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| OTL, Graphic Poem, xii-2012 |
People who like our friendly, anti-hierarchical, pleasure-centred Marxist politics at the AMM often ask me, "
Why music? Why Association of Musical Marxists? Why not Association of … nice … horizontal … realistic … bullshit-free Marxists? Why this 'music' thing??" But now, listening to
Derek Bailey in Liverpool in 2003, I've got a reply: I don't want a politics which tramples upon the things I know are true but find hard to justify in the public realm. This principle, I know, throws me into sea-sick stuff many socialists and righteous activists don't like: art, subjectivity, shrinkiness, me-wallow etc. With reason! It's not like I like all that crap either. But talking about music broaches something else, I think. Because recording and records came and upset the whole settled thing of bourgeois 'greatness' (Bach, Beethoven and Brahms etc), and suddenly the Beatles mattered. And after that, you can't talk about music without talking about class and privilege and where we really are. 'Art' and 'Science' remain specialised pursuits which socialists can comment on; music however begs the question of, Who are you? and, Why do you respond to this? What do you
REALLY like — I mean, really, for real?? This is the
BIG discussion of the democratic proletarian ferment, and no-one has convinced me that this is not so. When people talk about music they reveal what soul is left us by the work grind, and that is the truth of this world. That's why when I hear what issues forth from a sanctified church I don't condemn 'ideology', I wail along, baby. If the intellectual left can't wail along, it's not intellectual anymore:
"the tear is an intellectual thing" said William Blake … Oh shit I've got déjà vu; anyone heard this argument before? If so, where?
OTL 18-vii-2012
Great post. But aren't the Beatles a little late in the day: re talking about class and privilege? What about Little Richard, Wynonie Harris, or Fats Domino? Which isn't to argue, really, it's just to say Yeah! And ...
ReplyDeleteFor sure. I've just been reading 'Blue Monday: Fats Domino and the Lost Dawn of Rock and Roll', which discusses that and much else besides.
ReplyDeleteA book could be written on the idiocies embedded in this small post; and I wouldn't bother even to gesture towards them, were it not for the clear and present dangers posed to the impressionable by the forceful assertion of the "whole settled thing of bourgeois 'greatness' (Bach, Beethoven and Brahms etc)". Bach I'll leave for now (though drawing the attention of the interested to Adorno's essay 'Bach Defended against his Devotees', in "Prisms"). Beethoven, on the other hand, can't be left to moulder under Ben's grave-slab. Adorno - whose major, unfinished book on Beethoven goes unremarked in Ben's book - has much to say on Ludwig van's radicalism. Here are a handful of snippets, sufficient to sink Ben's daft generalisation irrevocably:
ReplyDelete"In the totality of its form, Beethoven's music represents the social process. In doing so it shows how each individual moment – in other words, each individual process of production within society – is made comprehensible only in terms of its function within the reproduction of society as a whole."
Adorno, "Beethoven: The Philosophy of Music", p. 13
"The key to the very late Beethoven probably lies in the fact that in this music the idea of totality as something already achieved had become unbearable to his critical genius."
(ibid, p. 14)
"Beethoven's music is Hegelian philosophy: but at the same time it is truer than that philosophy."
(ibid, p. 14 - and see further the quotation from the "Phenomenology of Mind" which bridges the book, pp. 15-16, which Adorno declares "looks like a *direct* description of the Beethovenian sonata")
Harry Gilonis
Adorno was special because he looked at Beethoven from the point of view of someone that knew that mass culture had changed everything. He was a Marxist. You, Harry, though you choose somewhat cryptic and unattractive bits of Adorno to figleaf your conservativism, are not. Bourgeois "greatness" was not something Adorno defended - he dissed that to death in Current of Music - but MUSICAL EXPERIENCE. Luckily, the idiocies of Harry Gilonis don't require a book, just five sentences.
DeleteDamned if i can see what's unattractive in any of those bits of Adorno; nor that they imply anything other than a stringent critique *OF* notions of bourgeois "greatness". Adorno is defending Beethoven against his bourgie devotees, and trying to make clear the innate radicalism of LvB's music. It is as curious that Ben can't allow radicalism to be findable in classical music as it is weird that he's forgotten that I've been listening, avidly, to free improv. for rather longer than he has (see the acknowledgements in his biog. of Derek Bailey...).
ReplyDeleteThere's all sorts of radicalism lurking in all sorts of music, but not in YOU Harry, that was my point. You forever preen - and forever miss the point. Look at your reasoning. What do you want for avidly sitting through innumerable improv concerts? A medal?
ReplyDeleteBen: I was trying, too obliquely it seems, to suggest that Beethoven *wasn't* smug about possessing (nor wanted to possess) the Glories of the Classical Tradition. Since you raised the suggestion that I, too, was happy with notions of settled bourgeois 'greatness', I wanted to rebut that. I listen to Beethoven for the same reason that I listen to improv.; at their best both give clear intimations that things *need not be as they are*. They embody a real, revolutionary, optimism. This is NOT the world of 'Classics for Pleasure' you so lazily elide it with. Your banal dismissal of Beethoven riled me; its ease, its smugness, its self-satisfaction, its ignorance. Even - to throw Adorno at you again - its resting complacently with totalising gestures. (Your dismissal of Evan Parker endeavours, equally sillily, to make improv. into a similarly unitary monolith.) How can you not have noticed that one of your favourite writers is completely, and very thoroughly, at variance with you on Beethoven? (I love 'cryptic' as a term of dismissal for Adorno, btw. Very elegant. Very Richard Littlejohn.)
ReplyDeleteAs for medals: declaring* yourself* a Marxist (a verdict for History to give, surely?) and calling me a conservative (a palpable libel) looks all too much like the giving and withholding of (self-minted) gongs. I detect a wee whiff of the commodity-fetishist's faecal gift... In this instance better in than out, I think.
I was trying to resist butting in on this debate, but can't avoid it. Ben, I think that your attack on Harry is not only unreasonable, but also is couched in fully reified (or perhaps, one should say Leninised) accounts of proletariat and bourgeoisie. Yes, Adorno did attack bourgeois "greatness" but not so you could parenthesise its contents and magically forget about it. Or perhaps you didn't listen to it in the first place. Bach, Beethoven, Brahms is such an odd set anyway - Brahms, the master of stodge (with a few exceptions like the clarinet trio, the opening of the Alto Rhapsodie, some of the late piano pieces) is clearly closer to the unconsciously deadening music of the Beatles: Brahms, through his academicism, and the Beatles through their anti-academicism (someone should have told them that playing all chords in root position just sounds shit) both flatten and mask what music might be, it’s attempt to speak contingent on its fragility, and self-destruction. Both were the masters of edifice. Adorno writes, "A Beethoven symphony as a whole can never be appropriated" - Brahms offers us over and over again wholes which are just wholes, and the Beatles give us parts which are just parts. Both are figures of fetish under capital, and both deny any moment of fragility.
