What is good about Pop Music?

[blissblogger]

what's my code

tim, i'd always thought i was a reasonably bright fellow, but i'm having real difficulty catching your drift. not false modesty, i honestly can't get my head around it

but as far as i can get a grip on it, you seem to acknowledge there's more to music than just a sign-system, and then immediately go back to treating it as a sign system, a code we acquire.

i don't think music is a sign system. it may have sign-systems, and discourses entwined around it, glommed onto it, but the way it impacts us first and foremost as sensations, as forces

the example of the Amen is actually a perfect one

it was years and years before i could recognise an Amen. during the absolute prime of me being a hardcore raver, i had no idea even of the Amen's existence. we're talking a good couple of years, maybe longer, when i seriously doubt i could even auditorily distinguish that break from the other breaks in use. which must surely mean they were affecting me in a psychomotor sense without me having any knowledge of what they signfied as meta-jungle. if there was pattern recognition it was entirely at the somatic level, pre-conscious. but even the concept of 'recognition' seems inappropriate because when you're raving, the music is dancing you. there's no interval of recognition and then choosing to respond.

it's true that the Amen has become a signifier in retro-dance in the same way that wah-wah or fuzztone or phasing or Gang of Four guitar have become signifiers in various forms of retro-rock. but honestly during those early years of rave and jungle, i don't think the Amen's existence was widely known outside of producers and djs. which means there must have been thousands and thousands of people like me raving in blissful ignorance. the beats were doing their work on our bodies because their effectivity has nothing to do with signification. the Amen break is not language, it's not information or code, it has no referent... it's a pattern of pressure, an alternation of stresses and impacts. it works your body. it's got more in common with metallurgy or building a bridge or something like that... an intuition of this being the reason surely why jungle was full of titles like 'physics' or 'Torque' or indeed the very concept 'breakbeat science'

i'm not sure when i learned of the existence of Amens --it was quite late in the day, maybe 95 -- and even then it was a while before i could learn to identify them, like 'ah, "terrorist", that's an Amen'. i still get surprised now and then by tracks that i loved back in the day that turn out to have had Amens prominently in them e.g. bukem's "atlantis"

i think the idea that the rapture of Nicks vocal, its quality of being both numinous and all-too-material, as being attributable to a failure in my aquired pattern-recognition system's ability to asSIGN a meaning to its texture is... just weird. music is not text.

mr barnes:
>i don't think you can credibly argue that dancing = experiencing intense aesthetic pleasure,

!?!?!


hey, i'm enjoying being in agreement with K-punk. i'd actually been thinking he is more Romantic than he'd like to think, but this is almost certainly due to a misunderstanding of Romanticism on my part. (Isn't Gothick part of Romanticism?) i would be interested in hearing further hearing explanations of Romanticism and why it's a bad thing to be.


someone mentioned Derrida not denying the Real. i expect you're right, but i have known Derrideans in the past who've claimed that there's nothing outside the text -- the text is all there is. Even then i thought this utterly loony, and this was when i was at the height of being under postmodernist influence.. it was paul oldfield actually who was also well into his baudrillard at that point and claimed that power didn't exist. that also seemed utterly loony to me.

 

[Tim F]

"tim, i'd always thought i was a reasonably bright fellow, but i'm having real difficulty catching your drift. not false modesty, i honestly can't get my head around it"

No it's not you I don't think, I'm very verbose and muddy most of the time!

but as far as i can get a grip on it, you seem to acknowledge there's more to music than just a sign-system, "and then immediately go back to treating it as a sign system, a code we acquire."

I think that music is always simultaneously a sign-system <i>and</i> a pure sonic excess of that sign system; one is always reacting to both. But for the purpose of articulating our engagement we generally rely on the sign-system to structure it. The excess is difficult to represent except in quasi-mystical terms (although, as I continue to stress, it's not <i>actually</i> mystical).

"it was years and years before i could recognise an Amen. during the absolute prime of me being a hardcore raver, i had no idea even of the Amen's existence. we're talking a good couple of years, maybe longer, when i seriously doubt i could even auditorily distinguish that break from the other breaks in use. which must surely mean they were affecting me in a psychomotor sense without me having any knowledge of what they signfied as meta-jungle. if there was pattern recognition it was entirely at the somatic level, pre-conscious. but even the concept of 'recognition' seems inappropriate because when you're raving, the music is dancing you. there's no interval of recognition and then choosing to respond."

