Can You Feel It vs. The Bells

Can You Feel It vs. The Bells

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    14
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T

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
luka said:
Watson made me read this thing of his yesterday


"
The crucial point is that art is an attempt to tell the truth about the world, the whole world, not simply to provide baubles for those in the comfort-zone of privilege. The economic pressures and national conflicts that create world wars and mass starvation and genocide are still in operation. The operations of global capitalism mean that the inhabitants of Burundi, Beirut, Belfast, Baghdad and Belgrade (I use alliteration to limit the list) have long suffered the terror and chaos which the suicide hijackers brought to Manhattan. Edgard Varèse brought the noise of sirens and bombs into music in the 1920s, a response to the horrors of World War I. His "Hyperprism" anticipated the terror of the Blitz, when civilian populations first became long-distant targets of military hardware. Unlike his "objectivist" follower Xenakis, he bent the shapes he heard into organic ovaloids which speak for the suffering ear. This is why, of all the pre-war orchestral composers, only Varèse has a non-salon, yet humanist ruggedness: a realism that moves the blood and shakes the entrails. Sonically, Varèse can stand comparison to Coltrane and Hendrix, who provided lasting testimonials to a different noise: a struggle against racial oppression in America and genocidal war in Vietnam.

These moments of musical truth weren’t easy to achieve, nor were they facile, attention-seeking stabs at ugliness or excess. According to his wife Naima (talking to C.O. Simpkins, his best biographer), Coltrane studied scales from all over the world, and tried to pack every musical system into his music. If the results sound ugly, that is because you are too wedded to your partial musical identity, to your comfort-blanket of familiar harmony: heavenly universality sounds like hell to closed-in ears. For his part, Hendrix was intensely loyal to classmates who had been drafted to Vietnam. Reaching an anti-US position was painful and slow, yet by "Machine Gun", it happened. His rainbows of audio-feedback revelled in spaces which brought pain to the repressed and rigid: in the ears of GIs, they were incitements to immediate pleasure, to disrespect for authority, and to outright mutiny ("fragging").

Coltrane and Hendrix did not invent this dialectic between musical shock and political liberation. It was the major theme for Beethoven and his followers. Romantic music was a call to revolution that now languishes under the idiot term "classical". The exhilarating allegri of the symphony - the hoofbeats, the jangling bridles, the crack of loading muskets - are not about hunting, as Roger Scruton fondly imagines. They are about bourgeois revolution - "to arms, citizens!" - discovering common aims, seizing the castle keep, liberating the prisoners, letting the in light of reason, sweeping away the cobwebs of feudal reaction. After 1848, when the bourgeois class made its historic pact with state power and landed interests, the excitement turned sour. In march 1871, the French state slaughtered the Communards in thousands, and drove the voice of universal truth and reason underground. In Wagner, massive chromatic transitions invoke myth and fate: surrender to the madness of the stock market as to a natural force. By Mahler, the revolutionary allegri are hollowed-out, febrile, a nostalgic memory."

It's a current of aesthetic thought that third is partial too, sometimes, when he's in that mood.
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that's brilliant yes. you hear it in brotzmann/evan parker sometimes as well, the need to break out of the limitations of the western tradition. it sounds all squouky to some, but there are melodic variations if you listen close enough. I don't want to pretend that if you grew up on turkish or arabic music (these are as much categories as western classical music) it will suddenly dawn on you, even my mum thinks some of the free stuff I play is a bit weird. But it can certainly aid in comprehending the aim of these improvisers.
 
T

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
luka said:
Anything else being baubles for those in the comfort zone of privilege
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part of my antipathy to a lot of metal is this. it's beethoven stripped of all his revolutionary content and made into a tradition, *a tradition of feudal nostalgia.*
 
luka

luka

Well-known member
luka said:
To reduce it to its simplest formulation

Art has a duty to tell the truth ugliness is truth
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You can think of the way techno can, very beautifully and vividly, evoke alienation, for instance, and pitch that against houses beautiful dream of universal brotherhood and belonging.
 
luka

luka

Well-known member
There's another position you come across, often in reggae fans, sometimes even in fans of hiphop, that says music has a duty to uplift. Conscious artists. These are people that have a huge violent Antipathy to anything 'negative' in music.

I can find myself swayed by this at times. If I'm in their company and exposed to their rhetoric.
 
luka

luka

Well-known member
Because reggae has a religious dimension it has always been much more convincing in presenting this uplift than hiphop has.

House has religion without religion, which is a neat trick.
 
luka

luka

Well-known member
I've got a friend from Kennington who stopped talking to me for ages after I sent him the Kennington where it started video he was so angry. These are the scumbags who destroyed the community. And of course he's absolutely right a and you can't dismiss that point of view with a clear conscience.
 
S

sadmanbarty

Well-known member
gives the producer the freedom to really mix like it as a proper rock song because they know there's a bloke who's going to cut through.
 
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