ReplyDeleteLook, just fucking listen to some stuff. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l3dgACCAzwM http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eveyPLgTFgc (first 8 minutes) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XEZXjW_s0Qs - this especially http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xb8a17_beethoven-op-127-mvt-2_music - maybe you’ll think about that the next time you want to write “(Bach, Beethoven, Brahms)” and hopefully you’ll back up a second and ask yourself what you’re doing.
But the point of my comment wasn’t to accuse you of philistinism, but rather to make a demand about how we might listen to music dialectically, and why the crudest class politics here are making such dialectical listening difficult. This seems to be the classic mistake of Leninism: the antagonism between capital and labour is seen as identical to the antagonism between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. In the middle, the commodity, the real (yes false and internally antagonistic) reconciliation labour and capital in which capital dominates in the form of the commodity, allows for a vulgar analysis whereby all commodities, all expression under the conditions of domination by capital, which aren’t explicitly self-proclaiming of being proletarian, are treated as pure and reprehensible bourgeois culture. All are to be trashed: “Because recording and records came and upset the whole settled thing of bourgeois 'greatness' (Bach, Beethoven and Brahms etc), and suddenly the Beatles mattered. And after that, you can't talk about music without talking about class and privilege and where we really are.”
This leads to two important points for dialectical listening: the first is to understand that capitalism is as degenerative for the bourgeoisie as it is for the proletariat - as humans, as consciousness; but also good dialectical listening involves the acknowledgment that the moments of reconciliation have already happened, and it is thus the work of an thinking with and against any music to try to understand how this false reconciliation expresses its falsity in history, in the breaking apart of those musical objects from the inside out, under the continued claim to the truth of value under capitalism. From the standpoint of capital, of course nothing is or can be broken, and from the standpoint of labour, of course everything is the immediate bodily impression of permanent suffering. But the transposition of this point onto a simple sociological bifurcation undercuts art at the least, and all culture at the most.
Fuckin eh! That quartet playing Beethoven in 1989 is GREAT! You've really convinced me that Beethoven is great. But note - my appreciation of Beethoven was never "settled" - actually, it still isn't - got anymore recordings?
DeleteThis is exactly what leads Adorno to his line on the claims of authenticity of so-called proletarian aesthetic: this isn’t working within the objective antagonisms, but instead is a replication of the claim to authenticity of a false reconciliation already committed, and from which it doesn’t even begin to propose escape, through the careful subjective tracing of the fissures as they grow through history. (Maybe the more important question is what we HATE.) Instead, it erects an edifice, and is blind to the fact that its foundations were already made of shit. Only this time “the proletariat” will sink with it too.
ReplyDeleteAnd this erecting of edifices is tied precisely to the technics of records, which inaugurate the late capitalist cryogenics of culture. It doesn’t tell us “where we really are” but always “where we really were”. It leads away from the avant-garde and into a politics of nostalgia. But no-one can tell the difference anymore. Transience itself is dead. That isn’t to say that these new technics can’t be used as part of an avant-garde, and they have been. But this particular moment - the definition of a mass constituted by the oppressive technologies of mass distribution - is not a mass politics with which one ought to straightforwardly identify (without at the very least acknowledging the masochism of such a political move!)
It seems that the question that Ben is asking is not “who are you” but rather “who are you not?” It is the dishonest, broken response that allows one to exclude “(Bach, Beethoven, Brahms)” only to discover that their music perdures but is ruined by its summary under a set of bracketed names. This contributes to the polishing away of all of the critical details, those things that might let us get a grip on history, society, culture, the fucking point of listening, the only point of music. Only under these conditions to we regress to a stage of terror of the other, who we no longer recognise but attack in order to disable. “(Bach, Beethoven, Brahms)” is the expression of someone seeking protection from the truth.
But that terror, and guarding from truth turns you from a revolutionary into a reformist. I quoted from Daniel Chua (who is a decent Adornian musicologist) the other day: "For Wagner, the Ninth Symphony is revolution, and as if to verify this fact, his performances of the work ignited the audiences with revolutionary anticipation. When revolutionary fires broke out in Dresden, a guard shouted to Wagner from the barricades, 'schöner Götterfunken'." - I don’t want to finish by trying to defend the most ridiculous bourgeois accounts of freedom (although this story is compelling and important), but it is in these claims to freedom that we can best understand reaction. The claim of the universal meaningfulness of music, particularly the music of the proletariat, makes the same mistake that the guard did. Communism does not entail the bourgeois revolutions of the past with proletarian actors.
I think Bach, Beethoven, Brahms is a good list - for one thing, they all start with "B" - as does the fourth, Beatles. But more importantly, they all made music before recording technology - the fact that they are from radically different periods strengthens the point - which is that their "greatness" only reflects on past musical revolutions, not a visceral response now, when Frank Zappa can say "Let's All Be Composers!" and also (imagining the musicians whose job it is to saw through Bach & Beethoven time after time) - "We Hate Your Dots!"
ReplyDeleteWell, of course. It seems my simple-minded recourse to Anglo-Saxon alliteration (Beatles versus the Bs) has thrown a cat among the pigeons. But records and recording DID do something to music, and upset the settled list of "greats". Where we are after this requires much discussion, and I'm not going to deny anybody's particular experience (where have I said "don't listen to Beethoven"? I've just said, factor in the mediations involved in your own experience - school, concerts, records, radio etc Adorno called it phenomenology, but you could call it gonzo journalism). Neither Harry nor Jacob seem to take seriously Adorno's idea that maybe Beethoven is now impossible to relate to. Instead they interpret his work as a defence of the best of bourgeois culture, which makes it very very boring. Adorno predicted the EU's use of the Ode to Joy and that's what makes his musicology great. Jacob is recommending specific listens, which is good, but how much of the force and erotics of an orchestral movement can survive an mp3 is moot; Current of Music says no. Play on the sound stripe said Teddy. That's what Muddy Waters and Elvis DID. You two are nostalgia freaks, so of course Leninist realism affronts you. You're not explaining how the world works to those acting in it, you're sheltering yourselves in dialectical phantasms.
