Authors: Marvin Lin
And here, at last, we can revisit the stakes of the new technological rhythm: “Because of today’s terrific speed-up of information moving, we have a chance to apprehend, predict and influence the environmental forces shaping us — and thus win back control of our own destinies.” Taking McLuhan’s advice, those of us looking for change would be advised to adopt a perceptual sensitivity to our media rather than a conceptual mastering of our culture. If we had done so in 2000, we might’ve perceived how Radiohead’s embrace of Napster was also a wider embrace of digital freedom; if we do so today, we might be able to ensure access to this freedom remains a central right in the future.
Let us leave theories there and return to here’s hear.
James Joyce,
Finnegans Wake
One of life’s prime motivating factors is the awareness of our mortality: the more we ruminate on our impending death, the more motivated we are to do something about it. Consequently, time is treated like a commodity, something that holds value due to its limited availability. This is why, in addition to having and spending time, we can feel like we’ve lost or are losing time, why we’re finicky about where our time is invested. It’s also why I’ve spent the last two chapters discussing Radiohead’s relationship with the future. If our conception of time as a limited commodity forces us to worry about what will happen next, then we encourage ourselves to make the “most” of our time, to do something worth doing. But is music listening something worth doing?
For the majority of the last decade, I attempted to
make music seem more “important” by grounding it in social and cultural contexts. Taking cues from critical theorists (Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin) and surrounding myself with a multi-faceted bunch of so-called “new musicologists” (Susan McClary, Nicholas Cook), I was able to situate music within contexts that involved more than “just music,” linking it directly to identity politics, cultural anthropology, postcolonial studies, sexuality, social theory, media theory, etc. It was an interdisciplinary approach that enabled me to sleep better at night under the belief that contextualizing music was in fact something “worth doing.” At one point, I was even getting more satisfaction reading and writing about music than the act of listening itself. Whether through the lens of traditional or new musicology, I could pontificate until my jaw ached, and I didn’t even have to hear a single note.
Indeed, music, for better or for worse, had become an intellectual pursuit rather than a sensory experience, and my first target of analysis was the sensory experience that had once been my ultimate goal in music listening: transcendence.
* * *
I was most open to transcendent experiences as a teenager. This is when I found being “swept away” by music at its most invigorating, when ascendancy into timelessness was couched in sweet harmonies and hypnotic rhythms. It was in these rare moments
when the temporal boundaries that structure our lives — from breakfast time to nap time, work time to play time — were removed. Similar to how drugs can skew our perception of time, music could create the sense that schedules were irrelevant, that time itself could be transcended altogether.
It’s funny how such intense, overwhelming feelings can be so easily destroyed through academic endeavors. Part of adopting a critical perspective means divorcing yourself from the object in question and becoming more aware of your emotional reactions; that is, to see through the “spell” of music, one needs to be educated about its effects. The more I examined and deconstructed music’s constituent elements — rhythm, melody, harmony, tonal color, formal structure — the more I understood how they can be arranged to, in a sense, “manipulate” the listener. Indeed, what happens when you find out that there’s nothing inherent in the minor chord that makes it sound “sad”? What happens when you discover that tracing rock’s rhythms back in time will bring you through the slave trade and back to Africa? What happens when you notice that McDonald’s is suddenly using hip-hop to sell its burgers?
What happens is your conception of music changes: its “history” becomes entrenched in politics, while music itself seems to break down into transparent aesthetic tricks, in which the meaning assigned to harmony is arbitrary; in which tension-and-release is employed to create a false sense of narrative; in which continually delaying our gratification mirrors
the goal-oriented rhetoric of capitalism, of religion, where that carrot perpetually dangles just beyond reach. Work hard, get rich; lead a devout life, rise to heaven; give in to Western music’s conventions, and you’ll get your hook, your money’s worth, your sanctified musical experience. If Western music works under the same teleological principles as capitalism and religion, its desire to string us through time is also a way to convince us that time itself is a linear concern, with a beginning, middle, and end. And if time is an expendable commodity, I reasoned that trying to “transcend” time was a waste of time.
