Introduction
In 2011, singer, songwriter and producer Wally de Backer, who produces music under the name of Gotye, released the album Making Mirrors. It included the hit song ‘Somebody I used to know’, which became an international commercial and critical success. Alongside the release of this album, Gotye also released two short YouTube documentaries: Making Making Mirrors and The Making of Eyes Wide Open. Using reenactment and self-narration techniques found in ‘essay documentary’ styles (Corrigan Reference Corrigan2011; Nichols Reference Nichols2008), both documentaries detail the processes involved in the production of the album. At the time of writing, the documentaries had received almost 1 million views on YouTube, clearly marking an important part of the media content related to the album. While processual discussions about production are not new in pop music – music press such as Rolling Stone and documentaries such as the Classic Albums series have provided such accounts for some time (Bennett and Baker Reference Bennett, Baker and Inglis2010; Shuker Reference Shuker2008) – the event of a musician co-producing a documentary and releasing it concurrently with their album is distinct from typical music documentaries. Since 2011, emergent social media features such as ‘Instagram Stories’ suggest that the technological conditions that facilitate an expansion of the documentary format have continued to develop. However, the case of Gotye interests me for two reasons. First, the documentary – which is free to consume, released concurrently with the album and consumed in high volume – illustrates that his process is not only deeply intertwined with the text (the music), but also becomes a crucial media text that is separate from the recording. Second, his working practices shown in the documentary are important in establishing his status and reputation within the music industries.
In this article, I examine Gotye's documentaries to demonstrate how they can be understood through Pierre Bourdieu's concepts of cultural capital and field. His documentaries position him as a home recordist, auteur producer and as a tasteful collector of music technology. These distinct elements – with their links to discourses within popular music culture – interlock to develop his cultural capital in the field as an ‘experimental’ yet independent musician. I argue that these documentaries play a crucial role in providing details of his production process and establishing his position within a field of cultural production.
Processual discussions about pop music production
Over the past 20 years, media and popular music scholarship has brought attention to the crucial role that a discursive space plays within popular music (Shuker Reference Shuker2008; Long and Wall Reference Long, Wall and Halligan2013; Bennett and Baker Reference Bennett, Baker and Inglis2010; Williams Reference Williams2010). This space exists alongside popular music performances (such as concerts) and cultural objects (such as recordings), which have also been subject to much scholarly debate (Frith Reference Frith1998). In this space, multiple stakeholders – including musicians, journalists, managers, recordists and fans – provide commentary on music texts and the practices of their producers. This commentary takes place across multiple media forms, such as print, television and film. Its topics predominately focus on performers, their music and the relationship of both of these aspects to consumers and fans (Shuker Reference Shuker2008). Film and television documentaries are particularly important as they often provide in-depth discussions of music through histories of music scenes and their participants (Long and Wall Reference Long, Wall and Halligan2013). Recent work in this area has brought attention to the way in which the development of the music documentary format is not uniform throughout the world. As Eliot Bates (Reference Bates, Bennett and Bates2018) demonstrates, music documentaries are a recent phenomenon in Turkey, owing to historical media restrictions in the country.
Discussions about production and recording processes in music media texts within the anglosphere have featured in media and popular music scholarship. Music press magazines such as Sound on Sound, Mix Magazine and Rolling Stone contain interviews with musicians who detail their songwriting and recording processes. Since the late 1960s, film and television documentaries have been a particularly productive site for discussion as this media form facilitates an audio and visual reenactment of practices and video footage of the place of recording or songwriting.Footnote 1 Examples of this format include an album or genre-specific series such as Classic Albums, Sound Breaking and artist-specific documentaries like Brian Wilson: Songwriter 1962–1969. In these documentaries, journalists, musicians and producers recount the recording or writing process of a particular album or song. The Classic Albums series, for example, contains a combination of original and historical footage of musicians and producers associated with an album. Recording engineers associated with the project run multi-tracks of the original tape recordings through a mixing console to isolate individual tracks. This approach provides an in-depth – and often previously unheard – insight into the recording process. These formats also work politically within the field. As Bennett and Baker write, personal accounts and narratives in this format help position these albums as ‘artistic’ (Bennett and Baker Reference Bennett, Baker and Inglis2010). Television documentaries can also reorient the social order of a field. By providing an insight into the recording process, documentaries can prompt audiences to reevaluate the importance of particular roles within the production of a song or album. For Alan Williams (Reference Williams2010), the Classic Albums series brings into focus the crucial yet undervalued work of producers and engineers in the recording process. In his later work, Williams (Reference Williams, Bennett and Bates2018) brings attention to the production of mythology within studio practice and the role that the ‘fetishization of recording practice’ in media texts such as documentaries plays in its construction. There is often a long time gap between the release date of the album and the production of the documentary. Episodes within the Classic Albums series – which was produced between 1997 and 2018 – feature at least a 10n-year gap between the featured album and the production of the documentary. The episode on The Who's Who Next was produced 28 years after the album's original release. Further, the episode on Don McLean's American Pie was made 46 years after the album's initial release. Even documentaries on more contemporary albums such as Amy Winehouse's Back to Black contain a 12-year gap between production and initial release. This suggests that these documentaries serve as a means of historising albums that are deemed ‘important’, rather than accompanying material for the release of an album.