ReplyDeleteOops I took so long replying to Jacob, Ken snuck in there first! My "Well, of course" was actually agreeing with Jacob's "Communism does not entail the bourgeois revolutions of the past with proletarian actors". But I'm grateful that Ken paraded some HISTORICAL MATERIALISM versus the canonic/timeless idealism Harry and Jacob are mired in ("no dialectics without the sense of solid things" TWA ... your "dialectics", on the other hand, is pure intellectual tug-and-pull, comrades!). The unlikely benefits of knowing your Zappa. As Neues Deutschland put it last week "Mit Marx und Zappa ...".
ReplyDelete"Adorno predicted the EU's use of the Ode to Joy ...."
ReplyDeleteDid he predict the use of Muddy Waters and Elvis by the advertising industry?
"That's what Muddy Waters and Elvis DID. You two are nostalgia freaks ...." Nostalgia freaks? Muddy Waters and Elvis?
Look, the use of electricity in Muddy Waters is basic to any alive use of technology, I'm not talking about his image as used by advertisers. If you listen to what Stephen O'Malley plays with Iancu Dumitrescu, it's utterly dependent on what Muddy Waters discovered. It seems to me important to name inventers who are relevant to the technology we are living through. Beethoven established the basic frame of "music" as we know it - he also kicked against it, which are the bits Harry and Jacob (and me!) thrill to - but blues guitar doesn't fit in that frame. Of course, all three of us are saying: some things here haven't dated a bit, shed the prejudices caused by commercialism's emphasis on the new. It's just I've taken Adorno into uncharted territory whereas Jacob and Harry want to stick with his analyses of scores.
ReplyDeleteNot talking about the image as used by advertising seems to me very similar to saying that the image of Beethoven as canonical, great composer (the three Bs etc.), the institutions and rituals of the bourgeois concert hall etc. are irrelevant to Beethoven's music. And I don't understand you to be saying that (I'd say they in no way exhaust Beethoven's music. But I wouldn't discount them). To write that "maybe Beethoven is now impossible to relate to" makes little sense to me (at least stated that baldly, and I realise comments to a blog past have that about them) because it would imply that Beethoven is some monolithic given and that there's some monolithic given doing the relating (it also seems close to the kinds of things 'cultural commentators' write in left-liberal newspapers on the stuffiness, irrelevance etc. of classical music and the in 'our' lives-ness of popular music).
ReplyDeleteAgain, I don't really understand what it means to say "the use of electricity in Muddy Waters is basic to any alive use of technology" because of course it's possible to imagine and conceive other alive uses of technology - why not? (I fully agree that the music of Muddy Waters is alive and extraordinary). And "Beethoven established the basic frame of "music" as we know it ...." doesn't go any distance from Beethoven hagiography or say much to me. Maybe he did "kick against" a frame of music his music helps construct, but the resistances and tensions are the music so why not the analyses of scores? Otherwise it's in danger of becoming heroic biography.
Thinking about institutional use of music - the opening ceremony for the Olympics will be dominated by popular music under the insistence that it's in reality the only music that it's possible to relate to.
Yes, that's why I'll be at Mile End on Saturday. Continue the discussion under the AMM banner?
ReplyDeleteGreat, see you there Ben where I still might have not stopped laughing at this discussion. Offerings of medals & faecal holdings!
DeleteI'd like that very much, but I'm many miles from London.
ReplyDeleteYour message isn't oblique, Harry, it's out there in full view: you're pissed at the rubbishing of 'bourgeois greatness' because you are up to your neck in thrall to it yourself. You use Adorno simply as a way of putting lipstick on the turkey of your own stupefaction. The same goes for your pleading on behalf of Evan Parker - you want to paper over social antagonisms in favour of the supine, chummy inclusiveness of a crowd of hip consumers. Parker is fucking corny, man. And it doesn't matter if it's the Beatles, the Pistols or Charlie Patton - recording, electric music, rewires and reroutes everything. "Notes and chords don't mean a thing..."
ReplyDeleteI'm pissed at the "rubbishing of bourgeois greatness" because it's stupid, disingenuous and arrogant. Harry and Jacob between them comprehensively demolish Ben's "argument" , yet the idiot carries on regardless, characteristically believing any resistance to be a vindication of his own revolutionary purity. Posh people patting proles on the head has always annoyed me, but at least with the Cultural Studies crew I could console myself with the thought that they were victims of their own idiocy; Ben, on the other hand, likes nothing better than curling up with a bit of Mahler. But then, unlike Harry, he has the benefit of an expensive education to protect him from the "stupefying" effects of prolonged exposure to "bourgeois greatness"...
DeleteThe Pistols are fucking corny. I'd rather watch Steptoe and Son.
"Posh people patting proles on the head has always annoyed me"
DeleteA noble sentiment
So, if I have understood correctly, it's arrogant to dare piss on the holy fire of bourgeois greatness, and only a dishonest posh boy would dare venture to do so.
Seriously, all this posturing about 'posh people' reminds me why I gave up on anarchism thirty years ago.
To "piss on the holy fire of bourgeois greatness" or, in the current climate, to gormlessly attack academia, is to align oneself with positivists, populists, deregulators and privatisers.
Deletetechnically speaking, that sort of argument is just social democratic horseshit
DeleteSocial democracy is indeed horseshit. However, I don't see how a leftist critique thereof can be effective, or even audible, after 30 years of the vicious and triumphalist dismantling of the Welfare State.
DeleteTo deflate the debate like a soggy whoopee cushion... I remember an SWP comrade in Leeds telling me that Tony Cliff said 'Brahms, Bach and Beethoven' were enough for him when it came to music! Must be that Leninism at work again. Maybe a glance at the other B, Birchall, will say otherwise.
ReplyDeleteI wasn't "rubbishing bourgeois greatness" actually, I was pointing out that a mass market in records ought to change how past music is valued and perceived. Passing around and sharing recordings opens up new possibilities of experience and judgment. Is Beethoven any good? Sometimes it's relevant and works and you can hear it, sometimes it's flat and dull. Free Improvisation is a response to recording, creating moments of uniqueness. Simply adding it into a timeless zone of musical "greatness" ignores its motivations and disables critical judgment. I turned against Evan P because of continual disappointment at live gigs and because his recorded "encounters" simply layer his way of playing over other people's stuff - there's no dialogue. His bluff blast has none of Brotzmann's rhythmic response. Whenever I mentioned these facts in print, all hell broke loose from the Beresford/Toop self-publicist/mediocrity mafia. Come on Paul, when Sharon put on Never Mind the Bollocks all those years ago it saved your party!
