The modernist understanding of music interprets music to have no meaning other than its harmonic and formal structure (pretty orderly sound), whilst noise is held to be the expression of human emotion, social practices, social responses to music and political control and money.
This formalist account of music mostly refers to classical music. It is hard to justify this understanding of music given that the dominant economic system of our time is one in which ownership equals profit.This is seen with popular music, which is controlled by giant corporations selling product. On the other hand,the noise of rock music can be understood as a rupture or resistance toward the dominant ideals of classical music.
High cultural theoriests sometimes dismiss the repetitions of popular music as infantile and psychotic. Adorno is a case in point. This interprets popular music as an inferior form of music.
The contradictions of popular culture make it clear that in order to support itself, a capitalist system must provide products which contradict its goals. Hence we have the situation in which music megacorporations release anti-corporate songs by the Clash, the Sex Pistols, and Gang of Four, or hegemonic institutions like Geffen and CBS Records release anti-authoritarian works by Public Enemy. This music matters because it is an important way in which young people accommodate themselves to the contradictions of capitalism.
If we turn to Attali's modes of music outlined in Noise, and repetition mode of music in particular, we can see that its industrial progress in recording technology, makes way for a whole new mode of understanding music. Examples are Phil Spector's work, the tape-manipulated songs of Brian Wilson's such as "Good Vibrations" on Smile or the Beatles "A Day in the Life" on St Pepper. These songs could never be fully re-created in any other manner.This indicates that rocck music can maintain musical creativity within a commercial framework.
Does rock elude or supersede aesthetics, as some claim? One way that rock music can be understood is that it is a rupture or resistance toward the dominant ideals of classical music because it is a music of bodily desire and movement. This bodily desire highlights how the body senses reality in a biological or animalistic sense.
The aesthetic is a fundamentally cognitive experience. Not feeling good in my body is my way of criticizing the definition my culture gives to a situation. Cultural meanings are sensed bodily as being wrong. Just plain wrong as the badness hits you in the gut. So aesthetics is the body's form of critical cognition, and that this sensory knowledge can and should be trusted politically.
It is an aesthetics after art.