Another defining aspect of these documentaries is that they are expensive to produce and comprise large media production networks. High expenses are, according to John Thompson (Reference Thompson, MacKay and O'Sullivan1995), one of the key characteristics of broadcast media. As a result, media organisations such as Eagle Rock Entertainment – who produced the Classic Albums series – invest in multiple expensive technologies to produce their content. In order to maximise their audience, they have to focus on famous or well-known artists. For example, they have favoured artists such as Paul Simon, U2, Fleetwood Mac, Pink Floyd, Queen, the Doors and the Beach Boys, all of whom have prior significant commercial and critical success.Footnote 2 As documentaries are expensive to make, often lesser known artists are not chronicled in the same way.
Scholarly interventions into documentary formats and media more broadly have identified that media texts do not provide a transparent window into the recording or writing of a song or album. As covered in film documentary scholarship, the history of documentaries foregrounds debates about accuracy vs. deception, and ‘real’ vs. ‘fake’ (Bazin Reference Bazin and Gray2005; Rothman Reference Rothman1997). In order to describe the complicated and diverse approaches that filmmakers take to documentaries, Bill Nichols suggests they can be understood through six modes: poetic, expository, observational, participatory, reflexive and performative. For Nichols, ‘these models serve as a skeletal framework that individual filmmakers flesh out according to their own creative position’ (Nichols Reference Nichols2010, p. 143). Further, documentaries provide a representation of practice that is influenced by media conventions and the agenda of stakeholders. Kate Bowles (Reference Bowles, Cunningham and Turnbell2001) argues that production processes such as editing and genre reproduction shape representation in media texts. In the case of music documentaries, numerous factors mediate the representations of events, including the questions interviewers ask, editing of the discussions to accommodate time constraints and efforts to construct a cohesive narrative.
Self-published documentaries, new technologies and post-broadcast media
Despite the popularity of documentaries and music press for discussions about music production processes, some musicians have chosen to discuss their processes in other ways. These events present important questions for scholarship on the sociological dimensions of mediated processual discussions. For example, some musicians produce their own accounts. In his book, How Music Works, musician David Byrne provides an extensive account of his production practices, along with his thinking on the industry and music creativity more broadly. Other musicians have had their public lectures on their process adapted into written texts. Brian Eno's Reference Eno1979 lecture at the New Music America Festival, ‘The studio as compositional tool’, was published in Downbeat and Audio Culture (Reference Eno1979, Reference Eno, Cox and Warner2004). In the lecture, Eno builds on his reputation as a composer and recordist by offering his thoughts on production practices. This approach to processual discussion is productive as it allows producers to provide an extensive and controlled account of their processes. Although all media texts provide a representation of an event, the political coding of these texts changes as the producer – or subject of the event in question – chooses what they will discuss and, to at least some degree, how it is edited.
Against the backdrop of the expensive technologies, production conventions and profit-driven choices that characterise and inform the processual discussions found within media forms, the use of internet technologies – such as YouTube – over the past 15 years demonstrates that musicians have new opportunities for discussing their process. While technologies such as YouTube emerged with Web 2.0 in the mid-2000s, these developments began in the 1980s alongside widespread changes in media practice that have blurred the lines between producers and consumers known as ‘prosumers’ (Toffler Reference Toffler1980). More recently, Axel Bruns (Reference Bruns2009) built on this work to argue that the role of social media has further blurred these lines and offers the term ‘produser’. In recent years, critical debates about the relationships between media and culture have come to involve the role of social media. Intervening in celebratory approaches to understanding social media, Fuchs (Reference Fuchs2014) uncovers the complicating political, labour and class variables of social media. For Fuchs, social media reproduces capitalist ideologies, where forms of labour are subject to abuse and social media's ostensibly participatory elements are not as pervasive as they may seem. He advocates for a ‘society and a social media that benefit not just some of us, but all of us’ (Fuchs Reference Fuchs2014, p 11). Against the backdrop of its complicated political dimensions, social media also provides a space for producers of music to discuss their processes outside of television documentary and print interview contexts, and without the expense, conventions and profit-driven elements that often accompany them. Building on the narrative essay structure of television and film essay documentaries, producers of music can provide their own accounts of their processes. An example of this approach is Gary Numan (Reference Numan2017), who produced numerous videos to promote his crowdfunding campaign. In these videos, Numan narrates his vision behind, and processes of, his new album.
