Time was when composers, John Cage for example, luxuriated in their unpopularity, thinking that if they were liked they must be doing something wrong. That seems to have entirely gone away. Everyone wants to be popular now. How do you do that? It seems by largely feeding people what they expect and are used to with just enough novelty to seem fresh (while not exactly being fresh).
So what I want to talk about is how to be unpopular. Now there is a right way and a wrong way, obviously. The wrong way is to simply be bad: clumsy, incoherent, meaningless drivel. This is wrong because, judging from recent films, you can still see some mainstream success even if you are quite bad. No, in order to be unpopular in the right way, you have to be truly original. You have to be doing something that is either new, or something old refreshed. New wine in old bottles or old wine in new bottles. Or, heck, maybe new wine in new bottles. I don't think old wine in old bottles would work because we have lots of that lying around already.
The best way to be unpopular, I think, is to follow your own instincts and intuitions and if it results in some fame or even notoriety, then keep trying until that goes away. Yes, there will always be a few aficionados that will figure out what you are up to, but as long as they remain few in number, you are safe.
So is your main goal simply to be unpopular? No, not really, you strive for unpopularity in order to avoid the perils of commercial success which is the surest way to destroy any actual quality in your work,
Does this seem cynical? Well, I am certainly trying for that, but I worry that I am not nearly cynical enough!
I offer as an envoi, a piece by a composer who really did a achieve a considerable unpopularity in his career. This is the String Quartet No. 4 by Arnold Schoenberg, composed in 1936.
UPDATE: I ran into an interesting coda to this on another blog. A tech writer points out that:
The world largely runs on open source software, but not only is 99.9% of the revenue swallowed up by huge corporations, those corporations work tirelessly to make sure that the people that made that revenue possible will never see a penny of it.
This echoes what I see in the music world. I have a vague feeling that a lot of the real creativity that goes on is completely unrewarded while, again, huge corporations work tirelessly to make sure that the revenue goes almost exclusively to them. There seems something very wrong with this!
11 comments:
I don't believe that everything popular is intrinsically bad. Mozart was plenty popular, still is in a certain way (we just shelled out a bunch of money to take our kids to the Magic Flute and a lot of other people did too). Duke Ellington was popular. Miles Davis had some jukebox hits. A Love Supreme just went platinum (took a few years though.) I would take the high modernists' principled stand against popularity more seriously if I thought their music had anything to it.
Just between you and I, I don't think everything popular is intrinsically bad either! But wow, a lot of it is. How many of the high modernists have you given a chance?
Some more contemporary examples: Kendrick Lamar is hugely popular, and I think one of the most significant artists of our time. To Pimp A Butterfly is a tough listen in places but it reveals more depth the more time you spend with it. Same goes for his other albums. Solange Knowles doesn't move units the way her sister Beyoncé does, but she is popular by any reasonable definition, and her songs are as beautiful and inventive as anything I've ever heard. Moses Sumney is on his way up and you can just tell that some visionary music is going to come from him. The Roots are on TV every night, and Black Thought and Questlove are both breathtakingly great. And Questlove isn't just the best drummer in his style, he is also the most creative and adventurous DJ I have ever heard in my life. I heard him do a six-hour set at an outdoor kids' event in Brooklyn, all seamless, constantly unpredictable but musically logical throughout.
My main point here is that popularity and quality are orthogonal. Sometimes music is popular because it panders, but sometimes it's popular because it's good.
I got my masters degree in the NYU Music Technology program which is a temple of high modernism, with Cage as its patron saint. I have also been working at the New School, which is even more a temple of Cage. I took classes with Joel Chadabe and Morton Subotnick. I listened to the recordings, went to the performances, read the manifestos. I think it was mainly a dead end.
While I might not like everything that you like, I don't disagree with the principle: yes, orthogonal is the right word: popularity and quality are not always disjunct. But pick up on the corollary: there is also a lot of stuff that is very good, but unpopular. That is what I was trying to draw attention to as we don't need to pay more attention to the stuff that is already popular.
I picked on Cage because of statements he made. I would not necessarily argue with his music and that of Subotnick and others as being a dead end. I think you can probably guess who I would point to as NOT being a dead end.
one of the paradoxes of a high modernist like Cage is I think Leonard Meyer nailed it when he described the aesthetic ideologies of Cage and other high modernists as "late late Romanticism". Although I'm moderately conservative when it comes to religion and politics (I've not-really-joked that I'm a Mark Hatfield type Republican and a Presbyterian, both basically true) I have lived in Seattle for decades and it's another temple of Cage.
