July 14, 2005
Grateful Dead, romanticism, aesthetics
I heard someone on Radio Breakfast say that music--rock and roll for the masses--- was to be listened to, and not written about. The statement was not picked up by the Fran Kelly the presenter. It was if there were no cultural meanings around music, and there was no such as a tradition of aesthetics.
Consider the concept of Animated Architecture, which refers to Candice Brightman's magnificient light shows for the Grateful Dead
Jim Anderson
Consider what Marmaduke Dawson, guitarist of the New Riders of the Purple Sage, who toured with the Dead in 1970-71, says of the Grateful Dead:
"None of them knew where they were going, especially during the long, three- to five-hour sets when, fortified by a good bit of LSD, they were trying for the magic. Garcia would be there playing around with something and Weir would be playing around with something and everybody would be doing five things together on the stage, and people would still be listening and saying, what the hell is going on here? And sometimes they would get it, the magic of all of them seeming to think together. The magic could be worth waiting for, but for the fans, so too was the waiting."
Well that magic--the existential rush of teetering on the edge of chaos, when chaos gives birth to new musical forms---wasn't happening in the 1990s in the large stadiums playing to 60,000 people.
This doodling is usually interpreted in terms of romantic aesthetics: what David Gans calls self-expression, self-indulgence, being in the moment, making it real, being honest about it, and fostering a higher consciousness based on unconscious processes. It is an aesthetic that elevates the artist's orginality, emotion, spontaneity and invention as the measure of aesthetic success as artists rather than entertainers.
However, Candice Brightman's light shows are a long way from a bunch of freakish acid heads and dreamers, who drawing on the authentic tradition of white folk music and African-American blues, to create authentic music. It is high tech, fabricated, and linked to the doodling.
The Grateful Dead were a corporation whose marketing strategy was premised on a counter cultural (alternative) ethos of authenticity that was positioned against convention, decadence and betrayal. Authenticity was established through the outsider, outlaw Dionysian image of Andrew Oldham marketing of the early demonic Rolling Stones, the Malcolm McLaren marketing of the nihilistic Sex Pistols and the authentic blue collar Bruce Springston spontaneous outflow of genuine emotion.
Artistic musical expression, commerce and advanced electronic technology walked hand in hand in the 1990s. Time to drop the romanticism I reckon since since rock is a commercial enterprise.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at July 14, 2005 07:17 PM | TrackBack