Music And Fashion

In society as a whole, artistic and intellectual life are both for the most part lived in thrall to fashion. People in each generation tend to believe that what matters most is what is being done by themselves and their contemporaries. And I always see this as a delusion. Nearly all of what is done in any generation is quickly forgotten. Only a tiny amount, if any, survives to become part of the accumulating treasure of an ever-extending remembered past. Nearly everything of lasting value and significance that is available to each generation is already in its past. The fashionable concerns of the day are not worth bothering about unless they happen to coincide with what is lastingly important - and then they are worth bothering about anyway, not because they are fashionable but because they are lastingly important. What is lastingly important can easily be unfashionable in its day, like the music of Bach; or old-fashioned, like the music of Brahms. What matters about an artist is not how his work relates to his time but how good it is regardless of that consideration [my italics]. Indeed, whether it survives or not will depend entirely on what value it has for times other than his own. Innovation, novelty, up-to-dateness, contemporaneity, relevance to current concerns, are all characteristics of short duration. They are not values, they are irrelevant features when it comes to quality. A work can have all of them and be trifling, or none of them and be great. Equally, of course, it can have all of them and be great, and none of them and be trifling. If one says this to most people who are professionally concerned in artistic or intellectual life it seems to them obviously false, when it ought to seem to them obviously true. This is because they are irretrievably lost in the concerns of their own time. (Magee, 'Confessions of a Philosopher: A Personal Journey through Western Philosophy, from Plato to Popper', pg 25.)

This is a lot to consider - and it seems to me to be a point too many people either don't take to heart, hesitantly agree with but prevaricate away from, or fundamentally don't understand. And it seems especially true for people who don't have any particular understanding of classical or 'traditional' music, who aren't thoroughgoing in any particular traditional art studies, or who otherwise lack experience with them - namely, popular music listeners. Maybe it's because I've never been very interested, or genuinely interested, in most popular music; but it's not something I understand at a basic level, and with most of it I have a hard time sustaining any level of enjoyment and a harder time understanding how or why so many people do.

Especially in America (where I live), it seems to be the case that everything that's widely popular culturally is necessarily something ephemeral: watching a number of pop culture channels on TV and YouTube, it seems to be that some band or music group - band A - is at one point loved and to some shallow degree worshiped by a significant mass until, maybe a couple or few years later, a band B rises up and arrests all the love and worship that had hitherto been dedicated to band A; and the process revolves round and again with weird regularity, and so predictably that some commentators talk and are strikingly cognizant of - and with an apparent love of their band B - how band B must necessarily fall out of fashion and be forgotten entirely (though no doubt some appreciation will stick with some of the old listeners, though it'll be scarcely talked about) to yet be replaced by the inevitable band C who, here again as ever before, must steal their affections for the shortest of time of another few years until they too fall from grace and band D takes over as it inevitably must. And I've seen that this isn't just the case in popular media; this sort of consideration occurs everywhere in social media. It's almost as if what so many popularists want from art is something of the kind that isn't lasting, that's transient, and which only reflects the culture's most immediate needs (as Magee mentions above): it has to have in it the weakness to parish from the face of social acceptability to be replaced by something that's only barely more relevant or prescient - and I suspect that this is reinforced by a culture that wants this to be so, if only implicitly. I don't understand how this kind of cultural practice is sustainable, or how so many people live culturally and musically from band to band or artist to artist without ever a thought of higher, enduring, more unforgettable, indissoluble works and the people who created them. How is it possible that a single century, or even a single decade, can contain both the music of John Coolidge Adams and the music of One Direction? and where One Direction, or the genre they represent, has more listeners?

Anyhow, this is something that's been bothering me for a while. And I'm not sure yet what Magee's observations imply about the present classical culture. Nor am I sure if I'm in the right in thinking this way. - But what do you think?

Heck there aren't really that many new bands coming in and out of fashion (I don't think anyway)... What comes in and out of fashion are solo singers. Disney pumps a lot of money into their child actors and which ever piece of crap floats to the top becomes the next big thing. Of course all these singers are attractive (they have to be). The masses put their enjoyment in people they wish they were. They listen to music with lyrics that endorses their lifestyle and makes them feel good about themselves.

Heck there aren't really that many new bands coming in and out of fashion (I don't think anyway)... What comes in and out of fashion are solo singers. Disney pumps a lot of money into their child actors and [whichever] piece of crap floats to the top becomes the next big thing. Of course all these singers are attractive (they have to be). The masses put their enjoyment in people they wish they were. They listen to music with lyrics that endorses their lifestyle and makes them feel good about themselves.

 

Let's face it, something that refers to itself as "the music industry" isn't looking to produce a masterpiece. You can't mass produce masterpieces. They want something quick and cheap that's profitable. Like [McDonald's], they'll charge you $2 for a hamburger that costs them 10 cents to make. 

 

Simply, a culture that's money driven produces crap music that's money driven, no surprises here! 

 

That's really depressing... I find it hard to believe, though, that (1) people are so self-absorbed in their opinion of the arts that their interest extends only so far as their fantasies of somehow being a part of it or its celebrity go, or would like physically to resemble the more attractive persons of that culture, or because the music entertains their self-interest; and (2) that they would forgo any commitment to the higher arts because they don't appear to qualify to it the points made above: that classical music has lost popularity over time, its celebrities are largely isolated to the narrow bounds of its pocket culture, and so lacks wider distinction, and is therefore kept away from popular fantasy; that, comparably, there aren't as many physically attractive persons in the community; that its not typically interested in obviously entertaining the self-interest of its audience, though it might its artists'; and that the music industry itself focuses principally on profits than the art that makes them which, apparently, the public latently approves of.

There must be more substantial reasons than public ego, celebrity and physical distinction, and business. One would think that if this is true, however, not only does the public have only a grossly practical view of something which, at its height, is something highly impractical, and which therefore one would think that that view is either the most superficial or the most disinterested at heart; but that the same is true of the thousands and thousands of musicians and music-enthusiasts who make up that culture: and that therefore music is most popular when it's least interested in itself but the public - which is to say that music as such is of a secondary or even tertiary interest for the mass of listeners and is generally most successful when it necessarily lacks those qualities which make it, as it were, highborn, enduring, and indissoluble. - Not to sound like a fuddy-duddy, but from this it sounds like contemporary music has evolved into the worst, least progressive kind of decadent art. I don't really want to believe that this is true.