the utopian blues

"Why is the spirituality of the musician in "High" cultures so often a low-down spirituality?

In India, for example, the musicians belongs to a caste so low it hovers on the verge of untouchability. This lowness relates, in popular attitudes, to the musician's invariable use of forbidden intoxicants. After the "invasion" of Islam many musicians converted in order to escape the caste system. In Ireland the musicians shared the same Indo-European reputation for lowness. The bards or poets ranked with aristocrats and even royalty, but musicians were merely the servants of the bards. In Dumezil's tripartite structure of Indo-European society, as reflected in Ireland, music seems to occupy an ambiguous fourth zone, symbolized by the fourth province of Munster, the "south". Music is thus associated with dark druidism, sexual license, gluttony, nomadry and other outside phenomena.

Islam is populary believed to "ban" music; obviously this is not the case, since so many Indian musicians converted. Islam expresses grave reservation about art in general because all art potentially involves us in multiciplity ( extension in time and space ) rather than in unity ( tawhid ) by which Islam defines its entire spiritual project (...)

Traditional Christianity places a high value on music but a low value on musicians (...)

Christianity and Afro-American spirituality combined to produce the "Spiritist" churches where music forms the structure of worship and the congregation attains "professional" artistry. The ambiguity of this relation is revealed in the powerful links between sacred "gospel" and wordly "blues", the outcaste music of taverns, and jazz, the music of the bordello ( the very word evokes pure sexuality ). The musical forms are very close - the difference lies in the musician, who, as usual, hovers on the very edge of the clearing, the in-between space of the uncanny, and of shamanic intoxication (...)

Hierarchic society permits itself to remain relatively undivided by sacralising the specializations. Music, inasmuch as it is bodiless, can be the sign of the upper caste ( its spirituality ) - but inasmuch as music arises from the body, the musician must be symbolised by the body and hence must be "low". Music is spiritual, the musician is corporeal. The spirituality of the musician is low but also ambiguous in its production of highness. Drugs substitute for the priest's ritual highness to make the musician high enough to produce aesthetic highness (...)

Where hierarchy has not appeared there is no music separate from the rest of the experience. Once music becomes a category ( along with categorization of society ), it has already begun to be alienated - hence the appereance of the specialist, the musician, and the taboo on musician (...)

The bohemian life of the modern artist, so "alienated from society", is nothing but the old low-down spirituality of the musicians and artisan castes, recontextualized in an economy of commodities. Baudelaire had no economic function in the 19th century society - his low-down spirituality turned inward and became self-destructive, because it had lost its functionality in the social. Villon was just as much a bohemian, but at least he still had a role in the economy - as a thief! The artist privilege, to be drunk, to be insouciant, has now become the artist curse. The artist is no longer a servant - refuses to serve - except as unaknowledged legislator. As revolutionary. The artist now claims, like Beethoven, either a vanguard position, or like Baudelaire, complete exile (...)

Wagner, and Nietzsche, when he was propagandizing for Wagner, conceived of a musical revolution against the broken order in the cause of a new and higher ( conscious ) form of the order of intimacy - integral Dionysian culture viewed as the revolutionary goal of romanticism. The outsider as king. Opera is the utopia of music. If opera failed as revolution, as Nietzche came to realise, it was because the audience had refused to go away. The opera of Wagner or Fourier can only succeed as the social if it becomes the social - by eliminating the category of art, of music, as anything separate from life. The audience must become the opera. Instead, the opera became just another commodity. A public ritual celebrating post-sacred values of consumption and sentiment - the sacralization of secular. A step along the road to the spectacle.

The commodification of music measures precisely the failure of the romantic revolution of music - its mummification in the repertoire, the Canon - the recuperation of its dissidence as the rethoric of liberalism, "culture and taste". Wave after wave of the 'avant-garde" attepted to transcend civilization - a process which is only now coming to an end in the apotheosis of commodification, its "final ecstasy".

As Bloch and Benjamin maintained, all art which escape the category of mere kitsch contains what may be called utopian trace. Finally it is this trace which must serve to counter the otherwise-incisive arguments against music made by John Zerzan in "The Tonality and the Totality" - that all alienated forms of music serve ultimately as control. To argue that music itself, like language, is a form of alienation, however, would seem to demand an imposible return to a Paleolithic that is nearly pre-human. But perhaps he stone Age is not somewhere else, distant and inaccesible, but rather ( in some sense ) present. Perhaps we shall experience not a return to the Stone Age, but a return of the Stone Age ( symbolised, in fact, by the very discovery of the Paleolitic which occurred only recently )

A few decades ago civilized ears literally could not hear "primitive" music except as noise; Europeans could not even hear the non-harmonic traditional classical music of India and China except as meaningless rubbish. The same held true for Paleolitic art, for instance, no one noticed the crave paintings till the late 19th century, even though they'd been "discoverede" many times already. Civilization was defined by rational consciousness, rationality was defined as civilized consciousness - outside this totality only chaos and sheer unintelligibility could exist. But now things have changed - suddenly, just as the "primitive" and the "traditional" seem on the verge of dissapereance, we can hear them. How? Why?

(...) Is there actually a problem with the commodification of music? Why should we assume an "elitist" position now, even as new technology makes possible a "mass' participation in music through the virtual infinity of choice, and the "electric democracy" of musical synthesis? Why complain about the degradation of the aura of "the work of art" in the age of mechanical reproduction, as if art could or should still be defended as a category of high value?

But its not "Western civilization" we are defending here, and it's not the sanctity of aesthetic production either. We maintain that participation in the commodity can only amount to a commodification of participation, a simulation of aesthetic democracy. The problem of music remains the same problem - that of alienation, of the separation of consumers from producers. Despite positive possibilities brought into being by the sheer multiplication of resources made accesible through reproduction technology, the overwhelming complex of alienation outweighs all subversive counterforces working for utopian ends.

The discovery of "3rd world" music leads to appropiation and dilution rather than to cross cultural synergy and mutual enrichment. The proliferation of cheap music-synthesis tech at first opens up new and genuinely folkish/democratic possibilities, like Dub and Rap; but the "Industry" knows very well how to fetishize and alienate these insurrectionary energies - use them to sell junk food and shoes!

As we reach out to touch music it recedes from our grasp like a mirage. Everywhere, in every restaurant, shop, public space, we undergo the "noise pollution" of music - its very ubicuity measures our impotence, our lack of participation, of "choice".

And what music! A venal and venial counterfeit of all the "revolutionary" music of the past, the thorbbing sexualized music that once sounded like the death knell of Western Civilization, now becomes the sonic wallpaper hiding a facade of cracks, rifts, absences, fears, the anodyne for despair and anomie - elevator music, waiting room music, pulsing to the 4/4 beat, the old "square" rhythm of European rationalism, flavored with a homeophatic tinge of African heat or Asian spirituality - the utopian trance - memories of youth betrayed and transformed into the aureal equivalent of Prozac and Colt 45. And still each new generation of youth claims this "revolution" as its own, adding or subtracting a note or beat here or there, pushing the "trasngresive" envelope a bit further, and calling it "new music" - and each generation in turn becomes simpky a statistical mass of consumersbusily creating the airport music of its own future, mourning the "sell-outs", wondering what went wrong."

( excerpts from THE UTOPIAN BLUES , by HAKIM BAY )