Communist music reviews

Woebot

Well-known member

This is great!

"It is incorrect to say that the Stones are ‘not major innovators’. Perhaps a polarization Stones-Beatles such as Adorno constructed between Schoenberg and Stravinsky (evoked by Beckett) might actually be a fruitful exercise. Suffice it to say here that, for all their intelligence and refinement, the Beatles have never strayed much beyond the strict limits of romantic convention: central moments of their oeuvre are nostalgia and whimsy, both eminently consecrated traditions of middle-class England. Lukács’s pejorative category of the Angenehme—the ‘pleasant’ which dulls and pacifies—fits much of their work with deadly accuracy. By contrast, the Stones have refused the given orthodoxy of pop music; their work is a dark and veridical negation of it. It is an astonishing fact that there is virtually not one Jagger-Richards composition which is conventionally about a ‘happy’ or ‘unhappy’ personal relationship. Love, jealousy and lament—the substance of 85 per cent of traditional pop music—are missing. Sexual exploitation, mental disintegration and physical immersion are their substitutes."
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
It's that typical commie counterintuitive argument which is thrilling because it's not what you usually read but I dunno if I buy it. The Stones were radical because they didn't sing about happy things? Didn't they just rip that off from the blues?

Did the Stones ever do anything as radical as Tomorrow Never Knows?

Not that I think there's necessarily any point comparing the two. I probably prefer the Stones more and they obviously gave birth to a lot of good shit.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
It's that typical commie counterintuitive argument which is thrilling because it's not what you usually read but I dunno if I buy it. The Stones were radical because they didn't sing about happy things? Didn't they just rip that off from the blues?

Did the Stones ever do anything as radical as Tomorrow Never Knows?

Not that I think there's necessarily any point comparing the two. I probably prefer the Stones more and they obviously gave birth to a lot of good shit.

what does radical mean in this context? yeah yeah i know this sounds counter-intuitive. but surely the idea that academia is where radical ideas can be tried out and then they trickle down to pop music is conservative in its own right? surely we can value concrete in non-academic terms?
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
It's that typical commie counterintuitive argument which is thrilling because it's not what you usually read but I dunno if I buy it. The Stones were radical because they didn't sing about happy things? Didn't they just rip that off from the blues?

Did the Stones ever do anything as radical as Tomorrow Never Knows?

Not that I think there's necessarily any point comparing the two. I probably prefer the Stones more and they obviously gave birth to a lot of good shit.

I mean isn't the argument that which is more authentically proletarian? but that's irrelevant to working class people isn't it. noone cares! we all know the idea of working class culture is a sham, which i think has to be differentiated from cultures with a large working class social base powering them, EG acid, early hip hop, jungle...
 

Woebot

Well-known member
go tell that to Luke Davis he painted an image of tweed jacket in my head!

ha ha - that's funny :D well no offence taken :D

and certainly i did vote tory a few times - i might even one day again!

i guess i've always tried to look past the surface signifiers - braying people in suits quaffing champagne - and tried to think about what the core values behind the tags were...

this is grossly simplified - to the degree that perhaps luke will accuse me of being a "pollyanna" again (i look forward to that :slanted:) but to me what's nice about the left is the idea that people should care about one another. and conversely what's good about the right is the idea that we trust in people's better nature. just speaking for myself i see more pitfalls with the former.

my opinion only matters in so far as it's what i believe - that it's relevant to me. and i'm only going through it here in all its garish simplicity out of politeness and respect for a pal - you.

altogether though - and this is sharpened by watching the squad -vs- trump - is the realisation of how politics is theatre. people would do as well to stop the name-calling and try and do good shit/try and live better lives. :love:
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
definitely. culture warring has grown to mammoth seismic proportions in an era of traditional political meltdown. so i can agree with you on that. the anti-political imperative is key to me. they're the same bastards at the end of the day. better to focus on ppl around me. Which is what I've found ever so disappointing about Corbynism. unreconstructed bourgeois personality cult (i just typed cunt as a Freudian slip.) 🔫
 
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mvuent

Void Dweller
this thread was interesting since third's music taste is weirdly similar to my own (for example, I noticed we both posted the same relatively obscure Force tune in the ‘most insane sonics’ thread) but he often seems to come at it from an different angle I don't fully understand. same with other_life to some extent.
 
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mvuent

Void Dweller
the politics-minded criticism I see in music reviews, interviews, etc. usually boils down to “your music is bad because it is escapist and therefore complacent with the existing order, my music is good because it takes on important issues like climate change and institutional racism and therefore disrupts the status quo” holly hendon’s career is built on this kind of thinking. here’s an interesting example in writing. in my experience it’s the standard view among highly educated art people.