ReplyDeleteYes, those cuddly punks can sometimes lift flagging but drunkenly indulgent spirits at a party. If you really want to blow people's minds, though, whack on some Monteverdi or Wagner. Sharon can vouch for this.
DeleteThe Grand Erector's right, it's ANARCHISM we are contending with here, the Narodniks regretting the spread of capitalism in Russia and wishing peasants wouldn't move to towns. We ARE privatised and deregulated and we'd better find a means of dealing with where we are! Jesus, Paul, you don't understand Lenin, and you seem to have adopted Harry's line on Punk, i.e. regretting the halcyon days of Henry Cow, that wan bunch of Zappa diluters.
ReplyDeleteHaha, interesting that Henry Cow should be brought up. I was thinking some of the above arguments have that air of Art Bears/Chris Cutler at their worst: less rescuing tradition from the conformity that threatens to overpower it, more The Waste Land (timelessness, immateriality).
ReplyDeleteIn other words the arguments feel like a defence of Beethoven as a high point of bourgeois culture. I think even Jacob's correct recourse to actual listening has an element of 'imagine how it must've sounded at the time' i.e. let's reconstruct the historical/cultural context so we can try and re-enact the rupture that Beethoven must have caused, even though for us it can't be experienced as more than a little tremor that won't even rattle the chandeliers. Or: its not bringing an unexploded bomb into the present, its more like Time Team!
(On academia, having done my fair share of organising, being kettled, beaten etc.: I still think Ben is right when he says IT'S ALREADY HAPPENED! The problem is many academics and the like can't face up to the fact they are glorified artificial inseminators, like someone doing the limbo their feet are in front of their heads. But I'll still be out there in the new term on the demos and in the occupations.
I can put up with a bit of ad hominem (after all, since social being determines consciousness, it isn't *me* that's being attacked, is it?); but it would be nice if Ben attacked what I said, and not the *opposite*.
ReplyDeleteI'm *not* pissed-off at the rubbishing of 'bourgeois greatness' , I'm saying that Beethoven is busy doing that, too - and noting the direct correlations of Beethoven and dialectic, Beethoven and Hegelian philosophy (hence that "cryptic and unattractive' remark I first posted, which I would once have expected Ben to whoop at; but these days he prefers monolithic assertion to "dialectical phantasms").
Ben says I interpret Beethoven's work "as a defence of the best of bourgeois culture"; in fact I said that there's an implicit critique of that in Beethoven. It is *Ben* who reckons Beethoven "established the basic frame of "music" as we know it"; I think Beethoven unpacks and attacks that dubious construct. LvB's ways of working - variation itself varying, change as a constant, the use of microscopic sound-increments as building-blocks, even the attack in the late quartets on the notion of a fixed melody – are all the *absolute antithesis* of the rule-book-derived, convention-bound world of academic classicism. I'd be delighted to see Ben have a go at that – as Adorno did. (The only occasion I can recall TWA being lost for words is in an article where he says he simply can't describe how dreadful Sibelius is.) I'd have thought Teddie said it as clearly as you could want: that "in [Beethoven's] music the idea of totality as something already achieved had become unbearable". He speaks elsewhere of the way that Beethoven's music is driven to continue from moment to moment by negativity and by incompleteness. This all sounds to me much like the way the best improv. works; everything always in a state of becoming, and nothing ever definitively, finally, totally 'just' raw material, or 'just' waste material. None of this is at all like the bourgeois model of music, neatly set out by Jacob B-R: cut-and-dried, unitary and unchangeable, implicitly celebratory of a world-order/world-view that's cut-and-dried, unitary and unchangeable. Wanting this newness/malleability is the *opposite* of the nostalgia Jacob B-R and I stand accused of. (It's interesting, in that regard, that this discussion has gone straight back to talking about Brahms and the Beatles as if Jacob hadn't done a very elegant number on them: "the whole that's always the whole, the parts that are always parts". As he implies: they're commodity music. They're BOTH, equally, the enemy. To love Brahms - or the Beatles - uncritically, unthinkingly, because you know them of old: what the f*ck is that, if not nostalgia?) But then Ben thinks Evan Parker is corny; whereas I was at Café Oto a few weeks ago listening to Evan and the noise artist John Wiese whipping up as unholy a racket as Brötzm. ever has. Now *there's* music where "notes and chords don't mean a thing".
An afterthought on listening. Adorno - in the analysis of scores for which he, Jacob B-R and I get such stick - is looking closely at what a piece of music *does*; an *adjunct* to listening, not its evasion. Back before recording you *needed* notation to catch complexity, to grasp contingencies. It's terribly exciting, in a teenage sort of a way, to view writing out dots as a piece of bourgie elitism, best confronted by learning three obvious chords, playing them in root position, and forming a band. It is really rather stale, attacking notation as the Enemy. Why not go the whole hog and have a go at writing words? Reading and writing music isn't reserved for an expensively-educated inner cadre (as it happens, I can't do it); but is a relatively easily-acquired skill. The Beatles writing out chords is notation, for f*ck's sake. It would be good to be a bit less Sniffing Glue about this; what matters is *what's* notated, and to what *end*. Adorno's Beethoven book is full of precise analyses of minute sonic epiphanies, moments which irreversibly reconstruct the way you listen. (Check him out on the last-minute addition of a pair of notes before the original opening of the slow movement of the Op. 106, which re-shape how you hear what follows *completely*.) These sorts of moment are the "solid things" Ben says he values; and to view analysis that enables them to be heard as arid (because you can't do it?) is fatuous and self-defeating, exactly the wrong sort of "plumpes Denken". To valorise such a stance as revolutionary authenticity is just Proletkult dressed as Tony Parsons.
ReplyDeleteBen Watson as a proletcultist? I'm not buying it.
ReplyDeleteAlternatively, there are technical-apparatus insights into music that need expansion. Here's a favourite example (I sob when the drum kicks in);
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_sUeGC-8dyk&feature=player_embedded#!
Ah, yes. Henry Cow. Couldn't agree more. In the blue corner, a politically-astute leftist collective running their own label and distribution company, organising their own tours, paying their road crew the same as themselves, playing regularly at PCI benefits in Italy, and performing music running the gamut from free improv. through to complex compositions. And in the RED CORNER - to pluck an example out of thin air - hired musicians signed to a major label playing commercial venues and - between guitar-solos and drum-solos - singing about titties and beer whilst promising not to come in people's mouths. NOW I get it.
