There’s nothing more democratic than a jukebox.
In an age of iPods (hyper-individualized music machines) and corporate media (where commercial radio stations play the same top-40 pop songs over and over and over again), the jukebox remains a humble bastion of a community’s ability to exercise a collective culture composed of the autonomy of its members. The freedom to determine a playlist cooperatively, a playlist accumulated from the tastes and pleasures of all interested parties, is central to an ethos of a liberty premised on interdependence. It is neither a “liberal” nor “conservative” freedom. It is a democratic freedom.
It is in this spirit of freedom and democracy, in this belief that we as a people, a community, are more than the sum of our parts, that leads me to call on the managerial staff of the Memorial Union to bring back the Rathskeller jukebox.
When I first discovered the disappearance, last week, I was merely disappointed that I would be unable to listen to “Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard” while I sipped my coffee. In denial, perhaps, I wondered if it had simply been moved temporarily for construction, or if somehow I had misremembered its location. But no! Inquiry with two separate Union employees revealed the sorry fact that it was gone, had been removed, was sitting in storage or in some office and was going to stay there indefinitely.
The student staff, apparently, rewired the machine to play songs free of charge. When a private company came to collect the jukebox cash and discovered that thousands of songs had been played for free, they complained and had the managers take away the machine. Now, playlists are decided upon in back rooms. The music tastes of a slim minority of the student population (by a cartel of student managers, no doubt) are being piped directly into Rathskeller patrons with no transparency or accountability to protect the interests of private industry. Once again, the forces of organized capital and our governance structures have combined and are colluding against us. Once again, they are using the specter of crime to undermine our liberties and seize control over our public resources.
Having music to listen to in Der Rathskeller is a public good. It benefits everybody, much the way public infrastructure benefits everybody, or having an educated populace benefits everybody. In the modern tradition, there are two dominant ways to provide public goods. Liberals say that a centralized government should handle it. Conservatives say that an unfettered free market should handle it. But in practice, this is often a false distinction because both of these philosophies disenfranchise the individual by subjecting them to forces beyond her control, centralized, ostensibly omniscient institutions (in the case of the market, concentrated in the hands of so few so as to be centralized in essence).
A coup has occurred in the aural landscape of Der Rathskeller; the twin forces of hierarchal control and capital accumulation have displaced the decentralized, peaceful regime of direct control by the people. We must not be fooled by their excuses! The jukebox was created for all of us to hold in common, for the good of all! There can be no justification for its removal; keeping it in the Union for all to use has no cost and grants a sense of ownership and control mostly vanished in our modern world. We must listen to Paul Simon! To Carlos Santana! To Johnny Cash! And The Smiths! Our voices sound of our freedom, our independence, shall not be silenced by jukebox profiteers!
Noah is a sophomore majoring in history of science and community and nonprofit leadership. Please send all feedback to opinion@dailycardinal.com.
