Captain Champion

Madonna, Plato, same sentence? My my, what a rarity! but consider Madonna (ha! not the virginal one) who said “music makes the people come together” and Plato, “the guardians must beware of changing to a new form of music, since it threatens the whole system”, the equation becomes a function of complex values.

Artist versus Aesthetician. The eternal tension between expression and construct, personal and political, resistance and regulation.  Why is it that artists spout the rhetoric of freedom while the philosophers harp on the sociopolitical interpretation of music, particularly pop music? Is it that both sides are unsure of the other’s boundaries so these are protective measures to draw a comfort zone?

I am going with yes.

Artists, from the most commercial to the most uninhibited (what contemporary scholarly vernacular has deemed ‘avant-garde’ – whatever that really means…), must be able to maintain their title in order to keep their practice going.  Before anyone gets all Marxian on me here and renounces the consumer market on the project of creativity, it must be said that art has always been a commodity and depended on commerce to subsist- NOT EXIST-.  Rather to maintain a proliferating status in society, money has been a necessary facilitator of the artistic practice. (And I’d like to point out, the art market did not start with the Dutch.)  Do I like it? No, but honey I don’t make the rules…I just work here. Back to the point, the artistic impulse to protect the opportunity to create is one of instinct, just as the Kangaroo has her big pocket or Blue Jay has her nest. This should come as no surprise: money and audience are the precarious predator, whose looming threat is embedded into the artistic production process. The process of production also requires the aesthetic position, or rather the insight and persuasion of the critic/philosopher.  Yet, the aim of their goal targets is to advance the context or the meaning of music.  After all, somehow society cannot accept that phenomena emerge without at least an obvious identifiable purpose, right?

So, basically, from the start, there has been a contention in popular music by those creating it and those supplying its (social) significance. When the boundaries are obscured, particularly with the infusion of the audience, this conceit becomes a war of territory.  Am I talking in the abstract a bit too much? Yah, ok, sure.  When a musician explains the creativity of their music in a context, particularly a sociopolitical one, it’s a call against convention, a rejection of previous constructs. Likewise, an academic discussing taste is compelled to legitimize pop music by ascribing some sort of sociopolitical impact.  Let’s take punk and disco, for example, two musical genres that have been vocalized by the artists and deeply politicized by the critics/academics; the former being the ultimate white working-class rebellion and the latter the ultimate fringe-culture release, both in the end were co-opted by mainstream label-backed production.  The artists in both genres famously lauded the authenticity of expression: for the punks via the language of the raw and for disco, the DJ and his ability to remix/cut as an output originality. Sure, the origins of punk were anti-establishment and those of disco were unadulterated freedom, both rejecting social hegemonies, yet the roots of both genres vocalized creative expression.  As both of the genres began to gain leverage in their originating subcultures, the critics/academics classified both as sociopolitical movements.  This mutual classification of creative expression and social significance necessitated these genres as something larger and more meaningful than cocky bangers and soupy hip-shakers.

Yet, is there a benefit to this classification, particularly a system so tied to comfort zones? The conventions of identification rely on this notion of comfort zone. I’m not talking about a panic room, Chuck E. Cheese or our beds, but rather in a post-Habermasian sensibility, a metaphoric space that someone adopts as a label of definition.  I’m not sure if I’ve totally invented some new term for basic ‘identification’ along the lines of gender, race, class, geographic imprint, culture/subculture affiliation etc (nor would I want to be so arrogant to suggest that I am).  Yet, the complexities of identity politics have made the process of personal identification laden with both artifice and meaningful associations.  To identify, let’s say, as white, a woman, working class, queer, American and/or of indie-taste immediately thrusts you into these particular spaces that have a controlled set of characteristics whose meanings have been both ascribed by the groups themselves and other groups outside.  Yet, these spaces of identification are shared and the process of identification is aligning oneself with a community. Community promotes safety. And thus, identities are comfort zones.

In the discussion of popular music, the variable of the comfort zone stands as bridge in the tension between creation and context, artist and aesthetician. Artists need to utilize the conventions of a comfort zone to make their creation accessible whereas aesthetician employ comfort zones to supply meaning.  Take punk and disco again: punks were bunch of pissed-off city white kids in New York and London who weren’t feeling hippie music and needed to vent somehow. Likewise, disco took shape because the gay, black and latin NYC kids needed a release and to express themselves.  Yes, as previously states, the roots of these genres are sociopolitical and well, that’s because we’re dealing with people here. But, more to the point, punk self-labeled as an expression of white disenfranchisement through its fast, hard-edged musicality and its lyrical assertions and utilized the conventions of that label to spread its message globally.  The critics flagged punk as a subversion of hegemonic values to give the brash, unskilled and often atonal music meaning. Both parties relied on the comfort zones to proliferate the music.  The same extent is true of disco.  The producers and DJ’s of disco employed gospel-like vocals, repetitious refrains and interspersed genre styles to keep the dance floor going and to promote release and freedom.  The critics tagged these mechanisms to give weight to the social implications. The great irony is that punk became corporate and disco became commercial.

Regardless, the reliance on these comfort zones of identification has enabled both sides of the spectrum to essentially impact the same thing: the continuation of the structure they both reject.  Artists express in the name of originality, aestheticians supply meaning to mark importance (divergence from the norm). Yet, the originality and importance are subsumed by convention and comfort when the process of identification occurs. It is almost a symbiotic proliferation of hegemony, albeit an unintentional one. The tension that has divided both parties perhaps has been a tension because each side recognizes the eventual result (and blames the other for it). The question remains: does it even matter? Does recognizing this circularity enable a new understanding, acceptance or progress that could contribute to the betterment of society?