What is good about Pop Music?

borderpolice said:

Fire and Ice are two incomensurable
categories. No matter how much you (think you) loose yourself on a
dancefloor, you are still observable to others, your dancemoves are
still socially acquired in a long process. And you are still,
observing and reacting to others, even though this isn't obvious to
you, because your consciousness is maxed out with the music. But
conscious content is not a good indicator of what else is going on in
your body.

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so with the virus explanation we can have an account whereby everybody on the dancefloor is afflicted by the same sounds and rhythms

and what others do before their eyes reinforces what the feel in their bodies

i.e., the others before their eyes are similarly afflicted

i.e., there's a kind of amplification of the viral proces

border police said:

Take D&B versus Metal. Two forms of music that are very similar in their
rhythmic structures, but rather different chromatically and socially. One can take a D&B track, have it played by a metal band, and get a fairly convincing thrash workout, and vice versa. This musical similarity in the face of widely diverging styles of bodily movements indicates that music and dance are only weakly correlated.

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yes -- but can't two separate viruses be in someways structurally similar and yet cause entirely different symptoms and effects?

moreover, the viruses are operating on separate populations

each population has already been afflicted, shaped, conditioned, formed by previous viral processes

of course the viral explanation does not seem to give an adequate account of the "conversion experience," i.e., the feeling of being seized

unless this is explained in terms of a fever that utterly disorients its victim -- i.e., sets him on a new direction

explained in some such terms

so rave as mass epidemic -- an affliction that reorients bodies and so produces populations

and yet to succumb to the epidemic you have to be predisposed to one extent or another

or whatever

the great advantage of the virus metaphor is that it can *perhaps* explain both the political and the psychological

the political is now understood in terms of the epidemic's disorienting effects

politics is about orientation -- directionality

bodies that succumb to the viral disease are ravished and ravaged, disoriented and reoriented

"good" and "bad" are questions of ultimate orienation

sense of near and far

petty and great

meaningful and trivial

and the passion of political commitment is simply a matter of fever and fervor

as for the psychological side of the equation, the fantasy complex is now seen as a pathological effect of the virus

certain people become so diseased in body and mind that they develop elaborate fantasies about music

OF COURSE the popist reply is to say that such people are hypochondriacs to begin with -- that they merely imagine that they've been ravished and ravaged by music

the viral theory of music and music scenes -- aka the theory of musical disease -- also provides great insight into the nature of popism

that is, the peril of popism is not disease but complacency and ease

rather than the ravishing and disorienting effects of music, we now have the prick to the ear

the tincture that merely titillates

the innocuous tickle

that is, just as music has psychosomatic effects -- so too do arguments

and the effect of the popist argument is to close off body and mind from the power of music

to immunize and make resistant

popism as anti-virus

and so it goes

dominic said:

that is, the peril of popism is not disease but complacency and ease

rather than the ravishing and disorienting effects of music, we now have the prick to the ear

the tincture that merely titillates

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ok, now i'm finding this interesting. because yeah, for me the assumption is that music/art is tremendously disorienting and powerful and compelling at times, and the point of criticism is in a way precisely to transcend that, and tame it by making it something that feels less private and more able to be shared and shaped and discussed. like it can give us ways to talk about things that we maybe wouldn't otherwise, but the key is that we *do* end up talking about them. disarming the music is rearming the listener, yeah. but it takes a lot of work to get there, dig? which isn't to say that changing the world shouldn't be done, but if say the music is parta how you structure your understanding of *why* you wanna change it (c.f. teenager in bedroom w/ radio & angst & identifying with, say, haha Blink's "Anthem pt. II") isn't the actually changing it part also about getting *over* the music?

on another note it hit me re: "fidelity to the event" that that's a fine way of describing the task of say, history, where there is "an" event -- a particular set of circumstances, time, place, actors, etc. Hey, even with art you can have fidelity to "a" performance, or "an" opening at a gallery. but unless you reduce music to the live performance, yr. stuck with a v. hazy and confused notion of "event." Is the "event" of 50's "candy shop" the entire multi-month span of it playing out on charts worldwide and blossoming and then ppl. getting sick of it, and kids getting the words wrong to it, and then maybe an answer track by Lady Saw (or whoever) and then a skit on SNL 3 years later when he guest hosts that has a gag about a "candy shop" in there too? Or what then?

