I find both sides of this discussion very difficult and a bit more typical of GS…
Just so many layers of intersecting issues to consider: nostalgia, the reductiveness of commodification, the difference between engineering vs. design mindsets, the meaning of all this at our specific historical juncture…
So I find very difficult – on the one hand, this way of thinking that reduces the overall meaning of a device to the properties of a single component, on the other, the way that views all components as inherently replaceable based on individualized properties, and thus becomes equally reductive.
Both arguments: snake oil/anti-snake oil seem eternally locked within these views, which frame the discourse possible on GS. The unsayability of the name indicated by ‘GS’ now appears as something more than accidental.
And what is the ‘sound’ of a device, anyway? it’s not how something sounds according to psychoacoustic perception but how one responds to the call of the future and thereby comes into one’s own purpose. What sound and gear ultimately ‘mean’ is only in on the basis of this future and this purpose. This is how the 303 became an instrument in its own right-- not the ‘practice tool’ with crappy emulation of a bass guitar that it was designed to be. The 303 was not ‘squelchy’ until ‘squelchiness’ had a distinct meaning which came forth only in specific artists’ works and the communal contexts in which these works were disseminated. Likewise, digital tools were not ‘8-bit’ before 16-bit tools had become widespread and a certain ‘lack’ led to nostalgia.
But all this is not to say that gear doesn’t matter. It’s only a plea to honor the dimension in which the questions pertaining to a certain contemporary ‘fetishization’ of gear - including the terms ‘vintage’, ‘snake oil’, ‘fat sound’ etc. take place meaningfully. For instance, the fact reproduction seems now to impart its own distinctive character or ‘sound’ is meaningful in light of this question - such is the lesson of Alvin Lucier or of Baudrillard’s ‘copy without original’. Meaningful as well is the nostalgia trap that’s a response to the failure of this reproduction to bring forth new realms of meaning. Both – while opposed, have the essential character of nihilism. One the meaning of which is the collapse of all meaning; the other the retreat into a space where meaning as horizon cannot be found. Nostalgia for the 80’s does not in fact return to the 80’s; rather, it sharply delineates the contours of the void left by “the 80’s that did not take place” – the missing sense of a post-Internet future, not the actual 80’s of Reagan revolution, militarism and mass HIV deaths. Thus the very concept of ‘snake oil’ itself, as constituted historically through this dialogue, is ultimately a very pernicious form of nihilism.
In a practical, day to day positive sense what does matter, I think, is rapport. And this rapport has its own direction and specificity, it’s not something that can ever be quantified as in ‘1% there, 99% there etc.’ – nor are elements easily exchanged. You either can learn to get along with the instrument, or you don’t get along. Or you fall out of this getting along – this can happen too and is perfectly natural, like the change of a season. What you thought was there seems no longer there, as if it never was. It’s like love – the exact way this works or does not work for a person remains in the end a mystery. I see value in preserving the mystery. As long as the music is meaningful, as long as we can function within some future-oriented horizon of meaning, this is all that should matter.
The call of the horizon, the spirit of discovery which led to the first distortion box or Moog filter, in other words, is the ‘mojo’. But in this spirit – mojo was never a question. To enter into this spirit only the future counts. In the spirit – mojo is not thinkable, not in the language at all. The point where mojo becomes thinkable it is no longer mojo. The term essentially says as much. It’s an apophasis, an unsaying. The spirit – let things be. Preserve the mystery.
