Michael L. Jones

Evaluation of heat shock protein 70 as a biomarker of environmental stress in Fucus serratus and Lemna minor

Heat shock proteins (Hsps) are known to be induced in response to short-term stress. The present study aimed to evaluate the potential of Hsp70 as a biomarker of stress produced by increased temperature, osmotic pressure, and exposure to cadmium and sodium chloride in marine macroalgae and fresh water plant species. An indirect competitive enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (IC-ELISA) was developed with a working range of 0.025–10 μg ml−1 using a monoclonal antibody raised against purified Hsp70 of Phaseolus aureus (mung bean). Fucus serratus (toothed wrack), Chondrus crispus (Stackhouse or Carrageen moss), Ulva lactuca (sea lettuce) and Lemna minor (common duckweed) sample extracts were stressed for up to 24 h and then tested in the IC-ELISA. The presence of Hsp70 and cross-reactivity of the monoclonal antibody was confirmed by Western blot. The heat shock response was confirmed in each species using a 2-h 42°C treatment. Following heat shock, Hsp70 concentrations increased to a peak at 2 h (F. serratus) or 4 h (L. minor), after which concentrations decreased. Osmotic and cadmium stresses also resulted in elevated Hsp70 concentrations in samples of F. serratus and L. minor when compared with unstressed controls. In both, osmotic and metal stress, the production of Hsp70 increased to a maximum and subsequently decreased as the stressor levels increased. Results suggest that Hsp70 IC-ELISA could potentially be applied to the detection of stress in these aquatic species, although it would probably be most effective when used in conjunction with other measurements to provide a stressor-specific biomarker profile or fingerprint.

Forgetting and remembering the Bhundu Boys: conditions of memory in popular music

This article explores the relationship between discursivity and the writing of history. It takes as its example the discursive formation of ‘world music’ in the late 1980s and charts the consolidation of world music as a body of judgements about music through the example of the embrace and then rejection of the Zimbabwean group, the Bhundu Boys, over a period of years. This period was one in which four members of the group died—three because they succumbed to the AIDS virus and one who committed suicide. The challenges faced by the Bhundu Boys as human beings were severe; where the irony is that, when they most needed support from the people who embraced them, they were shunned and scorned by their former champions. The shunning of the Bhundu Boys can be argued to reveal the mechanisms of discursive formation and of a way of writing popular music history.

Introduction: Music Industry and the Music Industries

While working on this book during a train journey, I became conscious of the iPod or some such MP3 player of someone sitting behind me. He was listening to heavy metal. I could tell it was heavy metal by the relentless shuddering kick drum, the pounding two-note bass line and the screaming guitars. Every aspect of listening to someone else’s music choices intrigued me. It intrigued me because I was the last link in a very long chain whose individual links would all be difficult to specify, but which all existed or had existed in the moments leading to my fellow passenger’s sounds arresting my attention. Why that kick drum sound? Why that bass line? Why those players together in that band? Why choose to immerse himself in listening to them? How had he encountered them? Who created the conditions for that encounter? Who paid who to have the record made and promoted? Why did they choose this band to invest in and not some other when there are so many others? How had the investment been organised? Were the investors happy with the end product? Were the musicians happy?

Music and Industry

We are entering a territory in which terminological uncertainty is a strong feature but this confusion is not accidental, it derives from the conflicting conceptions of ‘music’ and ‘industry’ embedded, generally, in cultural and social usage. Consider these comments which appeared on a BBC website for its children’s service: Most manufactured bands are highly successful, but I think truly talented people should come forward and make their mark without people interfering!! They should find their talent within their heart, not within the ‘manufacturing’ studio. Ella, 14, London I think most of the top 40 is rubbish but some songs are brilliant because the artists wrote them themselves and really thought about the lyrics! Eva, 11, Derry The top 40 nowadays is full of groups which are owned. This annoys me as we never get to see people who have formed a band themselves, and produce their own music. The companies which own the groups make the band go on different TV programmes and magazines, and the single turns out to be awful. The question is when are non-owned bands going to enter the charts? Paul, 15, Cheadle. (news.bbc.co.uk/cbbcnews/hi/chat/your_comments/…/2248416.stm 10 Sep 2002 – accessed 3 October 2011)

Music Contracts and Music Industry

The processes through which musicians pass before they sign their first recording contract can encompass a lifetime’s effort. When writers write and players play they draw on every aspect of themselves that led to a particular point in their personal history. They do this because they elect to go in search of audiences and the acclaim they offer. There are no real blueprints for any of this activity; the autobiographies and biographies of musicians tend to treat industrial interactions as of marginal relevance and, in any case, audiences constitute themselves through ceaselessly changing signifying materials drawn into ever-shifting structures of feeling. Effectively every musician, at least at the outset of what are too loosely referred to as their ‘careers’, reinvents the wheel; the wheel, they hope, will roll them into public consciousness and through this to the acclaim of discerning audiences. But as every chapter has so far argued, this ‘wheel-rolling’ is, in fact, an industrial process: audiences can only be found through market practices and, consequently, how markets are entered, in the face of enormous competition and with an offer of enormously fragile symbolic goods, decides the fate of all musicians, established or otherwise. In turn, because it is an industrial process and because new musicians can be so unprepared for its industrial nature then the process tends to favour music companies as investors in the production of symbolic goods, rather than musicians. Considered in these terms, musicians mostly come and go and music companies usually survive, but so far in popular cultural history, what outlasts both is the industrial process of cultural production itself.