Gotye is an example of a musician who has used social media and emergent production tools to discuss their production processes. Since 2001, Gotye has released three albums. His second album – Like Drawing Blood, released in 2006 – won an Australia music industry award for ‘best new male artist’ and one of the songs reached number 8 in the Triple J hottest 100, which is a popular annual countdown by Australia's public broadcaster. In 2010, Gotye released Making Mirrors. Unlike his previous albums, it achieved international success, particularly for one of its songs – ‘Somebody I used to know’. Following the public interest that this success generated, Gotye appeared in numerous radio interviews and music press publications. In 2012, for example, Jian Ghomeshi from the Canadian Radio program ‘Q’ conducted a 30-minute interview with Gotye (Q on CBC 2012). Also, in 2012, Gotye was interviewed by music production magazine Sound on Sound on the mixing techniques used by François Tétaz on Making Mirrors (Tingen Reference Tingen2012). During these interviews, Gotye discussed his songwriting processes. However, before the success that generated the interest that led to these media opportunities, and alongside the release of his album, Gotye released two 10-minute essay style documentaries on his YouTube profile ‘gotyemusic’. The first, Making Making Mirrors – a Short Documentary, was released at a similar time to the album. The second documentary The Making of Eyes Wide Open was published in January 2011. Gotye appears as the director, narrator and actor in the documentaries. They involved collaboration with visual artist James Bryans, who also co-directed the project (gotyemusic 2011a, b).
Two points about Gotye interest me and inform the aims and scope of this research. First, I am interested in the way in which the Making Mirrors documentaries differ from other more conventional documentaries such as the Classic Albums series. These discursive paradigms engage large production networks and credit scores of people involved in the production of the documentary. Conversely, Making Making Mirrors comprises a two-person production team. The documentaries are also distributed throughout the world on social media platforms.Footnote 3 Another curious part of this documentary is the timing of its release, which occurred alongside the album. While Gotye's two previous albums established him as an independent local Australian musician, Making Mirrors led to international recognition, leaving questions about the role of documentaries in this success. Second, I am also interested in how these documentaries shape Gotye's status within the music industry. As Classic Albums both reposition music released decades before as ‘artistic’ and also re-negotiates the status of specific yet undervalued roles within the production process as important (Bennett and Baker Reference Bennett, Baker and Inglis2010; Williams Reference Williams2010), questions arise about the sociological dimensions of Gotye's documentaries.
A theoretical framework for understanding Gotye's documentaries
The work of Pierre Bourdieu (Reference Bourdieu1977, 1984, 1986, 1993; Bourdieu and Wacquant Reference Bourdieu and Wacquant1992) offers a productive framework for understanding the sociological dimensions of changing access to the music documentary format. These dimensions reveal that the use of social media technologies by Gotye shape value around his work and practice, and establish its social position among audiences and peers. While Bourdieu's work was wide-ranging in both time and scope, I am particularly interested in his work on cultural production and forms of capital where he unpacked the relationships between taste and status of high and low ‘art’ in 1970s French culture. He used terms such as field, agents, capital and the habitus to argue that cultural objects, and coded knowledge of their perceived value, inform one's status and position within social groups (Bourdieu Reference Bourdieu1984, Reference Bourdieu and Richardson1986, Reference Bourdieu1993). In the first instance, a field is the site of specific cultural practice (Bourdieu Reference Bourdieu1993; Bourdieu and Wacquant Reference Bourdieu and Wacquant1992). An agent is a person who contests a position within a specific field (Bourdieu Reference Bourdieu1977, Reference Bourdieu1984). As succinctly noted by Randal Johnson, ‘to enter a field, to play the game, one must possess the habits which predispose one to enter that field, that game, and not another. One must also possess at least the minimum amount of knowledge, or skill or “talent” to be accepted as a legitimate player’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant Reference Bourdieu and Wacquant1992, p. 8). Within these fields, knowledge and cultural goods with cultural capital structure the position of agents (Bourdieu 1985). Cultural capital is ‘a form of knowledge, an internalized code or a cognitive acquisition which equips the social agent with empathy towards, appreciation for or competence in deciphering cultural relations and cultural artefacts’ (Johnson Reference Johnson, Bourdieu and Johnson1993, p. 8). The practices – including dispositions and values – involved in an agent's acquisition of cultural capital within a field are known as the ‘habitus’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant Reference Bourdieu and Wacquant1992). These definitions interlock to demonstrate the links between an agent's mobility and status within that field and their identification of – and association with – practices perceived to be highly valuable and confer cultural capital within that field.