Was your body still not reacting to the speed of the break, its place within the track etc at this early stage? Could you not recognise these things as being constitutive of a jungle track? These are all signs too! My point was that until the "amen" is identified as a sign in and of itself it has no meaning, its signifying capacity lies in other elements like its speed, its use, its volume. Before the "amen" became a sign (or, more specifically, a sign that <i>you, the particular subject experiencing it, could recognise as such</i>) it was impossible to talk about what it was specifically doing as distinct from the apache or paris break. So at that pre-sign stage the amen is only enjoyed as pure sonic difference, and for that reason it is not addressed specifically, it is not theoretically accounted for. By entering the sign system - or, to put it another way, by you becoming aware of it as a sign - it can become accounted for theoretically, and yet this is merely accounting for it <i>as</i> a sign, because it can still only be referred to in terms of other signs.

"but even the concept of 'recognition' seems inappropriate because when you're raving, the music is dancing you. there's no interval of recognition and then choosing to respond."

I think the brain works faster than this. I think the physical response to music is <i>experienced</i> as a compulsion from the outside but that doesn't mean that's all it is.

"i think the idea that the rapture of Nicks vocal, its quality of being both numinous and all-too-material, as being attributable to a failure in my aquired pattern-recognition system's ability to asSIGN a meaning to its texture is... just weird. music is not text. "

Ha but this is my very exact precise point!!!!! What is your pattern-recognition system but an ability to understand certain sign systems? I feel like shouting "DO YOU SEE?!?!?" in a Mark Sinker style.

The broader point of course is that text is not text either.

 

[Tim F]

An analogy for what I'm talking about might be this:

Sometimes I will wake up in the middle of the night and see a certain arrangement of light and shadow in my bedroom, a sense of the closeness of certain shades and their orientation in relation to eachother. But this does not, to my half-awake mind, translate into the following: "the end of my bed, my stereo, the door, the chair in the corner over which is draped a pair of jeans, the very faint amount of reflected star and lamp light through the window etc." It is merely an arrangement of differential intensities whose arrangement strikes me as deeply alien and simultaneously <i>meaningless</i> because I am not looking at in terms of a sign system. I feel a certain traumatic feeling - "where am I, what is this?" I can't even say "what are those things?" because they haven't even turned into concrete objects, it's just different shades of light and shadow.

Immediately my focus and my brain sharpens and I begin to realise where I am and what all these things are. I "recognise" them, I can think about them, and my momentary panic begins to look deeply silly. This is "only" a chair, "only" a bed. But it's also a "bed that I am sleeping in", so it has a use value, a meaning to me. It is a sign system. But that doesn't mean that it isn't also a shape, an experience of light and shade that, were I not able to draw on my general knowledge of beds, would not contain any of the comforting associations that I can now attach to it. It might even be deeply unsettling.

What I experience in the moment before I begin to wake up is a sort of Deleuzian schizophrenia.

 

[Tim F]

Oops I just misread the last bit I quoted of your Simon re Stevie Nicks - I thought you were restating your own position, not mine...

 

[blissblogger]

i have to go to bed now but i think:

a/ your disoriented experience of your bedroom sounds really cool and intense, and the kind of thing one would want to actively seek out!

more to follow tomorrow, doubtless (and despite the doubters -- hey 4186 views can't be wrong, surely!)

 

[tek tonic]

mr barnes:
>i don't think you can credibly argue that dancing = experiencing intense aesthetic pleasure,

!?!?!

oh come on, don't tell me you've never faked the funk.

"i lost my friends, i danced alone
it's six o'clock, i wanna go home,
but there's no way, not today,
makes you wonder what it meant, and, uh..."

 

[Tim F]

"a/ your disoriented experience of your bedroom sounds really cool and intense, and the kind of thing one would want to actively seek out!"

I agree!

But I think this is what I-as-a-poptimist mean I talk about pop listening! ie. it's the same thing as when you listen to Stevie Nicks' "Sara" - music as "pop" because there is nothing else that can be said about it *yet* except that it affects you deeply, unsettles you. Unfortunately you cannot think about it afterwards without converting it into sign systems ("what was <i>actually</i> happening was [x]"), so there's no point hanging on to this mystical-seeming moment.

Of course "Pop" in this sense is very different to chart pop, "classic" pop *AND* pop-that-produces-populations. This is because all of these are grounded in the social, and there is no social relationship except relationships of sign systems (ie. even if you feel this and someone next to you on the dancefloor feels this too, you can't really share that feeling except in the form of signs to eachother - dance moves, smiling at each other, shouting incoherently, using slang words, having a theoretical conversation on a message board).

The somewhat Habermasian point I would make in defence of these sign systems is that they can be distinguished according to their fidelity to the event of the pre-signification "rapture". Eg. I'm much more sympathetic to a sign system that described the experience of being on the dancefloor in terms of responding to certain sonic cues than I would be to one which described the same experience in terms of having a personal connection with the artist who made one of the particular dance tracks. Both are sign systems that can only describe imperfectly the differential affectivity of the sound itself, but the former is much closer I think to what is actually going on.

