Bring the Noise

[Ralph Dumain]

Malgosia, you must know that the high-low distinction, imported from Europe
and tossed about here among the cultural elite, is none of my concern.  I
would say that the judgment of quality is something that goes on all the
time, on the part of musically trained people and non-musicians, and can be
done on varying levels of formal musical knowledge.  Now if one wants to
take on the task of why some three-chord pop song is not on the level of a
Beethoven symphony, I don't mind, but it is not really the issue here.  It
is the case that even by those kinds of considerations jazz really is a
complex, highly developed art form, though even some of its practitioners
historically have chafed against some of the formal restrictions imposed by
having to improvise off of show tunes, play hour-long sets in bars, etc.
Jazz is now in danger of being accepted as a high art form, which it
deserves, but which could make it, and perhaps already has, too respectable
for young proletarian customers.  Regardless of such considerations, the
formal measurement of musical quality is an interesting puzzle, esp. because
in our lifetimes our own personal responsiveness and standards change, from
childhood, to teeny-bopper, to young adult, to "mature" person, and we may
reject some of the tastes of our youth while retaining others.  The fact of
growing up is also an extra-musical consideration.  Another extra-musical
consideration is the phenomenon of cultural change, adapting to, adopting,
and adapting the unfamiliar.  Becoming sophisticated.  Learning to see
something as dated or corny.  All these things are not prima facie strictly
musical, though I suspect they can be subjected to formal musicological
analysis.  You know I don't care a hoot about defending the purity of high
culture against the unruly mob.  My point is, all levels of the population,
at all levels of musical seriousness as listeners, have notions of quality,
and respond to what they hear with differing levels of emotional commitment
and depth.  And this is where the quality of life enters in.  I said the
universal is not politics, it is not revolution, it is not social protest,
it is the development of humanity.  I don't care whether the Beatles are as
good as Beethoven.  I do know, though that Ice T is not Stevie Wonder, that
Sista Souljah is not Aretha Franklin.

I'm going to drive home this point once again so that even professors can't
misunderstand me, Doug.  It is the high point of intellectual snobbery at
its most liberally disgusting to hold oneself at a safe academic distance
from humanity and pontificate about the protest embedded in the cultural
forms of the gutter.  I do not take an instrumentalist attitude toward any
art form, whether it serves the revolution or not.  All of the discussion of
hip/hop, every bit of it on this list, with the exception of the comments
made by me and Scott Johnson and in some sense even Jim Jaszewski, are all
political evaluations: I like rap because it expresses anger at the terrible
conditions that exist and 'cause that's how I learned about these
conditions.  That is 100% pure Stalinism, so don't you lie, Doug, and talk
trash about agent provocateurs disrupting your precious academic reverie.  I
don't settle questions of the value of human life in Stalinist terms, but
you do, as you vacillate incoherently--just like I said!--between the petty
bourgeois poles of academic purity and political relevance.  These are your
categories, fella, not mine.

At 11:49 AM 8/7/97 -0400, malgosia askanas wrote, among other things:
>was there ever a developed body of writing that considered popular music
>from the viewpoint of the "high" musical aesthetics?  It seems to me that
>most of the "high" writing did not stoop to such critical analyses of
>popular music, and would either disregard it or dismiss it as worthless.

>Under these circumstances, traditional aesthetic standards find themselves
>in a pickle, because they no longer can tacitly assume some kind of
>inherited validity for popular culture.  One's aesthetics are very much
>shaped by what they one is exposed to from early on.  In a society where
>a small bunch of people is exposed to Chopin and a large majority derives
>their aesthetics from muzak and Bruce Springstein, the small bunch would
>have to take a very militant stance for -- what?  Massive aestethic regulation
>of popular culture?  -- if they wanted to effect any change.  On what grounds
>would they make such demands, take such a stance?  One can scientifically
>prove the harmful effects of asbestos in walls, but can one scientifically
>prove the harmful effects of elevator music?  
>
>Of course, one might say: you don't have to have scientific proof to
>know, viscerally, that elevator music is harmful.  Well, this "visceral"
>knowledge, however, is not the kind of knowledge that one would happily
>carry a banner for.  It is hard to understand how one can carry such 
>a banner without the whole thing simply degenerating into an impotent rant.  
>Which, I think, is part of the question you're asking.   I know you'll
>correct me if I'm wrong.