Do The Right Thing
We Love Radio Control
Do The Right Thing
We Love Radio Control
In 2020, Jeffrey R. Di Leo followed up his 2018 essay about the intertwined relationship between Neoliberalism and Vinyl Records with a book that digs into the vinyl resurgence. The fundamental claim of these texts is that the persistence and resilience of the vinyl record as a medium is the persistence and resilience of Neoliberalism. Neoliberalism, as critical theorists like to say, has been dead (discredited) since 2008, but as Mark Fisher suggested, the carcass of Neoliberalism has not gone away, and where an emergent ideology would normally usurp the fallen, no ideology has entered, effectively leaving a cadaver in charge. In his 2020 text, Di Leo uses the work of Jacques Attali and Theodor Adorno to frame the socio-economic aspects of vinyl culture, and amongst these critiques we find the notion of “music as control”.