My companion is with me wherever I go,
Even when I go to a show.
My companion is, of course,
My radio
– The Shaggs, “My Companion”

Perhaps you have had the experience while listening to the radio of tuning into a beautiful and favorite song of yours. At these moments, your beloved radio song blooms in presence. It can be quite romantic: the song, un-pauseable, un-rewindable, becomes a transitory soundtrack sent from the airwaves. In your memory, those radio sounds and those minutes of your life (usually a car ride), merge into one. Even more so if you sing along to the radio song, crank the volume, witness your friend hear the song for the first time, hear it recontextualized anew by the songs and commentary placed around it, or, in the case of The Big Lebowski’s The Dude, beg the car driver to change the channel, because you “hate the fuckin’ Eagles, man.”

This is not to say that these memories are exclusive to radio music—indeed, music is also intertwined with our life when we hear it performed live! But it is hard to hear most things live, and so the accessibility of the radio song revelation makes it a defining mode of our relationship to music. The record, cassette, or CD revelation exists too, but this requires a friend “of good counsel” to ‘put us on’ to the song, and not everyone has a friend “of good counsel.”[1] 

Most recently, algorithms and the content they feed us have made social media, and especially TikTok, a hive of almost continuous song revelations. However, we should be careful before trusting the “good counsel” of a machine.

We start with radio revelations because radio is the first mass-produced sound in history. Discussing in the same breath effervescent aesthetic presence and mechanically reproduced art may surprise readers familiar with Walter Benjamin. The sense of presence and live-ness which animates the radio revelation is reminiscent of Benjamin’s “aura,” an ineffable quality of art manifested in the “the unique phenomenon of a distance, however close it may be,” which “withers in the age of mechanical reproduction.” [2] In “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Benjamin is primarily concerned with the way mechanical reproduction of the visual through photography and film strips away the aura, making way for a truly avant-garde form of expression. Here, in the act of listening to mechanically reproduced sound, the negation of the aura is itself negated. The aura of the original song, performed somewhere in some recording studio or concert hall, is not recuperated: instead, listening creates a new aura which is intimately tied to the life history of both the listeners and DJ who shepherd the song into new life. Far from abolishing the aura, the mechanical reproduction of sound allows for the creation of new ones.

This suggests that (reproduced) music and film are very different media, requiring different theoretical treatments to understand their relationship with our lives. This essay is an attempt to sketch out such a treatment for the nature of music’s mechanical reproduction on the radio. In doing so, I work with ideas from Benjamin and his Frankfurt School colleague, Theodor Adorno. They emerge as vital, if flawed, theorizers of what music can do to us in an age of mechanical reproduction.

In searching for the long afterlife of the aura in reproduced music, I want to examine the ‘story’ form which Benjamin discusses in The Storyteller Essays. The story is an ancient form based upon its continual rebirth, yet, through this process of reproduction, the story’s aura does not dim, but shines brighter.
So, finding good music may take a friend “of good counsel,” but radio is everyone’s well counseled friend (Storyteller, 51) Both our collective memory and the popular songbook overflow with radio revelations [3]. My friend, who tuned into an unknown Australian station on a dusty road as Tchaikovksy’s “Romeo and Juliet” flowered into the ‘love at first sight’ measure, and she saw a kangaroo. Or Lou Reed’s story about Jenny, who “said when she was just five years old // There was nothin’ happenin’ at all…//Then one fine mornin’ she puts on a New York Station // You know she don’t believe what she heard at all // She started shakin’ to that fine, fine music // You know her life was saved by rock ‘n’ roll.”

Of course, the story is not always so easy. DJ’s and their stations may be totally distanced from the communities for which they spin records. Out of 11,000 commercial radio stations across the US, fewer than 180 are owned by Black people. Although an outsize share of American musical history is owed to Black musicians, the dissemination of this music is most often carried out by people who may be unfamiliar with the culture they broadcast. Chuck D of Public Enemy describes this inequality in station ownership, and the way in which it precludes the experience of a radio revelation for those who remain unrepresented: “If somebody is listening to the music in Memphis, do you think that the music comes from what the community wants to hear in Memphis? The music could be programmed from a white boy sitting in L.A.” [4] So, music does not spread by chance—it requires active participation from those organically involved in their community. Those who DJ without such respect for cultural heritage are more than out of touch—they are sonic gentrifiers.