Numerous scholars have used Bourdieu's framework to understand contemporary phenomena in popular music production, including the way in which music production reshaped the status of the advertising industry in the 1960s (Taylor Reference Taylor2015), and have established new economies of capital in home studios in the 1990s (Cole Reference Cole2011). Bourdieu's work has also been applied to social media and music. Cecilia Suhr (Reference Suhr2012) uses ideas about fields and cultural capital to argue that early Web 2.0 websites such as MySpace and YouTube provided new opportunities for independent musicians to distribute their music and influence the negotiations of power within the music industries. My work aims to bring together these two previously separately discussed areas to highlight the way in which social media technologies inform status and reputations within music production practice.
In order to identify forms of cultural capital within the field, I draw from the large body of scholarly work in music production that has emerged in the last 25 years. Work such as that by Vigil Moorefield (Reference Moorefield2005), Steven James Cole (Reference Corrigan2011) and Theodore Gracyk (Reference Gracyk1996) highlights the cultural value placed on practices associated with specific production space, roles and technologies. From this work, it is possible to understand practice within this field through economies of cultural capital. To provide evidence of Gotye's cultural capital within a field of cultural production, I also draw from industry texts written about Making Mirrors. These texts reference the practices brought into focus in the documentaries and illustrate the culturally constructed value and status of Gotye and his work.
Cultural capital in ‘Making Making Mirrors’ and ‘Making Eyes Wide Open’
Gotye: the home recordist
One of the key themes that can be identified within the documentaries is that he works within a home studio. In order to explain this process and space, the documentary features voice-over dialogue and reenactments of the lead-up to, and production of, Making Mirrors. In Making Making Mirrors, he states:
Making Mirrors was recorded mostly in a room in a big barn on my parents’ block of land on the Mornington Peninsula in Victoria, Australia. I set up the various bits of recording gear I had collected over the years, but mainly worked on a Macbook Pro and a quarter inch tape machine given to me by my friend Phil Muster. The barn proved to be a good place to set up instruments, just experiment for hours and record the results.
During his voice-over narration, the documentary also features an overlaid time-lapse of Gotye setting up an empty space with furniture, recording technology and acoustic sound treatment. Gotye reveals that he has practised this recording approach for some time: ‘I spent quite a few years moving from around shared houses in Melbourne, taking my growing collection of gear from one small room to another small room’ (Making Eyes Wide Open). The visual elements of the documentary are also important in illustrating his home studio setup. They reveal the domestic nature of the space as they show the studio lies inside a wood panel barn in a grass and tree setting.
Gotye's home studio production practices are also demonstrated in his descriptions of the challenges he faced while recording the album. In the first instance, he recounts the problems he faced working in a non-professional treated space without the audio engineering support commonly found in in larger studios. He states: ‘It's not an ideal space acoustically; birds, hi-speed traffic, even hundreds of metres away and the odd tractor all have to be worked around. Acoustic treatment tubes that my dad built helped with vocal recording in the space’. In the second instance, Gotye claims he found it logistically challenging working by himself, in contrast to large studios where the recording process may involve multiple producers and engineers. In Making Eyes Wide Open Gotye states: ‘There's a lot of vocal layering on the new record. It proved challenging at times engineering my own vocals. But the chance to work at things at my own speed helped a lot. There's a fairly dense backing vocal layered section in eyes wide open that isn't featured very prominently in the mix’. Similar to the tractor noise, recording his own vocals was ostensibly a challenge as he had to perform while ensuring the vocals were recorded and capturing the sound he wanted. Despite these problems, Gotye claims this way of working had advantages as it was ‘great’ to be able to record ‘for long hours uninterrupted’.
Illustrations of Gotye's recording practice in the documentary are important as they position him within the field of home music production, with its distinctive forms of cultural capital. These spaces and approaches date back to at least the 1950s, when musicians such as Les Paul recorded music outside of commercial spaces such as the ones still found at Sun Studios and Abbey Road. The presence of these spaces expanded significantly in the 1970s, when numerous commercially successful musicians built studios where they could work freely ‘without the pressures of paying for commercial studio time and hourly rates’ (Théberge Reference Théberge, Frith, Straw and Street2001, p. 11). Over the past 20 years, home studios – such as the one demonstrated in the documentary – have become viable for a much broader cross-section of musicians, particularly owing to developments and cost reductions in recording technologies (Moorefield Reference Moorefield2005). Home recordists have also tended to modify their technologies to compete with larger studios (Cole Reference Cole2011). The use of technologies has challenged the importance of larger and commercially focused studios, and there is evidence to suggest that large studios are now in decline (Leyshon Reference Leyshon2009). As a result of these tensions, these studio spaces form one of the more contested parts of music production. Recordists and musicians debate approaches to music production and choices about where music is made and the technologies involved. These debates are even further complicated as narratives about large studios have tended to obscure the role that home studios have played in music production since the 1950s (Doyle Reference Doyle2005).
