Decomposed: The Political Ecology of Music

by Kyle Devine

The hidden material histories of music. Music is seen as the most immaterial of the arts, and recorded music as a progress of dematerialization—an evolution from physical discs to invisible digits. In Decomposed , Kyle Devine offers another perspective. He shows that recorded music has always been a significant exploiter of both natural and human resources, and that its reliance on these resources is more problematic today than ever before. Devine uncovers the hidden history of recorded music—what recordings are made of and what happens to them when they are disposed of. Devine's story focuses on three forms of materiality. Before 1950, 78 rpm records were made of shellac, a bug-based resin. Between 1950 and 2000, formats such as LPs, cassettes, and CDs were all made of petroleum-based plastic. Today, recordings exist as data-based audio files. Devine describes the people who harvest and process these materials, from women and children in the Global South to scientists and industrialists in the Global North. He reminds us that vinyl records are oil products, and that the so-called vinyl revival is part of petrocapitalism. The supposed immateriality of music as data is belied by the energy required to power the internet and the devices required to access music online. We tend to think of the recordings we buy as finished products. Devine offers an essential backstory. He reveals how a range of apparently peripheral people and processes are actually central to what music is, how it works, and why it matters.

Genres: Music, Nonfiction, Politics, Environment

328 pages, Paperback

First published September 20, 2019

Reviews

[Randall Wallace · Rating 3 out of 5]

We just don’t think of the geopolitics behind the Recording Industry. But you could not have had shellac records at the dawn of the record making, without a whole bunch of women and children out there collecting that insect resin in Colonial India, as well as quarry workers, scientists, and chemical engineers. Shellac comes from “lac, the sappy secretion of a beetle native to Asia.” Output could range from 1 to 4 million kilograms of resin per season. These records were still mass produced in India until the mid 70’s. Shellac was also scarce because the Navy used it as a non-corrosive paint. Shellac factories had 30,000 workers in “horrible” conditions working dawn to dusk every day of the week. Wages were the lowest in India. Limestone acted as the best filler in records because it was smooth, the best recording limestone came from Indiana. Painter J.M.W. Turner had a pigment advisor in Michael Faraday. Many of the top chemical companies got their start creating synthetic dyes. You can read paintings and reduce their original color to their historical pigments as well (see “PBS Giving the Mona Lisa a digital makeover”). Thomas Edison was “the largest individual user in the United states of carbolic acid” for making phonograph records. He started making so much Phenol that he’d sell Bayer his overstock so they could make aspirin. This book is as much about quarrymen and beetles, as it is about the Quarrymen and the Beatles. When we see a wood table, we say, “yep, that’s wood” but when we see music packaging and CDs we don’t think “yep, that’s crude oil and gas”.

45 records were created for jukeboxes which needed constant updating with the latest hits for establishments to be hip. The LP (20 minutes per side versus 4 minutes per side) arrives after 1948 for songs made to be heard together, as well as being able to play classical works without interruptions. “By 1979, the United States was producing a higher volume of plastic than steel.” LP’s are compression-molded while CD’s are injection-molded then metallized, lacquered, and silkscreened. One study showed a smartphone streaming video one hour weekly for a year uses more energy than a refrigerator does left one in a full year. Each iPhone is made by going through 75 pounds of rock in backbreaking work to get the 100 grams of materials needed. Spotify and Pandora do not pass Greenpeace’s tests of commitment. And so, online music streaming “amounts to at least 5 percent of global electricity consumption.” Downloading one gig of data is the energy cost of running a 60-watt bulb for one hour. An album is about one tenth of a gigabyte so the real energy damage is collectively people downloading billions of albums. Yes, people are using less plastic by not using CD’s but apparently the environmental costs have doubled, because streaming one’s music doubles the CO2 emissions over just owning CD’s or doing a simple one-time download. Reading that made me glad I still haven’t used Spotify or Pandora and instead listen to CD’s, 320 bit mp3s, or one-time downloads. Live music is one of music’s biggest revenue streams yet publically undiscussed is that music touring is a big energy hog where everyone in the audience is driving to one location for a very short visit, and constantly moving heavy lighting and PA equipment takes its energy toll. The author wants us to look behind the screens and see the political ecology of music: “petro-capitalism, polymer chemistry, forestry and factories, war and waste, gendered labor and geological laceration.”

