Conspicuous Obscurity

The Annotated MixtapeJosh HarmonDzanc, 2014Josh Harmon has written a new book called The Annotated Mixtape, which is ostensibly a mixtape so great that it’s worth reading 400 pages to fully engage with. I’m reviewing this book from the perspective of a reader who has come to cherish mixtapes more than any other gift, who wet his lips at the prospect of such a massive undertaking.In their purest form, mixtapes are curated to connect people through music. They spark relationships, instigate bands, sweeten goodbyes. You give one away and unless it sucks you create common ground with the receiver. With annotations, a mixtape becomes an even more personalized, intimate gift, which means that even in concept Harmon’s project has some friction: books are not personalized; books are not printed in the author’s handwriting with their signature doodles in the margins; books are rarely reciprocated with return books. This isn’t to say that it’s impossible for a mass-marketed item to stir feelings of personal connection and emotional exchange in its consumers. That’s done every day by talented advertisers and authors alike and it’s probably even doable in mixtape form. It’s just that this isn’t Harmon’s goal.Despite its title, Harmon’s book primarily chronicles an earlier and more solitary process in the mixtape supply chain: the purchasing and owning of vinyl records. His essays are more about the consumption of music than the sharing of it. While the Platonic mixtape exists to create common ground, Harmon’s project sometimes seems more concerned with destroying it. Read, for instance, some of his interactions with fellow consumers at the Rhode Island Rock n’ Roll Collectors Convention. Here’s a passage where Harmon talks to a stranger circling back for a Tom Petty LP:

“I think it’s in this box,” I said, pointing. The man had simply overlooked the record; I’d flicked past it moments ago. I’d spoken even before deciding to do so. Perhaps I should have added something along the lines of “Man, Tom Petty, how stoned is that dude?” or “All his albums since Hard Promises have sucked.”

He’s right to have held his tongue, and I don’t believe for a second that he has actually listened to all 12. Here’s Harmon reacting to She’s So Unusual, a Cyndi Lauper album his wife pulled out of the bin next to him:

I blushed. Cyndi Lauper? This from the woman to whom I’d pledged my life? Even as the example of cheesy 1980s nostalgia she intended, this LP was indefensible. I shook my head in what I hoped was a dismissive way--in case any of the record dealers might be looking--and continued finger-flipping the albums.

Harmon’s essays are full of posturing like this--censoring purchases for record store clerks, disparaging bands’ post-breakthrough catalogs. Among other things, these moments reveal a distaste for popular music, one tier of a frustrating taste hierarchy at work in this book. This dogma drives him to write sentences like “Why, if I had the good taste to like a band’s music, did that band have the poor taste to admire the Beatles?” and “Sonic Youth (ruined by OUT people trying to be IN).” To Harmon’s credit, there’s a strain a self-awareness here. He has to be inviting me to wince and that Beatles sentence is written from the perspective of his teenage self. But never in this book does Harmon’s self-awareness produce anything like an enlightenment or even an apology. He mocks his faux-sophistication at 19 but remains a snob at 40.Harmon’s snobby tendency to discount “hyped music” doesn’t lead him to better music, it just leads him to obscure music. The artists on this mixtape, with a few welcome exceptions, are familiar only to the most severe rock nerds (myself included). This isn’t a condemnation. I like exposure to new music and this mixtape’s obscure tracklist increases the probability of providing that. And a mixtape can contain solely obscure music and still maintain its noble purpose, so long as its creator genuinely loves and wants to share the music that’s pressed to tape.Unfortunately, this condition doesn’t hold up for very long in the annotations. Harmon certainly doesn’t love all the music on the mixtape. Stereolab’s “Speedy Car” is a self-appraised dud, Bauhaus “a terrible band.” And while he has shared some music with us, his annotations reveal a musical spirit that’s far from generous. Some of his sentences make me wonder why he’s made a mixtape in the first place: “For years, music has been my private pursuit, something not everyone else understands, something I don’t always want to--or need to--share”.Out of context, I can sympathize with this sentence. Music can of course be private. But that tendency not to share is something else. It’s a shade of obscurantism, a hazard to the Platonic mixtape that recurs more nakedly in other parts of this book. Like when Harmon waxes bitter about the Scud Mountain Boys, a hyped local band: “This music might have been the perfect soundtrack to my aimless drives through the Pioneer Valley and the Hilltowns--all the towns I’m even now unwilling to name, to keep their few remaining secrets my own--had I listened”.Passages like these remind me that many mixtapes miss their mark, that sometimes the warm fuzziness of mixtape exchange is muddled by selfish intentions. This deviation can be very subtle, the difference between trying to connect with you and trying to impress you.A Platonic mixtape would be the mechanism that connects me and Harmon. The mixtape that Harmon has actually given me is an illustration of what the sociologist Thorstein Veblen called conspicuous consumption. Veblen’s famous idea is that people don’t always buy things for the function they provide or the inherent value they possess. Sometimes people are more interested in the signals of class and taste their purchase sends than the actual product.We typically associate conspicuous consumption with things like expensive sneakers and ostentatious cars, objects that everyone knows the price of. In The Annotated Mixtape, conspicuous consumption works a little differently. Instead of buying things everyone recognizes, Harmon buys records that only a select few can recognize. It’s a balancing act. He wants his music to separate him from the masses but it has to be recognizable enough to earn cachet in a subculture that has recently grown fairly large. It’s not so much conspicuous consumption as it is conspicuous obscurity--a paradox and a pretty insincere position to take. This results in a mixtape where Harmon’s selections and annotations are culled for their optimal level of obscurity, for their implication of exquisite taste and diligent fanhood, not necessarily for their significance to Harmon or their ability to connect with me.Conspicuous consumption is at work in Harmon’s prose too. He’s got a brainy reading list and he advertises this with copious epigrams and excerpts from Adorno, Bourdieu, Debord, Baudrillard, Barthes, Borges, Lyotard, Wittgenstein, et al. There isn’t much genuine interaction with these names. The quoted passages sit unexplored between paragraphs. For the most part, they’re used like the records Harmon owns but doesn’t listen to. They’re little more than ornaments, signifiers of sophistication.He doesn’t just quote the best, he writes like them too. His footnote-addled essay on Shuggie Otis’ “Aht Uh Mi Hed” reaches for the academic tone of his quotees. Present in many essays, the trick of letting paragraphs of history implicitly inform passages of introspection sounds like Didion, though unlike Didion he never pulls off the reverse. In an essay on Def Leppard’s “Photograph” replete with excerpts from Sontag’s “On Photography,” Harmon’s verdict on frontman Joe Elliott could easily be turned back on himself: “He performs a distressed ardor using classic lead singer gestures and poses: his performance is learned from other performances.” All this is especially confounding when you go back and read Harmon’s fiction. His books History of Cold Seasons and Quinnetukut possess a confident, unique voice.

