Music

“Swallow reality/ Belch the truth” -Wayne

"Ours is a time in which every intellectual or artistic or moral event gets absorbed by a predatory embrace of consciousness: historicizing. Any statement or act can be assessed as a necessarily transient 'development' or, on a lower level, belittled as mere 'fashion'. The human mind possesses now, almost as second nature, a perspective on its own achievements that fatally undermines their value and their claim to truth."

--Susan Sontag, writing in 1968, apropos of a philosophical work published in 1956 (E.M. Cioran’s The Temptation to Exist).

‘FATALLY’: this means that, for the dwindling crowd of readers for whom philosophy is a means to an end and not a diversion, the birth of a new thought is a milestone in the history of futility and sorrow, like the birth of a man in Ecclesiastes. The real keynote of Sontag’s appraisal comes later. Regarding the ‘transvaluation’ of historical thinking, she proposes the following course:

“Perhaps... one must look to those thinkers, like [John] Cage, who—whether from spiritual strength or spiritual insensitivity is, to speak bluntly, a secondary issue—are able to jettison far more of the inherited anguish and complexity of this civilization... For relief, it may be that one must abandon the pride of knowing and feeling so much—a local pride that has cost everyone hideously by now.” She cites Cage’s Silence: “Error is a fiction, has no reality in fact. Errorless music is written by not giving a thought to cause and effect.”

Today, music owns this territory indisputably. Music is the form easiest to achieve effects in: if you line up two words, or two lines in space, they will be dead in the water without an effort of contextualization, on the part of the artist, or reflection, on the part of the audience. But if you play two notes in harmony your audience will be gratified.

‘Whether from spiritual strength’—the clause’s ungainly nesting above betrays its primacy. The drug rap braggadocio of musicians like Lil Wayne can claim, in our era, a unique profundity and scope. And spiritual strength isn’t exactly the name for what force vouchsafes this music. Because Wayne, for example, isn’t afraid to rope together the most divergent, bizarre sentiments over a few supremely confident bars, his songs are able to impose a world of indescribable power and authority under the sign of a speaker’s tone, a tone of studied and flawless effortlessness. The art of the most capable, most charismatic rappers transmutes death itself into punch lines; the easy authority of the gangsta rapper’s technique renders the speaker’s persona inviolable, like the narrator of the Iliad who was given to describe the most shocking derangements of human beings in love and at war.

When we are truly at war—fighting the wars we were born to fight—spiritual error is a fiction. The gods excuse every excess. Violence, then, like music, has a law of its own. But is this the way forward, following the path of the gulliest musicians (spiritual insensitivity) and the most jaded (‘strength’)? The pleasures of music are certainly one great, turbulent affinity between Sontag and her subject. Among other forms of culture, Cioran may have had music in mind when he characterized Western history: “Our disease? Centuries of attention to time, the idolatry of becoming.” Like Cioran, who hoped that the punishment for believing in the truth of great music was to burn forever in its flame, Sontag was an ardent, if anxious devotee. In a year-end wrap-up in her diary, she recorded that a particular moment spent listening to the Beatles had been the year’s most profoundly moving experience. And so a synthetic resolution must wait for a discerning reader of both. Can music (and the question concerns pop music in particular) be construed as a part of ‘life’, or do we consign it to the cesspool of hedonistic escapes, with sex, drugs, etc.? Music seems like bondage. (I was intrigued by athletes who compete with music blasting. Why doesn’t it throw you off, how do you reconcile it with your efforts to dominate at any tempo? And soldiers who raid cities with music blasting. Why doesn’t rap music distract you from efficiently killing people?)

The bait set for Western man, the terminal counsel, is: “Relax and tap your feet to the music.” What if there is no music?

You get sucked back into these preposterous proofs.

1. The Absolute is eternal.
2. In its historical manifestations, the Absolute has material qualities.
3. We enjoy a finite amount of time in which to figure out how our material lives should be spent.
4. Our decisions affect the Absolute.

This sequence can abort right there because it triggers a bodily response: an “ukkhh” noise, like hacking a pretend hairball. One starts pretend-drumming bass and ride-cymbal with one’s hands. Music is bondage. In my bondage I know nothing but the truth, I feel nothing but the sirocco of truth.

What they were playing in STARBUCKS one morning while I tried to read:

The Smiths—Radiohead—Dave Matthews—The woman from Morcheeba—Morrissey—The Beatles—Nancy Sinatra—Vintage Blues—Vintage Bluegrass—‘Bootleg’ Bob Dylan—Alanis Morissette