I am including a link to a new essay by Ted Gioia in the Friday Miscellanea tomorrow, but there is one phrase from it, the last one in fact, that I want to just muse on for a bit.
music is too powerful for them to kill
He says this because he sees a grass-roots music revolution turning things upside down the way rock 'n' roll did in the mid-50s. Well, maybe, but back then the music business was a tiny fraction of what it is today so the people running it were proportionally less powerful. Now it is a large industry and more invulnerable to revolution, aesthetic revolution at least!
But let's have a look at the sentiment Ted expresses: music is too powerful for them to kill. The underlying assumptions are interesting. Music has some kind of Platonic Form that has an aesthetic power above the mere instances of it in the world. I might even like to believe that! But I don't think that is the actual question here. It is not music that is being put into a mindless algorithm box: it is rather people's tastes. If you feed people the same thing over and over, they will have no taste for anything different and will even reject it as "bad." In the past there was enough regional variation that music was more of a cottage industry. Every group of producers followed their own methods and formulas like traditional cheesemakers in France. But now we have a globalized homogeneity that is fed to the whole world. That is a pretty powerful creator of musical taste.
But I very much would like to believe that musical revolution is possible. But wait, we had one just fifty years ago. No, I'm not talking about The Beatles, though there is an argument to be made there. I am referring to the so-called minimalist music of Steve Reich and Philip Glass which very much overturned the maximal complexity model of the post-war avant-garde. But this revolution only caused tiny ripples in the music business and hardly affected the commercial models at all.
"Music" --that is, some ideal form of music, may be too powerful for them to kill, but they can certainly keep it locked up in a closet somewhere so it doesn't upset the commercial applecart.
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