Page 196 - Cultural Studies Volume 11

190 CULTURAL STUDIES

and different ways because of their juxtaposition with other interviews). At one
level, of course, these are the sorts of problems with representing the ethnographic
Other that all researchers collecting data from and about ‘ordinary people’ have to
face and, as such, they are potentially excusable. The problem here, however, is
not simply that the book’s editors helped to shape the ways in which these people
could be heard to speak—after all, other studies of ‘ordinary people’ work around
such difficulties all the time—but that the MDLP is completely lacking in self-
reflexivity about their role in speaking for their subjects. Instead of acknowledging
the impossibility of (re)presenting other people’s thoughts without distortion (and,
in doing so, perhaps providing some clues as to how we might be able to
compensate for those distortions as we read), the MDLP assumes that they have
provided their readers with unmediated (and thus, presumably, uncontaminated)
access to the thoughts and ideas of the individuals they’ve interviewed.
Even if one is willing to treat these very ‘cooked’ interviews as if they were
accurate reflections of the real world, the MDLP simply doesn’t provide enough
information about these ‘ordinary people’ for readers to come to any conclusions
of their own that aren’t limited to the highly localized level of the individual people
interviewed here. A handful of the book’s interviews are preceded by factoid-ish
blurbs that provide a few demographic and biographical details about the
interviewees, and the transcripts themselves occasionally contain additional clues
as to who these people are when they aren’t busy being research subjects for the
MDLP, but this sort of information appears too infrequently and inconsistently to
make any broader social or cultural patterns apparent. To be sure, the body of data
collected here is often anecdotally interesting, and it does support the MDLP’s
claim regarding the complexity of the musical terrain quite well, but ultimately
this is the only broader conclusion of any sort that these interviews render possible.
To be fair, this is undoubtedly part of the book’s point: that there are no
significant patterns to be found in the sea of data gathered by the MDLP, and that
the absence of such patterns demonstrates the folly of trying to impose overly-neat
meta-narratives on a world where they simply don’t apply. For instance, of the
approximately 150 interviews conducted for My Music, evidently no two of them
(besides those done with a few Grateful Dead fans) were sufficiently alike to fall
into readily identifiable patterns. As Keil puts it,

That is the main point of this collection of interviews. Each person is unique.
Like your fingerprints, your signature, and your voice, your choices of music
and the ways you relate to music are plural and interconnected in a pattern
that is all yours, an ‘idioculture’ or idiosyncratic culture in sound. This may
seem obvious or will seem so by the time you have read half of these
interviews, but we believe most people think of the musical tastes of others
in highly stereotyped ways that are based on layered prejudices and
prejudgments We hope this book convinces you that our musical lives are
much more complicated than that.
(p. 2)