STEVIE WONDER SONGS IN THE KEY OF LIFE SOFTWARE
At the intersection of popular music, media, science and technology and postcolonial studies, the author describes oppressive elements that accompany the quasi-administrative structures, automatisms and design imperatives of popular music machines, software and discourses. Stereotypical defaults are passed on for example in drum machines, digital audio workstations, live-looping technology and copyrights or in narratives of the history of electronic dance music, in a way that is analogous with national and colonial thought patterns. But problems of culturalised and racialised representations have not automatically been removed from contemporary music production or music making apparatus. Popular music-making today primarily involves electrical or digital data streaming. Innerhalb der vermeintlich starren Regulationssysteme sowie Standardisierungen des Denkens hört Ismaiel-Wendt aber auch produktiv knisternde Entgleitungen und alternative Operationen der Theoriebildung. An Schnittstellen von Popular Music, Media, Science and Technology sowie Postcolonial Studies beschreibt der Autor beklemmende Momente, die mit den verwaltungsähnlichen Strukturen, Automatismen und Gestaltungsimperativen populärer Musikgeräte, -Software oder -diskurse einhergehen. Kulturalisierte und rassistische Repräsentationen sind damit als Probleme aber keineswegs automatisch aus zeitgenössischer Musikproduktion und auch nicht aus den MusikmachDingen herausgerechnet – im Gegenteil: Johannes Ismaiel-Wendt zeigt, wie sich stereotype Voreinstellungen beispielsweise in Drum Machines, Digital Audio Workstations, Livelooping-Techniken, Urheberrechten oder in Erzählungen zur Geschichte von Electronic Dance Music ganz analog zu kolonialen und nationalen Denkrastern vererben.
Populäres Musikmachen hat heute seltener etwas mit Holzschlitztrommeln oder Streichinstrumenten zu tun, sondern vor allem irgendetwas mit elektrischem oder digitalem Daten-Strom. Within this framework, Zeth Lundy covers Stevie Wonder's excessive work habits and recording methodology, his reliance on synthesizers, the album's place in the gospel-inspired progression of 1970s R'n'B, and many other subjects. It's divided into the following sections: Birth Innocence/Adolescence Experience/Adulthood Death Rebirth. Zeth Lundy's book, in keeping with the album's themes, is structured as a life cycle. But Songs in the Key of Life is different from the four albums that preceded it it's an overstuffed, overjoyed, maddeningly ambitious encapsulation of all the progress Stevie Wonder had made in that short space of time. Over the next five years, Wonder would amass countless recordings and release his five greatest albums - as prolific a golden period as there has ever been in contemporary music. Upon turning 21 in 1971, he freed himself from the Motown contract he'd been saddled with as a child performer, renegotiated the terms, and unleashed hundreds of songs to tape. Stevie Wonder was unable to control the springs of his creativity during that decade. If its titular concern - life - doesn't exactly allow for rigid focus, it's still a fiercely inspired collection of songs and one of the definitive soul records of the 1970s.
Like all double albums, Songs in the Key of Life is imperfect but audacious.