I own a recording studio so I wanted to better understand all the green vs non-green aspects of the music business and this book was very helpful, but could have been better if it would have included: That records tend to arrive in more eco-benign packaging than CDs: cardboard sleeves, as opposed to bulky, petroleum-based polystyrene cases. Or that according to a recent analysis by a U.K. organization dedicated to reducing the British music industry’s carbon footprint, cardboard sleeves produce only 1 percent as many greenhouse gas emissions as similarly-sized jewel cases? On the other hand, an LP is about twice as heavy as a packaged CD, which translates into higher fuel usage for transportation. Why not mention that records are made out polyvinyl chloride? PVC being a plastic nightmare among environmentalists, because of concerns about dangerous emissions during its production and—if burned—its disposal. Why not mention the ecological/energy cost of tape manufacture (cassette, 8 Track, 2” reels, etc.)? Why not tell the story about the demise of the CD blister pack? Or musical LaserDisc? Or the energy cost difference between making tubes and transistors? Or discuss the very interesting history of making great tubes, transistors, amplification, speakers, and tape (including Bing Crosby’s cool role)? Which takes more energy to make – a LP with art and sleeve, or a CD with jewel box and artwork? What was the construction difference between regular LP’s and though see-through colored novelty ones? Many things come to mind that would have made this book more interesting and complete.

[K · Rating 4 out of 5]

A must-read in music studies that I'm glad to have revisited. Devine expands the political economy of music to ecology to take into account the environmental costs of musical materials. There are three body chapters organized around the main materials of the last century of music: shellac, plastic, and data. I'm teaching this text to my undergrads and they seem to be profoundly moved by it, even though there's a fundamental tension that it's not really about the "music" per se. And that's the point. It won't be a hard sell for music scholars committed to looking well beyond music as art, but for those more committed to textual criticism and studies oriented around major musicians and composers, this might be a harder sell. I still think we should all read it. The only reason why it's not five stars –– and I know this is totally nit-picking –– is about minor issues like overlong footnotes and an afterword that might come across as shadow boxing to some. Really, not big deals when it comes down to it. I really liked it.

[Cana McGhee · Rating 4 out of 5]

easy read, if not also a depressing awakening to the music industry's history of environmental damage.

[Alexander O. Smith · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an actor-network inspired history of the encoding of music to media and its effects in political-economic ecology in excellent detail from the late 19th century until present. While, for many who critical data studies and related areas might consider this a somewhat obvious history of western industrialization, this is the sort of book that highlights a level of awareness for its particular case in a way that translates well to the bigger picture of issues of data and media in a way that most histories only seem to be able to explain with either high levels of abstraction of information technological systems or through watered down or greatly exaggerated critical perspectives. This is an accessible history of information-driven political economy just as much as is a history of music media.

[Andy Janes · Rating 3 out of 5]

Probably should have been four stars, but it was more scholarly than I wanted it to be as well as more depressing. I know it's important for us to know all this stuff if we want to make changes, and it addresses things that are rarely discussed, but I always hope for some solutions or suggestions.

But overall, it's an important discussion for musicians and fans of music that isn't happening very much yet. Hope more people read it.

[booker g · Rating 5 out of 5]

Kyle Devine's Decomposed is that rare monograph that manages to be both meticulously archival and quietly radical: a book that takes the most naturalized object in modern life, recorded music, and makes it strange again. Devine's central move is deceptively simple. He asks what music is actually made of. The answer, shellac, petroleum, plastic, rare earth minerals, server farms, coal-fired electricity, dismantles a century of aesthetic mythology in about 250 pages.

