(10:42 PM) | Adam Kotsko:

Commodification of Music, pt. 3

From à Gauche:

From the spiritual songs of African slaves to Stalin's infamous Pravda denouncement of Shostakovich, music has always had the capability of inspiring intense political feeling. (Not to sound like a PBS lead-in, but it's true.) But it's a fairly safe assertion that this is no longer the case.

He cites examples, already satisfactorily commented on by Adam Robinson. Then à Gauche continues:

So if music is no longer capable of inspiring intense political feeling, why is this the case? I wonder if an answer like "commodification" isn't as trite as it sounds. For one thing, political passion in general seems usually tied to a specific time and place, like a rally or a protest or a strike. In the same way that a recorded speech by Tom Daschle is even less inspiring, I doubt Sibelius would've been in as much trouble if he had been able to distribute CDs of "Finland Awakes" instead of performing it with a live orchestra.

Is it possible to get a group of people together to listen to a CD? In the early days of radio, it was possible for a radio program to be an "event," bonding people together in disparate physical locations, as effectively as an audience for a symphony -- the only place this is now possible on a grand scale any longer is the movies and, in exceptional situations such as 9/11, on television. Everyone's feeling of being involved in the event of 9/11 was of course on many levels artificial, but then, so is everything -- political activity is always in excess of the objective brute facts, made possible by a certain arbitrary hemming in of possibilities (at its most basic level, restriction in time and place as à Gauche points out).

Obviously that artificial investedness in 9/11 had very real political effects that the left was woefully incapable of exploiting. We on the left should come clean and admit that our objection to Bush is not the form of his exploitation of 9/11, but the fact that the exploitation of 9/11 did not have left-wing content. Although all the Great Bands of our era are explicitly leftist, none have been able to create any discernable political effect or even to provoke resistance or worry from the powers -- most likely because of the effects of commodification not only on the consumer end, but also at the producer end, its role in further consolidating profit. The most genuinely subversive moves by bands in recent years have perhaps been their leaking of albums onto the Internet.

Adam Robinson comments:

While I think a Gauche's observations regarding commodification and music are mostly right and good (excepting his take on rap), I can't see why they matter because I can't see what we're losing. We still have alt country.

It's commodification in the other artistic arenas that concern me now.

In view of the 1960s alone, I think Adam is being a little too rash in dismissing the "loss" of music as a non-loss (if that's what he's doing). The commodification of other artistic arenas is truly worrisome. I will leave the plastic arts to Jared Sinclair or Cap'n Pete, as Adam suggests, but film and television are both moving away from their possible unifying effects: the development of the "home theater" and the TiVo system that allows for the complete abolition of "appointment television" may symbolize the complete foreclosure of an identifiable "public space." An analysis of the Internet would also be appropriate at this point, to coincide with Adam's observations about the underground:

For a while I have allowed mainstream music to serve merely as a curiosity for me. I have taken no respite in bands like Radiohead and REM who are supposed to be the ones that matter. Instead, I've found bliss underground, listening to bands that I can understand, that have lives like my own, that play really outstanding music and don't need the credibility that comes with being commodified.

One might ask if the underground music scene is at all like the early church -- a loosely affiliated group of "cells," consisting of people with a broadly similar, at least nominally "countercultural" lifestyle (even if it too often degenerates into partisan infighting based on the fetishization of small differences). I'm inclined to think that the contemporary Leninist turn might be a kind of half-sarcastic nostalgia. The really momentous contemporary "event" might be the Pauline turn -- a certain desire for "authenticity," an impatience that won't wait for the revolution, that demands real life here, now, today, for us. In the loss of the public space, the cynical hijacking of "values" language by powerful elites, etc., Paul is certainly our contemporary (even if my "historical reconstruction" may not take into account all the details of his texts).

This is my best shot at joining this conversation for now.

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