I’m sure there’s something to this view but I also have doubts. seems to assume that our obligation to fight oppressive systems in life in general encompasses every activity, and that music is always an effective medium through which to advance political causes--both of which I can disagree with without being a horrible person, surely.

it’s doubt of the second assumption in particular that makes it hard for me to take famous communist composers like Cornelius Cardew and Luigi Nono seriously. in blissblogger’s piece on Nono he describes how Nono arranged to play some of his music that dealt with the plight of factor workers directly to said workers, and:
Those workers were not interested in the ‘messages’ of my work, but… my technical choices in the use of particular kind of material rather than another
so even when he was able to explicitly present his work to interested non-musician population, they weren’t won over by its messages. Nono weakly adds that he still thinks that, really, they got it. but to put it bluntly, it’s tough for me to imagine an artist failing more completely on the very terms they themselves laid out.

I might have assumed that looking at music from a marxist perspective would entail this sort of thinking. the term agitprop in particular brings it to mind.

escapism. but not the escapism of the invisible man. the escapism that says it, i don't know and i don't want to know. whereas our escapism is fuse bblowing out.
but this post stuck with me because it reframes the issue of escapism. I like the identification of a particular kind of middle class escapism based around blocking uncomfortable aspects of reality out, and of how that contrasts with another kind of escapism in which they are acknowledged in some way--maybe in the form of being implicitly turned inside out.
 
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version

Well-known member
There's an old Newsnight interview with Noam Chomsky where they go out and ask people whether they agree with his statements and none of them really do. They all just wrinkle their noses and wave it away although they've obviously picked people who gave the responses they were looking for.

0:42

 

luka

Well-known member
That's a good post mvuent. Best post on the thread even including my ones
 
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entertainment

Well-known member
Don't know if it's been mentioned but this guy Cornelius Cardew has a book called 'Stockhausen Serves Imperialism' which is a good example of what Mvuent is talking about.

http://www.ensemble21.com/cardew_stockhausen.pdf

He has essays assailing John Cage (who he studied under) and Stockhausen for making music that's doesn't speak to oppressive structures or contribute towards social change or antagonize bourgeois audiences and is therefore inherently irrelevant or even conflicting with the cause as it's pacifyng the masses through escapism.

And if it does not support those struggles, then
it is opposing them and serving the cause of exploitation and oppression. There
is no middle course. ‘There is no such thing as Art for Art’s Sake, art that stands
above classes, art that is detached from or independent of politics’ (Talks).
‘Works of art as ideological forms are products of the reflection in the
human brain of the life of a given society.’ (Talks). What aspects of present-day
society are reflected in the work of John Cage? Randomness is glorified as a
multi-coloured kaleidoscope of perceptions to which we are ‘omniattentive’. Like
the ‘action’ paintings of Jackson Pollock, Cage’s music presents the surface
dynamism of modern society; he ignores the underlying tensions and contradictions that produce that surface (he follows McLuhan in seeing it as a manifestation of our newly acquired ‘electronic consciousness’). He does not represent it as
an oppressive chaos resulting from the lack of planning that is characteristic of
the capitalist system in decay (a riot of greed and exploitation). However, if
progressive people begin to appreciate the music as reflecting this situation in
fact, then it will become identified with everything we are fighting against.
 

john eden

male pale and stale
There are some obvious pitfalls with this Leninist privileging of ideology over art:

1. Cardew's pop songs. He apparently moved to Leyton to be nearer the workers (lol) and wrote a bunch of Maoist folk/pop songs which are so direly awful I have inevitably developed an affection for them. Like Mvuent's bit about Nono above there is a seismic gap between what is being attemped and the outcome.

2. There is a great 3 part BBC3 podcast in their "composer of the week" series on a Century of Russian composers. It covers the revolution and aftermath and it's clear that initially there was some incredible Symphonic Shit That Sounds Like The Power Of a Factory stuff going on. But then it all goes to shit because it gets decided that X is bourgeois and organisations of talentless composers who happen to be good at politicking get set up to decide What Is Good Music and who should compose it. All of the products of that were predictably awful. Plus religious music is suppressed.

3. Ben Watson. I love the guy but I also love disagreeing with him. His thesis that it is possible to be objective about what is good and what is bad free improvisation is provacative but some of the stuff he likes is cobblers. There are various positions he takes in his book on Derek Bailey which are bobbins:

a. Echo and reverb in music is bad and is used to cover up bad musicianship (but he likes Lee Perry?)
b. Free improv that involves more than a set number of people (3 or 4?) is bad.
c. Free improv with more than that people will inevitably turn into drone music which is inherently reactionary as it conjurs up visions of some kind of pastoral idealised world of the past.
 
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john eden

male pale and stale
As usual what people miss is that music produced autonomously by proles is (in terms of form) political in itself. Working class people coming together at the weekend to get blasted and dance and cop off with each other is political. Ordinary people's capacity for weird noise and experimental sound is considerable.
 
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