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Posted January 4, 2005
I rarely listen to rock. I have a few albums here and there, crank 'em up maybe once a year. A few months ago, when I read my neighbor's book, Of Grunge and Government, it was mainly for his thoughts on government.
Still, one of the best parts of his book came early, in his discussion of the importance of music and style in a young person's life. Why did the author become interested in punk? Well, the music was different, new. But there was something more:
Punks were also connected through do-it-yourself (DIY) publishing. Fanzines were the blogs of the early '80s. Anything went with the zines; they not only covered music, there was a heavy dose of politics as well. Of course, they were antiestablishment, and most were left-wing, promoting vegetarianism, drug-free living, and anticorporatism. They were truly independent and decentralized, in stark contrast to mainstream media I was used to. They were part of an alternative economy promoting small, independent business. For me, punk wasn't a fad; it offered meaning in a society that didn't offer enough. (p. 12)
Now, when I was young, a decade or half-decade earlier, in a similar (rain-drenched) part of the country, I too had friends involved in rock-n-roll, some of whom went on to punk. But meaning was not a problem for me. Not lack of it, anyway. There was meaning everywhere. Most kids, I figured, weren't interested in the meanings available. Most adults were oblivious, too. Local sports provided the dominant social structure. Schooling and religion provided the secondary local structures, with mass media and mass politics providing the cosmopolitan reach. But locals of all ages tended to stick to sports and religion, mainly emphasizing sports. Kids saw the meanings provided by school as mostly uninteresting. They were utterly incurious. There were books and magazines available far over their heads, promising much, and interests galore — but few kids explored these. For at least half the teen population, sports participation was accepted as a dominant social form, school something to be endured, and the possibility of high culture something to be ignored. Rock-n-roll was the main alternative to adult-oriented culture for kids. It encouraged sex, it encouraged drug use, and it encouraged pleasure over discipline. It was, thus, cool.
And, as such, to me obviously shallow and often degrading. It offered meaning, but to me it provided meaning without much transcendence, without any out. It offered no hope. Rock, it struck me, was mere diversion, an opiate of the masses, not a cure. It was, like some drugs, a way to escape responsibility and escape the issue of meaning by revelling in cheapjack meanings of a low sort.
And as music, as art, it lacked something. Fortunately, after a dispiriting autumn quarter devoted to odious football practice, I developed conjunctivitis, or pink eye. And had to stay home for two weeks. There, unable to read without pain, I searched for something to do without my eyes. I thought: ears. I rummaged through a closet and found a vast collection of classical LPs. And my life changed.
First, the music was all orchestral, so: no words. Except for the liner notes; plenty of words there (the set of albums contained elaborate explanations). After listening to a piece, I'd listen again, this time reading — with tears running down my face (because of pain) — the liner notes. And so for those two weeks I learned more than any other two weeks in my high school time.
I was instantly attracted to Vivaldi. Haydn sounded a world away, and his 104th symphony a marvel of cohesion, seriousness, and joy. Beethoven was too formiddable. Brahms too convolved, emotionally. Liszt too, well, bombastic (I loathed Les Preludes), Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto clumsy and a mess. But then: Rimsky-Korsakov. While listening to L'Coq d'Or I thought: why do I even bother with rock? There's nothing in rock that comes close to this. It wasn't the Rimsky's music was the pinnacle, but that it was something exotic and striking and utterly different from what I'd experienced before. And, after Haydn and Bach and Grieg and others, it was the straw that broke the camel's back. I moved away from rock, then, forever.
It didn't take long and I was enjoying Beethoven, first his piano sonatas and then his symphonies and other works. Quickly I moved on to Hindemith. Like my sister nearly ten years before, I checked out Charles Ives's Fourth Symphony from the local Bookmobile. I didn't quite know what to make of it, but I knew I'd be listening to it again. And then I found Stravinsky's Petrouchka, which enthralled me. And then came the Rite. Here, a whole world of feeling, ritual, meaning, and a license to re-interpret originally imputed meanings. The work may have been about
a ritual sacrifice, but moving from ballet stage to concert stage, and then to recording, it meant what I wanted it to mean. And it was primarily about music. To some small extent, Stravinsky seemed correct: Music expresses nothing. Music is not a semiotic system. It is . . . what? An aural dream? It is a more direct connection to feeling, without the cumbrance of signs and semiosis. (Hence my love of non-vocal music; it seems sign-free, and yet meaningful. Somehow.)