I don't think pop is antithetical to unterground when it comes to viral processes. Sound memes also play an important role in pop dynamics. The difference between pop and unterground is in the limits to the space of possibilities. Pop must remain in the comfort zone, while unterground is free to explore the outer regions.

dominic said:

so with the virus explanation we can have an account whereby everybody on the dancefloor is afflicted by the same sounds and rhythms

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i don't have any particular beef with the viral metaphor, but it's a bit biological for my licking. it lacks a social dimension. The beauty of the mimetic approach is its being radically social. it acccounts for what's observably happening. the viral approach just says something is happening -- let's call it an infection or affliction -- but not what or how, so it's in effect just a new name with interesting connotations. I also find the spatial associations somewhat misleading: a virus enters your body (or are you talking about computer virii, that would be more fascinating, maybe), whereas one of the most interesting facts about humans is that they are monadic, they are operationally closed, and yet they are fundamentally and irreducibly social creatures. there is of course a strong spatial dimention to dance events. one sees only a few at each point in time, those dancing near you. The sound, the darkness, and the preoccupation with music and sexuality prevents the brain from being able to process more than just a few humans at a time. so the mimetic mechanisms are working locally. given the imperfections of the copying, this leads to local clusters of dance styles.

how about this compromise: musical fragments are the virii and the affliction they creates are pleasure intensifying memetic behaviour?

xerox and xenogenesis

I wouldn't say viruses were biological (as Wiener says, it's a real question as to whether they are alive or not) and I wouldn't say it was a metaphor, it's an abstract description.

There's a whole chapter (Xerox and Xenogenesis) in my thesis on this if anyone's interested: this is the most pertinent section.

borderpolice said:

a virus enters your body (or are you talking about computer virii, that would be more fascinating, maybe), whereas one of the most interesting facts about humans is that they are monadic, they are operationally closed

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sound afflicts the body -- sound and rhythm have psychosomatic effects

and that is how the virus enters or, if you wish, seizes hold of the body or, still again, wracks the body

reworks and reorients body and mind

and yet we still think and feel in more or less the same ways as before

it's just that a new code has become entangled with the other content that our OS processes

we're now diseased -- not transformed into monsters -- and not terminally ill -- but living w/ a kind of disease

the new orientation -- the dis-ease -- is most manifest in how we relate to music and sound

and yet the pathology effects the other logics by which we live

e.g., it gives rise to fantasy complexes

or it makes us discontent w/ the real possibilities that we have in hand -- e.g., to be an accountant and get married and have kids -- the standard biological-reproductive content -- we now want different content

borderpolice said:

how about this compromise: musical fragments are the virii and the affliction they create are pleasure-intensifying mimetic behaviour?

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yes -- but why can't the pleasure-intensifying mimetic behavior be considered amplification?

amplification = massive replication of a gene or DNA sequence

amplification = the particulars by which a statement is expanded

NOW THE KEY POINT to grasp is that even though music and dancing are heterogeneous, each reproduces the other

the sound that afflicts the body is the wasp

the dancing bodies are like so many orchids

k-punk on deleuze-guattari said:

Deleuze-Guattari make a point of distinguishing the wasp-orchid relation from models of imitation, which imply a unilinear causality. “It could be said that the orchid imitates the wasp, reproducing its image in a signifying fashion (mimesis, mimicry, lure, etc.). But this is true only on the level of the strata - a parallelism between two strata such that a plant organization on one imitates an animal organization on another. At the same time, something else entirely is going on: not an imitation, but a capture of code, an increase in valence, a veritable becoming-wasp of the orchid and a becoming-orchid of the wasp.”

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and the same point re-stated --

k-punk on samuel butler said:

The heterogeneous quality of what appears at different stages of the process of reproduction should not be considered a reason to disqualify a system from being considered a system of reproduction. The “animalacules” from which we develop do not resemble us . . . . We are not made in their “image."

