You have said "Nothing that falls into the hands of the media can survive the experience." How are you defining "media" here? As "mass media" or any sort of medium that transmits ideas, music, etc., such as a CD or an e-mail exchange? You and I are having a discussion about ideas and music. How will this conversation be debased once it's printed in a newspaper?
By media I mean mass media, essentially, but as mass media widens its hegemony the borders blur. There are a million and one ways: an adjective here or there, an edit - these are the obvious things. More subtle is what happens to two way intercourse when overheard. More subtle yet is the effect of the media itself. Culture is like sub-atomic particles that can exist for only moments in the heart of the cyclotron. Even the act of observing changes their nature.
Culture can only happen in secret. It happens among small groups of men. It happens at the interface of the moment. As the individual is refined in the furnace of the moment he encourages his brothers. They gather strength and sometimes wisdom and expand the craft together. Whether or not anybody else ever knows it is irrelevant.
So why offer the end result of this collaboration to others? Why release records? "Whether anybody else ever knows" may be irrelevant to the creation of art, to the process, but isn't the transmission of the art to others?
Because you have to get paid to be able to keep doing it. And the essential, clarifying moment for the artist is always the point at which he stands before an audience. The audience is the arbiter. The audience forces you to confront the worth of your ideas: whether you've been simply staring into your navel or not. The audience is the anvil on which refined metal is beaten into shape. In craft terms the audience may not be necessary for the transmission of ideas, which is why I suggested morphic resonance.
Something that's difficult but rather why you want to play the apologist for cliche and banality. The language, the grammar and vocabulary of rock music is the result of a cumulative process.
Isn't much of that "language, grammar and vocabulary" composed of what you'd call cliche and banality? Where do you draw the line between cliche and the use of a vernacular that allows a songwriter to create an emotional response in his audience? On which side of that line do "I'm so lonesome I could cry" or "he could play guitar just like ringin' a bell" fall?
That's easy. "I'm so lonesome..." is art. He could play guitar... borders on inconsequential. The former is a universal. The latter borders on filler (though Chuck Berry did write some superb lyrics Johnny B Goode is not one of them). Nonetheless you seem to have missed the point. The language of rock music is
Study the history and meaning of rock music. When you arrive at 1975 it's quite clear that the manifest destiny of it as an art form is defined by Pere Ubu and other groups with similar ambitions, everything else falls away along an arc of deviation from the vector of the ideal.
Why do you think there is a unified direction in which "rock music" progresses? Evidently I have a more fluid notion of history. Could you briefly expand upon the key turning points in your version of rock history?
It's not my version. There is clear and trace-able movement, a flow, from an adolescence to a young maturity to an adulthood that's expressed in terms of subject matter, expansion of expressive capabilities, use of sound, shift from narrative to expressive modes, etc. There is a clear evolution. Thru all the throwaway trash the direction is unwavering. There is a tension and sense of expectation. Each album is reviewed on the basis on whether it advances the flow. Go back and see the difference in music journalism. In the early 70s sound is being directly integrated into the art and we are on the verge of a brave new world of possibilities. And then punk happens, the fight back, the victory of corporate rock institutions, the corporate mentality. Remember always, punk was invented to sell clothes. Culture is taken away from the poets and handed over to the barbarians. Plato will tell you that only the ideal is real. Depends I suppose on whether you rate Plato.
But what enables YOU to envision this ideal? Don't you think that the material conditions that lead to the creation of culture, under what circumstances people made and continue to make music, could possibly deepen our understanding of how music enriches the lives of people and helps them understand aspects of their lives and the lives of others?
Hunh? The answer is no. Outsiders can't understand what is a secret of the craft. Unless you played for the '64 Browns you can't know what it was like to be the best, what it was like to move the right end two steps to the left to free Jim Brown, to lay there in the mud and watch him and know what you know.
Music and art are manipulative processes. We all, all musicians and artists, work to force feelings at a subconscious level. We are all merciless in our pursuits. You don't know, can't know, what hit you. It's not a touchy-feely circle chat no matter what it's made to look like on the outside.
We can make records that make people cry and we can make them remember what it was that they thought was so special about rock music in the first place.
What is so special about rock music? I mean, I KNOW it's special for me, but I can't pin down why. For a bookish, shy kid like me, it pulsed with an energy and excitement and engagement with the world that I sometimes lacked, or opened up shared emotional responses that I kept hidden. Aren't you saying here that you DO want to share something with your audience, no matter how select a group they might be, they you do want to awaken a response? That there's more to art than the communal creation of it?
I've already explained the role of the audience. The special thing about rock music is it's nearly unique ability to document the human experience because sound operates below the consciousness of human beings. It is a language that speaks in the same language as human consciousness. No other medium has these capabilities. Some can make an argument for film but film relies on visual images. Visual information is useless.
Why do you allow all those other, non-experimental groups to get away with blithering nonsense? Why do you take all those press agent pronouncements so seriously? Is it ignorance of the history of rock music? Is it laziness? Why do you think after more than 40 years that juvenile social posturing has any relevance to rock music?
I guess this comes back to the Platonic question. Why do we have to justify ourselves to a notion of "rock music" as ideal? Isn't music also a form of communication, and also something we ENJOY? Where does pleasure fit into your aesthetic?
Because otherwise we live in a swampland where everything is true. Recognize it? When everything is true nothing is true. Why do you separate pleasure from intellect and poetry? Do you have to be stupid to feel pleasure?
What can those old songs offer late 20th century urban types?
I am dumbfounded by this question.
Well, I think you already answered it. It seems that from your vantage point all music can be isolated from incidental historic and social context. But aren't you going to hear a folk ballad differently from someone in 1920 whose mother sang it while she cooked dinner? Why do you say that difference doesn't matter?
The value of a song is within it, independent of historical context. No, I'm not going to hear it differently. I'm going to hear the meaning of the song. The meaning of the song will touch on something universal if it has stood the test of time. A river is a river always and means the same when Bruce Springsteen wrote The River - a good example of a song that stands on the universal power of the thing - or when the Carter Family sang in the 20s. Human beings are the same now as they have ever been, we have the same hopes and fears. A song that speaks of the human experience in a meaningful way will always in any generation speak the same way to the same effect.