Despite this, in Public Enemy’s “How to Kill a Radio Consultant,” Chuck D envisions methods of sharing music which are not beholden to the radio consultants in L.A. Those are the out-of-town DJ’s who “never know what’s good to the neighborhood // I swear I never seen the sucker in my neck of the wood.” So, the neighborhood runs their own broadcasts: “Thank God for the boulevard, they keep the motor runnin’ // The rap shows coincide with the tape flow // Bootleggers go inside and record the record low.” The listeners themselves resist the cultural homogenization of the airwaves by turning off the radio to collect and distribute songs of their own accord, through underground means. For Public Enemy, it is the very lack of Black-ownership in broadcasting which spurs this economy of bootlegging—a process through which listeners reclaim the right to share their music and establish communal ownership over the products of their culture.

Each of these musical stories, born of reproduction and often retold, are evidence of the important role that listening and sharing musical plays—its role to both form and challenge cultural boundaries.

***
Benjamin and Adorno on Audio Reproduction

Traditionally, the fundamental difference between music and painting is that the former has no concrete original, no ‘image,’ to reproduce. Benjamin quotes Leonardo da Vinci in a footnote to “The Work of Art:” “Painting is superior to music because, unlike unfortunate music, it does not have to die as soon as it is born…Music which is consumed in the very act of its birth is inferior to painting which the use of varnish has rendered eternal.” [5] In contrast, Adorno argues that this transient quality of music is central to its ancient significance: “[In the past], music was still something in itself and not an image of something. It was on the order of prayer and play; not of painting and writing.” [6] Despite this difference in painting and music, Adorno argues that, in their purest forms, both share in Benjamin’s concept of the aura, an artwork’s “presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be,” or, in other words, “the unique phenomenon of a distance, however close it may be.” Thus, Adorno solves the issue of transporting Benjamin’s visual theory to the musical realm by attributing the aura of the painterly original to “live reproduction in music.”

Adorno’s critique of radio is mainly leveled at the simultaneous broadcast of live musical performances which, at the time, were music radio’s main programming material. In 1940, when Adorno wrote “Radio Physiognomics,” phonographs were only played “on avant-garde radio stations, and even then only by way of exception.” So, the problem with live radio reproduction is that it creates an image out of music where previously there was none. “The image presented by the radio voice, by the music pouring out of the loudspeaker, is not an image of the outside world. This music sounds like an image of music.” [8]

On the radio, the image, the reproduction, has intruded on the pure, live song, usurping its place and inverting the relationship: now, the live song sounds like its image, not the other way around. But, this “usurpation has always already begun” within music [9]. The classical music which interests Adorno (since improvisations “do not count”) always already has an image to which it refers. That image is sheet music, which Adorno describes as “only a system of prescriptions for possible reproduction, and nothing ‘in itself” [10]. By bracketing this fundamental reproduction which stands at the core of classical music, Adorno is able to cast the live reproduction of music on the radio as monstrous and ghostly, since it “makes its fictitious claim to be unique, to be ‘here and now’ which, at the time, is disclaimed by technical reproduction.”

Yet, as Jacques Derrida writes, “representation is intimate with what it represents…one thinks as if the represented were nothing more than the shadow or reflection of the representer” [11] In this way, the mechanical reproduction of live music, presaged by music’s writerly reproduction on the page, has a tendency to usurp the place of the live performance itself. Adorno writes that it is the aura of authenticity that “leads people to be eager to attend a live performance even if they cannot follow the music as well as from their cheap seats as they could have followed it in front of their radio sets” [12] Even while viewing live, the audience member in a cheap seat will fill in the gaps of the live symphony with other reproductions of the symphony heard elsewhere, on the radio, perhaps when he accompanied “brushing his teeth with the Allegretto of the Seventh” [13] This usurping of the live performance’s ‘originality’ by the mechanical reproduction is most evident today, when concert goers will compliment the musicians for sounding “just like they did on the radio.”

