Jon Cogburn's Blog

Rosenbaum on Billy Joel

I missed THIS ESSAY when it came out a few years ago.

While I tend to have respect for anyone who can write catchy melodies as Joel can, Rosenbaum is really on to something with this:

I think I've identified the qualities in B.J.'s work that distinguish his badness from other kinds of badness: It exhibits unearned contempt. Both a self-righteous contempt for others and the self-approbation and self-congratulation that is contempt's backside, so to speak. Most frequently a contempt for the supposed phoniness or inauthenticity of other people as opposed to the rock-solid authenticity of our B.J.

Then Rosenbaum goes through hit after hit illustrating the thesis.

A couple of observations:

1. Graham Harman has written about the "sneer from nowhere" that ironic Gen ex hipsters perfected pre-internet and that came to characterize an awful lot of the early blogosphere. I think Rosenbaum's "unearned contempt" is pretty much the same thing.
2. Academic philosophers give in to unearned contempt much more than people in other fields. For some reason, we feel justified saying nasty things about thinkers and movements we don't know very much about. This is probably worst with analytic and continentals who view the distinction in Baby Boomer culture war terms (not to say only Baby Boomers do this). I think this comes from a kind of anxiety in philosophy that if other people are right about certain things, then your life work might be worthless. I mean, you can't get started on a project unless you presuppose an awful lot. But if those presuppositions are kicked out, then there's no point to what you've been doing. 
3. Incidentally, I think this bit about presuppositions is why orthodox Heideggerians don't make time for Harman. What is overwhelmingly offensive to them is not Harman's critique of correlationism, nor his neo-Aristotelian views, but rather his claim that most of Heidegger's work is just a repetitious restatement of of the tool/broken tool dichotomy. If Harman is correct about this (and he gives arguments, e.g. the discussion of time in Tool Being) then thousands and thousands of books and articles by orthodox Heideggerians might end up being beside the point. This kind of thing is pretty terrifying if you are on the receiving end of it.

Anyhow, the Billy Joel article is really interesting. Joe Bob says check it out.

Rock is Dead, Long Live Rock

In three recent posts ((1) Bands with which I used to jam: Lusting after Mary, Steel Fury, Three Lesbian Folksingers, (2) Kommunizm (Egor Letov) - Stop The Rolling Stones, and (3) Rock is Dead, and I Know who Killed it) I was able to explain exactly why rock and roll died. The first was some memories of my service as a humble foot soldier in the army of Rock, the second meditations on how Rock died (and punk and genuine industrial music arose) in the Soviet Union, and the third pulling all of that together to show exactly who killed Rock. Of course, good analyst that I am, I have thus discerned conditions necessary for Rock to live. These are

1. Being within fifty years of a folk musical culture rooted in catchy melodies where most people who can play instruments do play instruments.
2. Being within fifty years of a time when copyright was not enforced well.
3. A social milieu where it is not utterly irrational to collectively hope for things to get better.

Of course none of these things any longer hold in the United States (see the third post above for the argument).

Thus it seems to me that all of us former footsoldiers in Rock's Army really need to be asking ourselves the following empirical question. Are any parts of the world that do satisfy all three of these conditions?

My guess is that the best options are Brazil, Turkey, recent Arab Spring states (if things go well), and those sub-saharan African contries that have had really good decades (this never makes it in the American news). Possibly Indonesia as well?

I don't know enough about the ecosystem of folk music in Arab countries or Indonesia. One thing I think that might hinder rock there is that Muslim worship does not use music like Christian (especially evangelical and charismatic) worship does. I may be biased here, because I learned to play guitar myself in a charismatic church (as a child I actually provided background music to several violations of the laws of nature, and probably would not have become a philosopher had I not reacted as a child so strongly against the serial hypocrisy of Christian conservatives). But it is just true. So much of the blues and early rock had a symbiotic relationship with American Christian churches, for example Jerry Lewis and Jimmy Swaggart are first cousins and in fact learned to play piano together both at church and at honkytonk bars they'd sneak out to as teenagers.

This being said, several people have told me that Constantinople has perhaps the most exciting music scene in the world today, with what people are doing with traditional Turkish folk tunes in the manner that early rock took from the blues and Appalachian music (actually blues and Appalachian and Cajun music were all influencing each other long before recordings), and some of the music from Tahrir, Tunisia, and Libya was pretty amazing.

Who knows how all this will turn out? But just as it gives me great joy to know that it is not impossible that there is some planet in the universe with creatures like us, but not nearly so flawed, it gives me great joy to know that Rock may be being reincarnated as I speak in entirely different cultural millieus.

Rock is Dead, and I Know who Killed it

Post mortems of cultural movements are not like real autopsies, which are preferably done while the body is fresh. With culture sometimes it is easier the more time has passed.

Well, enough time has passed.  I know now not only that rock is dead but why it died.

Rock and roll has two essential properties: (1) catchy melodies rooted in folk forms (blues, dance hall routines, popular piano sheet music people played at home) that predominated before the advent of mass reproduction of recorded music, (2) the promise of some kind of liberation as part of a broader cultural milieu, whether this is explicitly political or something more inward; this kind of thing is best captured in anthemic music, which was always a part of the beating heart of rock.

Listen to non-oldies radio today and you just don't hear any decent rock. Instead, 99% of it is just aural wall paper for people who have no taste but still have pretensions to style that are themselves hangovers from the age of rock. The melodies are atrocious to non-existent and to the extent that any kind of liberation is promised, it's an absolute parody of what great rock bands (including "grunge" artists) routinely delivered.

