There’s nothing more embarrassing than someone from an older generation commenting on the present one. Think of the aging hippie professor, clad in jeans and t-shirt, trying to prove his bona fides by showing he is hip to his students’ latest taste in music. It never fails but to provoke amused giggles from the back of the classroom, followed up by the inevitable tweet : “I mean this guy is so out of it; that’s stuff, like, from a month ago.”
Having repented of my foolishness a couple of weeks ago in bringing to our readers’ attention an article by Charlotte Allen on the current sexual mores of the young, I now repeat my folly by turning to the parallel issue of, precisely, the musical tastes of the young. I say parallel because the article I now commend suggests that the music of yesterday is the prolegomena to the sexual mores of today. Put more simply, who says rock says hook up. The author is the renown philosopher Roger Scruton, and the essay can be found at http://www.aei.org/article/101717 or, in the fuller version, at http://www.american.com/archive/2010/february/soul-music. And we will all await, as we did last time when the youth movement spoke up to set matters straight on the effective truth of the alpha male, for commentators still in touch with the current generation (is it X, Y, Z or AAprime?) to show us where, perhaps, Scruton may have gone astray.
Scruton is a wonderful writer and an expert on music (among a thousand or so other things that he has studied and mastered). The current essay, “Soul Music,” is highly reminiscent of the famous chapter on music that appears near the beginning of Allan Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind. Bloom’s chapter is also on the music of the youth. Interestingly, too, Bloom and Scruton both begin from Plato, referring to the Republic. The theme is that music shapes the soul, and thus shapes the way of life or the regime. (“The ways of poetry and music are not changed anywhere without change in the most important laws of the city” Republic 424c). And sure enough, as our music has changed, so have our mores and laws, in the direction, as Cole Porter put it even before the revolution in rock, of “anything goes.” And consider for a moment not the music but the lyrics of that one:
In olden days a glimpse of stocking
Was looked on as something shocking,
But now, God knows,
Anything Goes.
Good authors too who once knew better words,
Now only use four letter words
Writing prose, Anything Goes.
The world has gone mad today
And good’s bad today,
Stop. “Good is bad today.” Porter saw not only where mores were heading, but what was to be a precise linguistic transformation. Kool! Of course, the dictum “anything goes” would be strictly libertarian, whereas the new ethic is in fact more restrictive: it permits only that which allows anything to go, while excluding anything that does not. This is what is known as political correctness or the dogmatism of relativism.
Returning to Bloom, he was known best for his attack on rock music. One line stands out: “life is made into a non-stop, commercially prepackaged masturbational fantasy” (p.75). His chapter on music, incidentally, is commonly thought to have been the reason for which this work of theory was able to burst out from beyond the narrow circle of academic readership to find its way to the top of the New York Times best seller list, earning him the envy and enmity of the academic establishment. Not even John Rawls, in his wildest, er, philosophical fantasy could top that.
There is more to the last point about selling books than meets the eye. I can testify to this first hand, for I knew Alan Bloom, as he once jokingly said to me, “before he was Alan Bloom,” meaning before he became a household celebrity. No one can say that Bloom knew he would become famous by writing Closing, as its success remains at the end of the day one of the more inexplicable events of modern culture. Still, I think its popularity was not a one-thousand percent accident. Bloom attacked rock music in large part to create a scandal. For a philosopher to jump into the mosh pit and talk about hip hop and MTV was to make him a shock jock avant la lettre. And the purpose was not so much to sell books–though the man could sure spend money!–as to try to reach and educate a portion of the youth generation. He attacked rock–he says as much at the beginning of his chapter–because he knew that modern youth would defend it. Indeed, he thought it was about the only thing they would defend as such, i.e., not on relativistic but absolute ground. And this was the kicker in his pedagogy: Defending something absolutely and with indignation is a precondition for philosophical inquiry. You have to love something first to be capable of beginning the ascent; you have to be in the thrall of a prejudice, to cling to something absolutely, before going through the wrenching experience of giving it up and opening up to the pursuit of truth. A student open-minded to everything would remain that way forever. “If a student can … get a critical distance on what he clings to, come to doubt the ultimate value of what he loves, he has taken the first and most difficult step toward the philosophic conversion.” (p.71) Bloom no doubt meant most of what he said about Mick Jagger, but the analysis was secondary to his “rhetorical” purpose of engaging some of his students and helping them to get some satisfaction.