ReplyDeleteNever mind the ethics/politics, what about the records? The Cow are great, but they don't really get beyond Uncle Meat. And both lyrically and musically (I'm thinking particularly of Apostrophe, Overnite Sensation and One Size Fits All), Zappa provides a dialectics of the commodity undreamt of by the literate Marxists of Henry Cow. In this sense, Zappa is both a radicalisation of Mahler and the obverse of Helmut Lachenmann.
DeleteVery interesting discussion - but I still don't see any convincing arguments against the original post. If you can give specific arguments why Beethoven moves you and Brahms does not, then aren't you questioning the settled greatness of both? The point is to be honest and not fake it - your sensual response is what's real and important, not reputations and received greatness. Of course the same applies to The Beatles and Muddy Waters, both having been canonized themselves. OTL doesn't say so here, but doesn't the same point about "settled greatness" apply to commercial pop? Mass production of music politicizes the spirit. Number of copies sold is not an argument - we need to know exactly what The Beatles or Hannah Montana do to you.
ReplyDeleteWhen Frank Zappa said "We hate your dots" he wasn't saying not to use notation - he loved writing on score paper, and some people thought he was quite good at it - he was performing class analysis of the industry of writing music and having other people copy it and perform it, and the difficulty of achieving viable contemporary music in a culture where it's more profitable to play Beethoven and show tunes. And I think that's what OTL is after - a discussion of music that includes analysis of its mediations - and that is what is happening here (I think).
Ben Watson on Wordsworth's Prelude & Beethoven's Fidelio
ReplyDeleteI think Ken Fox's remarks are spot on, as far as they go; but what is to stop (if, that is, you want it stopped, or think it ethical to stop it) someone having an honest - and favourable - sensual response to Hannah Montana? Without wanting to get into the whole "false consciousness" schtick (a separate, if related, issue) it is hard to see how you're going to prefer Muddy Waters to HM without understanding that 'bluing' notes isn't a category error like a wrong note, and without some grasp of the value of 'the grainy voice' over syrupy vocal perfection. Which, I suppose, it what lies behind my banging on about Adorno-on-Beethoven. It isn't that LvB has gone stale, it's that listening now needs to be different (we haven't all grown up in a sonic milieu shaped by Haydn and Mozart, as almost all 'serious music' listeners would have in Beethoven's hey-day; and, as Ben says, recordings have altered how we hear, and how we can hear). This, imho, is what makes an attentive analysis of what's going on invaluable. As - credit where due - we often get with Ben on Bailey or Zappa; and with Adorno on Beethoven.
ReplyDeleteThanks for your comments harryg.
ReplyDeleteConceptualizing the dissonance in blues is very useful and necessary task, but I don't think it is a prerequisite for enjoyment - the blue notes and grainy voice are technical advances that make music sound more like everyday life. A five-year old may relate to blues because they recognize an authentic voice, but a teenager cannot because they don't want to listen to an old man groaning.
Teenagers can certainly relate to the rhythm and tempo of hit pop - why try to stop them? But if you ask them why they like what they do they usually respond with identity-affirming bullshit. Awareness of mediation (hopefully) comes with age and experience. Still, I won't hesitate to ask my teenage daugher (in the 2020s) to analyze her choices - of course she won't - but it doesn't hurt to put the question inside someone's head. I also like to remind my 5-yr-old that the real purpose of TV is to sell us things.
Well, this post did ruffle some feathers, didn’t it? The contemplation of Harry Gilonis admiring two notes “added at the last minute” to Opus 106 is soothing, of course, like a sip of sweet sherry. But it begs the question: WHY were we subjected to this lengthy (not-to-say yawn-inducing) self-portrait of the politically-correct music buff polishing his aestheticism? I’ll tell you why. It’s because the AMM dared reprise Walter Benjamin’s programme: seize what’s positive in mass culture’s destruction of artistic aura, go forth and act. Apparently this proposal is “idiotic”. But to whom? Like the tender souls of German Idealism, aghast at Marx’s discovery that Communards were solving problems of philosophy which had foxed the best minds of Germany, Harry and Paul recoil at the suggestion that pop music has anything to teach them. So Paul abandons the project he announced ten years ago, which was to explain rock music to itself. Instead, he’s followed Harry into a gilded autodidact chamber hung with mirrors reflecting the solitary aesthete’s taste, knowledge and expertise (with a list of improv gigs conscientiously-attended hung proudly on the wall). You’ve made a culture of distinction out of stuff that aims to end distinction! I dread to think how you two talk to civilians about music - the sheer weight of do’s and don’ts, the albatross of an entire “culture” you know about, and they ignore. For a good reason: it’s a breeding ground for preening cretins! You say I should love the music of over-educated shit-heads because they paid their roadies and played gigs for the Italian Communist Party (nice work if you can get it). But what if Henry Cow sounds like blurry bad jazz rock today? Can this be figured in the moralistic carpet of your weave of justifying self? Moralistic anarchism, blind to the simple facts which stare us in the face. Poor music chasing poorer politics! Admit, it’s crap. Dissing bourgeois culture doesn’t ally me with the positivists, Paul, you’ve got your own pet positivist on board, i.e. Harry. A man who’s never ventured an unguarded opinion, and can only report (endlessly) “facts” about a culture he admires (but doesn’t understand) — until you want to die of boredom. To talk about pop is not to be Tony Parsons, it’s to talk about the very heart and muscle of capitalism. Harry’s kitsch projection of avant’s determinate negations into a positive culture is deathly, and shows in the fact that his comments simply regurgitate Adorno like some sacred text, with no new twist or thought. Of course Harry’s been an empty shell for nigh on thirty years, but Paul! What happened? Bin these borrowed clothes and dare to be yourself.
ReplyDeleteFar from "recoiling at the suggestion that pop music has anything to teach me", I have always acknowledged my considerable debt to my teen faves King Crimson, Van der Graaf Generator and, even, Yes. Without them, I would not have discovered jazz and "classical" music. Similarly, my youthful imbibing of Peter Hammill lyrics was probably almost wholly responsible for my interest in philosophy, as well as informing some of my literary predilections. Moreover, my recent experience of community service, during which I was subjected to 8 hours of Capital FM at a time, reminded me of the sheer misery and boredom to which many of the employed are subjected.
DeleteWhat the fuck would my wearing unborrowed clothes entail - pretending to like Johnny Thunders?
