Music to Hear on Here: Group 3 Post

Thursday, October 27, 2011

Group 3 Post

“It is contemporary listening which has regressed, arrested at the infantile stage. Not only do the listening subjects lose, along with the freedom of choice and responsibility, the capacity for conscious perception of music, which was from time immemorial confined to a narrow group, but they stubbornly reject the possibility of such perception. They fluctuate between comprehensive forgetting and sudden dives into recognition” (46).
Contemporary regressive listening has lead us to a false consciousness.  We become “subjects” to the music industry.  In contemporary popular music, we have only the illusion of freedom of choice and responsibility and even worse--we cannot perceive the reality that we are truly without choice vs. the illusion of our agency.    
iTunes is the ultimate example of the music industry’s control over public consumption.  Because of the convenience of iTunes and iPods, consumers become dependent on them for their musical consumption; that dependence means that, through iTunes, the music industry can establish and control what is made available to the public, while giving the perception of providing a wide variety of musical products to the consumer, which was not previously possible without iTunes and the internet.
“In regressive listening, advertising takes on a compulsory character... The type of relationship suggested by the billboard, in which masses make a commodity recommended to them the object of their own action is in fact found again as the pattern for the reception of light music” (48).
Culture industry creates desire for mass media entertainment which offers propaganda/advertisement (disguised as pleasure) that lulls us the masses (or the consumers) to be complacent with our conditions.
The music industry has made the public into voracious consumers that hunger for whatever product that it churns out; the product being top 40 hits, such as Britney Spears’ “I Wanna Go”.  This consumption of fabricated products creates a demand for more of the same, creating a cycle of supply and demand.  The demand has become so mindless that the consumers are satisfied with the musical products that sound like they’ve been cobbled together from previous products.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Course Description

"Writing about music is like dancing about architecture." Martin Mull (or Elvis Costello)

Thinking about the meaning and value, intellectual, affective and neurological experiences, and aesthetics of music has occupied an important position in modern and contemporary philosophical writings. Central to the philosophy of music is a questioning of what music is insofar as it is an art form and practice, akin to but different from other arts, such as drama, literature, painting, sculpture, to name but a few examples. Claims have been made, in fact, that music’s effect, when performed and listened to, surpasses those of the other arts because of its abstact purity, of its universality, and of its singular capacity to express, represent and incite emotions. This course will explore such issues in 19th-20th century philosophy. We will begin with introductory readings of what composes the field and discipline of the philosophy of music. We will read—among other philosophers, novelists, critics and musicologists—Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Barthes and Adorno’s writings on music. Finally, we will have the occasion to read about and listen to specific musicians, both high and low, and explore the contexts of their work, concentrating on the historical and political dimensions of the practice, performance and art of making music.