MOURNING "BECOMES-ECLECTIC"
always had this suspicion that the drive towards in-ESSENTIAL-ism – the centripetal drive away from monoculture, the canon, the idea of a music or band that has universal applicability -- while seemingly valuable in its anti-totalizing drive -- ultimately had a tendency (unintended but latent, creeping, insidious) towards inessentialism
once you rid yourself of that tyrant, THE ESSENTIAL – the thing that everyone should pay attention to -- what ultimately transpires is that everything becomes equally inessential
and the solipsistic narrative of "i like this, i don't like that" is all that's left
(and why, unless you're a personal friend, should i care about anyone's completely individual and idiosyncratic taste-patterns or journey-through-music-consumption)
if the confidence that what you are writing about could and should matter to “all” withers away... it is replaced by diffidence
and diffidence is never going to shake anybody out of indifference
the abandonment of the desire to occupy the central place means that there is never a moment of usurpation, coup d'etat, transfer of power... the throne is perpetually empty
it is an opting out of the dialectic altogether, in favour of pluralism... coalition government... shuffle politics... stasis
the end result of getting rid of "THE CENTRAL" has been that music as a (diffuse, scattered, dissipated) totality has become less central in the scheme of things
^^^^^^^^^
the consequences of the (post-broadband) revolution in listening habits = no revolution(s) in music
as once anticipated (in both the predictive and looking-forward-to senses)
the triumph of this vision can now be seen to be pyrrhic
it's a musical-cultural landscape that is flattened and voided -- placid and flaccid
as atemporality takes hold and the privatization of music experience intensifies, you just have an archival wasteland of spent signifiers, that are, fatally,not fully dehistoricized yet (and therefore not yet capable of being repurposed)
a state of entropy, i.e. music as dead energy, energy that can't be put to "work"
less and less capable of being used to generate stances
Taste-stances that are also life-stances
Taste positions that are also subject positions
what has declined in this is the role of music in identity formation
as a result musical choices (by consumers) and aesthetic decisions (by musicians) carry less and less freight
the decision of e.g. Zola Jesus to "go Goth" is far less meaningful than the people who formulated Goth as a look/sound/worldview
the struggle behind that formulation – psychological/personal, social... and just the sheer creative effort to create a new form.... is largely absent
the style/stance is taken from the repertoire of existing, established, archival stances (sound /sartorial)
And there are few consequences or resonances to its adoption – or stakes
Goths, once, risked ridicule, occasionally even attack, for the way they look
Long since acceptable, part of the menu of quasi-subcultural looks, it’s been on fashion runways, it’s underpinned mainstream movies (Tim Burton)
it’s a choice, an option, a flavor
subculture involves putting on the clothes and not taking them off – investment without divestment
today, under the aegis of plus/and aka everything/and, to side with one music and its corresponding identity does not require you to reject or oppose any other
antagonistic and nihilatory energy is not capable of being generated through your likes
perhaps all that (serious choices, taking sides, identity-as-stance-as-moral-choice) now lies outside the realm of music – back where it should be even – in politics
and people keep asking 'where's the soundtrack, the songs, for this political moment(s)?' (student protests/street riots/Occupy____)
perhaps there isn't ever going to be one, or any... perhaps it's not needed... perhaps the relationship between the two is finally uncoupled, for good
(and maybe that is "for good" in the literal sense)
Tom: "Why do you dislike rock 'n' roll so much?"
ReplyDeleteJohn: "It's dead. It's a disease. It's a plague. It's been going on for too long. It's history. It's vile. It's not achieving anything, it's just regression. They play rock 'n' roll at airports. It's about as like advanced as it can possibly get!"
Tom: "But there was a . . ."
John: "It's too limited."
Tom: "But there was a time when you didn't feel that way!"
John: "It is too much like a structure, a church."
Tom: "Yeah, but there was . . ."
John: "A religion. A farce."
Tom: "A time when you did not feel that way! What made you change your mind?"
John: "No, I've always felt this way."
Tom: "Even when you were with the Sex Pistols?"
John: "I wondered when you'd get round to that one! Yes, even then! Because the Sex Pistols was going to be the absolute end of rock 'n' roll, which I thought it was. Unfortunately, the majority of the public, being the senile animals that they are, got that wrong. Too bad. All's I want is an image - something flash."
Tom: "Where did the name The Sex Pistols come from? Who thought that name up?"
John: "Some animal, I can't remember. It doesn't matter. It's history."
Tom: "Well, I think history matters a little bit! When you say 'some animal,' was this a member of the band that made it . . ."
John: "History does not matter. I mean your program's called Tomorrow - there must be a reason behind that!
Tom: "Well, unless we remember our yesterdays, there will be no tomorrow's."
John: [Laughing
That's a great exchange, I've never actually watched the whole program. Tom Snyder does quite well there in arguing with Lydon. I would have reproduced the whole thing - or much of it - in Rip It Up and Start Again, but YouTube didn't exist when I wrote it. Some vintage rhetoric from Johnny boy! "Senile animals" etc I have some lines in the book - the bit about rock being "a religion, a farce".
DeleteMy tangent more recently on PiL - as in this review of Metal Box https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22374-metal-box/ - is that they were despite the rhetoric, still very much a rock band - virtuoso guitarist schooled on the greats but trying to invent his own style; physically potent bass; a Spinal Tap like procession of drummers, impassioned singer, lyrics that Meant Something. They are pushing rock to its outer limits. But Lydon is very much in the mold of a figure like John Lennon - that nexus where personal biography intersects with the political, expressive individual emotion (repression) and social demand (oppression). The bitterness of "Working Class Hero" is totally the place that Lydon is coming from - what Kpunk called the wounds of class. Lennon is the unacknowledged precursor, right down to the Irish ancestry.
And then Lydon does the return to rock with the album where he's got Ginger Baker on drums and Led Zep-like riffs, the album with "Rise" on...
All that said, I'm not sure how what you posted relates to the actual post above (some old thoughts of mine from the poptimism versus nu-rockism era)!
"All that said, I'm not sure how what you posted relates to the actual post above (some old thoughts of mine from the poptimism versus nu-rockism era)!"
DeleteWell I can only speak as someone who was born in the 90s generation, but it's all a bit cringe now isn't it? The idea of identity formation through music. It carries no potency for us. You look at a band like Rage Against the Machine and it's just abject. Horse cod-macho sloganeering for seemingly nothing at all. In fact I keep engaging in a freudian slip where I think of them as Rage 'for the' Machine, and it only dawned on me a couple of weeks ago how right I was.
There is actually a sort of identity formation in the German club scene, particularly German house and techno, but it's ultimately a patriotic (if not racist) one. We are the liberated and everyone else is still victim to their conformism kind of thing. Except nothing of the sort is the case. It's just the farcical afterlife of the rock n roll worldview, consolidated in a bureaucratic police state like Berlin.
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