Roger Scruton’s article is much more about music per se than Bloom’s chapter, but the two together make for some good reading. Make sure you get the version of the Scruton essay that contains the musical clips, and have your headphones ready.
March 8th, 2010 | 10:08 am
Back off Grandpa, Meshuggah RULEZ.
peace out,
SxGx
March 8th, 2010 | 11:35 am
Nice post, Jim and the Scruton piece is worth reading. Hopefully, Carl or Sam or both will weigh in since they seem to be the resident experts on all things musical, but for the sake of placating an expectant crowd I’ll throw in a few observations. Part of what bothers me about so much youthful music, especially the more bombastic kind Bloom and Scruton target, is that it seems premised on rebellion but also remarkably commerical and for lack of a better term, commodified. Also, the naked vulgarity, or the transformation of what was once subtext into text, makes the music shockingly un-erotic, desensitized as it is real love or even sensuality. You can also see this in the creepy sexualization of youth where teen girls, all dressed up or down like slutty adults, sing about experiences you can only hope they haven’t really had. So if the law is meant, at least partially as a counterbalance to eros (there’s no philo-word in the greek for a lover of law), and eros is on the wane, what implications does this have for the contemporary character of law?
March 8th, 2010 | 2:51 pm
Scruton’s essay is a wonderful use of the internet medium’s ability to embed you-tube clips into the text. Real music education may be had from it. And unlike Bloom’s famous chapter, the essay is moderate–it enlists Elvis Presley fans, Sibelius fans, and everything in between into a broad coalition against UTTERLY INDEFENSIBLE CRAP like Meshuggah and Alice Practice. (Sam, get real.) It thus turns out that Roger Scruton is a bit like Martha Bayles and her great book Houl in our Soul. I had perused but avoided purchasing Scruton’s book on music because it looked so forbiddingly dependent on a familiarity with a plethora of classical examples. But with the clips, this essay is accessible to all, and contrary to expectation, Scruton turns out to be a defender of the good in pop and jazz, as Bayles is and Bloom problematically wasn’t.
Oh, and generation Y knows that pop music today is screwed up–they aren’t confused about this the way my Gen X was. Older is better and Rock Progress is a myth. They thus have a love/hate relation with boomer rockers who know more about rockin’ than they can, but who were part of the reason the requisite musical knowledge nose-dived from the late 60s on, with the skill/soul gap becoming obvious sometime in the 80s or 90s.
H/T my bud Bryan Smith, but I’m glad Ceaser saw this too. And Ivan, James is no slouch on this topic–he had a great long essay on Radiohead a few years back.
March 8th, 2010 | 3:42 pm
Thanks for plugging that RH essay, Carl. I have some recollection of driving a Harvard Democrat into fits of apoplexy with that piece, which was probably the most practical use it was to anyone. Music criticism is a melancholy thing for a musician to write. When the album I am slowly recording is ‘finished’, I will look forward to finding out whether it is crap, defensible, or utterly so on either count.
March 8th, 2010 | 4:08 pm
Look, it’s hard to argue musical aesthetics with Scruton, who knows the subject so much better than I think any of us do. From the social analysis perspective, the question is (again) how representative his examples are of the way people actually live.
Obviously, it would be very bad if there were large numbers of people who listened to nothing but Meshuggah or Alice Practice. is that actually the case? I just don’t know.
What I find more disturbing than the market for non-music, actually, is the reduction of even good music to omnipresent background noise. It’s not that there isn’t good stuff out there. It’s that few people under about 40–and I include myself–have learned how to LISTEN. This was Adorno’s concern as well.
March 8th, 2010 | 6:06 pm
“Older is better and Rock Progress is a myth. They thus have a love/hate relation with boomer rockers who know more about rockin’ than they can, but who were part of the reason the requisite musical knowledge nose-dived from the late 60s on, with the skill/soul gap becoming obvious sometime in the 80s or 90s.”
