Re: [Marxism] When Facebook Isn't Fun, or...

["Ian Pace" <ian@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

There are strains of pre-industrial nostalgia underlying some of these 
arguments. I can't see anything socialist in a hearkening back to musical 
life before the division of labour, before the advent of recordings, 
electronics, advanced means of reproduction, etc., in which there was a far 
greater stratification between aristocratic, bourgeois, and folk music. 
Consumerist aesthetics undoubtedly inform the majority of musical 
consumption, but that's every bit as true of those supposedly discerning 
listeners who seek out particular concerts and recordings (in fact, 
especially true of them, many of whom collect CDs in the same way as Imelda 
Marcos collected shoes) as it is of those who employ music as background 
listening.

I encounter so much snide disparagement of the latter by musicians, 
classical music listeners, and some jazz and 'rockist' (those promulgating 
the supposed superiority of 'authentic' rock as against 'manufactured' pop) 
snobs; but what is the great benefit of the type of 'active listening' 
usually advocated as an alternative? Usually simply making a fetish of 
certain aspects of the music, relatively meaningless in themselves 
(structural complexity, harmonic or timbral exoticism, virtuosity, etc.), 
which serve to remove the music from a relationship with lived experience 
and the world and instead render it the property of the disinterested 
aesthete. All of this, and its associated discourse, is purely about 
mystifying music and elevating the status of those who claim to truly 
'appreciate' it. And this in itself helps to reinforce the social status of 
those who have been taught the 'correct' approach to music and culture 
(disinterested, pseudo-discerning, and above all depoliticised (which 
invariably means right wing reactionary)) through their bourgeois education.

There is such a thing as an active listening which focuses upon how the 
social context of particular music informs its very fabric, and also how 
changing modes of reception relate to social and ideological aspects of 
particular times and places. This attitude is most common in the best jazz 
criticism, but is very uncommon in other fields. There is a real virtue in 
this approach, as it refuses to consider music as being autonomous of time 
and place (and thus history, society, ideology). But otherwise, I see no 
reason to value the experience of sitting down and listening to a Pink Floyd 
album, or buying tickets to see the latest over-hyped Russian violinist, 
smothering some music with copious amount of vibrato and exaggerated rubato 
in order to lend it a mystical aura, than a teenager listening to some hits 
in the background or on their iPod.

Solidarity,
Ian 


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