What elevates this beyond a "materialist history of formats" is Devine's willingness to sit with the theoretical stakes. He is clearly in conversation with Jussi Parikka's media archaeology and its insistence that media objects are geological before they are cultural, but he pushes past Parikka's occasional abstraction into something closer to Jason W. Moore's world-ecology framework, treating music not as a reflection of capitalism but as a node within the capitalist world-ecology, implicated in the same extraction and disposal logics as any other commodity. There are clear echoes of Jacques Attali's Noise, but where Attali theorized music prophetically, Devine grounds the argument in bills of lading, shellac beetle harvests, and e-waste dumps in Guiyu. It's Attali with a supply chain.

The chapter on the "dematerialization" myth of streaming is, frankly, the best piece of writing on digital music's ecological footprint I've encountered, better even than most of the STS literature that gestures at "the cloud" without ever costing out its server farms. Devine is doing real Latourian work here: following the actants, refusing the black-boxing that lets us imagine Spotify as weightless. The move from vinyl's petrochemical dependency to plastic's mid-century boom to streaming's electricity-hungry data centers isn't nostalgia. It's a genuinely dialectical history, closer to Adorno's culture industry critique than anything in contemporary pop-culture writing, but without Adorno's elitism, since Devine is scrupulously even-handed about who bears the costs of extraction versus who gets the convenience.

I'll admit some surprise at seeing lukewarm notices for this book elsewhere. A few reviewers seem to have wanted a straightforward "history of recording formats," vinyl to cassette to CD to MP3, a comfortable audiophile nostalgia trip, and dinged the book for being "too political" or "not really about music." That reaction says more about the reviewer's priors than about the text. Devine states his thesis in the introduction: this is political ecology, not discography. Faulting him for not writing the book you expected, rather than engaging the one he wrote, is a category error dressed up as a critique. Similarly, a couple of notices treated the e-waste and labor chapters as digressions from the "real" musicological content, which rather spectacularly misses the entire argument: there is no music without those material conditions. That's not a tangent. It's the thesis and you missed it lmao.

Other critiques centered on the book being "too US/UK-centric" in its consumer history while drawing its extraction case studies globally, a fair methodological point, worth raising, though it doesn't undermine the core argument so much as suggest an obvious sequel. It is worth noting that Devine spent ample time around the globe preparing for Decomposed, including a lengthy stay in Wuhan, embedding himself as a scholar in the city's thriving indie / punk / somehow mid-west far-east emo scene. Other criticism from the reviewers who seem to have wanted Devine to reassure them that streaming is basically fine, or that vinyl's resurgence is basically innocent. Devine isn't in the business of absolution. If that reads as polemical, it's only because the alternative, treating music as immaterial, cost-free, ecologically weightless, has been the polemic all along, just one so naturalized nobody noticed it as an argument.

What ultimately distinguishes Devine, though, isn't just the argument, it's the intellectual generosity with which he makes it. This is scholarship written by someone genuinely curious rather than eager to score points, and it shows in the prose, which is lucid and inviting even when the material gets technical. Devine has that rare gift among academics of taking a reader seriously without ever condescending to them. There's a craftsmanship here, a sentence-level care, that suggests someone who thinks of writing itself as part of the ethical project, not just a vehicle for it. Few scholars manage to be this rigorous and this readable at once, and fewer still combine that with the moral seriousness Devine brings to material most of us would rather not think about. It's the work of someone with real integrity as a thinker, unwilling to let convenience (his/their readers', or his/their own) stand in for truth.

Decomposed deserves to sit alongside Sarah Sharma's In the Meantime and Shannon Mattern's infrastructure writing as essential reading for anyone thinking seriously about media, materiality, and the environment. It's rigorous without being dense, political without being shrill, and it fundamentally changes how you hear a record, or a stream, once you've read it. Very highly recommended, especially to anyone who thought they already knew this history.

[K. Goldschmitt · Rating 4 out of 5]

Materialist musicology meets political ecology with recorded media at the center. My favorite chapter was the one on shellac, but they are all incredibly illuminating.