Home studios have distinct economies of value and cultural capital, which are often focused on how one uses the technologies available to them. The documentary illustrates these economies and they are crucial to Gotye's positioning within this field. While home studios are difficult to define, their spatial and technological elements are distinct from those of large studios. For example, Gotye's studio comprises multiple digital technologies including MacBook Pro and a small digital audio interface. In contrast, larger studios often make use of larger more expensive computers and audio interfaces. Another way that home studios differ from large studios is in their single room configuration. In the documentary, the small barn space is not large enough for a band ensemble, nor does it have separate rooms for mixing and recording. While Cole (Reference Cole2011) writes about music production in the distinct technological conditions of the 1990s, his argument about field-specific economies of value towards technology is relevant here. He argues that home recordists acquire technological capital when they maximise the potential of their home without spending much money. Gotye's attempts to minimise outside sound and record by himself demonstrate this process.
The space in which Gotye works forms an important part of discussions about not only the album, but also his acquisition of cultural capital and his status within a field of cultural production where recording in home studios connotes independence and produces ‘uninhibited’ work practices. In the online popular culture magazine PopMatters, David Amidon's review of Making Mirrors describes Gotye as ‘a clearly talented multi-instrumentalist toying around in his studio crafting highly subversive breakup anthems alongside songs’ (Amidon Reference Amidon2012). This phrase establishes a link between Gotye's ‘talent’, the aesthetics of his work and, crucially, his home studio. In particular, references to his ownership of the studio coupled with a comparison of his approach to ‘toying around’ gesture at the domestic status of many home studios, where musicians can work at their own pace. This link is also made by the Australian newspaper The Sydney Morning Herald, which claims that while many successful musicians hire bodyguards to protect themselves in public, ‘it's his favourite pieces of recording gear that must be kept secure’ (Mathieson Reference Mathieson2011). In its reference to ownership, this statement suggests that his status as a producer is largely tied to his use of home recording technologies. The article also draws links between the value of the album, the studio and the work that went into making the studio. It states that Gotye and his father ‘built the barn and his diligent approach mirrors that of the work subsequently undertaken inside’ (Mathieson Reference Mathieson2011). The BBC also makes links between the work that went into building the studio and later success of the album: ‘it took him more than two years to piece the record together, thanks to his obsession with found sounds and obscure vintage synthesisers, but it led to the biggest hit of his career’ (Savage Reference Savage2012). Other examples of the links between cultural capital and his home studio are found in Australian newspaper The Courier Mail, whose article ‘Budget home recording became US No. 1’ proclaims him as ‘One of the world's last truly independent artists’ (Moran Reference Moran2012). The use of the term ‘budget’ makes a clear reference to economic limitations often faced by users of home studios. Finally, Rolling Stone (Hyman Reference Hyman2012) describes his home recording studio practice as ‘uninhibited’.
Gotye: the auteur
Another theme covered within the documentaries is Gotye's auteur producer working style. As Gotye works in a private home studio on an isolated rural farm, he mostly works alone. His style of working – and his emphasis on it in the documentaries – positions him as an auteur producer. While the term ‘auteur’ originally applied to film directors who had an unusually significant influence on the production of their films, record production scholars have used it in music production to describe music producers who work across multiple production roles and thus have a lot of control over the project (Burgess Reference Burgess2013). During the reenactments in the documentaries, Gotye appears to take on multiple production roles, including songwriter, producer, recordist and musician. Similarly to the space in which he produces music, the roles he adopts when he produces music reveal his style of working. For example, the crucial role that studio technology plays in Gotye's songwriting process demonstrates his auteur approach to production. In Making Making Mirrors, he says:
The way I come up with ideas for songs is very reactive. I think I've always got an ear out for any song that elicits an immediate response from me. In the case of the song ‘State of the Art’, a horn break from one-off recording of a traditional Taiwanese song was the starting point. I sampled it, sped it up, edited it into a sparser riff and added some echo. The same day I'd sampled a Turkish drum sound to work as a response. It's this sort of fortuitous meeting of sounds that I find a really exciting way to start recordings. It means you get combinations you may not have thought of before and when you're really in a flow with sampling you get the melding of sounds that feel like they were always meant for each other.
As shown in this passage, Gotye's ‘reactive’ approach to sample material demonstrates that his songwriting and recording approaches are closely linked. Gotye uses recording technologies to ‘speed up’ a sample of a traditional Taiwanese song, a process which many would consider being typically undertaken by a recording engineer. The resultant sound plays a crucial role in the songwriting process as it provides the basis on which Gotye composes the melody and writes the lyrics of the song.
