There is perhaps no warrant for such an ill-advised foray into the complex ground occupied by music, aethetics, and sociology. It is a land characterized by the absence of reason: each combatant seeks to impose its will over contested land. Those who seek to shelter there will find themselves subject to several regimes at the same time. But those who survive do so not by choosing sides, but by speaking all three languages – usually at once.
To set the stage, a blue light casts dim shadows, as a man walks out slowly onto a black, empty stage. He looks around as if expecting others. Nevertheless, he gathers his courage and begins:
I’ve wondered why there is no philosophy of popular music. […] [A]ll of us lovers of music, with ears tuned precisely to a certain kind of sublimity in pop, are quick to detect pretension, overstatement, and cant about pop – in an attempt at wider criticism – precisely because we feel a gap between the effectiveness of the music and the impotence and superfluity of analysis. This means we don’t know about our major art form what we ought to know. We don’t even agree about how the interconnection of pop music and lyrics, rather than the words spoken alone, accomplishes an utterly different task of representation, more scattershot and overwhelming and much less careful and dignified than poetry, as in the still-growing effluence around Bob Dylan.
As a programmatic statement, we can take no exceptions. There is total ignorance regarding the significance of pop. That it exists as it does is contrary to reason. But the answer to these questions (kitsch v. art; lyric v. music; proximity v. distance) are not to be found in Greif’s Philosophy of Pop. Throughout the essay, bold and informed as it is, we find themes related to one band and one perspective. What we do not find is systemic attempt to engage Pop qua Pop. It is a modest attempt that fails precisely in its modesty.
The problem with the elevation of Radiohead as the arbiter of any philosophy of pop is its inherently subjective beginning; indeed, I could make an almost identical case for Wilco, Bright Eyes, the Flaming Lips, Cake – the list could go on. Greif attempts to make Radiohead reflective of the current state of modernity. In his view, we occupy a stage in which our interpellation by relentless media bombardment leads to pervasive existential dread. Radiohead, we are told, reflects this state although remaining trapped within it. Their transition from guitar to keyboard signifies for Greif the human voice set against the weight of technology. By the end we find out that Radiohead “reactivates the moods in which you once noticed you ought to refuse.”
Throughout we have no sense of the significance – is this merely Greif’s reading of Radiohead? Music reflects culture, perhaps Radiohead does this better than most, perhaps they open up the gap for rebellion from within the machine; but is this the essential moment of Radiohead, of pop in general?
You can see a closed space at the heart of many of Radiohead’s songs. To draw out one of their images, it may be something like glass house. You live continuously in the glare of inspection and with the threat of intrusion. The attempt to cast stones at an outer world of enemies would shatter your own shelter. So you settle for the protection of this house, with watchers on the outside, as a place you can still live, a way to preserve the vestige of closure – a barrier, however glassy and fragile, against the outside. In English terms, a glass house is also a glasshouse, which we call a greenhouse. It is the artificial construction that allows botanical life to thrive in winter.This is a magnificent reading of Radiohead. But the questions remains whether it can be said of Pop? And if not, where should the boundary be drawn?
Greif writes, “Pop music always tells its listeners that their feelings are real. Yet here [in Radiohead’s “There There”] is a chorus that denies any reference to reality in the elation and melancholy and chills that this chorus, in fact, elicits.” In agreeing with those to statements, and noting their grammatical juxtaposition, we are forced to ask: Is Radiohead even Pop then? Might we propose an alternative: The move from Rock to Electronica, from “The Bends” to “OK Computer” marks an epistemological break between Pop and Electronica – at this point, Radiohead is no longer an exemplar of Pop, despite being, in fact, popular.
To clarify, the vast amount of Pop(ular) music is not so because it reflects an intellectual awareness of our existential situation; instead it should be said that Radiohead is popular with people who have a certain discomforture with the interpellation of modern life. This feeling is by no means universal. Thus a “philosophy of pop” that starts from such a point is doomed to the same solipsistic dead end as modern Pop(ular) culture.
There is something uncanny about our consumption of pop music. Our ability make judgments betrays more than proximity to the genre, as we might at first think. Habitas, in Bourdieu’s sense, may be the answer for our intuitive grasp of the mechanics of pop, but the very idea of a critical “philosophy of pop” shows the distance opened in the space between. The first observation to be hazarded concerns the reputed ‘sublimity’ of pop: Pop is characterized by the paradoxical combination of the sublime with the degraded. It is this which distinguishes Pop within the ground of music: the unity of the highest with the lowest, an infinite judgment.
In this sense, the question to be posed is “How is Pop possible?” What constitutes the particular constellation of qualities that separate it within the space of music and culture? (Part One) Once the ground of the object is cleared, we may then ask how it is possible to say things about it, or what it might mean to have a “philosophy of pop.” Although here we will eschew all talk of philosophy with its inbuilt bias towards answers. (Part Two) And finally having grasped the object in its context – the particular within its whole – we might then provisionally sketch a “philosophy of pop.” True to the terms set by Greif, we will take as our question the relation between poetry and pop music with continual reference to Dylan. (Part Three)Without a larger context there is a danger that in letting the music speak for itself, it will say nothing but what it already says, or that in attempting to speak for the music, we can make it say whatever we want.
[Our expedition is occasioned by the recent discussion over the legacy of Bob Dylan (at Pas au-Delà) and the recent "intervention" by Mark Greif into the Philosophy of Pop in N+1. At the same time, we must acknowledge the perennial interest in questions of (A)rt. In this regard, a ‘Correction’ was offered in Harper’s that argued for the privileged place of language over communication in literature. There is little doubt that these questions will not be answered here.]
Update: Don't expect this essay to be finished soon. Patience is a virtue that the blogosphere needs to learn.
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