The feeling of transcendence, then, seemed like nothing more than an illusion, a result of artistic manipulation and cultural conditioning. I rationalized that my relationship with
Kid A
had been superficial, that my emotional reactions were like Pavlovian responses expected from someone who had been duped into believing in the mystical power of music. Better to formulate Important Ideas about music’s socio-political worth than to, you know, bother with actually listening to it. If all music can, indeed, be interpreted politically, the desire to transcend seemed like an escapist retreat, a way to forget about the wars in the Middle East or the homeless people outside my window, a way to render myself politically useless for selfish, hedonistic pleasure. This all made me wonder even more intensely: in a time of social, political, cultural, environmental, and economic unrest, is music listening even important? Is music listening where I should be spending my time?
Thom thought so, and not just because our listening pays his bills.
* * *
In a 2004 issue of
The Third Way
(a British Christian magazine), an interviewer asks Thom to elaborate on a previous statement he had made about escapism: “You once said that the most important thing about music is the sense of escape it gives us. Our shallow popular culture seems to be all about escapism, but is that what we really need?” Not one to shy away from his passion for music, Thom replies:
“Escapism” isn’t really the right word. I think that all the best music … Well, for example, just off the top of my head, one of my absolute favourite pieces of music ever is “Freeman Hardy and Willis Acid.” It’s an Aphex Twin instrumental which has this frantic hi-hat thing going all the way through it and then at some point everything switches tonally and it all goes out of phase and then carries on. And the first time I heard it, it was like someone had just reached over and switched a switch in my head and I never, ever saw anything the same again. I was completely straight. I was just driving along the road, driving home, whatever — and I had to stop the car.
And that’s what we should be aiming at. A good piece of music — like Arvo Pärt — is like knocking a hole in the wall so that you can see out on another
place you didn’t know existed. If your consciousness is not constantly evolving somehow or other and you just keep going round the same room again and again, then you’re sort of trapped — and every good piece of music — or art or writing — stops you [from] feeling trapped. Maybe that is what religion is as well, I don’t really know. But it’s not really escapism, that’s the point.
What Thom is describing might more accurately be called transcendence: he’s not talking about “escaping from”; he’s talking about “going beyond.” While escapism can be seen as a retreat, transcendence is a different beast altogether: it advances one toward the possibility of a new way of seeing, a new way of hearing — indeed, a new consciousness of the sort that Thom so passionately describes. It provides a state of mind in which we are open fully to our senses, where our perceptions are heightened at the expense of any intellectual baggage.
While it seems counterintuitive to bypass rationality and intellect, choosing to emphasize our perceptions can be advantageous. In her 1964 essay “Against Interpretation,” Susan Sontag offers a critique of the over-intellectualization of the arts, claiming that art’s transcendent potential is being deflated as a result of our desire to “assimilate Art into Thought.” Instead, argues Sontag,
[W]hat is important now is to recover our senses. We must learn to see more, to hear more, to feel more. Our task is not to find the maximum amount of content in a work of art, much less to squeeze more content out of the work than is already there. Our task is to cut back content so that we can see the thing at all.
By cutting back the content to increase perception — that is, leaving analysis behind and instead learning through sensory experience — we align ourselves closer to Hugo Ball’s remark that “art is not an end in itself” but “an opportunity for the true perception and criticism of the times we live in,” or Marx’s claim that “Art is always and everywhere the secret confession, and at the same time the immortal movement of its time.” McLuhan, the non-conceptualist perceptualist, went even further with a theory of perceptual foretelling: “Art at its most significant is a Distant Early Warning System that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it.”