 

[borderpolice]

Borderpolice:
>Well, how do you know it was a dud? Did you test the pills?

>Nah? Didn't think so!

so you're saying, despite really wanting to have the
E-xperience, i would somehow trick myself into feeling good E as dud
E?! that don't sound terribly plausible.

Well, what can I say? Why don't you settle the matter with a double blind test
and an MDMA testing kit? Please report on the outcome!

your explication of the mimesis theory is really interesting -- it's
so intricate. in the end though i don't buy it. it seems to empty out
the whole dimension of the aesthetic, the affective, the emotional. in
your description liking music comes across as this enormously complex
game of socialisation, with no point.

it reminds me a bit of Bourdieu's theories, which are interesting and
telling as far as they go, but always seem to point towards the
implication that the only reason people invest in particular kinds of
music or art is as a form of social cohesion or social distinction --
consolidation of one's membership of one group, and defining oneself
as others. again chucking pleasure and afffect out the window.

that's why i found sarah thornton's club cultures book, with its
bourdieu derived 'subcultural capital' concept, in the end
unconvincing -- cos it made irrelevant what would be appear the whole
point of club and rave music ie. intense aesthetic pleasure, bodily
pleasure etc. for her it was all about hierarchies of cool and
inclusive/exclusion devices

I may not have expressed myself very clearly, so I'll try again. I'm
emphatically not "chucking pleasure and affect out the window". I try
to understand how it works. I begun my introjections here by
suggesting that this pleasure is IN PARTS generated by mimetic
effects, by observing that same pleasure in others, in the same way
that yawning, sexual excitement of mirth is contagious. In a strong
sense music is partly about THE SELF_REPRODUCTION OF PLEASURE BY
MIMESIS. I never DENIED that other causes may be important too.

What I want to get a handle on is the following set of phenomena.


* Music internally, phenomenological, is experienced, and maybe only
experienced in intense emotional ways. I am hit by music, it makes
me move, I adore it, I hate it. This reaction is strong and
compelling. No conceivable vocabulary for its description exists,
other than emotional intensities. Let's call this internal emotional
reaction FIRE!

* FIRE is unstable and changing almost at random: a piece of music can
trigger intense joy one moment and loathing one bar later.

* The external reaction to music, that which can be observed by
others, is much more stable and predictable. Let's call it ICE! One
can rely on a classical concert's audience to sit still and quite
during a performance, just as much as any metal crowd will mosh and
stagedive (where permitted). grinding, flexing and locking will be
the moves of the night in urban environments.

* There seems little connection between a style of music, it's aural
properties, and the FIRE it generates. Moreover, every (mature)
genre caters for the whole palette of emotional responses (FIREs).

* There seems little connection between a style of music, it's aural
properties, and the ICE it generates. Moreover, every (mature) genre
locks itself into one (or just a few) form(s) of dancing and way of
communicating about music.

* A piece of music's information content is important for FIRE: if it
is too confusing, too complex, I don't like it (otherwise white
noise would be brilliant to listen too), but if there's too little
novelty/surprise it's boring. It is worth pointing out that
information content is not an intrinsic property (at least regarding
the music that is actually listened too): It is a measure of a
listener's surprise.

* FIRE is a game of extremes, for me at least, maybe that is different
in others: I love or loathe a piece of music, but I'm rarely in
between.

* Sometimes counterfactually, I expect others to burn the same
FIREs. Musical emotions are experienced as compelling. That is to
say I expect others to share my enthusiasm or loathing of any given
piece of music, despite a fair amount of disappointed expectation.

* It is impossible for me to think about music -- and I'd be
interested in other people's experiences in this matter --
non-socially, by which I mean that whenever I think about music,
even of its most remote acoustic properties, I inevitably think of
(imagined) others and the effect that sound may have on them.

* There's little short-term but lots of long term correlation between
FIRE and ICE. I may be in utter despair and lonely in a club, yet I
dance like I do when in love. You just can't tell.

* Crucially, and that deserves its own paragraph, and has been missing
in the discussion so far, in as much as my FIRE is socially
coloured, it is also erotically coloured. I cannot dissociate music
and sexual/romantic possibilities. More generally, I think of future
possibilities (for pleasure of all sorts) that I imagine music to be
associated with.


To explain FIRE and ICE, I use the following mechanisms.

* ICE is generated by MIMETIC MECHANISMS of pleasure, similar to
language acquisition in children. What is being copied is other
people's expression of emotion(a reaction to music), especially
where it is pleasure. The reason for copying is that it can (to
some degree, not reliably), produce that emotion in the copier. This
mechanism is crucial to human development, one thinks of the
parent-child bond and can be related to all sorts of psychological
theories. One key pleasure, maybe the key pleasure being reproduced
is (structured by) the possibility of sexual/romantic gratification.
Public self-presentation to members of one's preferred genders
appears to be a fairly deep-seating human need.

