"Differences in what people listen to, in a Shuffled world, may have less and less to do with social class and purchasing power. Or, better yet, taste won't correlate to class distinction: the absence of taste will. As certain foodies score points by having eaten everything- blowfish, yak milk tea, haggis, hot dogs- so the person who knows and likes all music achieves a curious sophistication-through-indiscriminateness. The music magazine The Wire, which celebrates with equal abandon Cecil Taylor's pianism and Nicki Minaj's first things first, I'll eat your brains, represents the best product of this attitude. But the would-be escape from "distinction" more often becomes the highest and most annoying form of distinction there is."
"'I do love a new purchase!' says the Gang of Four outright- while all the other songs merely insinuate it. Around the holiday's, Banana Republic will alternate familiar hits like George Michael's "Last Christmas" with pounding C-grade techno, lulling you into a state of sickly nostalgia before ramping up your heart rate- a perfect way to goose you into an impulse buy. So too, as Adorno would be unsurprised to find out, has music become a common way for people to get through the workday. Your local cafe's barista may literally depend on Bon Iver's reedy lugubriousness to palliate a dreary job as you depend on coffee. Produce! Consume! Work! Buy! Cope! Endure! These can seem the common messages underlying the pluralistic proliferation of music."
"If recording and mechanical reproduction opened up the world of musical pluralism- of listening to other people's music until you and they became different people yourselves- digital reproduction expanded that pluralism to the point where it reversed itself. You have all the world's music on your iPod, in your earphones. Now it's "other people's music"- which should be very exciting to encounter- as played in cafes and stores that is the problem. In any public setting, it acquires a coercive aspect. The iPod is the thing you have to buy not to be defenseless against the increasingly sucky music played to make you buy things: the death spiral of late capitalism in sonic form.
"One radical option remains: abnegation - some "Great Refusal" to obey the obscure social injunction that condemns us to a lifetime of listening. Silence: the word suggests the torture of enforced isolation, or a particularly monkish kind of social death. [Some discussion of John Cage here, buy it to read it] What if we tried to listen to nothing? Silence is the feature of our buzzing sound world we enjoy least, whose very existence we threaten to pave over track by track. Silence is the most endangered musical experience of our time. Turning it up, we might find out what all our music listening is meant to drown out, the thing we can't bear to hear."
On another note, I'm fleeing the country for the next month or so, so posting will be scarce if not nonexistent. Pick up the slack suckers.
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