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now the difficulty here is that flowers in a species blossom in the same way after the encounter with the wasp

whereas human bodies are given to dancing in different ways while being afflicted by the same sounds and rhythms

as tim f noted upthread, his manner of dancing to jungle music in private was completely different than the forms of dancing to jungle that had taken hold at australian raves

and yet as he began to experience jungle with and alongside others, his way of dancing became assimilated to theirs

tim f's account therefore appears to support border police's notion that the primordial sound affliction gives rise to pleasure-intensifying mimetic behaviors

but what i want to argue is that when bodies are afflicted by the same sounds and rhythms, they're gripped by the same pathos and logic

the others who dance around you reinforce the power and logic of the sound virus by amplifying the virus

so whereas you could previously dance to the music in some willy nilly manner, you are now persuaded of the rightness of particular ways of dancing -- not necessarily precise moves, but ways that are in agreement with the shared pathology

so this allows for considerable diversity in how human bodies may dance to the same music -- but it eliminates ways of dancing that are non-pathological

the pathology compels bodies to dance

and the dancing must accord with the pathos and the logic

AND YET b/c dancing is replication on a different plane it is not the same pathology that is reproduced -- but altered versions in different bodies

or maybe i'm simply playing juvenile word games at this point

as for the "event of music," i.e., music that is experience as radically new and which therefore re-orients bodies

perhaps this can be explained as a VIRULENT STRAIN of previous viral infections

that is, were the music not closely related to previous sound viruses then it would not be geared to these specific human bodies

the music would merely be an "alien" curiosity -- a disease that afflicts others or perhaps nobody at all (as w/ inconsequential fringe music)

whereas the virulent strain runs its course through existing formations and so produces new populations

the new population = survivors of the epidemic, i.e., they weren't untouchable or immune = their bodies have been reworked and reconditioned

s_clover said:

tame it by making it something that feels less private and more able to be shared and shaped and discussed.

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actually i take it as axiomatic that music is most powerful when experienced with and alongside others

i don't have in the mind "teenager in bedroom w/ radio & angst"

again, i'm using rave as paradigm -- you might contest that paradigm

so perhaps by "private" you mean outside of language?

or do you in fact mean by "private" the teenager's bedroom testing ground?

s_clover said:

disarming the music is rearming the listener, yeah. but it takes a lot of work to get there, dig?

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errrr, no -- a bit befuddled actually

s_clover said:

which isn't to say that changing the world shouldn't be done, but if say the music is parta how you structure your understanding of *why* you wanna change it isn't the actually changing it part also about getting *over* the music?

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first, no matter how one engages or chooses to engage w/ music -- as rockist, as popist -- he cannot deny the seeming fact that this is a "low-level political choice" -- see especially the 2nd or 3rd pages of this thread

and indeed a persistent theme of this thread has been the notion of "fantasy" -- the person who engages with music retreats from the world of action and (real) politics into a fantasy world of record collecting and scene politics

second, it is abundantly clear that the adult world of politics and law and management is so far gone that its participants have no serious beliefs -- only desperate strategies for perpetuating their position -- or, if in opposition to the system, half-hearted measures whose only effect is to assuage their own conscience, i.e., make themselves feel good

that is, get into a conversation about politics with ANY person and i predict that person will soon waver and confess utter confusion about the best course of action in today's world

i realize i'm making a sweeping claim -- and to pursue it here would take this thread way off track

however, as k-punk recently said on his blog -- no one can imagine the end of capitalism

and yet i think we're pretty damn near to the breakdown of the world system

and once that happens new political positions will be elaborated

but until then -- does anyone seriously have a position

(a) severe austerity for america which would entail great material suffering w/ little by way of spiritual consolation

(b) naked imperialism -- i.e., though we have nothing of value to exchange for the world's products, we're not just going to vanish like the dispossessed -- no, we're going to deprive others of resources -- make them render unto caesar by one brute method or another

(c) crusade for a worldwide minimum wage as the best way to save global capitalism

(d) nay say doomsday as just a bad dream -- and continue to invest in parliamentarian politics as though it mattered

choose your position now!

of course what we have instead are pseudo politics

turning to music . . . .

