Fetishes and Idols
Monday, September 29th, 2008
Feeling a bit cynical today. I got to listen to some really great music this weekend. Some good friends–AshMae, Rachel, Spencer, Sam–played good things at the Sego festival in Provo on Saturday, and I danced and shook my body and felt quite alive. Then last night Sigur Ros played in Salt Lake and there were some pretty beautiful moments. But, I always come away from those experiences feeling pretty ambivalent. I know that a lot of people are having genuinely happy experiences, but I can’t help feeling like, in many instances, music has just become a medium for people to show how fluent they are in the language of cool. Even worse, although it’s related, is the sensation that ipods and concerts serve the carnivalesque function of providing places to blow off steam and forget for a moment that our lives within our capitalist socioeconomic surroundings are stupendously monotonous, unimaginative, and completely lacking any transcendence; in other words, we go to concerts on the weekend to forget about our 9 to 5 jobs, our majors that we don’t find interesting but need to complete in order to get a 9 to 5 job, etc., etc. We go to the communal rites of cool to prove that our souls haven’t been erased by the necessities of everyday life, but really we are just assuaging our thread-bare consciences enough to be able to return to the amoralities of the daily grind. We idolize the creative because we forfeited our own right to creativity long ago. (This last point is a little less applicable to the Sego experience, where there was much more a sense of a communal sharing and enjoyment of each other’s efforts, but even still, so much of what we produce is not made to be beautiful, but likeable, cool.) The way that we ‘enjoy’ music most of the time is directly analogous to the structure of our society: a very small elite class of creators/performers imparts its goods for consumption to the silent masses who have lost all confidence in their own ability to speak or create.
What would egalitarian creation and enjoyment look like?
That’s a matter for another post, but, for now, here are a few quotes from Adorno’s 1938 essay “On the Fetish Character in Music and the Regression of Listening” (still relevant after all these years):
“If one seeks to find out who ‘likes’ a commercial piece, one cannot avoid the suspicion that liking and disliking are inappropriate to the situation, even if the person questioned clothes his reactions in those words. The familiarity of the piece is a surrogate for the quality ascribed to it. To like it is almost the same thing as to recognize it. An approach in terms of value judgments has become a fiction for the person who finds himself hemmed in by standardized musical goods…
“In one of his essays, Aldous Huxley has raised the question of who, in a place of amusement, is really being amused. With the same justice, it can be asked whom music for entertainment still entertains. Rather, it seems to complement the reduction of people to silence, the dying out of speech as expression, the inability to communicate at all. It inhabits the pockets of silence that develop between people molded by anxiety, work and undemanding docility. Everywhere it takes over, unnoticed, the deadly sad role that fell to it in the time and the specific situation of the silent films. It is perceived purely as background. If nobody can any longer speak, then certainly nobody can any longer listen…
“The star principle has become totalitarian. The reactions of the listeners appear to have no relation to the playing of the music. They have reference, rather, to the cumulative success which, for its part, cannot be thought of unalienated by the past spontaneities of listeners, but instead dates back to the command of publishers, sound film magnates and rulers of radio. Famous people are not the only stars. Works begin to take on the same role. A pantheon of bestsellers builds up….This selection reproduces itself in a fatal circle: the most familiar is the most successful and is therefore played again and again and made still more familiar…
“Music, with all the attributes of the ethereal and the sublime which are generously accorded it, serves in America today as an advertisement for commodities which one must acquire in order to be able to hear music…
“Their only relation [between the consumers of hit songs and the hit songs] is to the completely alien, and the alien, as if cut off from the consciousness of the masses by a dense screen is what seeks to speak for the silent. Where they react at all, it no longer makes any difference whether it is to Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony or to a bikini…”
