Listening for the Secret. Ulf Olsson

      Technological transformations change the conditions for tradition—often drastically. If we look at tradition as some kind of belonging, a sense of being part of something bigger than the individual, then technological development and commodification breaks tradition apart. Here, as Benjamin pointed out, it is “as if a capability … has been taken from us: the ability to share experiences.”⁹⁵ Instead of the shared, collective experience, music turns into an individualistic enjoyment of a substitute product, illustrated by everyone listening with earphones—as if we are all connected to the same source, listening to the same monologue but individually, separated from each other. Attali points to how audio technology promotes repetition, which “requires the ongoing destruction of the use-value of earlier repetitions, in other words, the rapid devaluation of past labor and therefore accelerated growth.”⁹⁶ This is the logic of capital and commodification, and no musician—or anyone else—escapes it. It is a dismal perspective that Attali offers us, yet he sees possibilities for challenging power through “the route of a breach in social repetition and the control of noisemaking.”⁹⁷

      In its own way, even a rock-and-roll band like the Grateful Dead tries to subvert power structures. Self-organization, the dialectic of tradition and avant-garde, the focus on live performances, the careful cultivation of craftsmanship, the forming of and reliance upon a community—these are factors that combine to generate what Attali (naturally without referring to the Dead) calls “a music produced elsewhere and otherwise.”⁹⁸ Another word for that is, of course, marginalization—but it is in the margins that possibilities sometimes appear.