Benjamin is very clear about the reciprocal relation between original and reproduction when he notes that, “at the time of its origin a medieval picture of the Madonna could not yet be said to be ‘authentic.’ It became ‘authentic’ only during the succeeding centuries and perhaps most strikingly so during the last one” [14] This firstly demonstrates that the reproduction of a song has no “’Special compartment’ that holds it at a distance” from the live performance, and thus the radio reproduction takes part in the live performance’s aura just as much as the sheet music does. Secondly, Benjamin’s quote shows that the development of aura does not fully overlap with the development of authenticity: while the latter is a reaction to the artwork’s increasing speed of reproduction, the former predates and floats above authenticity. A work need not be authentic in order to have its own aura, its own sense of ‘here and now.’ Thus, when Adorno talks of “the remnants of the pre-technical concept of authenticity haunting an art technique basically opposed to it” he is half right. Radio’s very opposition to authenticity allows it to cultivate its own sort of aura.

The fact that aura and authenticity do not fully overlap suggest that there could be a multiplicity of auras, if only one ‘authentic’ original. In a very crude way, every artwork has its own “presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be,” (Benjamin’s definition of aura), yet authenticity has a stricter standard [15]. As Adorno defines it, authenticity in music “is the feeling that the listener is faced with the ‘genuine,’ with the thing itself, and not with an imitation”  [16] While the aura is dependent on artworks’ “existence, not their being on view,” authenticity requires that the listener be “faced” with the artwork: it requires that the listener be present, which can only happen in one place at a time [17]. This notion of many auras, all without authenticity and thus without presence, is what constitutes the storyteller in Benjamin’s The Storyteller Essays. We will now turn to those essays in order to chart the image of a radio with its own aura.

Admittedly, the Benjamin of “The Work of Art” would disagree with any notion of aura which did not include presence. In that essay, he writes “for the first time—and this is the effect of the film—man has to operate with his whole living person, yet forgoing its aura. For aura is tied to his presence; there can be no replica of it.” Even so, Benjamin called his own convictions a “contradictory and mobile whole,” and in The Storyteller Essays the aura casts a different light [18]. “The perfect story” is only revealed through “multiple retellings,” through which the storyteller themselves will be absent (Storyteller, 59).

Like radio music, the story is given life by reproduction. The story transmits experience through a community, and “for the unbiased listener, the crucial point is to be certain he will be able to reproduce the story” (62).  The audience of the story is bored, laboring on other tasks, and thus listens in a special way: “The more self-forgetful the listener, the deeper what is heard is inscribed in him. When he is caught up in the rhythm of his work, he listens to the stories in such a way that the art of telling them descends on him of its own accord. In this way, the web is woven in which the gift of storytelling is embedded” (56).

A question arises here: are the listeners paying attention, or not? One answer comes from a parallel description in “Work of Art,” where Benjamin writes that “A man who concentrates before a work of art is absorbed by it…in contrast, the distracted mass absorbs the work of art [19].” Since the “gift of storytelling is embedded” in the “web” woven by labor, it follows that the audience absorbs the story and its gift. The audience absorbs this gift through the web of the labor into which they have been assimilated, in other words, the web into which they have been absorbed. The audience concentrates on their labor and is absorbed into it, which allows them to be distracted by the story, and thus to absorb its message [19].

