OUGD601 - Practical initial thoughts

As the essay is beginning to take shape more and more, my thoughts towards the practical piece of work is developing. With the subjects of graphic design, electronic music and subcultures being the focus of my research, then the generic response for a piece of graphic design would be producing artwork for a particular DJ/producer. However, as I have continued researching and developing the essay, theory surrounding the themes such as Kraftwerk, subcultures, Warp Records and The Designers Republic have arisen that could lead to a potentially very interesting piece of design that links well to the essay but isn't too generic. The theory is heavily related to appropriation and the role it plays in electronic music but also design, therefore, a majority of my ideas correlate back to appropriation and how its critically examined in my essay.

Idea 1 / re-designing Kraftwerk albums as if they were being released in 2017

• This particular investigation within the essay focuses on the album packaging that was produced with the same attention to detail as the music, looking at the series of highly original and influential albums such as Autobahn, Trans-Europe Express and The Man-Machine. As these classic albums are an incredible body of work, exploring areas with the aid of graphic design as distinct as nuclear energy, motorway travel, the internet and telecommunications, concepts not normally associated with electronic music songs. These areas were communicated by using appropriation of images and objects that led to the the band having a visual culture of juxtaposition. Hence it allowed Kraftwerk to use historical alternatives which contrasted to the modernist models which were dominating the industry at the time.
• Therefore, the idea is to re-appropriate the albums in art style that is relevant to the modernist models of today, yet bearing in mind what Kraftwerk were communicating in the 70s and if that would still be relevant today. This links back to the essay as I discuss the importance of Kraftwerk's covers and how they communicated the bands hidden messages. 

Idea 2 / Looking at brands that have appropriated something with a negative perceived image to create something that is positive

• This idea is influenced by the tactic used by Kraftwerk who appropriated negative/unsuccessful imagery, movements and styles to prompt a better future. It was a concept that aimed to fuse utopian notions with nostalgic images to create an aesthetic tension that confronts the present. In my essay I discuss how it can be seen in Autobahn with the confrontation of Hitler’s ‘prioritised project’ to maybe show an era of social transformation following the war. Even more so in The Man Machine , with Kraftwerk’s retrieval of Lissitzky as he had once reflected utopian desires and futuristic anticipations, yet communicated a movement that ultimately failed.
• For this idea I aim to stay away from electronic music but use key theory from the essay and apply it to generic graphic design such as branding. I could create this for an already existing brand or create a fictional one, then select a negative subject from the past and re-appropriate it for the brands benefit.

Idea 3 /  re-appropriation of mass culture music

• Consumerism is examined with a focus on 'white label' identities in music and how 'underground' white label music is appropriated and consumed into mass culture. As when white label music is assembled and packaged with the aid of graphic design, the sounds that were once ‘underground’ become corrupted and appropriated into mass culture. The listeners or clubbers conspicuously admire innovative artists, but show a disdain for those who have too high a profile of being charlatans or operated 'media sluts'. Therefore, I want to focus on these 'media sluts' who are mainly UK chart music artists but not necessarily electronic music, for example Little Mix. 
• The outcome would most likely be a redesign of current album artwork but in style that is appropriating trends not associated with the typical UK chart artist. 

Idea 4 / Appropriation of underground artists

• This idea follows the same concept and theory of idea 3 but is basically vice versa. Instead, this time the artist would be one considered 'underground' then through visual language I'll aim to showcase them as mainstream and mass culture. 
• By examining current mainstream music artwork and applying it to a artist not normally associated with this particular aesthetic. Then testing it to see people perceptions towards a so called 'underground artists' who has trickled down the mainstream, will be an interesting experiement which links heavily back to the essay.  

Idea 5 / Commercialisation and appropriation in electronic music zine

• This idea looks into examples of commercialisation in electronic music, but also potential cases of appropriation in the scene, and how graphic design visually showcases this. This idea was influenced by two images in particular, which can be seen below. They instantly reminded me of the points made in my essay so I feel this idea could be best formatted in a zine, if I could come across more examples, like the ones below. 