In his book
Noise: The Political Economy of Music
, French economist Jacques Attali offers an impassioned, highly politicized treatise that extends the possibility of using musical perception as a way to not only mirror history but also to anticipate historical developments. Attali’s not claiming that artists are mystical visionaries or divine prophets; he’s saying that, because music’s organization is so inextricably linked to society’s organization, any sonic ruptures are indicative of future societal
change. That is, because we can see
societal
organization reflected in music, any new
musical
organization can serve to forecast the future because music “explores, much faster than material reality can, the entire range of possibilities” of that organization (e.g. the mode of production). Music, therefore, acts as both a mirror and a prophecy of society: we can see where society is headed if we can hear where music is headed.
Like McLuhan’s theories on new technology, Attali’s thoughts on music are often misunderstood because they’re rooted in perception, not conception. But by understanding the history of music as a channeling of noise and violence (an argument central to his theory, but beyond the scope of this book), Attali argues that we can see/hear how the transformation of troubadours into minstrels foreshadowed the shift from feudalism to capitalism, how Mozart and Bach “reflect the bourgeoisie’s dream of harmony better than and prior to the whole of nineteenth-century political theory,” how Jimi Hendrix signified “more about the liberatory dream of the 1960s than any theory of crisis.”
In fact, Hendrix, a perceptualist if there ever was one, made a similar assessment of music: “If there is something to be changed in this world, then it can only happen through music.”
Greil Marcus did too: “If one can stop looking at the past and start listening to it, one might hear echoes of a new conversation.”
Hell, so did Thom: “Sometimes really powerful music can presage things that then happen. Like any
artform, there’s that element of seeing into the future, no matter how dimly and naïvely.”
* * *
It’s not surprising that music perhaps best provides the immediacy for perceptual awareness. Not only are our ears exquisitely sensitive — we can tell if people are smiling over the phone; make spatial predictions based on volume, intensity, direction; differentiate between the waving of thick and thin paper or the pouring of hot and cold water — but music, by its very nature, is a pursuit of the senses. I wonder, then, what implications might this have regarding our perception during the act of musical transcendence? In the rare moments when the present feels intensely amplified, when we forget about our rigid schedules and dwell in a pregnant now, when even discerning between past, present, and future seems misguided, might our ears be picking up on something we can’t intellectually grasp?
If the twenty-first-century electronic society is indeed propagating principles of simultaneity, discontinuity, and pattern recognition, the standardized time of the past — based on old attributes of power, control, and repetition — seems terribly misfitting. I’m reminded of Einstein, who said that “the only reason for time is so that everything doesn’t happen at once,” that time was in fact an “illusion.” More than just positing time as a temporal dimension along the three spatial dimensions of length, width, and height
(which then allows us to specify
when
and
where
an event happens), Einstein’s theory of relativity served as the basis for even crazier ontological investigations of time that would puncture our everyday conception of it, just as the railway did in the mid-1800s. From the eternalists and endurantists to the quantum physicists and pendurantists, from theories of duality and thermodynamics to loop quantum gravity and eternalism, the scientific community vigorously dismantled time over the last century, showing how the standardized, linear time — that is, railway time — upon which we’ve structured modern society is in fact just one way to perceive time, if not an entirely false way altogether.
And the scientific community wasn’t alone. While the rigid standardization of time has led to schedules, alarm clocks, and the very concept of “leisure time,” many art movements of the twentieth century sought to destroy the need for any of it, to truly fuck with our sense of time in order to propagate new perceptions residing outside its incessant ticking. In fact, temporal concerns were reflected, subverted, and critiqued throughout the arts — in the writings of Ishmael Reed, Virginia Woolf, and Kurt Vonnegut; in the artworks of the Impressionists, Fluxists, and Cubists; in the films of Jean-Luc Godard, Luis Buñuel, and David Lynch — where linear and structured time were undercut by anachronism and non-linear narratives, where spatiality was offset by temporality. As artist Richard Huelsenbeck so wonderfully put it, “time is
a bourgeois construction, to turn an hour into fifty minutes is to be a Dadaist.”