I can't post it here; it's just too much worse than the Royal Shakespeare Company version, `a droite. Also check out Charlotte Courdet's great song at 6:40, mourning all that we once read in Rousseau.
Collins would have pulled it off if Tom Waits had organized the music. For all of Collins' mamoth skills (among other things, she discovered Leonard Cohen) the instrumentation on her cover masks over herky jerky syncopation of the original.
Anyhow, here's lyrics from the libretto, which I just ordered from Amazon.
4 years after the revolution and the old kings execution 4 years after remember how those portia took their final bow
String up every aristocrat Out with the priests and let then live on their fat
Four years after we started fighting Marat keeps up with his writing Four years after the bastille fell He still recalls the old battle yell
Down with all of the ruling class Throw all the generals out on their ass
Why do they have the gold Why do they have the power why why why why why Do they have the friends at the top
Why do they have the jobs at the top
We've got nothing always had nothing Nothing but holes and millions of them Living in holes Dying in holes Holes in our bellies and Holes in our clothes
I think I might be teaching the first graduate seminar on Graham Harman in the United States. At least two of my students are applying for this awesome summer institute at Bonn on the new ontology (teachers including Hagglund, Brassier, Harman, Grant, and Zizek!) and as part of a class on Derrida with my colleague Francois Raffoul they should get a chance to work through some of Hagglund's work.*
We've started the semester with a huge dollop of Meillassoux and Harman on Meillassoux (many notes thus far are HERE, this week I'm going to include more stuff on Harman on Meillassoux). Two Springs from now I'm scheduled to teach a class on Meillassoux and Graham Priest which will be awesome, awesome, awesome and which Insha'Allah might form the genesis of some collaborative work with Levi Bryant (at the very least it will form the genesis of some solo work on Bryant, which would also be awesome).
One of the things we've read this semester is Meillassoux's "Spectral Dilemma" essay and Harman's exegesis of parts of Meillassoux's second (currently unpublished) magnum opus L'Inexistence Divine. Strangely, I was able to lead a discussion of some of the material in the article in the current adult sunday school class I'm doing on the Meaning of Jesus.
So I think today, February 12, 2012 might be the first time Meillassoux has been taught in an adult sunday school class (notes on that class HERE; Meillassoux is mentioned multiple times in different contexts).
I do not think my teaching bits of Meillassoux today will be the last time that conscientious Christians will struggle with his ideas in churches though, for a couple of reasons.
Being within fifty years of a folk musical culture rooted in catchy melodies where most people who can play instruments do play instruments.
Being within fifty years of a time when copyright was not enforced well.
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.
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.
My God, but punk rock from the Soviet Union was great.
Fantastic essay HERE by Adam Curtis on music and youth rejection in the Soviet Union.
Curtis is motivated by the thought that the widespread failure of communism to deliver what it promised is currently being repeated by neo-liberal regimes in the west, and that this is going to lead to the kind of collapse of belief that produces such great music in the Soviet Union.
To right is Kommunizm's "Stop the Rollin Stones." It's fantastic, Curtis has a video form Letov's other famous band Grob for the song "Everything is Going According to Plan" and then part of a wonderful punk/folk song by Yanka Dyagileva's that includes the lyric "the television is hanging from the ceiling, and no one knows how f***ing low I'm feeling."
In the current epoch, we are all in danger of becoming exactly like Hamlet, as Curtis says, "someone who can see through the superficiality of the present age, but is unable to have any beliefs or even feelings about anything."
Genuine punk is paradoxical because the manner in which it asserts that we are all Hamlet promises the negatation of the assertion. It probably doesn't really work, but this kind of performative contradiction may be all we have left, the only way to recover some smidgeon of beauty and autonomy in a world without rock.
As of the time of uploading, this video has only been viewed seventy one times (fast-foreword to the fifty second mark for the beginning of the song proper). I find this appalling, unacceptable, indicative of a hopeless age. . . but also strangely affirming at the same time.
I mean, some things are still unpolluted. They are what they are, and that is enough. The implosion of the traditional market for music has resulted in popular musical forms being disseminated in the manner of 1920s folk art. Given all the other civilizational detritus with which we have to contend, this can be liberating.
In any case, I hope to be able to provide some evidence for the claim that the number of downloads for this band's songs should be several million more than seventy one. The justification will almost certainly involve reference both to one of Mark Lance's weird superpowers and to a noble band of chrononauts all alone, lost in time yet still sacrificing themselves on the alter of RAWK.
It's really amazing how the "fiddlesticks" method ends up producing something that sounds so much like the way drums can sound in Indian classical music.
This is fiddle legend Dewey Balfa singing and fretting the instrument, and his nephew Todd drumming on the strings. Keep watching through until Dewey stops bowing and Todd is still drumming. It's otherworldly.
The footage is from Yasha Aginsky's documentary "Les Blues de Balfa," which I plan to see ASAP.
