Dream Lights (Riverbank)

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Adorno Gone PostFreakEverything-MathFolkCore

I've been reading Philosophy of New Music, and various interpretations of it, and have a very rough, short response I've been tossing around.

In it, Adorno argues that to be successful, aside from a bunch of arbitrary criteria derived from the German tradition he means to disavow, music must be radical, and radical enough to anger audiences and make them realize that their own situation in society is pretty much awful.

Philosophy of New Music followed an essay he published entitled "On the Fetish Character in Music and the Regression of Listening." In that one he "presented the change in the function of music," as one that repetitively sells the commodities of mass culture to an audience which has become, for lack of a better word, lazy in their listening.

Here's the thing: how can he expect his high-brow position on music that develops according to its own rules, within each piece, to liberate the individual consumers if they completely ignore it and it is drowned out in the noise of the chaotic mass culture he so despises? Literally, his definition of music as true art with a moral responsibility won't get anything done. It gets studied and performed in classrooms and lectured about, but doesn't move anyone to action to improve their own situation. What sort of music can do this? Music that destroys boundaries and preconceptions of itself, but does so in a way that it can compete with mass culture. So write a record that is a piece of true art, that is radical, behaves by its own internal logic, and riles up the enslaved spirit, and then blast it at everyone louder than anything ever before. Invite people to a concert of what they're used to, sell them what they know and are conditioned to want, then once you have them start breaking down walls and make an example that they'll be there to experience.

Adorno, you're right, you just don't know how to sell it. Berg was a genius. So was Messiaen (who you probably would have hated, I haven't come across his name in your writing yet). So are Radiohead and Merzbow and Raccoo-oo-oon and Dillinger Escape Plan (a few records ago). Schoenberg caused such a stir because the educated concert-going Viennese public had, at the time, a sense of consonance and harmony and order that he disrupted. The public doesn't have this anymore. To most people, a violin sounds like a violin, nearly regardless of what it is doing. Lure them in with its sweet sound then melt their skulls with a wall of feedback, and be sure to throw in a triad just to point out how badly many of your followers, Adorno, missed the point.

There's one other big point that needs to be said: I enjoy music. A lot of aesthetic philosophers seem to have forgotten about this. It's OKAY if a piece doesn't point to truth or operate according to an internal dialectic or free the soul from the bonds of consumerist, production based society. Is it art? Who the hell cares? Let's dance.