One of my key dissents from Cage is his disdainful approach to popular/vernacular musical styles. Sure, he did a concert with Sun Ra but I think there's such a thing as a non-pejorative populist stance artists can stake out. Ever since Trump got elected I've noticed a significant temptation among advocates for classical music or highbrow anything in the arts to have too reflexively negative a definition of all popular/populist impulses in the arts. I don't think it has to automatically be the case and that taking such an ideological stance, for one, just that, an ideological stance but secondly, and more important in practical terms, is that if we treat populist impulses in the arts as "only" bad we cede the entire conceptual domain to the sorts of artists (and political figures) a bunch of us might want to have less of a dominant role in defining the populist field.
I guess by now for regulars here I've made it obvious at my blog that I think restoring a synergistic exchange between popular and classical styles is something I'd like to see more of at a theoretical as well as a practical level. Schoenberg had plenty of sincere praise for Gershwin, after all. I might half-jokingly suggest that Schoenberg could write what he wrote while arguing the best offerings in American music would be in "light" music and that Americans would be missing out on some musical brilliance in their fixation on finding American music that was "serious".
I'll still take Scott Joplin over Schoenberg in the long run. It's not that I can't appreciate the latter, I got to see Ewartung here in Seattle a few years ago, i just still like Joplin better and find Joplin's legacy one I want to build from and build on.
Nothing I want to argue with there, Wenatchee. What troubles me is not populism, which is always a powerful energy in both the arts and politics, but rather the enormous economic pressures and temptations in the music business today. "Populism" as in Scott Joplin or the popular jazz genres or the influence of Hungarian folk music on Haydn or even Bartók is one thing, but the billions of dollars floating around the music industry today is a whole 'nother thing, don't you think?
yeah, I'd say there's a difference between populism as a grass roots activity and a populism that is more a front for corporatist interests. I think we can manage to agree on that regardless of where we land on political or religious spectrums. Scott Joplin then is different from Max Martin now.
But even there I don't want to hand wave away assembly line song machines. John Seabrook's The Song Machine didn't sell me on the newer era of pop songs being to my taste but whether it's Motown or Italian opera factory/assembly line approaches to music aren't "always" inimical to art if there's a wealth of craft involved. I suspect what we're skeptical about is money flushed into resources and assets used to do what I somewhere else described as "merchandising the monomyth".
Apropos of nothing, it's the holiday season and I decided to film an E major version of a song I wrote in F major. Back in 2006 I had a fantasy that Bob Dylan, Pete Townsend and Stevie Wonder got together to adapt the Song of Mary into an English language song for Mahalia Jackson.
https://youtu.be/4snyCrnS2jE
F major's a bit much for six minutes for me lately, so I dropped it down a half step.
Is radio pop equivalent to vernacular music? I doubt it. On the contrary, I've noticed this weird breed of people who are really, really pretentious about liking radio pop and insist it's the new high culture, the superior, more expressive replacement for classical music. Pop isn't worthless, of course (not so hot take: a lot of it is), and there have been some really charismatic, talented people in the space, but overall I get the impression that it's a sort of cope after years of being the butt of jokes from everyone else.
I think what seems to have happened in the last 120 years is that song forms in commercial radio have leaned more and more on strophic forms and on loops and on a kind of "ramp" or "crescendo rock" pattern. For instance, if I singled out particular candidates for the shortfall in terms of structural creativity the big offenders would be Nirvana and U2 where a song like "Smells Like Teen Spirit" has its structural differentiation points based on what Leonard Meyer would have called secondary characteristics (volume, timbre, register and so on). Cobain mumbles in one octave and screams in another octave but in a lot of the song the differentiation strategy is "clean" or "dirty" guitar sounds and volume. U2 songs can practically be passacaglias, too but with not so much ornamental variations as statistical accumulation of detail. I can think of some Shawn Mendez songs I really hate that fit into this pattern.
Up through the 1970s songs with a verse, chorus, verse chorus, bridge, verse and chorus were still pretty commonplace and they'd have significant differentiation. Not always (especially not in Zeppelin!) but often.
I am okay with old John Lee Hooker songs that "sound" as if he's vamping endlessly on a single chord but he wasn't and I can hear the harmonic changes within the oblique motion on the guitar and how he sang melodic lines with his voice but later generations of R&B and rock flattened out those elements into mono-chord shuffle that I just don't like quite as much.
What I do think poptimists may be right about is that the era of the song has returned and "autonomous" instrumental music has by turns stopped being considered the apotheosis of musical art in the last 120 years. Reading about the debates about musical values in the 18th century through the 19th century it seems as though the era in which instrumental music had supreme prestige in the West was a blip in comparison to the status of the song but a fair chunk of music education has stuck with the idea that the most profound stuff around is instrumental. For folks in the 19th century building off of Kant or Hegel or Schopenhauer maybe but not necessarily now.
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