music is not about "how you structure your understanding about why you wanna change the world" -- rather music is one of the few sites where politics still happen

that is, the SITE OF THE POLITICAL since the end of wwii has been music & art & culture

the traditional site of politics is today non-political -- not about serious alternatives

the alternatives that (at least some) people take seriously are in music

this is why i describe members of music scenes as willing to die for their claims

let's put the matter this way --

the rockist agrees w/ nietzsche -- serious belief is far superior to weak belief or no belief at all -- and so too the products of such belief as compared w/ other products

the popist wants to affirm lack of belief as descriptive of who we really are -- i.e., popism as the post-therapeutic position -- i.e., even though popism as ideology is prescriptive -- i.e., the drug that if swallowed whole has wondrously therapeutic effects, dispelling all fantasies about music

OR in the case of the k-punkian sublimating popist -- critical purchase as opposed to belief on the one side and drug therapy on the other

s_clover said:

on another note it hit me re: "fidelity to the event" -- that unless you reduce music to the live performance, yr. stuck with a v. hazy and confused notion of "event." Is the "event" of 50's "candy shop" the entire multi-month span of it playing out on charts worldwide and blossoming and then ppl. getting sick of it, and kids getting the words wrong to it, and then maybe an answer track by Lady Saw (or whoever) and then a skit on SNL 3 years later when he guest hosts that has a gag about a "candy shop" in there too? Or what then?

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first, the event need not be a single instant in time

(although badiou -- whose idea i'm vulgarizing -- seems to have in mind a single diagonal that cuts across existing processes -- the diagonal that interrupts linear time -- or rather, i forget the details of badiou's theory as soon as put him back on my bookshelf -- what stays with me is the idea of fidelity to the event -- and the event as that which has changed everything -- at least for its subjects, i.e., those who are formed as subjects by the event)

so let's call the event the "conversion experience"

and let's say that the conversion experience may occur all at once -- paul being struck by lightning on the road to damascus

or that the conversion experience may occur as a series of encounters that together constitute a unified experience when viewed retrospectively -- or rather as viewed through the eyes of the believer

viewed from the outside and analytically, the conversion to rave may have occurred over a series of months -- and through a series of discrete small "e" events -- perhaps consisting of hearing a couple of rave tracks at your friend's house, then listening to pirate radio first time, then going to a rave, then reading a couple magazine articles, then talking to people who are part of the scene, etcetera

and then suddenly, at some point, you cross over -- you shed the old clothes and take on the new garments

you are now a believer -- and the conversion experience is for you the unified Event -- the Event that has formed you as a subject of its truth

you also raise the question of how to distinguish true events from false events

and that's a difficult question that can perhaps be taken up later on this thread -- though surely with no adequate answers

though i don't think 50 cent's "candy shop" could in any way be construed as an Event

it's simply a blip on the radar screen

a passing moment in hip hop

though you could perhaps argue that 50 cent is a subject of the truth of hip hop -- and that his works have a place in the process of hip hop's truth

others might call 50 cent a charlatan and his works cheap & disposable

and this is what i mean by music as a site for politics

"tim f's account therefore appears to support border police's notion that the primordial sound affliction gives rise to pleasure-intensifying mimetic behaviors

but what i want to argue is that when bodies are afflicted by the same sounds and rhythms, they're gripped by the same pathos and logic

the others who dance around you reinforce the power and logic of the sound virus by amplifying the virus

so whereas you could previously dance to the music in some willy nilly manner, you are now persuaded of the rightness of particular ways of dancing -- not necessarily precise moves, but ways that are in agreement with the shared pathology"

This is an interesting theory Dominic except that I consider it to be wrong in this case: the crushing predominance of dancing-to-the-bass at drum & bass events is <i>not</i> a good thing; it's a way of reinforcing the body <i>against</i> the destablising quality of the beats, the tempo etc. To continue with the virus metaphor it's like a vaccine which adjusts the body to a small, safe portion of the affectivity of the virus so the body can cope with the music's bigger menace without being compromised. I'd also argue that it's a sign that most people in the post '97 drum and bass scene in Australia just imported a lot of their dance moves wholesale from hip hop as opposed to it arising out of rave.

My style of dancing - dancing to the beats, which I persevere with but <i>intersperse</i> with dancing to the bass when I exhaust myself or my legs become sore - is surely more pathological by your definition: my body is more truly transformed by the radical sonic qualities of the music, more synergised with its intricacies; my body and the music have arrived at some sort of symbiotic relationship whereby we mutually reproduce eachother. My dancing isn't a less "true" response to the music in this sense, and the style used by the majority of the scene isn't <i>more</i> true. The scene's dancing style is as much a response to the cultural/fashion demands of the scene itself (which in Australia consciously models itself on hip hop) as it is to the demands of the music. At the same time, <i>my</i> style was also partly produced by an accident of social forces.