Yes there are still a few great rockers, just like there are still people programming text adventure games really well. But bands like the White Stripes truly are the exception that proves the rule, because they would not have been nearly so exceptional in the 1970s (though no less great for that), and other recent great bands such as second through fourth album era Marylin Manson are to some extent minstrelsy (though no less great for that),  and other exceptions (to the universal inabilitiy of current bands to write songs that (a) have good melodies, and (b) are meaningfully liberatory) like Hedwig and the Angry Inch, and Brothers of the Head, are literally minstrelsy. Note that by the end of the Bush administration, none of these bands were even still together.

What brought this about? How did rock die? Who killed it?

First, The victory of recorded over live music. This killed rock in two ways. (a) You used to have to play music to hear it. This created an incredible overabundance of musicians from which a John Lennon could emerge. This created audiences with good ears for melody that would recognize the genius of a Lennon/McCartney, or even, near the end of the era, a David Bowie (before, album after album, producer Tony Visconti allowed him to show up to the studio with bags of cocaine and no written material). Every decade since the advent of the radio, the percentage of people who play competently has decreased. This has been a disaster both in terms of creating a pool of artists, and in terms of creating competent listeners. (b) The copyright regime of the recorded music industry. Even the very best of the originally recorded folkies (Leadbelly and Woody Guthrie) shamelessly plagariazed *and refined* everything they could get their ears on, but as more and more stuff got recorded under the new copyright regime there has been more and more melodies out there that you cannot use and adapt.

Second, the Rousseauan ideal of the 60's rightfully died at Alamount, and communism rightfully so thirty years later. But then what replaced them was just as dishonest and at least far more destructive than the dimbulb liberation of Peace Bear and his little sidekick Hippy Pants, and it is possible that history will end up being less kind to neo-liberalism than to communism.

Playing to the void

The older I get, the more moved I am by G.E. Moore's two universe thought experiment.

One universe contains things of great beauty and the other does not, while neither contains creatures even sapient enough for the beauty or lack thereoff to make any difference. Moore thinks that it is clear that the beauty containing universe is more valuable than the one that does not contain beauty. If I remember right, for Moore this shows that forms of hedonism  that entail that the only intrinsic good is pleasure cannot be correct.

There are all sorts of strategies for dismissing possible world type gedankenexperiments, but I don't think they should make us dismiss Moore's conclusion.

In yesterday's post I talked about Greil Marcus' new chapter on the importance of  putting something out there into the void. I think that what he has in mind does the same service as Moore's experience, and moreover expresses a norm quite central to the practice of art.

Most art is never really enjoyed by anybody other than the artist. Think of somebody sitting on the back porch playing the blues. Most such performers never get discovered by anybody, they just make our universe a little bit more beautiful. Now clearly, an undiscovered artist doing this considers the unverse to be a better place for being more beautiful.

The obvious response here is that the performer gets pleasure out of the performance, so this does not show that beauty is intrinsically  valuable after all. But consider this Euthyphronic problem. To sustain the anti-Moorean point you'd have to say that the act is valuable because it brings pleasure to the performer. But this is phenomenologically wrong. It goes the other way around. The extent to which the performer derives pleasure from the act is largely the extent to which the performer takes the the act to be valuable.

Moreover, the act does not always bring pleasure. Our weird obsessions with trying to make this universe more beautiful can actually diminish pleasure quite a bit (consider the Van Goghs and Gauguins who never become famous).

The moral here of course is that both beauty and pleasure are intrinsic goods. I wish I could say more about the failed Gauguin case, but I don't think I can. With the exception of propositional logic, philosophy provides no algorithms. And with the exception of digital computers, neither does the universe.

why haven't Bauhaus been more influential when they rock out so much?

This may be heresy on these shores, but by my lights The Damned's first single "New Rose," (promotional video here) is an even better example of how great punk rock is also great rock than the Dead Boy's "Sonic Reducer" (CBGBs performance here). 

Thus the Damned's post-punk "goth" move to keyboards (Eloise here, Grimley Fiendish here), is I think just as terrible as Queen's move to keyboards a few years earlier.  Bauhaus' guitar driven post-punk "goth" music is infinitely better as far as the music also instantiating the form of Rock (Dark Entries here, Stigmata Martyr here, Bella Lugosi's dead here).

This raises an interesting question.  Arguably, jazz guitar would be much better if jazzers used Django Reinhardt as their main inspiration instead of Charlie Christian.  Can something similar be said for goth, which seems to have been much more informed by The Damned's keyboard approach than by Bauhaus' rocking out approach?

One would expect the genre of horror-punk to be heavily influenced by Bauhaus, but as far as I can tell it's all a footnote to the Misfits.

How plausible are these conjectures?  Moreover, can anyone name any good bands strongly influenced by Bauhaus (as, for example so many good bands are strongly influenced by Bowie, The Velvet Underground, and the Stooges)?  If not, why not?

narrator versus artist

One of the strange things about pop (broadly conceived) music is that listeners have so little ability to seperate narrator  from artist.  For example, Johnny Cash said that many people he met thought he'd really done hard time in prison. 

I guess this happens to novelists who write in first person sometimes as well.

Sometimes artists themselves end up getting confused, I think always to their destruction.  If Jack Kerouac had continued to think of On the Road as a fictional great American Novel he might not have drank himself to death.  Tupac Shakur's confusion of himself with his character led to his death much quicker.