OUGD601 - Timeplan

Introduction 
7th - 9th November

Chapter 1, 2 & 3
10th - 28th November

Conclusion 
29th - 2nd December

Turnitin
10th December

Editing of essay
Christmas break

OUGD601 - Critical essay - Essay structure

How does graphic design interpret electronic music culture?

Introduction

• Research introduction
• Review of each section

Chapter One - Early links between electronic music and graphic design

• Intro to electronic music
• Kraftwerk influence on EDM
• Autobahn
• Trans Europe Express
• The Man Machine / El Lissitzky
• Kraftwerk's appropriation of the everyday

Chapter Two - Appropriation of electronic music 

• The 'White Label'
• Consumerism in electronic music
• Appropriation of subcultures in electronic music
• Appropriation of rave / the death of rave

Chapter Three - Warp legacy on design & subcultures

• Cultural / Subcultural capital belief 
• Artificial Intelligence
• Warp
• The Designers Republic

Conclusion

• Review of research
• The role of appropriation in electronic music 

OUGD601 - Critical essay - Kraftwerk research

(From https://www.creativereview.co.uk/loving-the-robots/ top of the page)
If the graphic design industry had a house band it would be Kraftwerk. Their aesthetic, musical output and cultivated air of mystery are all of endless fascination to us.

(from https://www.theguardian.com/music/2017/jun/15/kraftwerk-ralf-hutter-music-about-intensity-the-rest-is-just-noise )
What about the Trans Europe Express album. Bartos once described that as being a message of European unity …

“Yes,” interjects Hütter with a smile, “But he was not the composer.”

So was that not the case?

“It’s like … where we live [in Düsseldorf] is the Rhineland. It’s Germany, but there was a British sector, it used to be French. It’s close to the Netherlands and Belgium. So we were brought up multilingual, whereas with other parts of Germany – say, Bavaria – it’s different. Ours has very multi-European connections. It’s a four-hour drive to Paris, so we were always going to discotheques in France or hearing new bands in Brussels or spending the weekend in Amsterdam. It’s very pan-European, so when I wrote the lyrics with Emil [Schult, their longtime visual artist collaborator] it was like a fantasy story about that.”

Even back in the 70s, when Kraftwerk must have seemed more like aliens beamed down to earth than human beings, the music was always accessible, always able to connect with people, always alive to the possibilities of collaboration. Did it surprise Hütter when black audiences in New York and Detroit took it to their hearts and used it as a building block for hip-hop and techno?

The album packaging was as beautifully produced with the same attention to detail as the music. The cover featured all four members of the band, resplendent in red shirts, black ties, neat haircuts and bright red lipstick artfully arranged on a staircase in some far distant European office building. The stark imagery and typography was, according to the credit on the back, “inspired by El Lissitzky”, the influential early 20th century Russian avant-garde artist. Solid information about Kraftwerk was impossible to find; the internet hadn’t been invented, music press interviews were nonexistent and I didn’t have the address for the fan club. This lack of information only made the band and their music more appealing

(From no more rules : graphic design and postmodernism rick poynor page 75)
In 1982, when Neville Brody was designer of The Face, he fashioned the opening spread of a feature about Kraftwerk in a style that referenced both Die Mensch-Maschine and its graphic origins in Lissitzkys work.

(From no more rules : graphic design and postmodernism - rick poynor page 70)
In 1978, the german electronic music group Kraftwerk released the latest in a series of highly original albums whose austere synthetic melodies and pulsing robotic rhythms would have lasting influences on the development of dance music. The 12 inch record was titled Die Mensch-Maschine (‘The Man Machine’) and its front cover announced at first glance that its musical and aesthetic concerns were radically different from most popular music at the time, whether rock, disco or punk.