It is significant that Benjamin chooses “spin[ning] and weav[ing]” as the two labor activities which accompany listening to a story [20]. It calls back to the weaving Fates, and implies the necessity of the audience in furthering the story: “counsel, interwoven with the fabric of one’s lived life, is wisdom” [21]. Just as the storyteller spins his tale, the listener spins its threads back into their own life. The listener’s spinning is an accompaniment to the storyteller. In a much similar way, people sing along as they listen to songs whether in concert or in the shower. Music stands alone with the story in this ease and invocation for communal reproducibility. The listener of a story compares to the reader of a novel in that the latter will not “give voice” to their reading and “is alone and is so for an extended period of time…he takes possession of the material…jealously and…exclusively” [22]. Although the filmgoers are almost always in the company of others, they only have meagre options for sharing their experience with someone outside the original audience—a filmgoer would either need to reshoot the film entirely, an expensive and ridiculous process, or pirate the film and send it to their friend. This second process maintains a high fidelity, can be reproduced cheaply and instantaneously, and is distributable to friends all over the world—digital piracy is the apotheosis of Benjamin’s model of the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction.

***
Music, Communities of Reinterpretation, and the Freedom of Listening

Of course, music can be pirated, too, and much record label money has been spent on trying to criminalize this practice. Yet, the music listener, just like the story listener, has recourse to another process of reproduction which is much more difficult to legislate: the oral tradition. Without the need for any additional technology and without direct reliance on the specter of the original, the two listeners make use of “memory, the most important epic faculty of all” to give new life to old experience in the form of an interpretation [23]. For what is the point of singing along to a beloved song, besides that it proves the accompanier has memorized the song’s lyrics and melody, and is ready to share the song with another person? It would take a very annoying person to begin reciting the script of a movie as it played out on screen. No, we must stay silent at a movie theater: we must not, cannot, accompany film with our own creativity. The film audience cannot concentrate on its own weaving so to better be distracted by the film: no weaving is allowed. As Benjamin quotes despairing Duhamel, “I can no longer think what I want to think. My thoughts have been replaced by moving images.” [24]. The evidence of music listener’s weaving comes from the memories people associate with music listening—their experience and the music interpenetrate each other at these moments. Only music and stories can be so organically and cooperatively assimilated into their audience’s spirit, and only music and stories can be so easily reproduced, since both are malleable in their reproduction.

When someone asks, “What song was that, again?” it is a special thing to be able to hum the tune in your own voice, thus allowing the song to ventriloquize you. To remind someone of a film requires a much different act, since film is much more in line with Benjamin’s new barbarians of modernism, like Scheerbart and the Bauhaus, who both “created rooms in which it is difficult to leave any trace” [25]. When you remind someone of a film, you are forced to give them a plot summary, to “transmit the pure, intrinsic nature of the thing like information or a report.”

In contrast, storytelling “plunges the thing into the life of the teller and draws it out again. The storyteller’s traces cling to a story the way traces of the potter’s hand cling to a clay bowl” [26]. One cannot leave a trace on a movie. Thus, there are jazz standards and there are horror movie tropes, but no horror movie standards. As mechanical reproduction through radio and record extends music’s reach past the natural radius of live performance, organic reproductions, or ‘cover versions’ begin to echo back.

Some great covers are acts of devotion—they pay tribute to the qualities that made the original most influential for the cover artist by blowing those qualities up in the cover artist’s voice. Jimi Hendrix covers Bob Dylan on “All Along the Watchtower” by honoring his Electric Dylan provocation with a guitar tone that thunders out any voice but maintains the wistful texture of the harmonica; or, The Breeders cover The Beatles on “Happiness Is A Warm Gun” with all the original’s bubblegum psychedelia, but juices the drums until they drive home the point that punk descends from the same place. Some great covers are acts of critique and clowning. The Raincoats cover The Kinks on “Lola” as an all-woman band that sings the original’s lyrics unchanged, sending the song down a tunnel of gender trouble which scoffs at the Kinks’ conservativism-by-comparison [27]. In any case, the cover passes the original down into a new audience, sometimes (for Hendrix), a much bigger one than the original ever reached. Like the story, the song always open to a new interpretation, and mechanical reproduction only opens the field for a greater number of interpreters.

