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July 15, 2005
I heard someone on Radio Breakfast say that music--meaning 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 thing as a tradition of aesthetics that gives us the categories to make sense of autonomous art and popular culture.
What should have said is that music does need to be written about.
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.
Jim Anderson
It suggests that rock is not immediate, real or authentic in a way that jazz or classical music is not. It undercuts the romanticism of rock critics, such as Dave Marsh and Greil Marcus, who run the romantic aesthetic of authentic self-expression counterposed to inauthentic estalishment pop.
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's spontaneous outflow of genuine emotion.
Why not celebrate style or performance rather than intensity of feeling?
There are lots of meanings around music. Why there is even a rock canon that has been constructed that privileges 1960s music.
Artistic musical expression and experimentation, commerce (product for popular consumption) and advanced electronic technology walked hand in hand in the 1990s. Though rock music in this setting does not seem to be very rebellious, it is not a sellout to the corporation either. Rock is rooted in recording techology and the commerce of the music industry.
Time to drop the romanticism I reckon, since since rock music is a commercial enterprise that has little to do with high art and high culture and more to do with pulp fiction.
However that does not mean we need to accept the postmodern repudiation of aesthetics by cultural studies academics; nor accept the dualism of popular and high culture with the former the negative opposite of the latter.
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Long live Jerry