* It is important to realise that what is copied may be quite subtle.
Emotional attitudes are in body posture, minutes variations of tone
of voice, glances, not necessarily in the most visible aspects of
one's behaviour.

* The mechanisms generating ICE are not strongly affected by FIRE.

FIRE is more complicated. I stipulate several seemingly
independent mechanisms at play.

An INFORMATION CONTENT EVALUATOR: it asks, does this music have the
right kind of predictability (with respect to my current,
historically evolved level of familiarity)? Incidentally what you
said about Amen fits very nicely here and chimes with my
experiences. In my rave youth I could certainly not distinguish any
breaks at all. All jungle was just incredibly complicated,
energising, confusing, compelling and amazing. It was only when I
started DJing and producing, that I finally understood breakbeat,
acquired the skill to distinguish them all, that I, for want of a
better term, understood Jungle. Contrary to my expectations, this
understanding did not engender an intensification of pleasure, an
increased infatuation with the scene, but disenchantment. Thank fuck
UK-Garage came along just at the right time to take over!

* A CONFORMITY EVALUATOR: Does my emotional response conform with that
of others, especially those whose opinion I care about (the
scene). If yes, good, if not bad. [These others are in a large
part, but not entirely an imagined community, with complicated
feedback mechanisms.] Why do I expect conformity? This expectation
is formed because of the subterranean experience that pleasure has a
strong mimetic element. I get consistently electrified by other's
excitement and vice versa. This experience of pleasure generation by
mimesis is so ubiquitous, so unproblematic, only the rare cases
where this breaks down are consciously noted.

* A POSSIBILITY EVALUATOR: what kind of pleasure possibilities,
especially sexual/romantic possibilities does any particular piece
of music/scene is promising to provide? This is the place, where
your social transformation stuff fits in because
one's emotional response is intimately tied in with possible future
worlds and promises of pleasure.

* Finally, and crucially, there's the IDEO-MEMO-MUDUL, my way of
saying: I-don't-know. There are other mechanisms at play, I have
just no idea what they may be. Neuromagic!

I emphasise that FIRE is always and inevitable an UNCONSCIOUS
EMOTIONAL response: I am being HIT by a song. I LOVE it or I HATE
it. This is the only phenomenologically adequate description I can
think of. But this adequacy says nothing about the genesis of the
feelings.

I think your complaint about technical descriptions like mine being
inappropriate because they are not couched in terms of emotional
responses and possibilities is telling and working in my favour. You
dislike it precisely because it it cold and anti-mimetic. The
disenchanting technical description does not generate excitement about
music (except maybe in weird freaks like me). But you have the
expectation that that pleasure generation should take place when
dealing with music. You do not trust intrinsic aural properties to
cater for your enjoyment. You need your pleasure being regenerated
through observing other peoples' pleasure, even in highly sublimated
contexts of ivory towers. And why would your have that expectation,
that need? Because of all your previous experiences with music ...

 

[borderpolice]

Here's a suggestion: Discourse is Rockist, where it denies, or
denigrates mimesis of pleasure as an important mechanism, instead
stipulating intrinsic properties. It is Popist, where it feels no
need to deny or denigrate this mechanism.

 

[borderpolice]

also your theory of change is quite odd too -- are you saying that
society is changing all the time, slowly, by itself -- and therefore
doesn't need any help from specific individuals or groups of humans,
and in fact can't be pushed forward by conscious efforts -- sort of
gradualism without any scope or purchase for human agency, right --
that seems to fit what kpunk was saying about the mystification
re. Society as this quasi-divine entity that has its own agenda and is
like Nature or something...

As to social change, maybe this is not the right time and place to
discuss it, especially as my understanding of society and agency is
highly contrary to common sense. In brief, I do NOT believe that
society (note the singular, there's only one!) is made up of humans
(for otherwise I'd cut off a piece of society every time I get a
haircut), but rather the collection of all communications (a
communication being a relation between two anticipatory systems,
modeling each other). One of the effects of society is the production
of agency by ascription. Because communications are atemporal events,
society regenerates itself all the time in a dynamic and chaotic
process. What this communication is about is mostly society itself and
changes in society are an evolution of self-descriptions and agency
ascriptions. <pheew!> As to divine, what pleasure could come from that
vocabulary?

 

[borderpolice]

Borderpolice don't you dare self-deprecate, these last few posts have been awesome!

I had this sudden flash of "YES! He is right!" (which I wasn't certain about immediately prior; or at least hadn't yet turned my mind to that question) with your reference to dance moves.

