Music and theory

Very late on this, but Simon Reynolds on theory and music for Frieze is an excellent read (… and p.s. thanks to Dan Fox for the link to this in the comments)

Via that I found this dialogue (also from Frieze) between Simon R and Kodwo Eshun, from all the way back in 1999. Essential reading as a whole I think, but Kodwo’s first response caught my eye in particular. After that Nuum conference back in the spring, a lot of the Reynolds & nuum naysayers seemed very keen to approve of the presentation by Kode9 and Kodwo… sort of as ‘theory we can believe in’, a move to give them more leverage with which to bash k-punk and SR… if they approve of Kodwo and Kode9, it pre-empts the charge of being knee-jerk anti-theory philistines. But this quote from Kodwo shows the degree to which they’re trying to line up with someone who‘d repudiate much of their standpoint:

Music [has] changed so drastically that it was more pressing to analyse the widening gap between how music sounded and the terms we used to understand it. When I started writing in 1992, most dance writing was still at the level of ‘kicking’ and ‘banging’. There was a fiercely-held anti-intellectual drive that made writing about dance music more of a challenge. […] You get people writing things like ‘the music speaks for itself’ as if it’s the most admirable thing you could say - but it’s just a cop-out. There’s an idea that the writer’s aim is to empathise, to intuit, on the side of the producer against the world.

For me, it seems far more urgent to understand what computerisation is doing to rhythm than to understand that a particular musician was a bad boy who grew up in care and had a really hard time. […] 99% of writing is still socio-historical and my attempt to totally destroy that is probably doomed to failure, but it’s an experiment to show that it’s viable, using the particular example of black electronic dance music, machine music, computer music.

. . .

The Frieze Theory print issue was excellent too. But there's something about the entirety of, or the presumed possibility of, any debate about ‘Theory’, whether for or against... When you read some depressing ‘common sense’ reductive write-off of theory it’s (usually) impossible not to think a) there’s no engagement with the actual ideas in question going on, but instead a flat objection to complexity and/or abstraction in principle and in general, and b) even if you were presented with a compelling take-down of say, Paul de Man’s entire philosophical project from top to bottom, how does that impinge on Foucault? Theory is a sufficiently heterogenous body of critique and inquiry that any generic attack is going to struggle for traction. The flipside of this is that defending ‘Theory’ as a whole skirts dangerously close to being futile and/or reductive.
. . .

Reading around and about the theory debate over the last couple of months, the word ‘precisely’ seemed to leap off the page. It often seems to serve more of a rhetorical function than an author would probably like to admit, cropping up just at the point where two slippery concepts are being linked together, and the more counter-intuitive or unlikely the link, the more likely it is that ‘precisely’ will pop up. It suggests a residual anxiety about abstraction, a will-to-exactitude that kicks in when talking about the conceptual and the conceptualization of the conceptual; so ‘precisely’, with its connotations of incisive, surgical specificity, is often as much the writer assertively reassuring or reaffirming themselves as anything else.

Immaterialism

It's a strange feeling, if you read a lot about the music industry and its impending death-by-downloads, to turn to this piece by Nicholson Baker and read about Jeff Bezos of Amazon and his determination to do the same for publishing.

Bezos and Amazon must believe that e-books, downloaded to a device like the Kindle, are inevitable and that they might as well get in first. They must believe that the earlier they're in, the better their chances of colonizing this new world, setting Amazon up to exploit the pilgrim hordes to come.

This depends on the assumption that technology will make the Kindle or similar e-reader so pleasurable and easy to use that it will supersede the book.

But the same assumption – that ingenuity will find a way – is surely what will prove fatal to them. The Kindle will only work if they can make its DRM work, and no DRM has ever remained uncracked once users reach a certain critical mass. Eventually, readers will have access to an infinite wealth of digital texts for free, and publishing will have exactly the same problem as the music industry: how do you make readers pay for something they can get for free?

Maybe there's a different psychological economy at work in the way people relate to and acquire books, and the way they relate to and acquire music. But it's quite a chance to take.

. . .

I sometimes try to imagine a culture without artefacts – the endpoint of digital in which no-one prints a book, buys a newspaper or magazine, presses a CD (let alone a record), and wonder when it will arrive. And how I will make a living.

Then I remember that in a hundred years' time, humanity will be reduced to small pockets of hunter-gatherer-fisher-farmers, scraping out an existence on small temperate islands, while the continents become uninhabitable scorched wastelands. Assuming the climate stabilizes and these surviving communities start to send out sorties to the old hubs of civilization (like Ballard's Drowned World), as they gather together relics from the old world there will presumably be a huge lacuna. The cultural fossil record will start to go blank from the turn of the century onwards, and with no internet, no electricity, the migration to digital will appear as a kind of universal amnesia. These survivor-explorer archaeologists from the future will find books, records, magazines, CDs, but they will be decreasing to a trickle as the years go by, while even they if manage to fire a computer up, there will be no distant Google server-farm to supply them.

Errata

After this post, it has been pointed out to me that of course three (not two) of Hot Chip attended Elliott School. Forgot about Owen Clarke. Sorry Owen. Felix Martin did not, but he did go to Pimlico School, which unlike Elliott is out-and-out Brutalism (I’m not going to make much of the fact that Felix now stands at the back jabbing at drum machines). Or at least Pimlico was Brutalist. Also, the underground river nearby is in fact called the Wandle, not the Wendle. For this, I blame Michael de Larrabeiti. I’m going to write about de Larrabeiti sooner or later, but if I do it will probably be too long for this blog. I also have this from an Elliotonian correspondent:

it never gets mentioned anymore that some of So Solid also went to Elliott. One of them once mugged me in MacDonalds as a 14 year old. He got expelled for something else later on. Though he was always very friendly whenever I bumped into him later

With heart-warming happy endings like that, no wonder it was declared Britain’s friendliest school. Also some another small corroboration for Owen H’s suggested sympathy between brutalist architecture/grime sonics.

Finally, I think I was harsh on Bukem here. I liked Logical Progression (and recently got very into Woebot’s ambient jungle mix for Fact). But two moments for me stand out for me when I think about the decline of my initial interest in dnb. Owen Hatherley’s description of it: 'by 1998, a ponderous stonerstep for slovenly, unshaven UCL science students in expensive rainwear', here echoes my own experience almost exactly, with the nadir being a Goldie night in either late ’98 or early ’99, rammed with public schoolboys in body warmers. But a harbinger of that was listening to Earth 2 on one of those HMV listening posts and thinking, this sounds like a waiting room.

pic credit: Pimlico School, RIBA via Twentieth Century Society