The relationships between performance and recording in his practice and as illustrated by the documentary also help establish Gotye as an auteur producer. This approach is demonstrated by his use of a wire fence to make a virtual instrument for use on the album. In Making Eyes Wide Open, he states:
In late 2008, I was traveling through outback Queensland, Australia with my rock and roll band the Basics. And we stayed a few nights in a small town called Winton. Winton's home to an odd instrument called the musical fence. I'd brought a portable stereo recorder on the trip, hoping to find some interesting sounds that I could sample. So this was a pretty exciting thing to discover. The fence was designed and constructed by Melbourne percussionist Graham Leek, and is basically five large fence strings attached to a wooden resonant chamber for amplification.
The samples of the Winton musical fence suggested themselves immediately for the tone of a track, so they were the first piece of the puzzle to fit. There's piano on the track too, and that felt right because that's how the song was written. But it ended up pretty buried in the mix under everything else that I came up with afterwards.
Here, the studio processing involved in sampling the wire fence provides the basis for the chords of the song. When Gotye triggers a sequence of multiple pitched fence sounds with a hardware controller in a specific order, he creates the chord progression for the song. These practices bring into focus the close and interconnected relationships between his work in the roles of producer and musician.
Gotye's positioning as an auteur artist links to trends in pop music production where songwriting, performance and recording roles have become linked. The historical context of these links influences his hierarchical place within the field. For example, Gracyk writes: ‘As rock gradually came to use recording technologies to compose, disseminate, and represent musical thought, recordings became the primary medium for rock tradition’ (1996, p. 50). Numerous pop musicians including Brian Wilson from the Beach Boys and Brian Eno demonstrate this trend (Moorefield Reference Moorefield2005; Gracyk Reference Gracyk1996; Cunningham Reference Cunningham1998; Théberge Reference Théberge1997). Cunningham states: ‘In his mind, the studio was, like a guitar or piano, another musical instrument’ (1998, pp. 75–6). Théberge states that Eno's practices exemplify ‘the degree to which the technology of sound recording has become productive, not simply reproductive’ (1997, p. 216). Virgil Moorefield states that songwriting ‘has come to mean the deft combination of samples from various sources, and the skilled manipulation of technology such as samplers, synthesizers, mixing boards, and computers’ (2005, p. 92). These examples demonstrate that the field highly values practices in music production in which musicians challenge the role and dominant narratives of recording technology, engineers and producers, as seen in the auteur approach. The status and reputation of figures such as Brian Wilson and Brian Eno demonstrate that these approaches produce cultural capital within the field. Gotye's practice within home studios distinctly removes him from the realm of large-scale production, and the legitimacy and status that sometimes come with it. On the other hand, his auteur practices realign him with the practices of musicians such as Wilson and Eno who are regarded as experimental but who also have strong associations with these larger spaces.
Examples of the cultural capital of Gotye's auteur practices are found in industry texts that make strong links between his auteur practices and the value of the album. The BBC states, for example ‘rather than recycling other people's drum loops and instrumental breaks, he tracks down sounds that intrigue him and manipulates them into new, unrecognisable instruments’ (Savage Reference Savage2012). This phrase brings attention to the way in which his sampling techniques across his recording and songwriting practices break with traditions to produce experiential outcomes with ‘unrecognisable instruments’. The article continues: ‘It sounds like an enormous effort for a simple five-note riff, but this attention to detail is what makes Gotye's patchwork pop stand out’. This statement constructs a link between the finished work, its processes and his status. It also suggests that the value and status of his work must be contextualised within his experimental practices. The article then implicitly links Gotye to Brian Wilson, whose reluctance to perform in the 1960s is well documented (Gracyk Reference Gracyk1996, p. 7). It states: ‘But, in the midst of all the excitement and kinetic energy, the musician makes a comment that exposes an underlying unease with playing live … Backstage, he admits touring distracts him from making music’. Rolling Stone further demonstrates the links between his work, his practice and his status. In their discussion about his use of the wire fence to produce chords, the article claims his ‘most intriguing songs sample natural field recordings and other aural oddities’ (Hyman Reference Hyman2012). This quotation demonstrates a close link between his auteur practice and this value of the resultant work as it claims that the most ‘intriguing’ parts of his work lie in auteur practices. The article further states: ‘This DIY process of piecemealing unexpected sounds to create something bold and new is at the core of the multi-instrumentalist's approach to songwriting, and figures largely on Mirrors’. These examples illustrate that the processes initially discussed in the documentaries at the release of the album are reproduced in valuations about its status within a field of cultural production where the processes involved in music are important to valuations about the status of the music itself.
Gotye: the collector
The documentaries uncover Gotye's collection practices, which form an important part of the production of his album. Working as an auteur in a home studio, Gotye reveals in the documentaries that he collects vinyl records and discarded instruments for sounds used in his music. Gotye recounts his interest in collecting vinyl records for use as ‘samples’ in his music.