I've always been fascinated by what I would call the infectiousness of dance moves - when I'm at a club I'll see someone make some particular move and, somehow before I've even registered that I'm impressed or enamoured by it, it's like my body is watching and learning that move and I'll feel my limbs either flow or snap into it. The sensation is of some sort of physical compulsion, or perhaps rather that my body has become liberated to the point of being a stronger social "agent" than my consciousness (supposedly in the driver's seat) is. But of course it's really the same thing that happens when someone uses a word I don't know in a sentence and yet I can understand exactly what is being said without puzzling over it; the mind is so well trained at picking up what is necessary for building social interactions that it can do it at a preconscious level. Significantly, I never start doing this only for my mind to catch up and realise "oh no, actually that dance move looks <i>awful</i>." But the fact that I'm instantly copying moves from someone near me while still feeling like my body has an unmediated connection to the music kinda cuts through the binary between music's-direct-impact/social-mimesis.

Thanks. The funny thing is, that mimetic understanding of music occurred to me when I realised just this: that
I locked into other people's dancing and their pleasures. Using words/phrases I don't really understand is also
rather familiar to me.

There's a potential third strand between the reification of meaning for the sake of coherent shared understandings and an insistence on deconstructed instability, and this is the act of deconstructive criticism itself.

Talking aboutmusic , discussing it, is certainly an important aspect of the reproduction of scenes.

 

[borderpolice]

Likewise with ideology: it is never experienced as being ideology or it would be useless. No-one ever says "I am being ideological", it's always the other person.

The term "Ideology" is unfortunate -- because of it's negative connotations, noboys accepts being ideological, hence blocking the cruicial circularity. Being socially constructed is better because it's neutral: good constructivism accepts it's own constructed nature and the really exciting one derives much of its force from the coherent integration of it's constructed nature into it's own theorising (the "Re-Entry of the observed in the observer", or vice versa).

 

[borderpolice]

but isn't there also the case of freaky dancing -- the complete and total freak with all the freaky moves -- nobody else dances like this person and nobody else picks up his moves -- and yet if he's a really good freaky dancer, then nobody is going to deny that he's seriously down with the music, that he "gets" the music on a very deep level

ALSO -- I think the mimetic theory is a bit too formalistic -- i.e., its formalism is neutral as regards the TESTIFYING and PERSUADING that goes on when people are dancing to music -- i.e., the dancing testifies both to the power of the music and to the fact that yeah man i feel the power of this music coursing through my veins -- or dancing as persuasion, i.e., look at how i'm dancing -- isn't this powerful? don't you agree that this music has got power? and that now i've got the power running through me?

I agree with the freaky dancing thing, dont have the time to respond in detail. as to formalism and persuasion: the mimetic reproduction is not one-off but rather happens continually: at each point in time one (subconsciously) compares how the others react/dance/sing/talk against one's own expectations, which were formed by prior such
observations. At the same time, expectations are modified by the new observations. A musical scene (and its pleasures) are a dynamic process in constant need of reproduction by more singign/dancing etc.

 

[borderpolice]

do birds 'copy' each other when they flock? Flocking, propagation, contagion are infinitely better models... memes not mimesis....

better in what respect?

bird flocking is an emergent phenomenon (in the technical sense) where birds copy the flight trajectory of their
neighbours locally, like in dancing. only the behaviour of the leader brid cannot accounted for in this way. it acts
instinctually i would imagine.

 

[Woebot]

Feel mildly embarrassed that I haven't really done this thread much justice, short of coming up with my (heartfelt) initial conjecture. I printed it out with the intention of trying to tackle it over a lunch break, with two children to look after my dayjob and writing for two magazines at the moment I'm stretched pretty thin, and it was 108 pages long. Kind of stunning in every sense.

Thanks firstly to Tim F, Freelance ILX Stormtrooper, for his contributions.

what i've been trying to think about a lot over the last year is a sort of new formalism - ie. trying to break down exactly what is happening when we experience a piece of music from a phenomenological perspective (as opposed to a musicological perspective). This is probably the thing that fascinates me most in music criticism, and it's why most of my writing takes the form of tiresomely repetitive "close readings" of my own experience of any given piece of music.

Thought you were harsh on yourself here. Prompted me to reflect that the "Rockist" position (nothing to do with Rock people!) can tend to be quite monosylabbic, grunty even. If anything the theoretical flowering of ILM/Freaky Trigger has been enabled by people allowing themselves to get frothy. And frothy is good.

