Here you will find a serialisation of a transcript of a talk which Bill Drummond of 80′s multimedia art project The KLF gave to BBC Radio 3 regarding the music industry. The KLF were a pop sensation throughout the 80′s and early 90′s, but unlike their contemporaries they were deliberately repetitive and derivative in an effort to highlight the ridiculousness of pop music at the time. The talk will be serialised in 4 parts as the whole lot at once would probably be a bit much. The idea of recorded music as “product” is, he thinks, an outdated concept unique to the 20th century that spawned it. The rapid collapse in value of recorded music is, he thinks, A Good Thing. In the future, music can once again become connected with time, place and occasion. And of course with musicians. We give you, A History Of Music: Part 19…

That’s the title of this talk. What parts 1, 2, 3, 7, 11 ,13 or 17 were, or are, is almost irrelevant to this talk. That said, I want to start by reading something which I wrote almost a year ago and is taken from the history of music part 17, this is it: All recorded music that has ever meant anything to you or me or anybody else is speeding its way towards irrelevance. The whole cannon of recorded music that has been stockpiled over the past one-hundred and ten years is going rotten. Rapidly losing any meaning for anybody except historians and those that want to exploit our weakness for nostalgia. The very urge to make recorded music is a redundant and creative dead end, not even an interesting option fit only for the makers of advertising, ring tones and motion picture soundtracks. The sheer ubiquity and availability of recorded music will inspire forward looking music makers to explore different ways of creating music – away from ways which can be captured on a CD, downloaded from the internet and consumed on an MP3 player. The very making of recording music will seem an entirely two-dimensional, 20th century aspiration, for the creative music makers of the next few decades. They will want to make music that celebrates time, place, occasion. They may be those that want to keep the craft of recorded music alive, but we will look upon them as those who work with bygone art-forms – irrelevant in tomorrow’s world.

The kids today have a different perspective

In 1876 to hear music, you had to play an instrument or sing yourself. If not you could listen to other people playing or singing. All music that was written or performed was conceived to be listened to in a specific context. This could be religious songs to fit the religious calender. Or ones marked to celebrate the major milestones in life – birth, marriage, death. Or songs sung in the workplace to make the workload seem lighter and the hours speed by. Or regal music to crown a new monarch. Or marshal music to stir our sense of nationalism in times of war. This can literally be music to march into battle with. Or just music to have a good old knees up on a Saturday night. Remove the context from any of these examples I have given and the music will lose its potency and meaning and become something else altogether.

On a surface level the music stays the same but our relationship changes, it is our relationship with music that defines what music is, not what the composer dreamed up or what the musicians thought they were playing. So that was in 1876 and everything that had gone before. In 1877, the American inventor Thomas Edison invented a device he named the phonograph. It was a wax cylinder and on it he recorded himself reciting Mary Had A Little Lamb. His recording was not musical, but that technological development would have more influence on music of the 20th century than anything else that happened in the 19th century, be it the music composed by Beethoven or the music sung by cotton pickers in the slave plantations of ol’ dixie.

Ten years later an American, another American, Emille Berliner took Edison’s idea and ran with it. In 1887 Berliner patented his Gramophone – that is Gramophone with a capital “G”. On this he could play flat circular record things, that he also invented. And on these flat circular records, Berliner was having music recorded, not just himself reciting nursery rhymes. By 1892 he was selling these records and his Gramophones to play them on. This was the moment when music could be contained within a physical object that could be bought and sold. Thus the record industry was born. A small aside that I would like to make here is that within a few months of the first record and Gramophone being sold, the musicians union was formed in Manchester.

To be continued…

KLF – Official Website

BBC – Radio 3

Wax cylinder preservation and digitisation project