Music Industry: Working Alliances

The previous four chapters could be read in any order. They are comparatively freestanding because they each deal with an aspect of a whole and no aspect is necessarily precedent to any other. Their purpose was to specify the four key constituencies involved in the production of symbolic goods. These are musicians together with the texts they originate, artist managers, music companies and contracts. As the analysis contained in those chapters should have shown, working alliances between musicians and music companies are the pivotal component of the Music Industry. They are pivotal because, working together, these constituencies form the production and supply process created to satisfy the demand for a particular type of good — a symbolic good with music at its core.

Industry and Music

The previous chapter can be summarised as series of propositions: 1. Even though the term ‘the Music Industry’ is used as if industrialised music is a social and cultural fact, there is a parallel and contradictory cultural resistance to music’s implication with industry. 2. The co-existence of resistance to, and yet comparatively casual acceptance of, the idea that there is a ‘music industry’ is a barrier to analysis because in neither accounts are the working relations between musicians and music companies specified. 3. The term ‘the Music Industry’ is a problematic one and its use needs to be supplemented by application of ‘the music industries’ and ‘music industry’ when and where appropriate. Further the music industry is not to be confused with or reduced to ‘the recording industry’. 4. There is major digitally driven change across the music industries but there are underlying continuities that continue to give music an industrial character. 5. These continuities involve the relations that exist between music companies, musicians, music users, music and music markets but the ‘industrial character’ of music must be sought in the inter-relations between music companies and musicians. 6. The inter-relations between musicians and music companies are a form of production relations. Rather than consider their actions separately, it is of greater analytical benefit to consider how the actions of one party bears on another in a joint effort that results in the production of symbolic goods in music.

Musicians in Four Dimensions

The object of the previous chapter was to establish the roots of the three terms used at the outset of Chapter 1: music industry as the activity of industrialising music, the music industries and the Music Industry. The concentration on the rise and consolidation of Music Hall over an 80-year period was intended to demonstrate that a new industry of live performance became established from the 1840s onwards. In creating popular music by generalising and systematising amateur music making practices associated with the emergence of an urban populace, the live performance industry also helped to transform the existing music publishing business by encouraging writers and publishers to produce for the vast new market created by entrepreneurial innovation. It would take a far more detailed historical study to explore the full impact of Music Hall on music publishing and, similarly, the discussion of the rise of an industry in live performance was necessarily schematic. The point remains that new industries in music were called into being in the 19th century. These became substantially inter-dependent, standardised in their practices. They then took on the trappings and, more importantly, institutional power through their growing centrality to commercial entertainment. The purpose of this chapter is to explore the ongoing effects of this embedded, industrial framework on musicians, organised as popular music acts, seeking market success.

Digitisation and Music Industry

The argument made in the previous chapter was a culmination of those made before it and it consisted of five core elements: 1. Musicians organised as ‘acts’, seek audiences. Audiences bring recognition and the possibility of acclaim for ability, sensibility and inventiveness, but they also offer the monetary income to sustain the role of a musician. 2. In organising themselves to be ‘used’ — to be attended to and enjoyed — musicians offer themselves as a text in their totality. The value users find in a music act derives from its textual totality and so involves the music it makes, how its members present themselves together with the ways in which their actions are explained or contextualised. 3. In order to find audiences acts must enter markets. In entering markets, acts seek to form alliances with companies whose expertise lies in music-market entry. 4. While acts and companies have vested interests in market success, these interests are not identical: musicians may want acclaim above other considerations; companies must seek profit and growth regardless of other considerations. Ultimately, there is a defining tension between the two which always problematises the working alliances they form. 5. In preparing them for market-entry, music companies ‘add value’ to acts. This added value is what converts texts into symbolic goods. To add value to a text involves value adders having access to that text. This ‘access’ cannot fail to be registered as impacts on the original conception of the text. ‘Impacts’ need not necessarily be negative and an act might offer the strongest definition of its own work. Even so, neither eventuality is certain; so it is that the value-adding process is usually a fraught one and always tense because musicians, artist managers and music company representatives might conflict with each other, separately and together, over the finished form of the symbolic good.

Music Companies and Music Industry

Musicians need paying audiences; only paying audiences allow them to be just musicians and not workers of some other kind who play music in their ‘spare time’. Paying audiences, though, do not occur naturally and can only be constituted through market practices. In Chapter 1, the argument was made that it is impossible to separate musicians who make music for markets from the industrial process of making music commodities. Essentially, the only things that can be admitted to music markets are music commodities, tradable experiences of music making. Musicians are not bound to rely on the intervention of others to enter markets and to exchange the experiences of music they offer, but they cannot escape the logic of organising those experiences as commodities, or the logics associated with market competition. Musicians compete with each other and those of them who achieve market success, and sustainable ‘careers’ as musicians, are those who find and go on sustaining competitive advantage over other musicians. In this way, ‘competitive advantage’ is not solely an outcome of music; it is an outcome of a combination of factors which involve the ‘non-musical’ effort associated with entering markets.