In the field of radio broadcast, the same reinterpretation is possible. If the aura of a song decays when it is broadcast to a mass of different locations simultaneously, since it no longer has a “unique existence at the place where it happens to be,” this aura is reinstated in a different form when the song is placed within unique musical company on the broadcast itself. Paula Cole’s “I Don’t Want to Wait” (the theme to Dawson’s Creek) means one (saccharine) thing on its own, but when followed up with the hellish dystopia of Three 6 Mafia’s “Playa Hataz,” the contrast in tone adds a joke which did not exist in either tune separately or before they became mechanically arrangeable in such a way. The contrast between both songs also plays on a more serious disparity in the daily fears of different American teenagers depending on their place within constructed racial and socioeconomic hierarchies [28].

These interpretations, whether between friends through humming, between artists through covering, or on the radio through creative sequencing, take place in the absence of the original songwriter, and thus open towards infinite possibility. As Pheng Cheah writes, stories do not develop through “presence,” but through an “unending promise, because the paradigmatic experience at the origin of stories is the aporetic experience of the finitude of human existence” [29]. The storyteller who “attains self-presence” is thus able to fully tell his story, and just as necessarily, is already dead. Thus, a story undoes the interpretive authority of authenticity enforced by a singular ‘here and now’ by always accompanying this authority with “its impossibility, the absolute loss of self-presence” (Cheah, 324). What rise instead are a multiplicity of interpretations, each with their own aura and “unique phenomenon of a distance, however close it may be,” since the authority which determines the standard distance has vanished. Both mechanically reproduced and live storytelling carry the same potential of a “promise that which is always yet to come” [30].

The storyteller is the “man who can allow the wick of his life to be entirely consumed by the gentle flame of his story” [31]. Music, as da Vinci said, is “consumed in the very act of its birth” [32]. Thus, neither have a true, authoritative original which can be said to hold aura. The same can be said for film, which is so bound up in mechanical reproduction that the concept of the original ceases to be meaningful. Yet, film is resistant to organic reproduction which melds the reproducer’s interpretation with the mechanical material of the medium. It thus has its political value and can “assail the spectator.” In contrast, storytelling and music, whether they reach the listener live or through mechanical reproduction, draw the listener closer, and ask them to continue, to allow for the “slow accumulation of thin, translucent layers which offers the most fitting image of the process in which the perfect story is revealed through the stratification of numerous retellings” [33] These retellings are auratic in that, taken as a whole, in all their distortions, point towards the “vessel” of Benjamin’s “greater language” [34].

Notes

[1] Walter Benjamin, The Storyteller Essays, ed. Samuel Titan, trans. Tess Lewis (New York: NYRB Classics, 2019), 51.

[2] Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 222, 221.

[3] A short list of radio songs: “Transmission” – Joy Division, “Stereo” – Pavement, “Video Killed the Radio Star” – The Buggles, “Radio Ga Ga” – Queen, “Radio Song” – R.E.M, “Rock and Roll” – The Velvet Underground, “This is Radio Clash” – The Clash, “Radio Friendly Unit Shifter” – Nirvana, “Do You Remember Rock ‘n’ Roll Radio?” – Ramones, “On The Radio” – Donna Summer, “My Companion” – The Shaggs, “Turn on the News” – Hüsker Dü, “Get off the Air” – Angry Samoans, “Screenwriters Blues” – Soul Coughing.

[4] Chuck D and Yusuf Jah, Lyrics of a Rap Revolutionary: Times, Rhymes & Mind of Chuck D (KingDoMedia, 2006), 183.

[5] Benjamin, Illuminations, 220.

[6] Theodor W. Adorno, Current of Music: Elements of a Radio Theory, ed. Robert Hullot-Kentor, 1st edition (Polity, 2014), 119.

[7] Benjamin, Illuminations, 222. Adorno, Current of Music, 89.

[8] Kentor, Robert. Introduction to Current of Music, 18.  Adorno, Current of Music, 119.

[9] Adorno, Current of Music, 89.

[10] Adorno, Current of Music, 91.

[11] Derrida, Of Grammatology, 39.

[12] Adorno, Current of Music, 89.