Carl has hit on some truth here, I think!
Being a gentleman of a certain age, I distinctly remember when the “British Invasion” swamped R&B, which was on the cusp of dominance.
It’s possible that even you kids might discern the sometimes subtle emotive rhythmic movements in early 60′s doo wop and R&B in such hits as Theora Kilgore’s “This is my Prayer,” Harvey’s “Anyway Ya Wanna,” The Tames, “What Kinda Fool,” etc. when compared with the Beatles, Rollings Stones, and others.
It’s a shame, really, but I think it reflects the disorders of the period.
March 8th, 2010 | 7:07 pm
So James, the inevitable question–who do you sound like and what are your influences? Keep in mind I stopped being hip sometime around 1994.
What to make of the occasional Messugah listener? You know, like Sam? I don’t know. My sweet bird-watching Christian wife occasionally puts on the Joy Division, and I occasionally put on the San Diego garage-gods the Morlocks. This last week, I’ve been enjoying some low-fi band of depressed weirdo Brooklynites called Woods more than I’d expect. But I know they’re not as good, nor as good for me, as the Beach Boys and Mozart I’ve also been listening to.
Rock does speak to us in ways (often limited and/or unhealthy ways, but perhaps more OUR ways) that classical music and old-style pop cannot…which is an interesting topic. Less interestingly, the sad truth is that you can get used to any sort of music if you don’t watch yourself, and given my one and only exposure to Mesuggah from this Scruton essay, well, their sounds do seem to designed to satisfy a kind of adrenaline addiction one would have to get all too used to before bothering with ocassionally.
Finally, while the Meshuggah and Alice examples are extreme…I thought Scruton’s analysis of a winsomely-gentle-yet-lacking contemporary band called the Kooks better points to the melodic poverty that he rightly says increasingly afflicts us.
March 8th, 2010 | 9:51 pm
For the record: I don’t actually listen to Meshuggah, who are palpably false metal. But I do enjoy any number of equally or even more horrible bands, most of whom combine adrenaline addiction with a level of primitivism that makes the Morlocks sound like Brian Eno. The Cro-Mags for example, have no redeeming aesthetic value whatsoever. I add this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RXmEX2ROlDU for any PoMoCon readers interested to know how I spend my free time–you can almost see me getting kicked in the head at the bottom left, at about 2:50.
But do I think Carl’s right to highlight Scruton’s critique of the Kooks. My question is: does anyone really listen to such trash ? Perhaps I lead a sheltered life. But I never imagined that kind winsome folk pop existed outside chain coffee shops.
March 9th, 2010 | 8:52 am
And the problem with the Kooks isn’t the folk-pop genre per se, but their melodic formlessness. They have the trappings for folk, pop, and folk-pop, but they don’t have the songs, the melodies. They wind up being a mere evocation of the FEEL of folk-pop. Musical poverty.
March 9th, 2010 | 9:51 pm
“If a student can … get a critical distance on what he clings to, come to doubt the ultimate value of what he loves, he has taken the first and most difficult step toward the philosophic conversion.” (p.71)
-Allan Bloom
“Kill your idols.”
-Thurston Moore
March 10th, 2010 | 1:14 pm
Thurston Moore lyrics on a First Things blog; never thought I would see the day. Killing one’s idols as a necessary condition for philosophy? Sounds like the n. conditions for nihilism, which seems to be the problem with Bloom’s book. Philosophy can’t get off the ground if everyone “is in the thrall [of what he already knows to be} a prejudice” How can something be loved absolutely if we know it to be preconceived opinion, not truth. Perhaps Ceaser can set us straight on this, but it seems to me his liking for Fed. 49 (as opposed to, say, to Fed. 31 or 43) seems make matters worse.
March 10th, 2010 | 8:43 pm
Kill your idols is not the same a coming to doubt the ultimate value of what one loves. One can still be in doubt and in love, although this is surely a maddening condition to be in. Philosophy perhaps saves in this regard. Killing idols leads to Freud with there being no future to the future of a so-called illusion. Or it leads to worse–what Carl describes as pure adrenalin junkiedom.
