Once again, it began as a throwaway Facebook exchange. Why, a Friend asked, do DJs have to invent new words and stupid spellings for everything?
Moving on from DJs posturing and muso disdain, there is a wealth of worth in the language of the music business. It is constantly evolving to define, enable and exclude, responding to events, technical advance and outside forces. And we need it as much as we need mics and mixers or ambition and opportunity…
While not endorsed by the Oxford English Dictionary, my understanding is that ‘slang’ is a contraction of ‘secret language’. More certainly, it has origins as what was once termed ‘thieves’ cant’, which was used to frustrate law enforcement’s efforts to penetrate crime circles in English-speaking territories. Jargon, meanwhile, is more readily defined as ‘the terminology or characteristic idiom of a special activity or group’. And putting a name to a DJ or band is no different from branding a major multinational. The music industry revels in it all.
A particular mix of slang and jargon characterises communities of all kinds, and neologisms (new words and terms) are common in any community or industry that is defining or redefining its boundaries. Within the greater music industry, specific terminologies conspire to distinguish musicians from techs and live sound from broadcast. And musical genres and subgenres throw up some of the most expressive tags – from sludge metal and goregrind to bleepcore and glitch hop.
If we look outside of the territory occupied by the music biz, there are adjacent industries and endeavours whose language we would be well advised to understand, if not speak.
Among them, internet hackers have revived the spirit of slang’s formative days. Here ‘leet’ – or ‘7331’, a combination of slang and substitution code – defines a community that often challenges social norms and seeks to evade attempts to monitor and control it. As a quickly evolving language, it offers inclusivity as well as some security of communication and very effective internet filter evasion. That’s the same internet that has reshaped the music industry’s remit – and it’s not through with us yet.
If you want to keep your future technology radar active, reading science fiction is way better use of your long-haul flight-time than spreadsheets or speeches.
When William Gibson first began to map cyberspace, it was doubly virtual. But that didn’t make it any less important in helping to explore the nature of the internet. And while 3D printing has hit the news with its potential to fabricate guns, food and human organs, ‘fabbers’ have been mainstream sci-fi for decades. Right around now, Google Glass owes its precedent to the detective’s magnifying glass in Hannu Rajaniemi’s Quantum Thief. And you will find programmable matter and picotechnology/femtotechnology explored here, long before real science (/g/) has got its act together to catch up...
Memes and spimes on the horizon
Introduced by Richard Dawkins in his book The Selfish Gene, a meme is ‘an idea, behaviour or style that spreads from person to person within a culture’. From Greek mīmēma (imitated thing), this has neatly stepped outside of evolutionary biology to encompass the internet’s ‘viral’. Among the examples he gives are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes and fashions. In the absence of effective A&R, a meme is also the secret code to the breakthrough that today’s musicians seek.
Another neologism, Bruce Sterling’s spime, meanwhile, describes ‘a theoretical object that can be tracked through space and time throughout its lifetime’. Its definition pulls together internet searching with 3D printing and cradle-to-cradle recycling (Rajaniemi’s tempmatter), to enable the sharing of physical objects over a virtual network. If music and video downloads presently lack the physical packaging of more traditional delivery media, it might not be for too much longer.
A recent BBC radio documentary on the science of music revealed that the neurological centres in the human brain are older than its speech centres, and that one of its earliest forms might be termed ‘hmmm’ – with its meaning contained in the articulation of this fundamental utterance. I’m not sure that we’ve discarded it yet…
It was William Burroughs (and later Laurie Anderson) who called language a virus from outer space. If so, it may be our most precious invader.