Since some people recently are debating the "timeless"
nature of Nine Inch Nais and related industrial bands
(most of which I freely admit I don't and haven't ever
listened to), I've been thinking about it as well.
I find that I seem to have a much stricter meaning for
the word "timeless" than most people. I take it
almost literally.
You see, while an angst-ridden teenager, I found some
meaning and importance in The Downward Spiral, and
even now I admit that some of the lyrics have a
certain poetic quality to them, and much of the music
is still well-done and enjoyable. Much of what I
listened to as a teenager is even "timeless" in a very
general sense, as applies to my life - a lot of it is
so much a part of me, even though it's not my favorite
music anymore, that if I do listen to it again, I
still enjoy it a lot or get something out of it.
However, it's not really, really "timeless". It
continues to have some meaning to me, but to me,
"timeless" is Shakespeare's Macbeth; "timeless" is
Beethoven's 5th; "timeless" is anything that touches
so close to the human spirit or the human condition
(whatever those are) that they continue to have
meaning and affect us, even hundereds of years later.
I hate to say this, but I really don't think that NIN
or even Coil will still be remembered or thought of
much a few hundred years from now. However, I'm
fairly confident that many of Shakespeare's plays, or
the old Greek plays, or tons of classical music, will
be.
Is anything "timeless" still being made? Sure it is.
Heck, maybe a few odd pop tunes here and there will
make it, and maybe NIN's TDS will be one of the
longer-lasting pieces - I don't know for sure. I
think some of the music by The Police is more timeless
than TDS, though. Just because an industrial band
takes some themes from the bible and existentialist
thought, waters them down 100-fold, embeds it in talk
of "machines" and such (how 20th-century!), doesn't
make it a great work of art, and certainly doesn't
render it timeless.
Will any IDM be timeless? I'm willing to bet that
some of it might actually gain some wider hearing
eventually (probably the mid-career work by Autechre)
and last a while.
Part of the problem is that true "timelessness" is a
largely cultural phenomenon, relying on the majority
of the people in a culture appreciating and enjoying a
work, and in that way, the culture internalizing the
work such that you can't hardly grow up without being
exposed to the work in some aspect.
So, to a certain extent, I don't see many "timeless"
things coming out of the modern age at all, simply
because there are so many people and so many works
that even the truly potentially timeless works are not
absorbed or noticed by everyone. Culture is less
fluid; it has become a gas, moving around extremely
fast and randomly. A chaotic system in which artistic
works flounder and find niches in which they grow, but
it takes a gargantuan Hollywood effort to really reach
the great mass of people that is today's global
culture.
Imagine, if humankind does reach out into the great
beyond and colonize other worlds, someday there will
be multiple cultures on different planets, all
developing on their own, with different new "timeless"
art that separate worlds will not share. Will they
all still remember Shakespeare and Mozart? Probably
some relics from the past will always remain.
However, how many of us remember much of the
"timeless" art that must have been created in
Babylonian times? We have almost no record of any
Egyptian art - for example, there must have been some
form of theater (acting is something humans do without
thinking - it isn't much of a leap to act out a
story). Why is the earliest theater Greek? The
earliest music lost? Because eventually it is all
lost.
So, will NIN be around in 50 years? Probably it'll be
around as long as Trent's fans are alive, but given
how culturally-bound the music is (industrial is
easily "dated"!), I doubt if the kids 50 years from
now will find it as appealing as you did when you were
15. If anything, music kills itself nowadays because
most of it is marketed towards kids, and kids are so
flighty and picky - they don't *want* old music, for
the most part - they want something new that makes
them unique; they want music that's different from
everything else. They want to feel special. A
ready-made market for the music industry to always
churn out something new that's just different enough
for the new batch of teens to think "this is *my*
music - no one else likes this!"
Sorry, I've been reading too much Vonnegut lately.
-Ada~`
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