Considering that Harmon seems more concerned with music purchasing and posturing than actually listening to what’s on his shelves, it makes sense that he writes very thoughtfully about these subjects. His essay about speculating on obscure indie rock 45s (titular “Weed Demon” among others), most of which go the way of the Beanie Baby or the Dutch tulip, is fascinating. None of the collectors in Harmon’s trading ring appear to listen to the (deliberately) rare pressings they buy, they just flip them for profit or cachet.

Harmon pokes fun at himself and his fellow vinyl junkies in this story of a speculation gone wrong. As he critiques his herd’s conspicuous consumption, he ends up writing the book’s most honest and incisive sentences. Here’s one that I was waiting for all book: “At a certain point, the only real value in a 7” is in having the thing itself--since most of them are available digitally these days--and in being able to impress one’s friends with it.” Not that it’s actually true, but I knew he believed it and it was nice to hear him admit it.He’s got another good essay dedicated to Bohannon and the Talking Heads. It’s about coolness and the ridiculous contortions that modern hipsters pose in to obtain it. The essay starts with Harmon and his friend (another English professor, presumably) talking music at the off-campus pad of two former students. The students don’t like post-punk or indie rock, they’re into “‘80s production values”, which to Harmon’s bafflement means they listen to the Police and late-period Fleetwood Mac. In his attempt to trace how liking indie rock became elitist and guzzling mainstream schlock became hip, Harmon again seems keenly aware of the humor and absurdity in projecting coolness and superior taste.This is essentially his understanding: when the underground gets “mainstreamed”, hipsters scamper to weird places to practice their enduring rituals of geekdom and obscurity. Harmon’s sense of cool folds in on itself and for one more essay we see a Josh Harmon who has dropped his pretensions and taste hierarchies and is left to write honestly and curiously about what people like and why. His words on why the kids love “Synchronicity II” are fresh: “Cool derives from an emotional detachment, and we often need such a defense mechanism when even the farthest reaches of the pop-cultural multiverse have been colonized, when our tastes are data-mined and marketed back to us by corporations, and when asserting our individuality requires imaginative gyrations.” Well said. In rock demotic: now that they sell Joy Division t-shirts at malls, Sting’s deep cuts are as hip as anything else.These two essays are successful because they are expressly not about music. Coolness and conspicuous consumption are the true subjects of this book, so when Harmon writes openly about them he is not convoluted or ironic, he is an expert. His education took place at the record store, not in front of the stereo. He’s more of a collector than a listener, which is a distinction you will understand after you read this book (as he explains, these passions can actually be at odds: “I don’t listen to music as much as I’d like to because I spend so much time searching for it”).So while essays about buying music and being cool may be interesting, they don’t make for tender annotations. At book’s end, it doesn’t feel like Harmon has made me a gift at all. Harmon has written this book for himself (as he warns in the epigram, quoting Adorno: “what the gramophone listener actually wants to hear is himself”). There’s nothing wrong with writing a book for yourself, but there is something insincere about writing a book for yourself and then naming and structuring said book as if you’re making an intimate gesture toward the reader.Not that Harmon ever really committed to the concept. His mixtape is 51 songs long, with the entire U2 album Boy occupying tracks 18-28. He couldn’t fit that on a CD, let alone a C-90 cassette tape, his preferred medium and the namesake of his introduction. So let’s call this book what it really is-- not an Annotated Mixtape but rather the Confessions of a Vinyl Junkie--an occasionally fascinating piece of anthropology on the territorialism, obscurantism, and isolation of a certain tribe of music geek.____ Ben Berke writes about local politics, books, and rock music for The College Hill Independent, a student-run newspaper in Providence. Send questions, comments, and mixtapes to 69 Brown St, Box 2771, 02912.