One of the things that's long struck me about that first burst of recorded music in the 1920s is how ethereal and strange the forced high pitched singing of the men could be. Often the songs sound like they are from another planet, both in virtue of the pitch and in virtue of the fact that all of these people being recorded did not initially learn from listening to hit records, but from their local communities. The sheer oddness and diversity of American folk music from the 20's is in large part a function of that. And I think musicians will always return to the recordings of this period because of that.
I've been availing myself of Ann Allen Savoy's masterful Cajun Music: A Reflection of a People, which not only is great history, but also includes sheet music transcriptions of a lot of great really early songs.
I don't think Michael Doucet gets enough credit for his vocal stylings. He's such a great fiddle player that people sometimes overlook the power of his voice. It gives me goose bumps.
It's kind of strange to me that with the decline of Logical Positivism, that there has been so little rethinking of the problems and prospects for transcendental idealism.
Every variety of transcendental idealism fails because it ends up violating its own strictures about what can and can't be said. Kant- causality only applies to things in the phenomenal realm (due to the mind's constitutive powers), yet objects in the noumenal realm also cause the mind's experience of them. Heidegger- beings only exist in a substantial way as present-at-hand abstractions from Dasein's world of projects, yet without Dasein there would still be (be!) beings, just not being. Logical Positivism- Only those assertions which are empirically verifiable are true or false. The previous assertion is true. Putnam's Internal Realism- an independent world does not constrain our theories about it, and causal connections with the independent world prohibits us from being brains in the vat (I need to do more work to show that Putnam's incoherence is a species of the broader incoherence; really it's probably best presented as a bad reaction to that broader incoherence). Dummettian anti-realism- Fitch's paradox (this is probably a problem for all the views under consideration; the claim that it's an instance of the broader problem here is something I'm arguing in a paper right now).
The dominant reaction to all of this has been to lapse back into a pretty unreflective realism, with almost constitutional irritation at those still moved by the Kantian problems with unreflective realism (leads to implausible skepticism and unworkable antinomies).
As far as I know only John McDowell, Graham Priest, and the new Heideggerian Realists (Alva Noe and Graham Harman in different ways) have work that is relevant to taking very seriously the initial Kantian impetus while being congnizant of the problem.
Here's some ignorant speculation (I don't understand the following thinkers well enough for it to be anything but). Among the informed responses to this situation include: (1) newly enforced quietism, (2) dialectics, and (3) animism/pan-theism.
(1) Quietism tries to avoid the contradictions in transcendental idealism by further limiting what can be said. (2) Dialectics either (2a) tries to make sense of a contextually situated interplay between the noumenal and phenomenal to license talking about the noumenal, or (2b) involves indexing phenomenal speech such that there is no contradiction and no collapse back into simple idealism (which happens with Fitch's paradox, which must be understood in this broader context). (3) The animism/pan-theism response is to characterize reality as being in some sense already intentional and normative in such a way that you don't fall into simple idealism but also avoid the problems that Kant attributes to realism (and here the Kripke-Wittgenstein paradox has to be seen in the broader light of the initial drive towards transcendental idealism).
Some of Schopenhauer can be presented as (1). Russell's type theory, Dummett's open-textured
notion of proof, temporal indexing responses to Fitch like
paradoxes, and possibly meta-linguistic resolutions of truth paradoxes can be presented as (2b), and possibly Heidegger's interplay
between earth and world in the art lecture is an instance of (2a). McDowell can be presented
as a combination of (1) and (3), while Hegel can be presented as a
combination of (2) and (3). I don't know to what extent the pantheistic and animistic ideas of Strawson and Chalmers (3) can be presented in this light; and the characterization of Harman probably only works in terms of (3) if you already (not always, but rather prior to reading Heidegger) thought the modes and structures of Dasein where particularly mental/intentional.
What are the other options? Should Priest's Beyond the Limits of Thought dialetheism count as an option alongside these other ones? Maybe it's the null hypothesis for how one could remain a realist? Then his critique of Kant, Heidegger, Wittgenstein etc. all work to argue against transcendental idealist approaches. I need to re-read his great book. I read it right when it came out and I didn't know that much at the time.
I realize this is just casually throwing a lot of things together. Part of what really interests me in both Schopenhauer and Heidegger is that while both were transcendental idealists, both undermined canonical forms of transcendental idealism of their age, and also both did the most to provide resources for plausible forms of realism. Some day I'd like to be able to think that through in a more systematic way, but as my favorite philosophers Bon Scott and the brother's Young once argued: I know Monty Python has this whole thing where all Australian philosophers are named Bruce and drink with one another. I have this goofy idea that they all completely rock out to AC/DC together. Can it possibly be an accident that the country that produced the greatest rock band of all time also produces a disproportionate amount of excellent philosophy? I don't think so. I think their philosophy is in fact high voltage philosophy, the analog to the following (again, also produced in Australia, for all we know, across the street from Smart and Armstrong's apartment house):
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