This is a problem in rock music generally–”Roll over Beethoven, tell Tchaikovsky the news.” Chuck Berry was Harold Bloom before the Anxiety of Influence was ever published. Kill your idols ends up in noise–Thurston Moore learned music with Glen Branca which in turn was a more academic version of Eno’s compilation of noise ‘music” called No Wave. Alex Ross’s book leads in this direction regarding contemporary music–The Rest is Noise.
This rest as in all the rest, but also the resting place calls to mind Samuel’s complaint that all music has become background music–”shopping music–no interruptions” as Tom Waits put it.
this is a problem because one wonders if Allan Bloom’s deliberate entry into the mosh pit would even render an elbow to the waist these days. A generation constantly hearing how great the 60s were–the music was better, the politics was better, the drugs were better, the sex was better, etc.–may become inured to the importance of music. Music is simply noise, something that takes place while one is cleaning house–no need to whistle while you work. Who defends what is simply an accompanying soundtrack to what seem to be much more substantive experiences like falling in love. Do couples still have “songs” these days, or do they have an amalgamation of all musical history in an ipod in a hip hop song playing in the background? Ceaser quotes the excellent Cole Porter, but in the popular culture does anyone even write songs anymore?
If music (or the critique of it) cannot provide a threshold for philosophy because it is all noise from it’s practitioners (e.g. Cage, Eno, Meshuggah) to its audience (e.g. the fans of Beyonce–does she sing songs or simply repeat three note riff after riff to a funky drum beat?), what can be criticized today to bring out the defense of what is ultimately important these days?
So 60s rebellion and its music seems to have spawned contemporary docility stuck on a locked groove at the end of lou reed’s Metal Machine Music.
This is why Lawler’s defense of country music is so important. It returns to the real as it were. It is akin to Nietzsche’s turn away from Wagner and toward Bizet.
March 10th, 2010 | 10:44 pm
John Presnall’s knowledge of serious pop continues to impress me. The beat on Reed’s MMM may indeed be the death march of rock ‘n’ roll. As it’s probably intended, although PiL’s Second Edition makes the same point in an even more convincing way. But what allows real country (not contemporary Nashville trash) to escape this fate? I agree that it does– just not quite sure why.
March 10th, 2010 | 10:51 pm
As I think about the above comments, I had forgotten to mention an excellent account of music as it relates to noise–that is, Claude Levi-Strauss’s intro the the Raw and the Cooked. It may be speculative regarding birds, and he may have too much love for Wagner, but I think he deals well the structural issues regarding what is music in a similar manner to Scruton. Scruton is as idiosyncratic in his examples as Levi-Strauss.
Scruton speaks of diatonic and pentatonic musical structure. I suppose this all points back to the Pythagoreans. St. Augustine has a nice piece on music in this light. Levi-Strauss asks similarly what is music, and likewise sees some sort of inherent mathematical symmetry. Schoenberg and Webern play on this idea with 12 tone scales–far beyond Wagner’s chromaticism and Debussy’s whole tones. Ornette Coleman (a Texan) likewise experimented with scales that can best be called eccentric.
But none of this has to do with the moral implications of the music. Can a confused mind who loves confused music live an orderly life? It is an interesting question from one who lives a confused life, but who likes to think he has an orderly life. Surely music affects the motions of the soul, but I’m not sure if picking up on fringe or underground trends says much about the larger popular culture, except that that the most innovative become the norm over time as later musical artists attempt to make a name for themselves. The irony is that they end up repeating the cliches of earlier barricade breakers.
As Ecclesiastes said, there is nothing new under the sun–and I definitely do not mean this in the Pete Seeger/Byrds version. I mean it literally.
March 10th, 2010 | 11:31 pm
Samuel, You’re right. PiL’s “ChantChantChant” is even more bizarre than MMM, but as far as I know PiL didn’t have a locked groove at the end of Second Edition–perhaps it did at the end of Metal Box. Though Lou Reed’s MMM preceded all of this–if one is looking for “originality credos.” It doesn’t matter. It is indicative of a jaded view on life where one must up the ante at the poker game of artistic expression. Where does this end other than he who can be the most outrageous. That said, I’ve heard that the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper was the only other album that had a locked groove in its original packaging.
