We listened to music, music passed between us; it was a kind of economy: a mixtape from you, a mixtape for you, and one which circulated according to the general equivalent of the new (have you heard this? you’re not going to believe it!). Yes, music circulated – it was a gift from one to the other, but what kind of gift? What was given?
Was a mixtape a sign of my generosity to you – or of my musical perspicacity – my musical hard work, going from this record shop to that having heard this or that song on this or that obscure radio programme, or having read this or that article? Less a gift, then, than a kind of display – a show of peacock feathers: ‘this is a sign of the breadth and boldness of my taste’. But what gave itself to you, to whom my mix tape passed? My taste, yes – a sign of my prowess – but also a kind of address, for wasn’t the tape always an address, a declaration to the recipient, to the friend, a way of saying ‘here I am’?
This is unavoidable; the mixtape had a direction, it was a tape for you – even if there were more than one of you. ‘You have to hear this’: the mixtape was addressed to you. It wasn’t that I’d play you records then and there, but that I sought to reach you when I was not present. A mixtape in the post, a mixtape given just before you went (‘I made this for you’); this was a deferred sharing (‘you might like this’). Addressed to find you when I was not there.
Addressed to you? – But rather, wasn’t it to call forward a listener in you – to test you by the tape I’d made for you? Wasn’t it to draw from you one of a new people, of listeners to come? Wasn’t it to summon from you the listener who you were not yet, the one who would join me on the new shore and at the brink of a new country? I made this tape for you, yes, but only to call forward one who was waiting in you.
Who would you be, listener? One beside me, listening alongside me. We were the first listeners in the new world of which the mixtape dreamt. Listen, said the future, as it reached you in the mixtape. ‘I am coming’ said the future with the music of the mixtape. And didn’t I give you the future to receive the future in turn? Wasn’t it in expectation of another mixtape, a mixtape to come, in which the net was cast out yet further?
Celestial currency, whose coins are made of fire. Currency of fire, and the destruction of exchange value! I gave you a tape; I wanted another in return. You gave me a tape, and what did you expect from me? It was already an economy. But what happened by way of this exchange?
The future came; each time, with each tape, the future came towards us. And wasn’t this because the tape was an address, that it reached you from me just as I received a tape from you? Wasn’t this was because what was shared was received from the one who did not occupy the same level as me, who was higher, closer to the future and to the coming of the future? Just as I, for you, was likewise closer to the future and to its coming?
A double dissymmetry; a relation doubly dissymmetrical. Each time the gift came from where I could not be. Each time was given what was not in my power to give. It reached you by way of the remix of ‘Bang Zoom Let’s Go Go’. It reached you by way of that long track by Nusrat Fateh Ali Kahn; it came by way of Terry Allen and The Uts. But how did it come? Via the signification of a music new to me (it was the explosion of ‘world music’ – the mid 80s) – via wild new significations? Or was it via what withheld itself from signification like the enigmatic navel of the dream?
It arrived by way of what did not signify, but waited nevertheless, watching out for me, looking for me, and then arriving, having dreamt of me, and by its dream, created me. It was the time of the great broadening – the time of WOMAD tapes and Folk Roots compilations. The music of the world waited for us; it had dreamt of us and created us; we were the people of a new world, a world that had not quite arrived, we stood at the head of the waters. Or was it that what reached us was more bare and more simple; that what came had nothing to do with breadth or range, of a music that was as yet unfamiliar (the instruments of Sardinia, the throat song from Tuva …), but what passed by way of that music and its unfamiliar signs?
Dreadful times: corporate buyouts, Linndrums, the triumph of the mediocre. Not yet the niche marketing that would allow performers with smaller audiences to survive. Not yet the ’boutique artist’; only big sellers and negligible sellers. Wasn’t it against this backdrop that we listened – and the backdrop of industrial strife and unemployment, of the completion of a new, vile order? Wasn’t it in terms of this backdrop that the future was intelligible? Non-signification: withdrawal, refusal. What mattered was that music said, ‘I would prefer not to’.The sixth-formers were listening to Level 42, the record player in the common room spun No Jacket Required. Evil times; but there were mixtapes –
Waiting for us, ahead of us, there was other music. Our friendship was only the circuit of this music, its network and we were the disobedient cells through which it spread like cancer. Yes, that was how the future arrived. First music, then friendship. First music, and then the double dissymmetry of friendship. That was how it came, the future: as refusal, and as the proliferation of refusal.
What was music without friendship? Friendship was its life; it required it, summoning a people around its newness. We didn’t know what it meant. What was this music? First of all, withdrawal. First of all it affirmed refusal. In the signs by which it circulated, there was the non-signifying, the ‘there is’ of music; its push, its novelty. The ‘there is’, the navel of the dream by which it dreamt us into existence, its audience. We were the preservers and sustainers of the work. Our friendship was its sustenance; it was the ark in which the future was carried.
First music, then friendship. First refusal, and then the friendship sustained by refusal. Music dreamt and gave birth to us. Music dreamt and laid out our world. And didn’t it, too, lay out the earth beneath the world? Didn’t it lay out the soil of the new country from which each of us rose like Adams and Eves? We knew ourselves by the music of refusal and by the mixtapes of refusal. We knew and confirmed our knowledge by way of mixtapes, currency of the new Eden. And each, for the other, was closer to the future than we were. And each friend was higher than the other, as we, for the others, were higher than them. By the tapes that reached us did we know the future. By those tapes was the future coming.
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