The virus model strikes me as a way of arguing, "yes, there is a social component, but this itself arises as a direct result of the sonic-physical relationship between the music and the dancer." The virus expresses as one of its symptoms a pathology, but that pathology has no effect on the form of the virus. It's strictly a base/superstructure arrangement.

Whereas I would argue that the direct sonic-physical relationship and the social apparatus always shape, delimit and reproduce eachother. This is true for all pleasurable activities: listening to music, dancing, eating food, having sex, looking at art... the social component always responds to <i>and</i> transforms the direct physical sensation of pleasure. The fact that some of these forms of pleasure are more physical than others expresses itself as a question of degree rather than outright influence, because even direct physical experience can never be the sole ground for any <i>meaningful</i> sensation (ie. a sensation that seems to possess some particular meaningful property, ie. being seized by the music at a rave).

ie. I reckon one of the big misreadings re Foucault is to think that through the idea of "bodies and pleasures" Foucault is somehow defending some underlying <i>distinctive</i> enjoyable physical component of sex that exists beneath its socialisation and, er, sexualisation (the emancipation of this non-socialised libidinous capacity is totally Marcuse's bag, and Foucault despised Marcuse's theories) - surely the point of "bodies and pleasures" as a descriptive term is that it could apply to absolutely anything eg. eating a peach? Which is one of the reasons peach fetishes can exist probably: the "real" component of sexual desire is structureless, non-specific sensual enjoyment of difference (it doesn't even have to be physical in the sense of contact; sight, hearing and smell, can come into it too), so the social codes and sign systems which structure it can seize on pretty much anything basically. It is in this sense that sexuality is "empty"; its positive content is so tenuous-and-yet-obvious that it doesn't really belong in the same category. (thinking about one's sexuality is a bit like looking into an empty, unlit well for water, or gold or something: at the bottom there is indeed <i>something</i>: a brick floor, but you knew that before you looked into the well anyway). Which is not to say that one doesn't enjoy specific physical sensations when engaging in specific sexual acts; rather that these are always sensations which have been partially structured by social codes/sign systems.

P.S. On an entirely unrelated note, I forgot to mention earlier how surprised I was to read Mark saying he had always found Frank Kogan's writing extremely boring. Mark have you read any of his "Why Music Sucks?" stuff? He really is a great writer and thinker, and I would have thought that his whole operating concept of "PBSification" would appeal to you immensely.

My position in this debate is really determined by the constellation of the writers who I would consider to have had a fundamental shaping effect on my thinking/writing about music: Simon, Tom Ewing, Frank Kogan.

"The fact that some of these forms of pleasure are more physical than others expresses itself as a question of degree rather than outright influence"

Sorry, the last word there should be outright <i>distinction</i>.

music and politics

dominic: "that is, the SITE OF THE POLITICAL since the end of wwii has been music & art & culture

the traditional site of politics is today non-political -- not about serious alternatives"

this is true i think, although one thing i toy with in the conclusion to Rip It Up and Start Again is the horrifying notion that "all this" (the discourses and dissensions coming out punk through postpunk to include, i think, distantly but insperably, the conversation we're now involved in), all this urgency and debate, is in fact a MASSIVE DIVERSION from actual processes of change

in other words, punk (or arguably the Sixties: the rockist original sin moment when POWER and IMPORTANCE was glommed onto popular music occuring circa 65) created this myth that music could create change the world and that punk renewed this myth immeasurably and opened an entire field where you could get worked up and use revolutionary language of upheavals etc.... but if you really wanted to change things you'd have done better to apply your good intentions and idealistic energies to proper politics

i don't actually believe that (and i'd have been a lousy politician or activist) but the thought does cross my mind sometimes and cause a flutter of anxiety

so that idea of a "low level political choice" does seem a useful corrective/keep it all in proportion type thing to keep in the forefront of your awareness