I went back to Bach, and beyond to Josquin and Machaut. I listened to current avant-garde. And against this vast cosmos of art, popular arts seemed more trivial than ever. I could ignore them. I had been liberated.
Except, of course, that I was in school, and every day I endured the teen culture around me. Schools are run by adults for kids, ostensibly to raise them into decent, civilized human beings. But much of school life is run by the kids themselves, according to ancient tribal principles, and it is often a cruel series of contests and ritual sacrifices. When it was discovered that I listened to Bach — diddly-dah Bach!
— I began to be teased, sometimes every day.
Liberation came with graduation. I no longer had to be around my peers,
for the most part buffoonish, anti-intellectual hedonists whose ethos became a dead-end at graduation. I also could avoid teachers, too. For I saw, like punks saw, that, though less buffoonish than teens, and a bit less anti-intellectual, too (most are just over-schooled and under-educated lock-step automatons), teachers provided little meaning
that a person who yearns for meaning could take hold of.
So my experience of rock and teen-age rebellion and culture and politics differs from Krist Novoselic's. Still, I can see a faint commonality.
Listening, again, to the music of Nirvana, the band for which he played bass, I was struck with how little sympathy I have for rock, even when I enjoy the music.
Take Smells Like Teen Spirit.
It has an interesting modal feel, but with relentless melodic repetition. I didn't understand most of the words that the late Kurt Cobain's voice crackled out. Which may have been the best part.
My cousin, a composer, explained them to me, explained their significance. And I thought, on reading her gloss: once again the anthropological character of rock becomes clear. In a counter-culture, even more important than in a dominant culture, the distinction between esoteric and exoteric meaning is vitally important to understanding what's going on. Rock often depends for its meaning on the presentation of words as hard to understand. Those whose voices make meaning crystal-clear cannot be subversive. That minimizes the exoteric/esoteric dichotomy. To be subversive, the dominant culture (the adults, the squares) must not easily be able to understand what's being said. Only the in crowd
knows.
And also it allows for hierarchical stratification amongst the fans. Those who listen on radio don't really know the words; those who buy the CDs do. Thus the levels of initiation into the secrets of the cult.
Hence the popularity of Nirvana, particularly their best-known song. Thus its meaning. I find fascinating rock's ability to organize rebellion. Rebellion is necessary in life, especially against the status quo state, against inhumane imperialism, against illiberal suppression. But rebellion for the sake of rebellion alone is childish, and the fleeting attempts of rock artists to come to terms with the fine arts are usually embarrassingly silly. Rock is a long way from Beethoven, or Haydn, or Rimsky. Rock trivializes high culture with its childish taunts (Roll Over Beethoven
) and proves, because of this, a stunting affect, like the drugs that turned Cobain's libido into a mosquito.
Sniff. Smells like Teen Spirit. Another distraction from beauty, truth, responsibility, hope, and meaning that can endure. Good song. Interesting critical commentary. But it is still enmired in the culture it criticizes.
If one cannot reference Aristotle or Bach or Rembrandt without snickering, without irony, without some little put-down, one has trivialized oneself in something like a cultural self-castration. Years after my first exposure to it, I still see rock as a force primarily preventing, rather than encouraging, the acquisition of higher meaning,
of personal progress.
Now, Krist himself is a gentleman. I will say nothing against him. And I note that most adults who still listen to rock seem responsible citizens. I interpret their enduring love for this youth music culture as buffered by experience, rather like the Christians who view the anti-civilization statements of Jesus and Paul through several refractions of theory and art. The essential meanings endure by corruption and distortion, and they take the religion (Christianity) and the art (rock-n-roll) with a grain of salt.
Good for them. But I am in no sense obliged to share their revisionisms. Or their culture. Mine runs counter to the explicit stances of their amusements. But, in honoring greatness as developed in many epochs of humanity, my culture isn't counter-culture, no matter how alone I may seem in a world awash with popular arts and deliberate ignorance of past achievements. My culture is defined by what I promote; theirs by what they oppose.
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