Now that sounds more like the old Paul. I'm afraid I've got to bow out of this highly-entertaining debate because we're all off to Bad Doberan for Zappanale 23 tomorrow. The summer before he died Gamma - street drinker and the biggest Zappa fan any of us ever experienced - managed to watch an entire Zappanale online. I imagine that must be even easier today. George Duke with Jean-Luc Ponty promises to be good. And if you start to miss my endless stream of rage-inducing idiocies, tune in on Wednesday at 1pm, I'll be delivering "lecture" on Captain Beefheart alongside Didier Mervelet of Les Fils de l'Invention, a script written entirely in OTL's hyperconfusing wordjazz. Noone at Zappanale ever understands anything I argue coherently, so I've decided to rely on intuitive verbal disjectamenta. On my return, I shall attempt to explain why Yes is a real problem in your make-up, Paul, and one which maybe Zappa is not sufficient to negate - their hysterical exhibition of chops doesn't know how silly it is (rather like Harry showing everyone how much he thinks he knows at an AMM meeting ... and coming over like a chump ... it is not for nothing that the restoration of Yes's reputation in the pages of The Wire began with Branford Marsalis and Vernon Reid coming out as fans, both responsible for some of the WORST music ever). The real reply to Yes has to be ... hmmm UK Subs? Evil Dick? ATV? Mel Torme with an arrangement by Marty Paich? Bad Brains!! Wishbone Ash!!! Over to Andy ...
ReplyDeleteThe restoration of Yes's reputation has nothing whatsoever to do with me; for the last quarter of a century I've regarded their music has irksome hippy piffle (although still preferable to the Clash). I mention them only because I find Simon Reynold's editing and polishing of his teen predilections narcissistic and contemptible (see the first paragraph of his Rip it Up).
ReplyDeleteTo claim, like a celebrity fuckwit on nostalgia telly, that the real reply to Yes is the UK Subs is like claiming that a bag of crisps is the real reply to a dodgy burger. I prefer steak.
DeleteI probably shouldn't continue this argument (not least as antagonistically as I am about to), but who cares.
ReplyDeleteA quick response to this: "I think even Jacob's correct recourse to actual listening has an element of 'imagine how it must've sounded at the time' i.e. let's reconstruct the historical/cultural context so we can try and re-enact the rupture that Beethoven must have caused" - This line of argument quickly dissolves into the ancient bourgeois aesthetics vs. history debate, which was predicated on some quite silly claims, like artworks not being historical (either being just of their time, or being eternal). The point of dialectical listening is to cut through this gordian knot composed of the frayed ends of stupidity and golden-calf-worship. The short answer is that, yes, it is necessary to know something about history, and to know (and listen to) music historically, through its historical decay, to its death at which point everything becomes a ringtone. The proposal that all this music is just out there, and needs to be honestly listened to in the present without the history of the music does a massive disservice to that present, which is finely woven of those threads of perpetual destruction which, when illuminated we call culture. And yes, this requires some critical historicism, but then so does *every* definition of the avant-garde.
Anyway, on to being antagonistic. I think all this hatred of scores, of dots on pages, is pathetic bullshit. Not everyone who talks about dots is an Eduard Hanslick or a Heinrich Schenker, and not all talk about notes is a fetish of technique. Far from it. The fact is that writing music down, as a means of its possible reproduction, is very much part of its technics, its relationship to knowledge and to capital. In fact, it starts to tell you that this whole business of the reproduction of the artwork is the concommitant social form of the artworks' self-pronouncement of its transience as each piece disappears into silence. And unless you're going to deal with this written stuff seriously, you have no chance of grasping what changes recording and radio made to music. Apart from anything else, reading a score, sitting with it in silence, or taking it apart on a piano, playing it in your head or in bits, is an important aesthetic experience. You wouldn't make the same claims about poetry or plays so why about music? But then it's also come to my mind that some of you probably aren't interested in the sociality of artworks per se, but rather in one particular moment of the introduction of electricity and recording. I can't help but think of that silly line from Engels' Dialectics of Nature: "The description of the electric spark, for instance, might have been translated directly from the corresponding passage in Hegel." But if you think that's all that the technics of music is then you're deeply conservative - you're missing out everything else. Why just electricity and not the Neapolitan sixth? Or the Gesamtkunstwerk? Or opera as an introduction of music's self-reflexion? Or fugue? Or the use of ostinati in early Stravinsky? Or listening to music while taking drugs? All of these things are the technics we should be discussing.
But worse than these omissions is the fact that the quite explicit incapacities of talking about the make up of music leaves two indelible marks on the type of argument that's being had here: The first is that you all sound like people trying to describe a painting, but you have only having been given words for colours and not for lines and form. That's probably a historical problem of the homogeneity of popular (and less popular popular) musical forms in the twentieth century, that critics just described texture and timbre, and as their audiences weren't musically educated they didn't say things like "it sounds like a dominant over a tonic pedal" (which as it happens is a more precise description of anything that what I read in most music criticism these days, because it actually puts in my head what it might sound like!) The second is that you all sound like a bunch of anoraks, who are trying to discuss music by listing names of artists, but you seem to have not much to say about them other than whether you like them or not, and making the odd concept about the patterns of their social consumption (which as it happens *is* generic, insofar as they all sold records and did some gigs.)
ReplyDeleteAnd then you think it's fair to attack Harry for actually talking about some notes in a piece of music - maybe you are all just terrified of the precision of the point he is making, because unlike most of what has been said here it isn't covered in several inches of dust.
Jacob B-R - you say some interesting things, I enjoyed especially your earlier posts. But I don't know where you are coming from. Nowhere above does anyone attack the use of musical notation or close analysis of scores. The original post was directed against socialists and activists who think music is unimportant or has no place in political discussion. THE POINT is that music is now mass produced and a commodity available to all, with social relations embedded - so what you like IS a political question. Unless you are a stuffy classical music person who worships the canon of greats, this should affirm what you already think - that music is worth talking about and is socially relevant - maybe it will inspire you to mention Beethoven in a political conversation if you don't already. You argued for Beethoven using RECORDINGS of performances - so you agree that his greatness is not a settled fact, it needs to be examined and argued. You argued against Brahms - so I guess his greatness is not a settled fact either. Harryg called OTL an idiot then agreed with me agreeing with him - is all this just personal?
ReplyDeleteJacob may not have liked my "Notes and chords don't mean a thing", maybe not recognising it from the song - "Notes and chords don't mean a thing / listen to the rhythm, listen to us sing" (ATV: Action, Time Vision), where it clearly implies that 'notes and chords' aren't the main thing for understanding electric music (electric blues, punk), and not intended as a rejection of scores, notation, etc., as such.
