Taking Control of Noise

As a boy, I always wondered about the truth in old people's complaint that rock music was just noise. There is an obvious truth to their complaint. If rock music was supposed to signify some kind of rupture with the past, then this question of the sound had to be part of it. If old style music was supposed to be an escape from the harsh reality of work, if harmony was supposed to transport you away from the grime and grind of modern life, then rock music took the opposite approach. It drove straight into the crash site.

So here's my thesis: the electric guitar marks an attempt to reverse industrial alienation. With the emergence of electronic music the grind of machinery was taken over by players who could rework the brutal sounds of factories and mechanical weapons. Blaring electrical music reinserted a human subject into technological sounds which to anyone raised on older music sounded dehumanizing. Theodor Adorno and countless others accustomed to old fashioned strings and horns failed to recognize the acoustic transformation, even if Adorno did understand that the new sound was quickly being absorbed into big business. The ease with which the blues went electric shows that industrialized music started when poor black people from the country hit factory jobs. The electricification of folk music was simply the recognition that the purveyors of acoustic instruments had taken up industrial labor.

So the next question is how does sampling signify the further disappearance of industrial experience and its replacement by a stream of endless media images. If innovation in contemporary music comes from transforming the sounds of everyday life rather than building on a tradition taught, then sampling must be a response to the further decline of virtuous performance in the face of its endless repetition through recordings. Why learn to play when you constantly have the best example at your fingertips? Are you going to compete with Clapton, Page etc, if you can hear their every twitch all day long? You may want to be like them, but air guitar and a stereo will let you indulge in the fantasy effortlessly. You don't have to recreate their sound with an instrument. Learning to play is an effort, after all.

Even dedicated, disciplined classical performers must face this problem: old quartets never die. Its hard to develop your own late Beethoven style if you are forever listening to the Guarnari Quartet. How do you sing Schubert if your mom already has three Fischer-Dieskau CDs? It's one thing to hear their music in your head as you practice yours, its another to have it blaring down the hall or even just sitting on your shelf, all packaged in perfection. That old chestnut that B.B. King developed his own style as he was trying to imitate Robert Johnson's may be true, but it could have only worked if King did not have a perfectly remastered set of Johnson's recordings in his bedroom. It's the gap, temporal and acoustic, between hearing a master and imitating him that allows your own style to develop. If the classic performance is forever in your face, you might as well just sample it.

Twittering Up

Just joined twitter and right away it seems I am out of my depth. This constant updating seems appropriate for celebrities or fighter pilots sneaking in below the radar but I cannot (yet) take myself seriously enough to announce my breakfast to the world.

This network is all about the first person, the magnificently expanding subject who now is global, or at least the affluent and technological global, the small elite who stretch across the world at key nodal points.

Yet to ignore twitter is to fall behind—this has been the standard pessimistic argument for why one should be Modern, if you are not Modern , then you are forgotten. People have been arguing this point since the nineteenth century.

So first reactions: Twitter is ideally suited for Versailles and the court of the French king, where the rise and supping of the monarch was important news to the ten thousand who lived in his proximity.

Twitter is a new form of the levee. When we can read how Lance Armstrong was awoken by anti-doping control agents and what television program he watched before bed, he is acting not so very different than Louis XIV. Except of course the monarch would grant a duke the honor of actually entering the update, perhaps Lance, too, as a twitter aide.

Now we all get to experience ourselves as the sun king, so many sun kings, what is the value in such grandiosity when so many can sign up?

Here endeth the first twitter blog sermon