Also I noticed people were asking about my (OK quite "empassioned") suggestion that Pop-ism has tainted alot of writing about music. I was definitely referring here, as Mark K pointed out, to the mainstream press. I'll confess my tastes in music writing were shaped by quintessentially Rockist "organs" (ha ha). What I liked in the writing of Lester Bangs, Griel Marcus, the old Melody Maker (let's not name names eh!), and The Wire (roughly 1991-1996) was it's reflections into history and geography as much as it's enlightening forays into theory. Anecdote, stories and insight into character as much as musical analysis. Music for me at least, was libidinised by these these things. Isn't music just one function of life? Don't we use music as puzzle to teach us more about the cosmos? Doesn't that shock of misrecognition one gets from really powerful music prompt us to act, to inquire, to re-assess? It seems as if the Rockist is more equipped to handle this charge than (giant 20-foot cartoon cut-out) Popist.

I think I've noticed a bottoming-out in this kind of writing in the media. Xgau must be the archetypical writer in this sense, free-ranging, without anything as tired as allegiences to any music, writes punchy reviews and gives stars. Actually, can you think of any music journalists these days who do have allegiences? Reynolds, Keenan, er......... Furthermore it's status as an "almost-career" for people travelling to some other destination (like translation, writing fiction, writing on different more profitable subjects like politics and film) underlines this.

I'd actually go further. In my background emails with Tom Ewing, I affectionately accused of him of using Pop music as though it were "Rock" (nothing to do with Rock music people). Forming communities, throwing club nights, collecting music, hmm doesn't this look awfully like Rockist behaviour to you? This was kind of echoed in Mark K's describing Finney as a Rockist at heart. (winks) Mark himself is, as Simon observed this time, more of a Rockist than he thinks he is... OK (yawn) everyone's a Rockist now

Who's headlining Glastonbury this year? Kylie. Nuff said innit.

 

[borderpolice]

but I think that in the case of music -- or at least dance music -- the overwhelming feeling of being seized by the music is EMpowering -- it's what makes you dance -- we could even say that this comes out of the Quaker and Pentecostal traditions

if one must pin it down, wouldnt that be much more the african contribution to music?

 

[dominic]

if one must pin it down, wouldnt that be much more the african contribution to music?

yes

i like to call it voodoo

however, pentecostalism in the united states, at least in early stages, was a largely black american movement

not that i know much about pentecostalism or anything

not even sure why i bothered to argue w/ k-punk on this one anyway, as it's a pretty minor point -- at least at this stage of the discussion, i.e., who knows the twists and turns that are ahead, or whether this thread will suddenly come to an end

though it may reflect k-punk's affinity for early industrial music as against my affinity for 90/91/92 rave music

i should also say that my emphasis on "empowering" does fit nicely w/ Tim F's argument that what I've been (naively) describing is in fact interpellation, i.e., the person who is seized becomes a petty lord in the feudal system

whereas in k-punk's version the "overpowered" listener is reduced to his empty status as mere creature, stripped of all vain conceits about himself, etc

 

[k-punk]

Quick, before this thread gets closed down by the restive masses

Dominic, Simon and Mark all argue against the "reductive" position of music-as-social-enunciation, and fair enough, there is a basic affective materiality to music which sign systems and socalisation don't account for. But this does not need to be a scarce transcendental sublime, some mystical property which jungle and Stevie Nicks' voice possess and which other music does not.

Ah! Now THAT'S a strawman if ever I saw it...

I have been very careful to say that the sublime is precisely NOT transcendental, i.e. Kantian. I take it that the whole point of Lacan, Zizek, Zupancic etc is that the sublime is not 'rare', unknowable and mystical... as animals, we cannot help sublimating.... but surely that doesn't mean that Stevie Nicks' voice DOESN'T possess qualities that other voices don't... clearly it does...

Mark being "drearily predictable" and being "simple" or "straightforward" are so far from being the same thing that I'm astonished you conflate them here. Ideology's success in producing similar, predictable subjects is not a function of its simplicity! Again, the correct analogy here is with language - choosing the right words in a given context usually appears to be both the simplest thing in the world and an almost unconscious, unmediated process. And if you ask different people to provide you with a synonym for one word it's hardly going to be surprising that most will offer up the same alternative word, or maybe one of a very small group. But this very dreary predictability is the result of a very complex and counter-intuitive system whose complexity and counter-intuitiveness has to be actively over-looked by the subject in order for them to feel confident saying anything at all!

Fine... people are drearily predictable for complex reasons... why is this interesting?

Sonics and Language are not the same, of course, but I think patterns of <i>recognition</i> are at a fundamental level the same across different signifying systems, which is to say that the success of a signifying system can be measured by the extent to which it is not recognised as such - the extent to which what is being "recognised" by the subject is experienced as a direct presence, an unmediated essence, rather than some sort of socially agreed construct or placeholder.

How does sound signify though? It clearly doesn't.... What does an amen signify? I'm not sure I'm grasping what you are saying, but it seems to amount to an equivocation between two levels: the nonsignifying level of sonic impact and the signifying level of ppl's INTERPRETATION of that impact....

