Panel Discussion in Los Angeles, CA - 1986 Mixtape: How American Music Played Out Through the End of the 1980s.

Saturday, September 20

3:00 PM

Panel Discussion:

1986 Mixtape: How American Music played out through the end of the 1980s.

A roundtable in connection with Matt Keegan's solo show "Now's the Time."

Panelists: Tammy Rae Carland, Cheryl Keyes, Alan Licht, David Novak (moderator), Dave Muller.

Anna Helwing Gallery

2766 S. La Cienega Blvd.

Los Angeles, CA 90034-2642

http://www.annahelwing.com/home.html

Mixtapes were a crucial part of the way music was distributed in America during the 1980's. Panel moderator David Novak has described the North American network of cassette tape exchange in the 1980s as an early model for the informal economy of internet distribution. Cassette mixes were a structural and ideological precedent for the peer-to-peer networks currently used within Limewire and other file sharing programs. Mixtapes also created an important skeletal socio-economic system that enabled the independent music scene to develop new democratic forms of distribution. The affordable and portable format of the cassette was used to circulate new sounds –such as post-punk Indie bands and unsigned rap artists -- that were not otherwise distributed on record labels, broadcast on commercial radio, or played on MTV. The mixtape, then, represents a special and contingent moment in the history of American media, but one that had ongoing ramifications for the way we think about democracy through music.

In the mid-1980s, US music distribution was strongly divided between artists that represented themselves as part of a national industry, and those who were considered removed from this as part of local or regional scenes. The broad and sweeping scope of songs like "We are the World," and events like "Farm Aid" and "Hands Across America" represented industrial pop artists as part of a national collective project. But in fact, most "local" music scenes were just as national, and wove into a national "independent" network that extended far beyond the regional scenes it fostered in cities such as Minneapolis, Athens, Austin, Boston, New York City, and Los Angeles. 1986 represents the beginning of a breaking point in this narrative of national/regional separation. Once-marginalized forms of music began to get more mainstream radio play and allocated chunks of time on MTV, and the logic of the mixtape and the zine began to have significance in mainstream media.

This panel will discuss the various ways that indie rock and rap music scenes changed at this time, eventually to found themselves as the two most profitable and played musics of the early nineties. These genres became powerful and nationally-distributed during this period, but were generated and circulated via local scenes with strong, self-made networks of exchange. What can we learn about what Americans considered "home" at this time by listening to the music that they created and circulated? How does the mix of music circulating at this time show how Americans were grappling with a newly mediated public sphere, and its attendant problems of displacement, disenfranchisement? And most importantly, how did American artists and listeners voice their responses to the changing local/national relationship by creating new self-determined models for sharing and distributing music?