benjamin's 'aura,' the white stripes on digital/analog

I was reading an article recently about the White Stripes, and specifically Jack White's reaction to ebay's 'flippers' of limited edition vinyl that the band has been releasing. Basically, there are online music communities and fan sites that fans sign up for/pay for in order to have access to rare editions of the White Stripes' music in a hard copy form.

Also on a sidenote- very sad to hear that the band is officially done making music together, what a sad day :(

But this was interesting to me: basically, Third Man records is White's own independent record company. Although the music is released in digital formats for the masses, the company also releases analog music releases for the fan. Obviously these are more expensive and printed in smaller numbers as a way to make them collectibles-- they're more 'rare' than any other common release. White was getting really pissed at ebay 'flippers' recently with regards to these limited edition releases, since there were people that would join Third Man's various fan clubs just so they could buy these limited edition releases for 100$, say, and then turn around and sell them on ebay for 500 or something.

A blogger for Stereogum was discussing this, with White's comments thrown in as well:

"When a fan tried to argue that people with “more money than sense” were to blame, Jack retorted: “Or are they just paying what the going rate is?” White explained: ”We sell a Wanda Jackson split record for 10 bucks, the eBay flipper turns around and sells it for 300. If 300 is what it’s worth, then why doesn’t Third Man Records sell it for 300? If we sell them for more, the artist gets more, the flipper gets nothing. We’re not in the business of making flippers a living. We’re in the business of giving fans what they want.”

Basically, the situation is that White and his record label tried to create this kind of exclusive 'club' for hardcore fans where they could buy the band's music in a rarer format, on vinyl, in box sets, or whatever. Then, he got pissed when non-fans infiltrated this club, bought up some of these special edition releases, and flipped them on ebay. There was a limited supply, and White wanted them to fall in the hands of true fans-- and he was pissed that flippers were getting these things and selling them BACK to the fans for more than the record label was selling them for, because that essentially robbed them of profit. And THEN, once he saw real fans PAYING those prices, he thought why not kill two birds with one stone?

So what he proposed/did was up the prices of these releases to stop the flippers from buying them and making profits, and making more profit for himself. This is a strange, interesting move- on one hand I see his point, since the fans keep paying these flippers' prices they're basically saying that the limited releases are WORTH what the flippers charge-- so in that sense its logical that White would raise his prices, since he knows fans will pay them. This is kind of dirty though, because he's basically shafting the fans in doing so all out of some kind of misplaced anger at the flippers (which really isn't that big a deal-- it would be impossible to truly control how your music/content is being used and distributed once it leaves your hands).

The point of explaining all this is because I found one of the responses to the article really interesting:
"

brad  |   Posted on Dec 1st, 2010

For the record, I like Jack White. I think he’s a nice guy and a very talented musician. Here’s my problem with Jack White:

He tries to manufacture authenticity.

He plays shitty guitars through shitty amps and purposely limits himself technologically in order to create music that is more “real”. He attempts to capture a kind of authenticity that he thinks old bluesmen had. The problem is those old bluesmen used shitty guitars and amps and recorded whenever and wherever they could out of necessity. It was all they could afford. It wasn’t a fashion statement. If Son House were around today I bet he would be using the very best equipment he could. And he certainly wouldn’t be releasing his records in limited quantities.

In this case, Jack White is trying to manufacture rarity as well. The reason old records are so rare is because, well, there aren’t many of them around anymore. Not because there were only three hundred originally made.

I understand his point about fans dictating the price, but if he really cared about people buying and enjoying the music then he would press more records. I think it’s silly to try to manufacture something in order to make it artificially rare."

This made me rethink my hero worship of Jack White, because this blogger had a real point. Stylistically in terms of the White Stripes' music, I really dig the fact that White is trying to "struggle" with these old, crappy guitars to get a sense of this old bluesy sound that we don't have anymore. He's trying to go for a purer, authentic sound in contrast to the streamlined, touched-up music we have all over the radio today.

Any musical elitist (I include myself in this category to some degree) can sympathize with a sense that we've lost something in today's musical arena where what we hear on the radio doesn't actually reflect a singer's real abilities. This relates to Benjamin's idea about aura-- what makes something "art" is it's authenticity, this invisible energy about it that emerges as a result of an individual's creative input.