The local op shop in Balnarring has a nice little treasure trove of all records to pick through … I'm just fascinated by the wealth of recorded music there is out there, I guess. The internet makes it easier these days to discover otherwise forgotten music, but there's something that draws me to digging – that pay-off when you find something strange or unexpected. The ladies at the op shop are really surprised I would want to listen to music from half a century ago. And on vinyl. But there is so much amazing stuff collecting dust in dollar bins. I love finding my own peculiar path through the history of recorded music.
This passage reveals that the samples he refers to as part of his auteur production approaches were found through ‘digging’ through vinyl records in op shops. In these spaces, Gotye ventures outside the realm of digital online music stores to locate rare and unique sounds for samples. This practice aligns with Bourdieu's notion of cultural capital. In this case, the documentaries allow Gotye to demonstrate his ability to collect items of cultural value.
The documentaries also show that Gotye collects vintage instruments. In Making Making Mirrors, he states:
During the recording of Making Mirrors, my folks bought me this amazing old organ called a Lowrey Cotillion. They got it for $100 from a second hand store. It pretty much immediately became my favourite instrument. Apart from standard electronic flute sounds, it has all these bells and whistles – really synthesiser-like patches I found had a special character to them. Just wanting to play with all these weird and wonderful sounds prompted me to write ‘State of the Art’ about the Cotillion. Technology offers these sci-fi visions sometimes – like little glimpses of the future, but it can also so quickly become quaint and outdated. I was interested in home organ culture and how it sort of encapsulates this bygone era of cutting edge technology and what entertainment can be for people.
These accounts are important as they link his songwriting and producing approaches to collecting practices. They also establish him as a musician with distinct tastes that result in distinct music. Vinyl record collecting forms part of a broader practice of collecting in popular music culture (Shuker Reference Shuker2013). An important part of vinyl collecting is that it is not a random act: it comprises distinct behaviours and practices that organise the value of cultural objects within the field. For Shuker the value of vinyl records is influenced by ‘demand and availability; condition and cost; aura and authenticity; and rarity and value’ (2013, p. 11). As such, specific cultural knowledge informs the items people collect and how they negotiate value on these items. Items of high value can include original ‘pressings’ of certain albums. Yet in order for this economy of value to work, sellers must acquire the knowledge to identify their value and buyers must be able to identify that the item is authentic. Gotye's collection practices also link his practice to vintage technologies in music production, which have become increasingly popular in recent years (Bennett Reference Bennett2012). Over the past 10 years, companies have reconditioned or remodel vintage technologies. According to Bennett, the market economy of these technologies takes place outside retail spaces and is more aligned with collection practices.
Gotye's collection practices work as cultural capital because he demonstrates the knowledge to identify objects of little economic value in one context (op shops) and the skills to reconstruct their cultural capital in another (music production). For example, Gotye's uses samples of material found in a dollar bin with not enough interest to accrue economic capital or interest in its digitalisation. Gotye's references to ‘op shops’ ‘collecting dust’ and ‘dollar bins’ demonstrate that he has a sophisticated knowledge of the potential cultural value of particular objects when reprised in music production, in spite of their initial low economic value. His use of these objects in his music renegotiates the cultural value of these objects.
The cultural capital of these practices within a field of cultural production is found in industry discussion about the album. While one reviewer claims that they are ‘just not interested’ in Gotye's discussion about the capabilities of the Lowrey organ he collected (Gill Reference Gill2012), others embed such discussions as a crucial part of their valuations about the album. For example, The Sydney Morning Herald states that ‘If you live on the Mornington Peninsula and have advertised a long-neglected family organ for sale, chances are Gotye came to your house to poke at buttons and listen to the results like a doctor examining a patient’ (Mathieson Reference Mathieson2011). The doctor and patient analogy in this statement positions Gotye as not only an avid and knowledgeable collector, but also as someone with an ability to fix technologies to make them useful again. Its placement in a discussion about the value of this album suggests that Gotye's practice aids in the construction of his status. Similarly, Rolling Stone states ‘he scours local antique and record stores for vintage instruments and obscure records for sampling purposes’ (Hyman Reference Hyman2012). These statements clearly align with Shuker's (Reference Shuker2013) work on collecting as a social practice. Here, Gotye did not randomly come upon these objects in his everyday experiences; he sourced them with cultural knowledge of how to identify their value outside of a capitalist metric of value and reappropriate them and their value for this use in his music.
New technologies for documentary production and cultural capital
The documentaries that accompany Making Mirrors function as powerful cultural production tools as they not only provide an insightful take into his processes, but also establish Gotye within the field as a home recordist, auteur and collector. They offer audiences, fans and peers information about Gotye's process that is not audible or correctly interpretable on the recording. The essay-style documentary's self-narration and reenactment practices are crucial to the communication of these processes. The self-narration provides a detailed verbal account of his practices, while the reenactment provides a visual representation of his practices. As illustrated in the time-lapse images of the studio setup or the descriptions of the recording process of the wire fence, for example, these techniques provide an insight into his practice and workspace. Perhaps the most important aspect of the documentaries, though, is that they construct a link between Gotye and his practice with cultural capital of popular music, including working independently in a home studio, producing in an auteur style and collecting cultural objects. The documentary aligns with the cultural capital associated with these practices in a carefully constructed way that may not be possible in other highly edited media forms such as a published interview.