To show the jadedness of modern music a la Lou Reed, a reading of Saul Bellow’s Humboldt’s Gift might be in order. Lou Reed became somewhat of an acolyte to Delmore Schwartz when he went to college, and Bellow gives a serious fictionalized account of this poet’s life. Why mention this? It has to do with the idea that one must constantly better one’s elders. Delmore Schartz, for all of his genius with language, suffered from too many vices while wanting to be himself in his ownmost.
I suspect that Pil and the Velvet Underground–and more importantly their listeners–may be missing much in terms of a full and complete life as they deliberately attempt to hear sounds which have never been heard before. This has nothing to do with adrenalin or with feeling good. Rather, it means an ineradicable alienation that must always be–whether proud or ashamed–itself. This is death that cannot speak other than music, but which will never be heard apart from those few who hear, and which leads to misery of those few ever awaken to what is going on. I’m not saying do no listen to such music, I’m just saying “know what you’re getting involved in.”
Nietzsche turned away from the cold, chill, grey, fogginess of the north (Wagner) for the clear, colorful, and sensual south (Bizet). Is Wagner more the genius than Bizet? Yes. Does Bizet have more life than Wagner? Yes.
At the end of the day,music must be listenable. I can appreciate John Cage’s theories that the random truck driving down the street is music as much as the symphony deliberately playing Mozart. I’ve heard interesting music using such an idea, but generally those noises have been given form outside of themselves in terms of a structured song or symphony. Cage was a real radical in his Symphony of Silence.
March 10th, 2010 | 11:50 pm
This song probably says more about American exceptionalism than anything else. It also shows how to write a song on something simple, but which can speak to deep longings for something else. It’s a nice tune–not profouund, but here goes in a bad recording–
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pDDB0cRZ7NU
Happy spring Break (too early for Easter).
March 12th, 2010 | 9:32 pm
This thread may be dead, but a word on PiL: ineradicable alienation is surely the point. This is what make Metal Box/Second Edition an extraordinary piece of art. It’s not something I can listen to often–a few times a year at most. But it hasn’t got its equal for intensity of experience among “rock” records.
Incidentally, I’ve always had trouble teaching the introduction to The Raw and the Cooked. Except for those few who have musical training, students find it totally impenetrable.
March 13th, 2010 | 4:09 am
Samuel, the thread’s not not dead yet. Second Edition is surely an amazing work of modern music. Similar to you, I find it music that cannot be listened to too often but all the while worthy of listening to. That said, I probably listen to that kind of music more than I ought–I have a friend who has Chant as his ring tone on his phone! It’s kinda creepy.
Regarding Levi Strauss, let me say it was the first thing I had ever read which tried to explain music from the point of view of nature in terms of sheer noise. For Levi Strauss, I suppose nature, in its “deep structure” already follows something intelligible to human reason and human making/techne. Nonetheless, his account blew me way, literally, when he said that birds may have some sort of music humanly understood in terms of structure. He ultimately does not allow it because he wants to make such a radical distinction between nature and culture, or nature and language. He missed his chance at being a realist in a Thomist sense, and fell back into the solipsism of modern thought.
So music becomes one’s own idiosyncratic self expression. This is sort of what I meant by ineradicable alienation.
Anyway, thanks for the encouraging comments on my “music criticism.”
March 15th, 2010 | 10:38 am
interesting weird music-theory stuff, everyone,but “anticontrarian” in my book takes the prize for his name alone!
March 20th, 2010 | 9:58 am
[...] James Ceaser at Postmodern Conservative: The current essay, “Soul Music,” is highly reminiscent of the famous chapter on music that appears near the beginning of Allan Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind. Bloom’s chapter is also on the music of the youth. Interestingly, too, Bloom and Scruton both begin from Plato, referring to the Republic. The theme is that music shapes the soul, and thus shapes the way of life or the regime. (“The ways of poetry and music are not changed anywhere without change in the most important laws of the city” Republic 424c). And sure enough, as our music has changed, so have our mores and laws, in the direction, as Cole Porter put it even before the revolution in rock, of “anything goes.” And consider for a moment not the music but the lyrics of that one: [...]
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