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March 20, 2005
A lot of music criticism works within, but does not question the classical/light duality, or the serious and the popular, and does not see them as two halves of a whole. This is particualary evident amongst those who conceive of musical value in terms of its structural complexity and independence from the commercial logic of the market economy.
What this ignores is Walter Benjamin's insight about the liquidation of art in the sense that art as we have known it is coming to an end. As Susan Buck-Morss puts it, this means that:
"Bourgeois art has always been a commodity, bought and sold on the market, so the commodification of art is not the point. His argument is, rather, that the technological conditions of production have so thoroughly blurred the boundary between "art" and cultural objects generally that its special, separate status cannot be maintained. Engineering has challenged the special status of architecture, journalism that of literature, photography that of painting, cinema that of theater."
Consequently, the those who valorize European classical music as art tend to examine rock music primarily in terms of harmony and structure, as these are understood and valued in classical music, not rock. This approach attempts to validate rock by focusing on the small amount of it that lives up to traditional fine art values.
What is needed is a rock criticism that honors rock's own complexity rather than the ways in which it approaches the aesthetic standards of other styles.
It is only this way that we can begin to understand a live version of the perennial Grateful Dead tune,'Dark Star' or Brian Wilson's advanced harmony and his impressive studio experiments in timbre and overdubbing, Cream's appropriation of the blues into 1960s rock, with its celebrating both incarnations of the style, or the experimentation of Pink Floyd.
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gary - just because I'm not commenting doesn't mean I'm not reading. Thanks.