ReplyDeleteIt's not just the "notes and chords don't mean a thing" but also OTL's "It's just I've taken Adorno into uncharted territory whereas Jacob and Harry want to stick with his analyses of scores.", and "The contemplation of Harry Gilonis admiring two notes “added at the last minute” to Opus 106 is soothing, of course, like a sip of sweet sherry" as well as the Zappa "we hate your dots" thing. I was also following on from Harry's argument. As for this thing about notes and chords not being the main thing for understanding electric music, I know there is this argument (in Aesthetic Theory there is a nice moment where Adorno praises Stockhausen's electric works for the fact that they throw themselves away as soon as they have been performed) but actually subjecting electric music to formal analysis is often productive.
ReplyDeleteAs I mentioned above, Zappa loved his dots - so did Pierre Boulez, the Ensemble Modern, and many others. "We hate your dots" is part of an analyis of the division of labour in written music, which separates thought from action in the manner of industry. The whole history of modern music is about trying to overcome that separation.
DeleteI've not been cowering from Ben's lash, I've been away from e-mail.
ReplyDeleteFirstly: Ken Fox is quite right that there are big areas of overlap in all our collective concerns (we're all leftists, despite some of Ben's bizarrer accusations). Nobody that I've read has sought to derail the A.M.M.'s project; there have been some forthright political critiques (mostly not addressed, I notice), but for my part what I've been trying to prevent is Ben hindering his own intentions by employing over-simplistic bluster which either puts people off or leads people astray. Whether all of classical music is a putrefying corpse or all of it is wonderful (I'd take neither position), it is straightforwardly the case that Beethoven differs crucially from Brahms, in that there are things that our ears, our hearts and our minds can learn from the former, while the latter is, now, for the most part wallpaper. Blurring the distinction helps nobody, and no cause either. Ben laudably calls for an end to distinction, but curiously muddles together critical distinction and socio-political discrimination – and then seems to want to dispense with the wrong one.
Secondly: I'm not persuaded by the rhetorical flourish "pop is the very heart and muscle of capitalism". Pop is a component of the ideological support-system, and has come to generate a lot of commodities. But it is a lot less key to capital's operancy than, say, the financial system. If pop vanished tomorrow, it would dent the profits of some multinationals; but I can't see that it would produce a crisis.
Thirdly: I'm not going to respond specifically to most of Ben's remarks directed at me, because he's still attacking me for the opposite of what I've said. Pointing this out repeatedly, to no effect, is a waste of pixels. But one is too daft to let slip: where in these posts have I suggested that there's nothing to be got from pop music? I draw the line at the more obnoxiously manipulative slabs of the culture industry, as do most people whose subscription to "Smash Hits" has lapsed.
Finally: Ben thinks sweet sherry is "soothing". That judgement in itself puts all his taste into question. That stuff tastes like kid's sweets shaken up in warm water. Blechcch.
PS: manqué the unlikely event of Ben taking iit into his head to *listen* to the Beethoven Piano Sonata Op. 106 and responding specifically (if he is going to, I recommend the Pollini recording on DGG), then here are my FINAL remarks on those two notes “added at the last minute” to the slow movement. Obviously, *objectively* they are no different than any other afterthought that raises the ante: Lol Coxhill 'bluing' a note, gradations of feedback in the Jesus and Mary Chain, Sun Ra layering raw synth noise against a pitched piano line. It is just such sensory details that catch the ear, the heart, the mind - in that order. As Keith says: "I sob when the drum kicks in": that's "the subjective response of sensuous humanity". Which is where Ben and I both start listening, surely. Or, at least, why.
ReplyDeleteSo glad that the aesthetes are still congratulating themselves for the fineness of their feelings while I was away in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. But I trawl through their pompous guff without finding ONE original response or un-prevalidated idea. Harry's three magic moments in music illustrates the problem perfectly: like David Toop's playlists for on-the-sofa sublimity, the only thing which brings these dried muffin remnants together is the connoisseur's own self-regard. "Mass culture is desublimated higher culture" said Marcuse (The Obsolescence of Psychoanalysis, 1963) and hence THE object for engaged criticism. To turn past engagements into a personal possession which allows you to despise the benighted masses is a task for fools and snobs - by whom we appear to be besieged. You understand nothing about the AMM is trying to do, Harry. All you do is consume the work of others. Your thoughts ARE sweet sherry. Blechcch!
DeleteI came back to this site after a fortnight away from a computer in the mild hope that Ben might have done some listening - or even thinking - in the interim; but evidently he's been too busy, or perhaps he's still nursing a Paulaner hangover. As so often in recent years, it seems that anyone who disagrees with him is a fool or a snob. Has he *met* Paul Sutton? Or Jacob B-R? Which of these are they? Or are they both both? As ever when arguing with Ben, our declared faults aren't our actual opinions but their direct opposites (never say Ben has learnt nothing from Stalinism). Reading back through the pabulum, it seems I declared the A.M.M.'s programme to be “idiotic”. Of course I didn't. I took issue with Ben's post, quite specifically his ignorant (and much more importantly, misleading) conflation of Beethoven and Brahms. (It is interesting that Ben has entirely ignored Jacob B-R's demolition-job on that conflation, presumably because he doesn't actually know enough about music to reply.) And now it seems I'm "despising the benighted masses" (now there's a turn of phrase). What fatuous cack this is. What's that great phrase in Bunting - "Spell out a fart / and get it printed"? It must be even easier to do that if you self-publish.
ReplyDeleteOh dear, seems I have to spell it out. I deliberately conflated Bach, Beethoven and Brahms in order to highlight the contradictions of bourgeois "greatness", and why it's a Good Thing record listening broke concert-hall repertoire as the definition of musical greatness. Thank you Beatles. However, I must say I'm chuffed to hear that "in recent years" I've come over as such a Delightfully Repulsive Enemy to you Harry - at last I must be doing something RIGHT. Is this maybe since December 2010? God Save the AMM!