The release of the documentary exclusively onto a social medium such as YouTube is also crucial to its influence on his position within the field. Unlike historical and large broadcast network documentaries such as Classic Albums, social media provides the means to release the documentary at the same time as the album. Rather than discuss a well-known album in an attempt to theorise its historical importance as seen in Classic Albums, Gotye's documentaries were released ‘on demand’ at the time of the album's release. On YouTube, audiences can both watch accounts of the process and listen to the album tracks. For listeners who watch the documentary, it can help frame their perception of the album. As such, social media demonstrates the album as a multimodal text. Here, the album product is not just its musical components, such as the instruments and their processing, or the music video clips and artwork. Rather, accounts about processes of the creation of these sounds become part of its consumable components too. As a result, an audio-visual narrative of how the sounds from the wire fence were constructed sits alongside and informs the musical results of the wire fence. Further, the images of the converted barn form part of the audience's spatial interpretation of where the work was created.
Music and process as political tools within a field of cultural production
One of the themes covered in this article is that ideas about how and where music is made can play an important role in the status of the finished work. For example, record production scholarship (Moorefield Reference Moorefield2005; Théberge Reference Théberge1997) and published industry discussions about Gotye's album (Amidon Reference Amidon2012; Hyman Reference Hyman2012; Mathieson Reference Mathieson2011) illustrate that practices such as collecting, home recording and auteur producing are considered by many to be highly valuable parts of music. They inform discussions about the released work. Building on the discussions which point to an extended history about the political nature of the discursive space of the field (Bennett and Baker Reference Bennett, Baker and Inglis2010; Williams Reference Williams2010), and examples I cited of musicians releasing self-authored works on their processes (Eno Reference Eno, Cox and Warner2004; Byrne Reference Byrne2012), Gotye's documentaries highlight technological flux within the discursive space of music. This discursive space, which shapes value within the field, but which has been selective of its musicians, has changed. The use of social media technologies facilitates a space where ‘independent artists’ with limited financial support engage with new media production technologies to produce and distribute accounts of their processes in the form of an essay documentary. Although these musicians are not the sole beneficiaries of these emergent ways of discussing music production (musicians who have appeared in documentaries such as Classic Albums, for example, can release similar social media documentaries too), they symbolise a clear breakdown in hierarchies relating to mediated discussions about music process.
The dual release of the music and audio-visual accounts of its process illustrates a bi-modal text where the process and the musical components become intertwined. In the case of Gotye, his album and singles are not the only part of his international commercial and critical success, but audiences are also highly engaged with discussions about his processes. Technological developments since 2011 suggest that the possibility to integrate process and text has expanded. Instagram stories allow users to upload short and quickly produced videos that are either deleted after 24 hours or saved onto their profile. Crowd funding websites – which have become a popular means of sourcing funds for album costs (Thorley Reference Thorley, Bennett and Bates2018) – encourage musicians to upload videos about their process and progress to generate funding. This developing technological and discursive space poses further questions for scholarly intervention regarding the continued integration of process and text across practices, particularly beyond large-scale production.
This article has argued that processual social media documentaries released concurrently with the album shape a field of cultural production in ways that are distinct from those made in broadcast contexts (Bennett and Baker Reference Bennett, Baker and Inglis2010; Williams Reference Williams2010). The application of Bourdieu's work sheds light on Gotye's documentaries as being part of a field of cultural production with distinct and complex forms of cultural capital from those covered in broadcast documentaries. Here, social media builds on examples of Eno (Reference Eno, Cox and Warner2004) and Byrne (Reference Byrne2012), to show a media technology that provides musicians with a compelling voice to contest and acquire cultural capital within a field of cultural production. However, in the case of Gotye, the forms of capital seen across home production, auteur and collector practices are complex and distinct from one another. As noted within home production in the work of Cole (Reference Cole2011), fields have their own ideas of value towards technologies and cultural goods which are often not compatible with those of other fields. This complex cultural capital plays out in the discussions and within the documentary where Gotye demonstrates a knowledge of practices and cultural goods that are perceived to be highly valued within a specific field. These forms of cultural capital work in concert to explain his album, position him as experimental and contest his position within the field. The analysis of the documentary illustrates an agent who uses an emergent discursive space to set out the context in which they want the value of their work to be judged, at the same time audiences are introduced to the work. Subsequent industry discussions about the album coupled with the 1 million views of the documentaries at the time of writing demonstrate that this approach is a productive political tool within a field of cultural production.