at the same time Dom is right, pop music has changed the world in big and small ways, and perhaps, conversely to the above, it is good to remind yourself of that and keep that alive, rather than underestimate it... perhaps the worst thing is to get into believing that it's all depleted of transformative power and is just a social game of references and subcultural capital and mimetic folderol... that would in fact be the ultimate impoverishment and self-disenfranchisement, to think it had no transformative power left

if you do believe in that idea-or-is-it-myth of transformative power (Sixtes>punk>postpunk>rave, or hip hop, or...) then i think that this Rockist Original Sin is precisely what allows for/enables/mayb even requiresa judgemental tone... the trivial/urgent distinction... because if music did once have that power, then instances of music that don't live up to those past possibilities are failing to be all that music can be

sometimes (not knowing much at all about philosophy) i think of poptimism/geeze as being like logical positivism (AJ Ayer, right?), getting rid of the metaphysics and the nonsense that gets people's mental knickers in a twist (no more revolutions)... remove the moral tenor to articulations of music preference entirely

Tim: stuff
well it seems like we're almost in agreement re the relative roles of the real and the discursive, except again i feel these mimesis/etc leaning accounts tend to downplay the visceral impact/"love at first hearing" aspect of music... the idea that we don't set ourselves up or predispose for these experiences, that they're involuntary, a seizing and claiming in Dom's terminology

that what it feels like anyways but an appeal to feeling is i suppose a cop-out

blissblogger said:

at the same time Dom is right, pop music has changed the world in big and small ways, and perhaps, conversely to the above, it is good to remind yourself of that and keep that alive, rather than underestimate it...

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not sure if the Sixties>punk>post-punk>hip hop>rave have changed the world in "big" ways

what these music movements have done, rather, is create a kind of ANTICIPATORY DISSATISFACTION with the "adult" world = careering, building a household, having kids = putting one's nose to the grindstone in exchange for nothing of great importance, merely the prospect of more $ than others and some modicum of respectability

they give the lie to the ideology of possessive individualism

if you've experienced the power of music -- been swept up in a social movement centered on music -- you are unlikely to be impressed by what the "adult" world has on offer

does such dissatisfaction change the world?

i don't know

perhaps it merely gives rise to fantasy & alienation complexes

but i suppose it's better than feeling at home in the world

ALSO -- in the cases of hip hop and rave -- these movements have probably helped to create better race relations

i.e., enabled their "white" adherents and sympathizers to recognize more fully the humanity of blacks

i.e., certainly many whites made rave music, and certainly many sounds like belgian hardcore had a white pedigree, but there was no getting around the fact that the music and culture owed it greatests debts to the black diaspora

although in the case of hip hop such improved understanding has been undercut and counteracted by the propagation of gangsta imagery

plus there's no shortage of racists who strum along to the delta blues -- so why not the same for rave and hip hop

AND THEN there are all the "small" changes that the great music movements have (likely) wrought, i.e., changes in sensibility that are hard to detect and work in subtle ways -- but which may in the end add up to something

that is, maybe there's some connection b/w the fact that an entire generation in england was shaped by rave and the demise of the conservative party -- though what you're now stuck with is tony blair

ALSO -- most such changes in "sensibility" are quickly accounted for and catered to by the market

so we should probably be really cynical about any claims that music movements have changed the world

AND YET WHEN BLISSBLOGGER REMARKS AS FOLLOWS --

blissblogger said:

sometimes (not knowing much at all about philosophy) i think of poptimism/geeze as being like logical positivism (AJ Ayer, right?), getting rid of the metaphysics and the nonsense that gets people's mental knickers in a twist (no more revolutions)... remove the moral tenor to articulations of music preference entirely

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then i really must say this --

yes yes yes yes yes

so when i say that music is the site of the political -- i mean only that it is more productive of the kinds of meanings & affects that people take seriously than the field of conventional politics is -- not that it has some grand transformative effect on the world that we share with all others, i.e., the world as a whole, i.e., the world that conventional politics governs

taking seriously = a belief or feeling or argument or claim that you'd be willing to DIE for (if only figuratively) -- AND which ORIENTS you in your dealings with others and in trying to make sense of your own life

blissblogger said:

well it seems like we're almost in agreement re the relative roles of the real and the discursive, except again i feel these mimesis/etc leaning accounts tend to downplay the visceral impact/"love at first hearing" aspect of music... the idea that we don't set ourselves up or predispose for these experiences, that they're involuntary, a seizing and claiming in Dom's terminology