In the old days, the music industry was simply different. Rare records were authentically RARE for whatever reason-- maybe a printed run of Beatles' vinyl was stopped for some reason, some kind of anomaly in the recording process or because they wanted to change the sequencing of tracks, repackage the entire album in another way, whatever-- but now, Jack White is trying to capture that sense of rarity by purposefully manipulating the number of records he prints, how they're made or whatever.

I understand the logic of promotional material today, because that preserves the old sense of rarity in a more genuine way. For example, if you go to a special concert of your favorite band, and the band has decided to reward the fans by giving everyone something special to commemorate it. It wouldn't even have to be in an analog format to do this (well, sort of-- ill come back to this)-- maybe everyone at the concert gets a special CD sent to them in the mail, a live recording of the show and in theory only the people at the concert ever get the chance to have this CD. That would be fitting with the moment and would feel "authentic" because theres essentially a REASON for the rarity.

The otherside of this that I said I'd come back to is the idea of having authenticity or "aura" at all in a digital format-- what I mean is if what's special about this hypothetical, promotional concert CD is the music itself, then digital wouldn't work very well because those fans could just take the cd home, upload it, and share the files individually on limewire or something. All the fans could hear them and it would kind of ruin the specialness of the whole thing. But then again, they could do that if the CD was a vinyl record too, it would just take a little more time/be more work.

Getting back to my main point, I'm not sure I agree with White's impulse to arbitrary make small print runs of vinyl in order to build a catalog of rarities for hardcore fans because it seems like just pure capitalistic manipulation of the fans. His argument is that he's just using the free market system to give fans "what they want," and he has a point-- I can sit back and call the fans crazy for wanting this stuff, since I don't believe there's anything special about it. Like Cubitt was saying about digital special effects, special effects are moving into the realm where they don't have referents anymore, and they're kind of broken signifiers. This seems similar to me, since any kind of special media item is a faulty signifier for some kind of special thing.

ANYWAY- what does everyone else think about this? I know the White Stripes wouldn't be the same if Jack White used modern musical instruments, things that were tuned perfectly and in great condition (it would probably sound like the raconteurs honestly-- their music is great too in its own right, in my opinion), but the whole thing still raises questions. Is it pretentious of him to use old crappy guitars and whatnot to capture an old sound when he can afford the new stuff? Or if it's just for the sound and style which can't be achieved otherwise, is it ok?

The bigger question in all of this is the question of aura. I think you can really only get the "auratic" aspect of music from LIVE performance anymore-- on any kind of recording, there's no way to know what was authentic and what wasn't. Another question is who even cares about aura. Benjamin's efforts to talk about aura lack any real, concrete aspects of it that we can point to-- its just this kind of weird, spiritual/psychic energy that fills things that are "art."

Going back to a discussion we had way at the beginning of this class-- let's say on one hand I have a real Van Gogh painting like Starry Night, and on the other hand I have a poster of Starry Night in my room. The poster lacks aura, by Benjamin's argument-- but should I care? I have the poster in my room because I like the painting, and that should be all that matters. This idea of preserving aura just so art can stay an exclusive, bourgeois club accessible only to those with the money/social status to do so seems problematic and unnecessary to me.

I have a sneaking suspicion that if I saw Starry Night in person, I wouldn't transcend reality and be completely moved by the authentic power that the "real thing" has. I like the picture, and I like how it looks in a GENERAL way, so the poster is enough for me. Am I committing some kind of moral crime by not caring about the loss of aura?

(I will make one concession to aura theory here though-- I saw St. Peter's Basilica in Vatican City and was completely floored by it, genuinely moved by the reality of it. A picture would never capture the real power and "aura" of seeing this structure in person. A side note to that though is maybe that's only because St. Peter's Basilica is a three-dimensional space full of depth and detail, and flattening it into two-dimensions in a photograph obviously loses a lot of the original.

An interesting thought experiment is what if we could reconstruct St. Peter's Basilica in a 3D program, 100% accurately, and then port that construction into some kind of virtual reality device where people could see it? I have a feeling that would be MORE auratic than a picture, yet still not capture the reality of the thing. Cubitt would probably want to kill me for making any of these comments haha, but anyway...)

What do you guys think?

ryan aliapoulios

PS: the original link to the blog about white's ebay battle is here:

http://stereogum.com/589621/jack-white-fights-fans-over-ebay-flipping/franchises/wheres-the-beef/