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Polishing a Scratched Record; or the Epideictic Power of Record Store Day

Sat, May 26, 17:00 to 18:15, Hilton Prague, Floor: LL, Congress Hall II - Exhibit Hall/Posters

Abstract

Record Store Day is a celebration that stands against a music market that attributes value to mediums which maximize profit through storability and ease of reproduction. I read RSD as an epideictic text, which aims to praise as virtues music’s synesthetic qualities in order to generate a disposition for action in music consumers. Its celebration “baits” customers into record stores, where they can rediscover, by means of practice, the qualities that differentiate music mediums outside of digital and web-based technologies. I use Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of “habitus” to explain why the synesthetic qualities of music proper to analogue technologies are hard to point out and to commensurate with other mediums. I then propose that, Record Store Day, as an epideictic text, is an exceptional way to revive record stores, and show how epideictic discourse provides an escape from a socially imagined false binaries and the concept of obsolescence.

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