The rise of the Industrial Revolution led to many advancements and progression in society. However at the same time, industrialization meant many people losing jobs and being replaced by machines in a factory. Although the factories still needed workers, the actual skills that people like shoemakers had needed to start learning how to run machines instead of how to provide the actual skill. The topic of deskilling is something discussed a lot in my Social Structures and Globalization course this semester. We learned about Karl Marx who talked a lot about the uniqueness of items being taken away because everything was made by a machine in the same way and by the same machine. This did help production be faster and broadly help our quickly populating world with supplying resources, but it took away common skills from people today. Today, we’re witnessing a lot of outsourcing of these factory jobs which I’m guessing will be a repeat of the dislocating of skills that we witnessed in society a few years ago. Factory workers will be outsourced (already are) – the start of the sustainability project we’re living introducing today.

GarageBand is weird. The fact that it’s so easy to appropriate any cultures’ sound or native instrument is really unsettling. Similarly, the way it’s so easy to change and shift the voice into something that sounds nothing like someone’s own voice is unfair. Someone who has no talent in singing should not be able to alter their voice to the extent where it sounds so different while folks who are naturally talented do not use the same technology to make their voices sound better. It is confusing listening to a song where the genres mix up in general but knowing that hypothetically I can just take a bongo and mix it with a traditional Chinese instrument is unsettling to me. My qualms exist when considering the people who played an instrument or recorded their voice to be used on the software. They do not get the credit of being the talent, and furthermore, anyone with GarageBand is able to take and manipulate their talent to make it work for them. An argument may be that the artists who shared their talent knew what they were signing up for, but I think the fact that so many different genres are coming together and becoming manipulated from their original form which may not have been what the artists thought would happen.

Tagging along from the previous post about ownership, the use and meaning of music has shifted. Instead of playing music as a means to be with the community and experience the music together, we put in our headphones and use music as a means to escape from the world. The social aspect of listening to a song only really exists in concerts, and this is mainly due to the way recording music has become so easy. In the past, live music was the only form, and if not live music, records were the only resource to hear a song. Everyone would sit around the record player and listen to their favorite artist’s album all the way through. Now, we don’t give music our undivided attention. There’ll be pop songs on in the department store while shopping, and we’ve become so accustom to hearing it everywhere that you really have to listen to realize what song is playing. The dislocation of community in music has a lot to do with it being an easier received resource that is attainable everywhere by everyone – we all have ownership to it.

Every time we’ve discussed Claude Shannon in this class, I’ve agreed with him to an extent but then he pushes it just a tad too far. I agree that creating a sample is just information, but Shannon’s belief that nothing has meaning and everything is just a mathematical equation is difficult for me to wrap my mind around. Not only does the math part turn me away, but I really do believe everything has an inherent meaning. Even if the thing itself is a bunch of equations put together, the reason behind why it was made gives it meaning and brings it to life. And my discomfort might be from the English major part in my brain that seeks to find analysis and meaning in everything, but I also just think that seeing everything the way Shannon does is a cynical way to see the world.

Sampling music is not something I know a ton about, however there have been many artists who have written, produced, and released a song, and then gotten sued because it sounds too close to another artist. I can understand if the melodies and the beat sounds exactly the same, however if it sounds different enough, is it worth suing the artist? This is a difficult question because then intentionality comes into play. If an artist unconsciously copies the melody of an artist that they really enjoy, it’s not they’re fault. And there are only so many melodies that can exist – why does one artist get ownership of a specific sound over another artist? As I discussed in the previous post, I do think some sort of copyright is necessary because it allows one person to hold responsibility, however I’m stumped in this scenario. If the song isn’t the exact sound, the artist shouldn’t be blamed.

Similar to my thoughts on following rules, technology and the conversation of copyright is a valid one to me. It creates order in broader society and allows someone to take responsibility for things that are provided online. However, I understand why folks like Richard Stallman support free internet, etc. His reference to FDR’s 4 Freedoms when listing the 4 Freedoms he uses on his own creation, and believes should exist all over the internet, represents how important this is to him. He lists: Freedom to run a program for any purpose; freedom to study how the program works, and change it to make it do what you wish; freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor; and freedom to improve the program and release improvements. These freedoms would all apply to Wikipedia, a source that I use frequently. Although Wikipedia is a crowd-sourced website, I haven’t had an experience on the site that has advertised false or incorrect information. And I guess I understand Stallman’s point because only folks who know something about the subject would have the interest of posting on the site or sharing something that they see as relevant. Along with that, there are still people who work for Wikipedia who sort through the reported content, but the entire site is a user-made, user-regulated site.

