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.
I have to wonder, though, is it just style? I ask, because the thought occurs to me sometimes when I read something really brilliant. The book on my nightstand right now, Junot Díaz's "The Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao", is exceptional. His writing is amazing, but his style is also pretty clearly the offspring of other writers that he loved. I find myself thinking, "Man, there's no way I'll ever write as good as this guy." But then, aren't there new stories, even if the style is a never-ending series of imitations? Or am I just falling into an obvious gap where I'm focused more on the work than the artist (whom I'll never admit we don't need)?
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