The four band members, wearing identical red shirts and black ties, were framed by diagonal rules and panels of block like reminiscent of Russian Constructivist typography of the 1920s, a historical reference confirmed by the use of red, black and white as the main colours. The same slanted composition and typographic manner was used on the back cover, which also featured various geometrical shapes. A credit confirmed that the design by Karl Klefisch had been inspired by the work of El Lissitzky, avant garde ‘constructor’ of such works as About 2 (1992); the back cover was, in fact a quotation from one of the books pages. Die Mensch Machine was not a parody in any sense, but two ideas were communicated clearly: that the music, too, was to be understood as ‘avant garde’, infused by a spirit of bold artistic exploration ; and that it was ‘futuristic’, anticipating the a new world that would be different from everything we know, but in some sense still positive. Nevertheless, the designer and musicians chose to construct an image that was backward-looking, if not quite nostalgic, and whether they intended it or not, the cover could also be read as tongue in cheek and humorously camp in its straight-faced seriousness. If Kraftwerk’s music was so progressive and new, one might ask, why did it need to be represented by imagery that referred ambiguously to a moment of political failure in the past?

(From Kraftwerk music non stop) (Utopian links)



























(Nostalgia links)




OUGD601 - Crtitical essay research - If I think of Germany at night documentary

If I Think of Germany at Night is a documentary film about techno music and related musical styles. Much more than a portrait of DJs, musicians and techno activists, the film takes a deep look at both music in general and electronic music in particular. I deemed seeing this film necessary to look at the subcultures of electronic music but through a different medium such as film. The documentary is more current to say most of the books I've been looking at. The film’s protagonists Ricardo Villalobos, Sonja Moonear, Ata, Move D and Roman Flügel have a broad horizon of experience from which they speak about themselves, their subculture and its development. As all the DJs and artist are German the focus is centred around the German scene, particularly Berlin. However, you get a sense of how the culture has changed along with the role of the DJ over the years. Seeing the theory of my essay in a documentary form made this research more tangible.

OUGD601 - Critical essay - List of books

No more rules: graphic design and postmodernism

Discstyle: the graphic art of electronic music and club culture: House, Techno, Electro, Triphop, Drum 'n' Bass, Big Beat.

Club cultures: music, media and subcultural capital

Subculture to clubcultures: an introduction to popular cultural studies

Popular music and youth culture: music, identity and place

Subculture: the meaning of style

Listening through the noise: The aesthetics of experimental electronic music

Energy flash: A journey through rave music and dance culture

Electri_City: The Dusseldorf school of electronic music

Reverberations: the philosophy, aesthetics, and politics of noise

Studying popular music culture

Adventures in wonderland: a decade of club culture

Discographies: dance, music, culture and the politics of sound

Cover art by: new music graphics.

Warp labels unlimited

OUGD601 - Critical essay - Subcultures & Youth cultures research

(from dance music first page 5)

"Writing about punk rock, Jesse Prinz argues that the identities it fosters and its roles as a subculture are a part of its aesthetic interest. unlike punk aficionados of dance music who don’t tend to make visible their affiliations but nonetheless dance music depends on scenes, and clubbers demonstrate significant commitment to their scenes"

(dance music first page 5)

"In the uk the term subculture is closely associated with the Birmingham school of subcultural studies, according to which subcultures are inherently dissenting ; forms of (youth) protest against hegemonic conservative forces, often class based"

"This fits in with the critical writing about dance music that theorises clubs and parties as spaces for expression of disruptive political identities and ideas"

(from studying popular music page 231) (links to dick hebidge)

"The title of this book, Subculture: the meaning of style (Hebidge, 1979) gives some clues to the approach he took. He argued that subcultural groups like teds, or mods or punks (and by extension all musical subcultures) construct a style - of dress, music, forms of transport, and forms of dancing or listening or buying - that is meaningful to them and others. To do this, subcultural groups take products that are available in the mainstream society and transform their meanings through ‘bricolage’ : a process of improvisation where conspicuous consumption is organised in distinctive ways to transform the meanings of the objects. Through this transformation of meanings, these styles begin to reinforce each other to create coherent whole that Hebidge, following Barthes calls ‘homology’"

(from studying popular music page 233) (argument against subcultures)

"Gary Clarke (1981/1990) has investigated the selection process of the subcultural studies, arguing that they have privileged certain spectacular groups at the expense of ‘ordinary youth’ who consume mainstream music and wear chain-store clothes."