ReplyDeleteYet again North has always been South, and Oceania has always been allied to Eastasia... Ben's original post refers quite uncomplicatedly to "the whole settled thing of bourgeois 'greatness' (Bach, Beethoven and Brahms etc)". I pointed out, as best I could, why these three weren't in fact doing the same thing, and that this had important aesthetico-political implications, and that it was weird that a supposed Adornoite could not know this. Jacob B-R then filled in the musicology very adroitly. Time passed, the Great Soviet Encyclopaedia Re-Write Committee were drafted in, and now Ben is the man who, all along, was trying to highlight the contradictions between these three composers. OK, I give up. Yes, I love Big Benedick; and, no, I don't think him either delightful or repulsive. A frequently tiresome mixture of arrogant and ignorant, yes; but not repulsive. And if 'Enemy' is to be the term, I suspect it is in the Wyndham Lewis mode; Ben, after all, works very hard at being everyone else's enemy ... but chiefly ends up being his own.
ReplyDeleteHarry, for the record, I find your comparisons with Stalinism incredibly stupid. It's the sort of bullshit teenage anarchists spout. The AMM Control Commission hereby condemns you to a lifetime of consuming "adroit musicology" - apparently it's the only language you understand.
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure changing your position through 180º and implying this reflects consistency of opinion actually puts anyone closer to negative dialectix than to the praxis of the Man of Steel. But do please explain why in Ben's case it shows a delightful whimsy that's lost on me, rather than an inability to think straight.
ReplyDeleteWhat, back to the beginning & we're going to do it all again? Ok, here's roughly what I said way above - the "B's" is a useful list because all 3 predate recording technology & the politicization of art in mass production. The fact that the 3 Bs had radically different styles within an acoustic, concert-hall tradition strengthens the essential argument because it emphasizes that "recording and records came and upset the whole settled thing of bourgeois 'greatness'" If you argue that Brahms sucks ass and Beethhoven kicks ass by pointing to RECORDED perormances as evidence then you are agreeing with OTLs very simple point, not demolishing it.
ReplyDeleteI also invoked Frank Zappa, who is one of the last composers to make great music in the classical orchestra tradition, and had the bourgoise ideology to go with it, but nevertheless could not talk about making music without also talking about class and money and division of labour and dozens of munchkins in dark places copying out his lines and dots.
This is what comes up on Amazon when I enter 'Bach Brahms Beethoven': http://www.amazon.com/Mozart-Bach-Beethoven-Brahms-Baby/dp/B0084O3A0Q/ref=sr_1_6?ie=UTF8&qid=1345577482&sr=8-6&keywords=bach+brahms+beethoven
ReplyDeleteI think everything that Adorno argued about the crapification of classical music via recording and broadcast, with the accompanying loss of any hint of revolutionary potential it may once have had, can be perfectly summed up thus.
If you don't push aesthetics to extremity -- whether thru radical reinterpretation, 'playing the hear-stripe', altering the sound itself thru new musical resources, or any other means at your disposal -- you cannot arrive at truth. An accurate aural photograph of an 18th century masterpiece is a LIE, just as the sensitivity of an acoustic singer-songwriter accurately projected out to tens of thousands of people is a lie. It doesn't acknowledge the mediations of its reproduction, nor the altered social relations between the time of composition and performance; like the wax figures in natural history museum displays, it presents an ersatz image of culture as timeless and immutable, independent of the mediations of its environment and society.
Ben is pointing to the fact that the only recorded music which isn't lying is the stuff that acknowledges its labour and materials and the listeners' place and PLAYS with them: i.e. Zappa's AAAFNRAA, Derek Bailey's idea of CDs that play only once & then self-erase, the blues & rock'n'roll fuzz, Beefheartian microphone-breaking vocals, Stevie Wonder scratching-at-the-car-speaker clavinet, Jaworzyn throbbing electricity, Henri Chopin technological throat explorations, Lee Scratch Perry, Sun Ra, Johnny Paycheck, X-Ray Spex, P-DI, Tony Oxley, James Chance, Napalm Death, Culturcide, Dumitrescu, Avram, Hendrix, Coltrane, Evil Dick, Simon Fell, Dr. Octagon, Varese, Chadbourne, Tod Dockstader, Betty Davis, Shannon Jackson, Jose Maceda, Su Tissue, Dogbiz, et al. Recording as production, not merely reproduction; because ALL recording is electronic, and the Famous Great Recordings of the Famous Great Dead Wig Wearers are generally lousy for the record.
That's not to say that all their music is worthless today -- but as Adorno acknowledged, the compression required to reproduce a music designed for acoustic instruments and played in acoustic space can destroy its original impact entirely, and necessitates the impurities of invention to bring it back to life. Recording made Beethoven 'easy listening' -- only electrified pop made Beethovian tonality sound shocking again.
"necessitates the impurities of invention to bring it back to life" - !!NICELY PHRASED!!
Deletealso love the "Classics For Babies" find - eagerly awaiting my copy in the mail!
Kudos Filboid.
At last someone prepared to face with sober senses what in fact we listen to. May the "defenders of culture" now please dwindle off into oblivion, their banners of cheesy self-achievement held aloft.
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ReplyDeleteI don't know why but even when I believed that Adorno was an elitist (and he wasn't) for criticizing pop culture, I never thought that if he was right, I had to stop listening to the music I enjoyed. I always reacted with: why should we choose between Beethoven and the Beatles?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gsp4VCbVvn4
Later, I realized that Adorno was attacking "mass culture" not as such but because it was NOT "mass" culture. The concept of "culture industry" was explicitly designed to unveil "culture" (not only records and films but books of philsophy, too...) as a mean for the extraction of surplus value (or the ideological defence of it). The way I see it, Ben's Esemplasm, the AMM, Free Improvisation ecc. are all attempts to pitch the making/appreciation of art & music against capitalist exploitation.
From the other side, and from the same reason, Adorno defended Beethoven and Bach AGAINST their high-brow fans, i.e. he was interested in saving the truth-content of their works against cultural reification. "Art" is the word Adorno used to define the dialectical revolt against the status quo and its fixed hierarchies (mind/body, high/low, ecc.). But it is itself something that should be understood in its dialectical tension with "not-Art": rubbish is pertinent. Between "intelligent", "articulated" entertainment and silly farces a la Marx bros, Adorno had no doubt: the first is ideology, the latter testifies the urgency of truth (he said something like this in Minima Moralia, where he praises Satie's irriverent immediacy against Schoenberg's complexity). Rock 'n' roll could be understood in a similiar way: the thrill derived from seeing the cage of rationality being abused by the oppressed.
And as Marco pointed out on Facebook recently, the power of pop music to corrupt and putrefy the minds of world youth are practically limitless - isn't this something to be USED rather than contemned as "commodified"? Listen to Ringo Starr ... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2H_SsrNE8eI
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