The irony is that in most writing about music this is tacitly acknowledged. When Simon talks about the history of the mentasm or the amen isn't he talking about the way in which a certain differential affect - a strange and harsh metallic squiggle, a percussive flash and skitter - is transformed into a social signifier via repetition and mimesis?

Proving my point... the only way it is 'transformed into a social signifier' is when it is talked and written about.. on the dancefloor there is no signification... and, really, this mimesis thing is going nowhere: a digital copy is precisely NOT a copy in the mimetic sense... it is a reiteration of exactly the same code... in the same way that if you have a virus, your organism hasn't mimetically copied one with the virus....

The recognition thing is so depressingly Hegelian I don't even know where to start...

 

[k-punk]

hey, i'm enjoying being in agreement with K-punk. i'd actually been thinking he is more Romantic than he'd like to think, but this is almost certainly due to a misunderstanding of Romanticism on my part. (Isn't Gothick part of Romanticism?) i would be interested in hearing further hearing explanations of Romanticism and why it's a bad thing to be.

There are obv many different interpretations of Romanticism, but the only one that makes sense for me is one which places emphasis on the Imagination as opposed to the Thing-in-Itself. Kant had argued that it was impossible to know anything about the Thing-in-itself; all we could legitimately talk about was our own Operating System - because that OS is necessary for any experiene or thought we could have. Romantic poets then garble this by claiming that everything in the world is a product of our own imaginations - and that changing the world just involves re-imagining it.

The great benefit of Lacan etc is to overthrow this... the idea that the Real is Impossible, but that it happens... the traumatic enounter with the Real is the founding moment on which any signifying system is based...

Badiou has a specifc sense of Romanticism, which I think basically means 'Heidegger'... he sees Romanticism as being about pathos, finitude, being-towards-death

The Gothic - Romantic relation... Gothic preceded Romantic, if it is defined in terms of the production of Gothic cathedrals (that's certainly how Worringer does it in Form in Gothic and Abstraction and Empathy)

That's why I love that joke at Coleridge's expense in Powers' The Anubis Gates. At the end, an opium-intoxicated Coleridge is imprisoned underground with some mutated monstrosities. Naturally, being a Romantic, he interprets the monstrosiites as aspects of his own mind, and frees them.

I suppose the post-structuralist equivalent would be, 'Be free, monsters - for I know you are only social signifiers...'

 

[dominic]

i think borderpolice and tim f are winning this argument!

which is not to say that i'm giving up

merely keeping score

Music internally, phenomenological, is experienced, and maybe only
experienced in intense emotional ways. I am hit by music, it makes
me move, I adore it, I hate it. This reaction is strong and
compelling. No conceivable vocabulary for its description exists,
other than emotional intensities. Let's call this internal emotional
reaction FIRE!

right

and i'd say that fire has priority over ice (this is the key point)

it's why i lose myself while dancing to this track

and why i come back to my senses when the dj plays the next track -- b/c this track extinguishes rather than feeds the fire

FIRE is unstable and changing almost at random: a piece of music can trigger intense joy one moment and loathing one bar later.

i'm assume you meant to say that a song may trigger intense joy if you're one mood

or if not loathing then at least very little reaction (apathy, annoyance) if you're in another mood

and yes, this is an accurate description of what may happen in private

The external reaction to music, that which can be observed by others, is much more stable and predictable.

not necessarily

you need the right kind of crowd, the right dynamics

you need the stars to shine that night

magic in the air

you can have more or less the same people at a bar on two consecutive wednesdays, play more or less the same music on both nights, and one night rocks and the other doesn't

i suppose this furthers your side of the argument -- b/c on the nights that rock a few people in the crowd take a chance, i.e., they start to dance -- but i call this "persuading" others to dance, showing others that the music is right, the situation is right and this is the way to celebrate

and yet it is all too often the case that the initial dancers fail to persuade -- they dance for two or three songs, but nobody else at the bar cares or feels like dancing or perhaps they even snicker

There seems little connection between a style of music, it's aural properties, and the FIRE it generates.

different genres of music have their own enthusiasts

different kinds of music spark fire in different people

the question is whether this is purely a function of socio-empirical factors or whether there's a quasi-religious explanation

and i'm not sure on which side of this binary to slot the neurological wiring explanation for fire

i.e., k-punk would presumably file the neurological under the quasi-religious as opposed to the socio-empirical

and yet if it's a question of wiring, then how is that not empirical?

or is neurological wiring transcendental b/c science can at most explain the OS -- i.e., maybe someday -- but not the content that runs through the wiring -- i.e., how the content gets assigned value?

that is, sounds that give me intense pleasure or light my fire cause in someone else intense loathing or displeasure

or again, is this a case of different people assigning different values to the same neurological sensations?

