Richard Meltzer sez:
"Rock is the only possible future for philosophy and art (and finally philosophy and art are historically interchangeable)."
The first part of this sentence seems outrageous, but the second part goes remarkably far in articulating a theory of how rock's aesthetics are to be determined. Somewhere else in the book (I can't find it, so I might have made it up), Meltzer refers to rock as a "totality"that basically encompasses everything. Like so many of Meltzer's grand proclamations (see above), this is going to far. But he is getting at something: rock/pop is a system itself -- it is somehow separate from other art and other music. (Again, partly due to its utterly commercial nature? Probably.)
So the second part: "philosophy and art are historically interchangeable." In rock/pop, this seems to be true, and lends credence to my idea that the fan/critic division does not apply. In fact, the very idea of "fan" (short for fanatic, after all!) shows us what's driving the rock world: INVESTMENT. Maybe even "love," if you can talk about such a thing. But Meltzer asks us to include the artist (musician, rocker, band, etc) in this relationship: the fan/critic/band division does not apply, then:
Fans are self-styled critics, and identify so much with bands that they wish to be them, or pretend to be them, or become them by starting bands themselves.
Critics are fans before anything else (yes?), and often failed or amateur musicians. (Or "real" musicians: Lenny Kaye springs to mind, and a number of writers for alt-weeklies, including me I guess).
Bands are fans of other bands (and of themselves?) and are amateur critics (of themselves, of other bands).
More than this, though, all three groups seem to need* each other, and seem to allow a blurring of the lines between roles. (*The need is -- I hate to say it again -- economic!! And spritual. Maybe.)
"The ability and willingness to deal ... with the cliche as the sole source of viscera and as sole viscera itself is rock's alone."
Elsewhere Meltzer refers to rock as the ultimate in "surface" art -- it is what it appears to be, it's all surface (no geist?), all viscera. I can't answer that claim because I love rock too much to consider it only "surface" art. But the idea of rock as cliche, or cliche as the province, the building blocks of rock, makes sense. Rock is full of 'readymades' in a rhetorical sense, identities and genres that are ready and waiting for people to step into them. Like jazz, it can be built on a system of licks and quotes (and of course the same 12-note scale as everything from "Happy Birthday" to "Moonlight Sonata"), but unlike jazz, it is rarely tolerant of improvisation and innovation.
Wait, am I really saying that? If so I think I'm caught up in rockism again, with those terminology problems. I still haven't come up with a contemporary definition of popular music. It is true though that popular music is rarely experimental -- Radiohead is a little weird sometimes, but it's not like they're Karlheinz Stockhausen (or maybe they are). Sigh. OK, this idea -- "rarely tolerant of improvisation and innovation" -- is not going to get me very far. I think it's proably wrong.
I haven't even gotten to the "mainstream/indie" divide yet, which doesn't apply aesthetically but does apply sociologically and economically. And I did say that the definition of Pop (I am hereby switching terms and only using the word POP until further notice) would be at least partly social and economic.
"Rock n roll has always been directly concerned with the art of selling and has produced an aesthetic of the hit."
See above section, and Adorno''s chapter on popular music in Introduction to the Sociology of Music. Hits are less important now than they used to be, but pop is absolutely focussed on "The Song." I would say "the single," but there are always exceptions. Explosions in the Sky, for example, don't exactly release "singles," but they do make songs. (Post-rock ever being the expection, I'm not sure what to do about certain bands who seem to make classical-style "compositions" or "pieces" rather than songs.) The most important feature of The Song seems to be repetition -- maybe a simpler repetition than classical forms, but not dissimiliar -- and this repitition, of rhythm and melody, seems to be what people viscerally react to in pop. Allan Bloom's assertion is that this reaction is to the almost wholly sexual nature of rock/pop (he's not 100% wrong, but not really right). But Gracyk's notion that it just makes people feel something (totally inaccurate paraphrase of his work, sorry) makes the most sense to me. Pop asserts its physicality through the way it is played (hitting drums, banging keys,scraping strings, forcing air through vocal chords -- or the simulation of all these things as in electronic music), and through, simply, volume. Loudness.
OK, we really took a detour there.
"The aesthetician...and the art critic can never be epistemologically capable of describing art by thinking at being but must think from and within being. I have thus deemed it a necessity to describe rock n roll by allowing my description to be itself a parallel artistic endeavor."
Again, for Meltzer, rock and rock criticism are, if not inseparable, driven by common underlying properties. They are parallel artistic endeavors, or even parts of the same artistic endeavor. Or the same social endeavor, out of which aesthetic value is determined. I'm still concerned that calling Pop a special system defined by community is too reductive, because that removes Pop from the greater conversation on aesthetics (e.g., attempting to discern certain universal properties of art and the aesthetic experience), but there are plenty of people who are discount the idea of universality in aesthetics as a Western idea -- I read some articles on indigenous and "non-Western" art and aesthetics which assert the absolute necessity of community and social (and material) functions of what we call "art." So we can say there is something separate and community-oriented about Pop, even if we can't say why that makes it more special than other kinds of art.
We could bring up the Pop World again. In fact, I'll get to that next.
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