“Music hath charms to soothe a savage breast, to soften rocks, or bend a knotted oak.” – William Congreve, in “The Mourning Bride” (1697)
Congreve was a fellow student of Jonathan Swift at Trinity College in Dublin and this was his only “tragic drama” – written in blank verse and only remembered for the quotes. Otherwise it is drivel – read it all and you’ll see. Swift had the talent there, although maybe Swift just speaks to us now – “Ambition often puts men upon doing the meanest offices; so climbing is performed in the same position with creeping.” So much for the current presidential primaries.
And Swift was at his best in “A digression concerning madness” from A Tale of a Tub –
Those entertainments and pleasures we most value in life are such as dupe and play the wag with the senses. For, if we take an examination of what is generally understood by happiness, as it has respect either to the understanding or the senses, we shall find all its properties and adjuncts will herd under this short definition, that it is a perpetual possession of being well deceived.
… Such a man truly wise, creams off nature, leaving the sour and the dregs for philosophy and reason to lap up. This is the sublime and refined point of felicity, called, the possession of being well deceived; the serene peaceful state of being a fool among knaves.
You can’t top that for cynicism, which seems appropriate these days – but Congreve may have been right about music, however sappily he put it.
The commentary that appears here, each long column, is cobbled together to music, usually from the remaining classical station in Los Angeles, the one out of USC – Jim Svejda programs good stuff in the evenings. It helps. The world doesn’t seem so bad, although last night the Prokofiev was a bit much – all of Alexander Nevsky, Fritz Reiner and the Chicago folks. That can make you nervous. But Svejda is okay – his family is Czech after all, and he studied oboe at Eastman. Fine.
But some things cannot be fixed by music. The oak stays knotted, as it were. Wednesday, November 21, the day before Thanksgiving, it seems Mark Kleiman, the professor in Public Policy at UCLA is saying be afraid – be very afraid –
George W. Bush doesn’t believe that firing the Supreme Court to prevent it from deciding a case about whether the President can be re-elected in violation of the Constitution, and then throwing thousands of people in jail when they protest “crosses any lines.”
What set him off was this –
President Bush yesterday offered his strongest support of embattled Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, saying the general “hasn’t crossed the line” and “truly is somebody who believes in democracy.”
Bush spoke nearly three weeks after Musharraf declared emergency rule, sacked members of the Supreme Court and began a roundup of journalists, lawyers and human rights activists.
And Kleiman offers this “footnote” –
Notice that the arguments for “sticking with Musharraf” are virtually identical to the arguments for “sticking with the Shah.” Are we having fun yet? The problem with “realism” in foreign policy is that it makes such unrealistic assumptions about the predictability of outcomes.
That’s one thing. The other is that the president seems to have this idea that “democracy” allows the guy in charge to dissolve congress, arrest the justices of the Supreme Court and lock up anyone who has a problem with that. Don’t say you weren’t warned. Of course if that were to happen here you could just listen to pretty music. That will put you in that serene, peaceful state of being a fool among knaves.
It seems odd that that same day, Wednesday, November 21, the day before our Thanksgiving, the Brits had their No Music Day with its explanation – “No Music Day has nothing to sell. There is no mission statement.”
What? No one will be in that serene, peaceful state of being a fool among knaves? Well, it’s something like that, as Kevin Berger explains in The Divine Sound of Silence – the world is too noisy and we need this here.
Here’ the premise –
One can dream. What if no music blared from airports, supermarkets, bars, department stores or restaurants? Imagine being able to sit down in your neighborhood cafe and hear your friend talk without having to parse her words through the strains of “Sweet Child o’ Mine.” My God, that would be something for which to give thanks.
Radio stations, stores, recording studios and all the music lovers in the UK took a vow of musical silence – enough is enough.
It seems the whole thing was thought up by musician and conceptual artist Bill Drummond. The French have Jack Lang, that fellow who thought up that Fête de la Musique thing back in 1982 when he was the Minister of Culture – that “celebration” that has now spread around the world. The Brits have Bill Drummond. Drummond wants to do the opposite. Perhaps he had been in Paris on the eve of the first day of summer – music everywhere, much of it awful, but the idea is everyone makes music of some kind. If you’ve been there you know the problem with that – the wonderful Brazilian stuff on Rue des Abbesses up in Montmartre must be weighed against the amateur heavy metal crap in Rue St Benoit at three in the morning, loud enough to wake Descartes from his long sleep one block west.
Bill Drummond is responsible for KLF – also known as The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu (The JAMs), The Timelords and a few other names – part of the British acid house movement during the late eighties and early nineties. Then it became “rave” and “ambient house music.” You can read about the group here, or you can visit and drop by a few of the more esoteric clubs here in Hollywood that feature such music (see this).
Drummond did explain what led to his anti-celebration of music in the Guardian last year. There’s just too much of it around, and most of it is worthless –
I decided I needed a day I could set aside to listen to no music whatsoever. Instead, I would be thinking about what I wanted and what I didn’t want from music. Not to blindly – or should that be deafly – consume what was on offer. A day where I could develop ideas.
It’s a matter of being selective again. You don’t have to accept what is given you, day in and day out. And that is what Kevin Berger likes about the idea –
Not being able to hear yourself think, or feel, or escape “Hotel California,” is indeed what makes music in public places a nightmare. Your poor senses are crushed every time you step out of the house. By hammering you with pop tunes before a movie, Cineplexes manage to kill your appetite for a film. And can’t we just daydream in a market’s fluorescent aisles, ruminate over whether we want to prepare salmon or ravioli tonight, without having to hear “once, twice, three times a lady”?
