Obviously I am out of practice as a writer right now but diction and syntax be dammed!
"I discuss music and society quite a bit with my roommate. We speculate quite often as to the what range of dates should constitute the 'golden era' of music and, more importantly, culture, in Western civilization, and, while we generally agree that things have been going downhill for about 15 years or so, and that the last five or six years have constituted the lowest ebb in what seems like forever, the starting date was, for a while, really hard to fix. Initially, it was placed somewhere in the 1960s, but jazz and all the innovations in classical music since Beethoven make that date problematic. Coming to that realization, however, provided the insight I was looking for. Beethoven is the great Romantic composer, the guy who took pre-existing forms that had been used to mostly write either paens to god or innocuous entertainment and reinvented those forms as vehicles for conveying deep feelings about life and the world around... it's really his era, the Romantic era, that is over. Music now has the function it did hundreds of years ago - entertainment for the wealthy where the inspired re-deployment of traditional forms is appreciated on an intellectual level (ie most of underground/critic music culture), or paens to new gods (consumerism, one-night stands, shapely asses). The desire for intense and direct communication is not really part of the audience's experience."
11 hours ago
1 comment:
I'll tell you what I notice in pop (not jazz, not classical, not muzak) as being new in the past 10 yrs, and that is the idea that music functions as sonic collage of ugliness, where styles that don't belong together (aural aesthetics here) are mashed together like cutouts from Look Magazine pushed onto a piece of construction paper with edible paste, into the most absurd mixture of images (styles) one can dare to get away with. The more often a song internally shifts styles and influences, abruptly and obviously, the more the indie kid hipsters like it. It's like someone took the idea of Mr Bungle, put it on meth AND steroids, and tried to make the collage as ugly as possible.
When influences are so naked it looks like lazy music creation. When the collage is so disjointed and abrupt, it looks even lazier. The hipsters claim it's "ironic" but that only betrays their inability to appreciate what the concept of irony actually entails. It's not even sonic sarcasm! It's more like farting in church, then puking on the lap of the person next to you on the pew, then masturbating during communion, then spending the rest of the service yelling FUCK YOU! at the priest.
Probably that means I'm getting old, because the indie hipsters lap that shit up and write glowing reviews on Pitchfork for shit that hurts my ears.
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