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August 07, 2002
Volume 26: The Radio is Broken
ICIE,
Sitting in the sun I am possessed by enormous, sur-wakeful benevolence-- a benevolence which impels me, compels me even, to lecture you on your abominable taste in music.
The difference, my incestuous cousin, between classical and jazz was a subject of mortal debate at the turn of the last century. The reason is that jazz is about feeling ("now I'm blue / and the trouble with me is you") and classical music is about thinking-- how else could one be induced to accept eighteen hours of dwarves fucking giants and vengeful women made out of water in a language half the audience didn't know? Yet my examples highlight the ridiculous of overgeneralizing that jazz is virile and classical sterile: Nat King Cole clearly knew some math ("the/trou/ble/with/me/is/you"), and Wagner-- great with the notes-- was fecundly inattentive to what Socrates said about building a good story.
Beethoven and Mozart clearly knew some things about passion so it's probably no coincidence that they're the commonest known composers in the world. Then we detour left to Shakespeare, who mostly wrote for money and didn't think his stuff worth saving, but who knew the value of humour in the middle of pathos ("the bawdy hand of the dial is upon the prick of noon")-- more importantly, though forgive the juxtaposition, the value of timeless humour. Shakespeare was lucky enough to live at a time when any in-jokes should be confined Zeus fucking a cow-- not a hanging chad in the bunch.
Now it becomes apparent that jazz is not so much about feeling as about individuality-- democracy even-- whereas classical music is about structure and tradition. The airiest classical is solid ("Joy, fair spark of the gods, / Daughter of Elysium, / Drunk with fiery rapture, Goddess, / We approach thy shrine!") compared to the liquidity of the grimmest jazz ("you took a heart / tore it apart / you took a dream / tore out the seams").
If we indulge a little in modern namedropping and compare the feuds on constitutes pure jazz to George Dubya stealing the presidential election in Florida, and the stultification of classical music to the corruption of the Christian church, the metaphors, I think, do take on some substance.
If one accepts, as I do, that rock music is as much an offshoot of jazz as is standup comedy, then one might surmise that I consider all rock music irredeemably liquid. This is true! However, rock is so demandingly fluid that it mixes easily-- one might even say it pollutes easily. My favourite music of any genre is so passionate that it has turned to steam. Yours-- and here's the lecture-- is so cold that it has become mud. People like Roger Waters and Alanis Morissette are loaded with Teutonic angst, but too superficial, stupid or ignorant to develop proper discipline. This makes me very angry, because people who are otherwise intelligent are easily distracted into mistaking passionately cold mud for either water or ground ("There is no disappearing of the true Dhamma until a false Dhamma arises in the world. When the false Dhamma arises, he makes the true Dhamma to disappear").
I am profoundly mistrustful of people who are old enough to have outgrown cold mud music but haven't. It suggests that they feel a great loss in their lives, looming and significant, but have transmuted it into something casual and tolerable. They've rechanneled sorrow-- which can be surmounted-- into melancholy-- which is only romantic. Someone who has permanently done that to themselves will probably do the same to others.
Melancholy is so teenage, ICIE. Grow up.
AD
Posted by gtaylor at August 7, 2002 10:20 PM
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