenomenon that reflected and inflected bigger social issues. With the right musicological tools and the right interpretive know-how, it was possible to show that tonality signified capitalism, atonality signaled revolution, symphonies symbolized sexism, fugues figured philosophy, noise represented society, and so on. Music became more than notes and chords. It was something much more significant.

This new, critical approach to music was eye-opening. And it was of obvious political importance. Yet my time with signs meant that, whatever music might have symbolized, I couldnt help but wonder about all the things and activities that must have been required to fill the classroom with pianos, scores, recordings, playback equipmentall the things we needed to study music, let alone to make music and listen to it more generally. In the same way that signs tend toward invisibility despite their prevalence and regardless of all the human and material resources that go into them, I sensed that a lot of what makes music possible was inaudible. What were all these LPs and CDs made of? Where did they come from? Who assembled the turntables and CD players? And what happened to all this stuff when it wore out or broke down, became unwanted or obsolete?