[13] Adorno, Current of Music, 91

[14] Benjamin, Illuminations, 243.

[15] Adorno, Current of Music, 90.

[16] Benjamin, Illuminations, 224-225.

[17] Benjamin, Illuminations, 229.

[18] Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life, Reprint edition (Belknap Press: An Imprint of Harvard University Press, 2016), 3. 

[19] This convoluted and mind-bending conclusion seems to contradict one of Benjamin’s earlier Storyteller Essays, “Reading Novels,” in which he describes “a voluptuous act of absorption, not one of empathy. The reader does not imagine himself in the hero’s place, but assimilates what befalls him” (Benjamin, The Storyteller Essays, 34). Since Benjamin sets the novel into contrast with the story all across the line, hearing a story is then implied to be an act of empathy, an act of being absorbed.

[20] Benjamin, The Storyteller Essays, 56.

[21] Benjamin, The Storyteller Essays, 51.

[22] Benjamin, The Storyteller Essays, 37.

[23] Benjamin, The Storyteller Essays, 62.

[24] Benjamin, Illuminations, 238.

[25] Benjamin, The Storyteller Essays, 46.

[26] Benjamin, The Storyteller Essays, 56.

[27] The list continues: “Iron Man” – The Cardigans (orig. Black Sabbath), “The Big Payback” – Big Black (orig. James Brown), “Talkin’ Bout A Revolution” – Leatherface (orig. Tracy Chapman), “Take On Me” – Cap’n Jazz (orig. A-Ha).

[28] The middle-class, suburban angst of Dawson’s Creek: “I don’t want to wait for our lives to be over // will it be yes, or will it be sorry?” Compare to the horror that faces satanic gangsters from Memphis: “Demonic mind, why must I love to take so many lives?… // Why does the devil use me to commit these evil crimes?” This is just one comparison. One could also play Blondie and Grandmaster Flash together to shed light on their friendship, and the correspondence between early hip-hop and punk rock in 80s downtown New York. Or a cross-section of psychedelic music from across the world. Or James Brown, and his many interpreters. 

[29] Pheng Cheah, What Is a World?: On Postcolonial Literature as World Literature (Durham: Duke University Press Books, 2016), 322

[30] In a similar way, Cheah describes how the novel State of War questions interpretive authority: “The stories Anna tells her child are repetitions, not of an oral presence, but of a technical archive, a tape recording, that comes to her from beyond the grave” (Cheah, What Is a World?, 324).

[31] Benjamin, The Storyteller Essays, 73.

[32] Benjamin, Illuminations, 220.

[33] Benjamin, The Storyteller Essays, 58.

[34] Benjamin, Illuminations, 78.

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Discography

Cole, Paula. I Don’t Want to Wait, 1997. https://genius.com/Paula-cole-i-dont-want-to-wait-lyrics.
Dylan, Bob. All Along the Watchtower, 1967. https://genius.com/Bob-dylan-all-along-the-watchtower-lyrics.
Public Enemy. How to Kill a Radio Consultant. https://genius.com/Public-enemy-how-to-kill-a-radio-consultant-lyrics.
Reed, Lou. Rock & Roll, 1973. https://genius.com/The-velvet-underground-rock-and-roll-lyrics.
The Beatles. Happiness Is a Warm Gun, 1968. https://genius.com/The-beatles-happiness-is-a-warm-gun-lyrics.
The Breeders. Happiness Is a Warm Gun, 1990. https://genius.com/The-breeders-happiness-is-a-warm-gun-lyrics.
The Jimi Hendrix Experience. All Along the Watchtower, 1968. https://genius.com/The-jimi-hendrix-experience-all-along-the-watchtower-lyrics.
The Kinks. Lola, 1970. https://genius.com/The-kinks-lola-lyrics.
The Raincoats. Lola, 1979. https://genius.com/The-raincoats-lola-lyrics.
Three 6 Mafia. Playa Hataz, 1999. https://genius.com/Three-6-mafia-playa-hataz-lyrics.