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i agree that this is a weakness, which i pointed out right from the start, but i don't think the answer should be
to ditch pleasure enhancing mimetic behaviour as a fundamental mechanism, because it's pretty untouchable,
but rather to improve on it, to make it more complicated, to add other elements.

in this vein, i'd like to point out that certainly for me that "love at first hearing" effect is rare. the average case
is that i need to get accustomed, have to warm up first, quite literally so in the case of dancing. most of my
favourite tracks or albums crept up one me slowly.

about the policial element, couldn't it simply be the case, that it's the pleasure one derives from music, that
reminds us that life could be better, that that's all, but no less that art contributes? If one take the mimetic
theory on board, group identity forming processes, collective identities, mass mobilisations and their relation
to music can also be tackled [but music is agnostic with respect to the explicit political content of such usage].

NP: Marcos Valle, Os Grillos

k-punk said:

There's a whole chapter (Xerox and Xenogenesis) in my thesis on this if anyone's interested: this is the most pertinent section.

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i'm interested, but i can't say i see at this point how it relates to the present discussion, it seems more about deleuze and guattari, with whom, i'm say to admit, i can only claim superficial famiiarity.

Tim F said:

My style of dancing

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given that i've never seen you dance -- let alone met you (if you ever visit nyc, then . . . ) -- it's a bit silly to discuss your style of dancing

i.e., you had mentioned your dancing experiences, and then i rather foolishly alluded to your remarks

but by pathological dancing i suppose i mean dancing that ACCORDS w/ pathos & logic

not dancing that simply mirrors the moves of others

i.e., i'm using a metaphor that relies on the heart rather than sense of sight

accord = the Greek "kardia" = the psychosomatic

so i'm not really doing what i purport to be doing -- which is abstract description -- i.e., i keep resorting to metaphors rather than describe abstractly

Tim F said:

The virus model strikes me as a way of arguing, "yes, there is a social component, but this itself arises as a direct result of the sonic-physical relationship between the music and the dancer." The virus expresses as one of its symptoms a pathology, but that pathology has no effect on the form of the virus. It's strictly a base/superstructure arrangement.

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actually -- the relationship as set forth in the virus model should run both ways -- i.e., the orchid affects the wasp, and not only the wasp the orchid -- i.e., each reproduces the other

so even though i followed up k-punk's suggestion and made appeal to the virus model, i haven't fully embraced the model

i equivocate b/w the virus model and the base/superstructure model

that is, i don't see how the dancing bodies affect the music -- other than in the obvious respect that it's human beings who both make the music and dance to the music -- UNLESS we say that the dancing bodies AMPLIFY the music -- but what exactly does that mean?

you shift the terms, however, when you remark as follows:

Tim F said:

I would argue that the direct sonic-physical relationship and the social apparatus always shape, delimit and reproduce each other . . . . The social component always responds to <i>and</i> transforms the direct physical sensation of pleasure

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that is, we intially had (1) music that afflicts (2) the body which then dances

you made the terms (1) the direct sonic-physical relationship and (2) the social appartus

once the terms are shifted, the argument follows --

but you've established nothing b/c you haven't shown that the body's movement affects the music (in the way that the orchid affects the wasp)

Tim F said:

Even direct physical experience can never be the sole ground for any <i>meaningful</i> sensation (ie. a sensation that seems to possess some particular meaningful property, ie. being seized by the music at a rave).

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what else do you need?

Tim F said:

I reckon one of the big misreadings re Foucault is to think that through the idea of "bodies and pleasures" Foucault is somehow defending some underlying <i>distinctive</i> enjoyable physical component of sex that exists beneath its socialisation and, er, sexualisation . . . . Surely the point of "bodies and pleasures" as a descriptive term is that it could apply to absolutely anything eg. eating a peach? Which is one of the reasons peach fetishes can exist probably: the "real" component of sexual desire is structureless, non-specific sensual enjoyment of difference (it doesn't even have to be physical in the sense of contact; sight, hearing and smell, can come into it too), so the social codes and sign systems which structure it can seize on pretty much anything basically. It is in this sense that sexuality is "empty"; its positive content is so tenuous-and-yet-obvious that it doesn't really belong in the same category.

