Hee. If you read that Kurt Cobain article about electronica and fill
out the accompanying questionaire they apparently have a running tally
of the survey results.
Of the people answering, the majority most recently bought rock/alternative,
think the guitar is the ultimate musical tool,would keep NIN 'The Downard
Spiral' if they could only have one CD, for a good time check out a 'hot
rock band' on a Friday night, and like some electronica but think
it's over-hyped.
If you use electronic music to distinguish yourself from the hoi polloi
you have nothing to worry about. If you are into the music because it
'speaks to your condition' (as the Quakers say), you wouldn't care one
way or another anyway, and have nothing to worry about. In short, you
have nothing to worry about.
Fact is, living in a consumer society presents you with a double bind --
you have to cope with two conflicting hard-wired appetites: the desire
to be an individual, and the desire to belong to a group that supports
and reinforces your world view. For many people (though most intensely
for the young), this is manifest as focusing on a style of music, or
small group of bands/artists/whatever, that project an image that
you seek to emulate.
To the extent that the other people who follow this band or style are a
small enough and distinct enough from the larger population, they give
you a tribe of sorts to belong to, and all is right in the world. If
you're 16, and said music sends your parents howling in horror into the
night, thats a bonus.
But any style of music or individual artist sufficiently 'good' on some
absolute scale of platonic wonderfulness is bound eventually to be
discovered by a larger audience. This larger audience will by demographic
necessity comprise people who seem anathema to your carefully crafted self
image. You begin to wonder what about your cherished artist appeals to
these ignorant yahoos. When these yahoos are the contextual oatmeal in which
the raisin of your admiration is swimming, said raisin no long holds
the same appeal.
And no one is immune from this -- certainly not myself. For reasons
I won't go into here I was a big Pavement fan, going back to the early
Drag City 7". Their album "Slanted and Enchanted" was for me the soundtrack
of the year it came out. I saw them live not long after in my favorite
cruddy bar, and had the opportunity to get smashed in the bar with their
loony drummer before the show.
A year or two later, they came back through town, and played at a larger
venue, frequented by the sort of frat-yuppie-scum that seem to suck all
the available oxygen from any room they enter. Well, I'm too big
a fan of Pavement at this time to stay away simply because of the venue.
Again, Pavement did what they do, and it seemed (and seems) to me to
be a certain sort of magic. But in the middle of one song that would
qualify as a favorite tune of mine, I notice that the guy next to me,
a square jawed lunk in White Sox cap, Yale sweatshirt, perfectly faded
501s and Timberland boat shoes was SINGING ALONG, AND KNEW EVERY WORD.
I was nonplussed. I was disenchanted. It set me to thinking the
things I've outlined above. What I concluded, finally, was that either
Pavement are good indepenent of how many records they sell and to whom
their sold, or they're not, and the obvious pleasure they give to
my boat-shoed friend shouldn't pertain. He's probably a nice enough
person in real life -- how would I know? Perhaps his appreciation
of music I like is evidence for more human sentience than I've
given him credit.
And what about the fact that I, a 39-year-old computer geek with a wife
and kids and a split level ranch on a quiet street am perhaps the
biggest electronic music head in my town? Does that give some of you
pause? If I like this stuff, and my lifestyle is anathema to the
Pomo Boho style that you've carefully constructed for yourself, what
does that say about you?
Music in the 20th century is Art, Entertainment, and a Consumer Commodity
all at the same time. The idea that you can purchase a consumer commodity
to express your individuality is a basic contradiction. Ironically,
this is the implicit message of much of modern advertising.
As Mad Mike says, "DO NOT ALLOW YOURSELF TO BE PROGRAMMED."
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Kent Williams kent@inav.net --
http://soli.inav.net/~kent