When studying historical objects, we’re often amazed by the artifact itself. As discussed during class, should Lester Young’s saxophone inside a museum be anything worth keeping in a museum? After all, Young played the music, not the saxophone. This is an interesting point that Professor O’Malley brought up because I think it touches a deeper conversation on the human innate need to know what they don’t know, and generally believing what we’re told by those who we see as holding more power or knowledge over us. We didn’t know Lester Young, so the next best thing is the instrument he used to make the music we hear. However, at the same time, the museum curators could’ve put any saxophone in the museum and told us what they wanted. The entire discussion surrounding history and being told how we need to view history is definitely uncomfortable because it dislocates me from everything that I’ve been told since I was little – don’t touch the museum display. As someone who loves to follow the rules and not cause any trouble, I never questioned why or who the history belongs to. As an American, some would argue everything in the American History Museum belongs to us, however I would argue that if everyone took ownership of the materialistic objects we have to present history, there wouldn’t be any history for future generations to observe. In personal experience, being able to see an artifact (even if the curators may be lying about how real it is) and learn from it is a special experience. I kind of see it like Santa Claus for adults – whatever works and allows us to be fascinated with things that have happened in the past should be celebrated.

Henry Thomas’s “Railroadin’ Some” is sung by a black man, however in Segregating Sound by Karl Miller, he argues that Thomas doesn’t use the traditional black music cues that immediately lets the listener know if the song is sung by a black or white person. This is especially true because the topic he was singing about was relatable for both black and white poor folks. Miller says, “Through this framework, one is more likely to see Henry Thomas’s travels and music as outgrowths of a generalized southern African American culture and predicament than as the action of a conscious and committed professional musician” (Miller 56). I think this is an interesting point that relates back to boundary transgression. All the people who had to move from their rural homes to the cities were able to relate to Thomas’s nostalgic music about what life was like at their homes. Living in a time where I don’t think there’s such a thing as “black music” or “white music”, it’s interesting to learn how mind-blowing it is for some people that Thomas didn’t “sound black”.

I believe that the song “Filipino Baby” by Cowboy Copas is a classic example of a man fetishizing a woman of color. Throughout the whole song, he didn’t once mention her name or anything about her other than what she physically looks like. He repeats the line, “I love my dark faced Filipino”. I understand that this was written in the 1940s and phrasing things as “politically correct” wasn’t a big concern, but there are so many things in this song that are just blatantly wrong. He also refers to her as “…my pet, lovin’ pet”. I disagreed with Professor O’Malley’s argument that this may as well have been a love song because he did end up marrying the woman he wrote the song for. I think that argument is the same as a racist person saying that they have black friends so they can’t be racist. There are issues of racist and sexism that this song highlights that we see repeatedly in history. As someone pointed out during our class discussion, after the war in Korea, many American men were with Korean women just to please themselves while they were away. It may be as simple as that this man was in love with the Filipino woman that he’s singing about, but his constant description of her dark features is unsettling and makes it hard for me to view it from a romantic lens.

The aspect in this class of learning about race relations in American history is really important to me as a Conflict Analysis & Resolution minor because it allows me to understand more about the dark past our nation has had and evaluate if/how we’ve improved and where we still need work. I knew about lynchings but the entire concept of spectacle lynchings was entirely new knowledge to me. It’s difficult to think about the fact that people would watch and be proud of being present at these “events”. After doing a little more research, I learned that although the spectacle lynchings were a big thing in the 1890s, they were still around until the 1960s, just over 50 years ago. While lynchings don’t occur as commonly as they did then, I realize that this is still a problem that we face today. I immediately remembered this article that I read from just last year. A black student was lynched at UMD by another student. It’s still happening in the 21st century and didn’t get a lot of media coverage. Although no one’s sending postcards to their family about the lynching they attended, it’s still highly disturbing that we’re still living in a time where it’s a possibility. Just as the spectacle element has been taken away, I hope that students 10 to 15 years from now aren’t able to cite an article that reminded them of a horrible time in our country’s history.