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i agree w/ your reading of Foucault -- and I think that Foucault is right about sexuality

however, what i question is whether our relationship to music is structured in the same way as our relationship to sex

that is, sexuality is about desire and lack -- that's perhaps why it can seize on anything

music, by contrast, is always there to have -- granted there is the questing disposition of the record collector -- but once you have a record you can play it on your turntable as you wish

and sexual preference is so much more obscure and unjustifiable

that is, i doubt that anyone who has a sex fetish knows the origin of his fetish or when he fell under the power of the fetish or even why -- it is sheer speculation -- a true mystery

in the case of sexuality we often feel intense guilt about what we want -- and yeah, such guilt may provide a kind of frisson, and the taboo may serve as incitement, etc -- but the point is that we cannot justify what turns us on (the most that some people can do is claim their desires are natural, i.e., the heterosexual couple into strictly plain vanilla -- but that's an argument few of us would deem persuasive)

by contrast, we know more or less exactly when we were seized by the event of music, and we can give a rational, if not fully satisfactory, account of why we're into this music, this scene, etc

that is, we can argue in good fatih about the superiority of this record or this music scene as against some other record or music scene

but nobody can argue about the superiority of his sexual preferences over someone else's particular set of sexual kinks unless he's intellectually dishonest or blinkered

MOREOVER sexual preference is hard to justify b/c it treats the other as an instrument for one's own pleasure, i.e., it's open to question whether you can treat the other person as an end in himself or herself while satisfying your own desires

whereas music allows us to relate to others in a way that is fully human (errrrr, that sounds rather sappy -- but i think the point holds)

last -- in pursuing the pleasures of sexuality the actual act of sex can be deferred indefinitely if not altogether avoided -- i.e., "deviance" and "perversion" -- i.e., the deviant fetishist must have his fetish actively satisfied if he is to be able to consummate the sex act, and the fully perverted fetishist may lose interest in the sex act entirely and wants only for his fetish to be satisfied

whereas the enjoyment of music REQUIRES that sound and rhythm afflict body and mind DIRECTLY

i say all of the above not because i think it dispostive of the issue, but because i think there is good reason for pause before comparing the structure of sexuality with the structure of musical enjoyment

certainly in both cases we feel "seized" by a kind of pathos and logic

and certainly in both cases the elements of reproduction are heterogeneous -- especially as in the case of fetishes or various sex games

but again, i'm highly skeptical of any argument that explains musical enjoyment in terms of sexual enjoyment

Tim F said:

The virus model strikes me as a way of arguing, "yes, there is a social component, but this itself arises as a direct result of the sonic-physical relationship between the music and the dancer." The virus expresses as one of its symptoms a pathology, but that pathology has no effect on the form of the virus. It's strictly a base/superstructure arrangement.

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Almost... but the base-superstructure metaphor doesn't go far enough really, in that it implies a lack of immanence, whereas my problem with the way you are constructing this precisely that transcendent dualism: the (implictly) non-reflexive 'physicality' of the sound versus the reflexive 'social'

By contrast, I would want to insist that there is no beyond of the virus or of the physical... the social itself is a field of viruses, intensities which replicate via subtle differentiation... and of course part of the benefit of talking about viruses is that they (particularly retroviruses) are extremely reflexive.. .they learn and adapt... and the apparently 'negotiated' behaviour of the meat components of sonic viruses is just one vector of their mutation...

I'm now clearer (I think) on what you mean by social... but for me this is not 'social' at all, quite the opposite, it is a form of anti-collective individuated connosieuring... this is what I find so difficult about cult studs, this INSISTENCE on that position of audience transcendence... but it's a broader problem I have with any theory that starts with experience... it is so anti-structuralist, so anti-systemic....

P.S. On an entirely unrelated note, I forgot to mention earlier how surprised I was to read Mark saying he had always found Frank Kogan's writing extremely boring. Mark have you read any of his "Why Music Sucks?" stuff? He really is a great writer and thinker, and I would have thought that his whole operating concept of "PBSification" would appeal to you immensely.
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ok, I admit I haven't been fair; it's just that anything to do with audiences etc raises my hackles and lowers my boredom threshold.. is there anything online worthwhile?