"This, he believed, would allow us to examine the sorts of options that are available to different young people, and would avoid viewing the spectacular subculture as some sort of original, which is then watered down for exploitation and mass consumption."

(from studying popular music page 234) (characteristics of consuming music)

"First, taste and choice in music is not arbitrary or haphazard, nor simply a matter of subjective choice. Rather it is culturally generated. we dot not choose the music we consume in isolation. Our choices of music and the ways we consume them are meaningful to us and those around us."

"Second, the way in which music is meaningful is not simply reducible to ‘the music’ but is produced in the particular ways that we consume it. Hebdige shows us that the ‘sense of style’ generated by the ways we consume music transforms its meanings. this was how hebidge utilised the notion of bricolage. while his examples are most often about music, the same idea can be applied to other forms of consumption. For instance, acquiring our music as vinyl LP from a second hand market stall, as a CD single from a high street store, as a 12 inch vinyl single from a specialist dance music shop or as MP3 file over the internet are all meaningful choices."

"Finally, the meaningfulness of one act of consumption relates to other acts of consumption (or other social practices) to form a whole style. This was how Hebidge used the notion of homology. So, the vinyl LP is usually collected, categorised, organised on shelves, listened to in relation to other collected records and the sense of popular music history produced by the collector. The CD is bought on a saturday morning shopping trip to the mall, which also includes buying clothes from certain shops, and is undertaken with friends as a social occasion. The 12 -inch single is tucked into a record bag to be mixed on a set of home record decks as practice for its use in a big club night. The MP3 file is added to hard disk in a bedroom to be discussed over the internet late into the night. Each of these constitutes a particular and coherent set of ways to consume music and each is distinctive in its meanings and related associations."

(from studying popular music page 235) (Fandom, a way of consumption)

"In an alternative reading of the interviews, fandom is revealed as an active process with its own forms of consumption and meaning making. The accounts are full of references to the texts of fandom - records, pictures, memorabilia, fanzines, fan meetings - the activities of listening, watching and discussion, as well as indications of the individual and collective pleasures of fandom."

(from studying popular music page 235&236) (cultural capital)

"A number of theorists of fan culture have drawn upon the concept of ‘cultural capital’ (bourdieu, 1984). This refers to those forms of cultural knowledge that allow intellectuals to create and circulate distinctions between ‘good’ culture (the high arts they like to consume) and ‘bad culture’ (popular culture that subordinate groups consume). For the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, the intellectuals who run the education and legal systems, the media and other cultural industries, construct hierarchies of what is good and is bad in culture. This power to make distinctions is a source of social power that he sees as corollary to the marxist idea of ‘economic capital’, the power derived from the ownership of the means of production. By analogy, just as capitalist factory owners invest in more capital to increase production, wealth and ultimately power for themselves, intellectuals invest in forms of restricted education that give them more cultural capital and so more cultural power."

"Music fans usually know an enormous amount of detail about their favourite groups or artists. They distinguish ‘their’ artist from others, and often distinguish them between different records produced by that artist, and give significance to the artists and music and their lives. Fiske’s approach is useful to our study in so far we can look at fan activity in a new light, in which fandom becomes a set of creative, productive and empowering practices."

"In bourdieu’s own work, the idea of cultural capital is a means of to explain how certain forms of knowledge and practice make groups of individuals powerful. In Fiske’s version, education in the high arts is simply an investigation in something that already assigns power in society. Further, fan self-education is simply a way of achieving prestige within a peer group."