I love the Doors, Otis Redding, the Clash, Public Enemy, Lucinda Williams and Arcade Fire as much as the next music fan. But why do bars insist on pummeling us with their songs at the decibel levels of NHRA drag races? Bars are supposed to be an oasis from work and noise, places to sort out life in conversations with friends and lovers. I don’t understand why bar owners insist on undermining their storied and welcome culture with eardrum-splintering music and now panoramic TVs playing “Mission Impossible II.” These days, I gauge the sound level before deciding to sit down and have a drink. One blast of “Once I had a love and it was a gas” and I’m on to the next place.
But Berger knows why music “is piped into bars, markets, restaurants, department stores and Jiffy Lube waiting rooms.” It not a conspiracy or anything – just “pop psychology and pseudoscience spouted by marketing and advertising executives.”
He says David Owen explained it all in the New Yorker with that article on Muzak, The Soundtrack of Your Life – for fifty years they had their trademarked concept, Stimulus Progression. You know the deal -“most people really were happier and more productive when there was something humming along in the background.” Berger suggests that “elevator music” got its name from “the soothing tunes piped into early skyscrapers, designed to calm people as they rode the claustrophobic new contraptions to top floors.” Perhaps so.
But you can visit the Muzak site – since the nineties things have changed, and they now do audio architecture –
The company sold music in public places not as a tranquilizer but as a means to enhance the shopping experience, as the marketing jargon goes. As Alvin Collins, a founder of the concept, explained to Owen, he was creating “retail theater.” Muzak wasn’t about soothing music anymore. “It was about selling emotion – about finding the soundtrack that would make this store or that restaurant feel like something, rather than just being an intellectual proposition.” That’s why you now can’t escape the Cure in Urban Outfitters or the Gipsy Kings in any Mediterranean restaurant; both are trying to match their wares to the music their target audience supposedly likes. Whether or not a particular business is a client of Muzak’s, they are driven by the same concept: Retail Theater is all about consumption and music is a star of the show.
That bothers Burger and no doubt bothers Drummond –
You hear songs that once lifted your spirits employed to sell you a computer. I don’t see much difference between using music to make you feel good about a dining experience and using it to sell you a car on TV.
I can easily picture the bright and musically savvy employee who came up with the idea to use Nick Drake’s “Pink Moon” to promote Volkswagen’s new Cabrio model. Pull an esoteric song out of rock’s demimonde to show off Volkswagen’s coolness to its college-crowd target. I have never been more disheartened by the use of a song in a commercial, or the response to it.
Afterward, many, including Drake’s sister, said the singer, who died in 1974, an apparent suicide, benefited from the commercial because it exposed millions of people to his music. That’s a pretty specious defense. One of the most extraordinary qualities about Drake’s sad and lovely folk music is that it has grown in popularity over the years by being passed between friends like a tender secret. The commercial did help the Drake estate sell records but at a terrible cost to “Pink Moon.” The emotionally fragile song, whose central image is a haunting metaphor for encroaching depression, is now forever bound to an automobile. It’s an incredible shame and a phenomenon sadly taken for granted, even endorsed.
And so it goes with Moby, “licensing his songs to Intel, the teen TV show Charmed, Nokia phones and Rover SUVs, sometimes before they appeared on albums.” You get your promotion, but you’re associated forever with “the product.”
Is that bad? It is, after all, just exploiting new avenues of distribution. Berger do not agree at all –
The difference is that today’s retail theater, designed to coerce and sell, robs music of its own visual and emotional power. I once admired Moby’s album “Play” but never listen to it because of its association with the oppressive drone of consumerism. Is that the legacy a musician wants? Does the human spirit find release in a phone commercial? I can’t believe that Bob Seger and John Cougar Mellencamp don’t regret the choice that eternally welded their music to Chevy trucks.
… I don’t mean to sound crotchety. I can be sitting in a bar and smile in solidarity with the bartender who programmed the wistful and witty Mountain Goats song into the sound system. And I relish the Chopin nocturnes that my corner cafe sometimes plays in the morning. I also don’t mean to raise the hoary complaint that music in public is further fraying some grand social fabric, as if life in America in 2007 is supposed to resemble a 1920s Paris salon. I’m in love with the modern world. I am.
And so Berger likes the iPod – you choose the music, you do your file-sharing, and it becomes “a way to reclaim music from the manipulations of the marketers, to escape the claws of the behaviorists.” The idea is that art that doesn’t manipulate is what forms real social bonds.
Of course that is patently untrue – think of rousing, manipulative music, like this, the battle of La Marseillaise and fake “The Watch on the Rhine” from Casablanca (the Nazi anthem, the “Horst Wessel” song, presented serious copyright problems at the time). You just want to punch a Nazi. Music that blatantly manipulates does form real social bonds. Think of the Notre Dame Fight Song. Still, you see what Berger means – commercial manipulation is his issue. So he likes his iPod. But then there is the isolation.
See John Cage – “”We do not like to be pushed around emotionally. The purpose of music is to sober and quiet the mind, thus making it susceptible to divine influences.”
Berger thinks that is right and maybe it is. And he suggests a bit of Erik Satie and the organ works by Arvo Pärt – clears your head and all that. It is not so much about escaping “the incessant and unwanted drone of music in public” – it is about actually listening.
Does that make sense? Cage also said this – “The grand thing about the human mind is that it can turn its own tables and see meaninglessness as ultimate meaning.” Maybe that is what is going on here.
What happened in the UK is odd, and maybe it is a good idea. Still the way the world turns, the music will play here. It’s a comfort, even if it is Alexander Nevsky, with Fritz Reiner and the Chicago folks.
Just Above Sunset 