Moreover, every (mature) genre caters for the whole palette of emotional responses (FIREs)

errrrr -- what about TAKING the listener up and down?

the TAKING is not simply manipulation -- it's a LEADING, a COME FOLLOW ME and YOU WILL SEE

i.e., the listener is taken through a range of emotions, but there's an internal thread

an ARGUMENT, a TAKE on the music -- i.e., the listener is given a chance to get the music, to get the vibe, to the message

again, i don't think it's as simple as pushing different emotional buttons to get different kinds of fires

in many ways it's more like an ARGUMENT that the BODY understands

"understand this groove" -- a classic mantra

and then it becomes understand these different grooves, understand the ups and downs

understand how these different songs, these different rhythms, these different sounds -- understand the argument they are making

There seems little connection between a style of music, it's aural properties, and the ICE it generates.

by ICE you seem to mean the outward forms -- e.g., how people dance, gestures, manners, etiquette, and so forth

so i here i must disagree w/ you -- certainly w/ dancing there does seem to be a pretty close fit b/w how people dance and the nature of the music

Moreover, every (mature) genre locks itself into one (or just a few) form(s) of dancing and way of communicating about music.

yes -- b/c here the arguments have been made, people have been convinced (rightly or wrongly) that this is the way to dance to this music

A piece of music's information content is important for FIRE: if it is too confusing, too complex, I don't like it (otherwise white noise would be brilliant to listen too), but if there's too little novelty/surprise it's boring. It is worth pointing out that information content is not an intrinsic property (at least regarding the music that is actually listened too): It is a measure of a listener's surprise.

EXCELLENT POINT!

but this also means that even long-standing participants in a community continue to be seized by the music

to the extent that they get bored with what the music scene produces, the music loses its hold and they move on to another kind of music -- as w/ your move from jungle to garage

or they become like me and become addicts of retro sounds

though perhaps the addict of the same damn sonic pleasures believes that the argument has yet to be properly made

FIRE is a game of extremes, for me at least, maybe that is different in others: I love or loathe a piece of music, but I'm rarely in between.

i'm often indifferent -- could take or leave a lot of stuff

often bored with music if it doesn't light my fire

not so much a case of loathing -- just boredom -- unmoved, unaffected

Sometimes counterfactually, I expect others to burn the same FIREs. Musical emotions are experienced as compelling. That is to say I expect others to share my enthusiasm or loathing of any given piece of music, despite a fair amount of disappointed expectation

i agree -- especially if i think a song is brilliant -- i expect others to share my enthusiasms but not necessarily my hates

It is impossible for me to think about music -- and I'd be interested in other people's experiences in this matter -- non-socially, by which I mean that whenever I think about music, even of its most remote acoustic properties, I inevitably think of (imagined) others and the effect that sound may have on them.

YES YES YES -- in fact i said the same thing upthread

There's little short-term but lots of long term correlation between FIRE and ICE. I may be in utter despair and lonely in a club, yet I dance like I do when in love. You just can't tell.

i will sometimes dance when in despair -- but i think my dancing reflects the despair

that is, i feel alone in the crowd, not connected with others, it's more a kind of burning for love than the ecstatic feeling of being empowered

Crucially, and that deserves its own paragraph, and has been missing in the discussion so far, in as much as my FIRE is socially coloured, it is also erotically coloured. I cannot dissociate music and sexual/romantic possibilities. More generally, I think of future possibilities (for pleasure of all sorts) that I imagine music to be associated with.

i associate music w/ eros and a kind of intoxication

but not with sexual/romantic possibilities

there's a relationship to sex, a relationship to promiscuous desire

the music makes use of these desires -- and would be ineffectual if it didn't make use of sexual desire

but for me it's ultimately asexual

it's about losing oneself

OR it's about feeling empowered as part of the collective

but it's not about sexual/romantic possibilities

A CONFORMITY EVALUATOR: Does my emotional response conform with that of others, especially those whose opinion I care about (the scene). If yes, good, if not bad. [These others are in a large part, but not entirely an imagined community, with complicated feedback mechanisms.] Why do I expect conformity? This expectation is formed because of the subterranean experience that pleasure has a
strong mimetic element. I get consistently electrified by other's excitement and vice versa. This experience of pleasure generation by mimesis is so ubiquitous, so unproblematic, only the rare cases where this breaks down are consciously noted.

so much of this is right on -- yes yes yes

and yet i think you're losing sight of the TESTIFYING and PERSUADING that occurs on the dancefloor

it's not simply mechanistic mimesis

it's a kind of argument -- it's about convincing others -- and about shared convictions