Music to Hear on Here: To the extreme I rock this blog like a vandal. . .

Thursday, October 20, 2011

To the extreme I rock this blog like a vandal. . .

"What is incessantly boosted as exceptional grows dull, and the festivities to which light music permanently summons its adherents, under the name of feasts for the ears, are dismal everyday fare."

- Adorno, Popular Music (25)

To those of us who have never enjoyed Vanilla Ice save with irony this may come as a surprise; he was popular music once. The success of rap/hip hop as an original outgrowth of inner city discontent and racial frustration with systemic injustices (to do the scene gross injustice and rob it of all it's vitality) led to popular music labels trying to reproduce within their own formula that which was original in rap.

If I may, I will indulge myself in some tongue and cheek close reading, Vanilla, despite being a delicious flavor, carries the figurative connotation of being plain, consumable. When something is described as vanilla, like in software circles when you say you are using a vanilla version of Mozilla, you are saying that it is unadorned. No extra flavor, no spice, as it were. Ice, of course, is considered cold as well as plain and unadorned. Someone who is icy does not have an affect, they are not lively or vivacious. So, Vanilla Ice is the unadorned unlively repetition of the highly adorned and highly lively aspects of an encroaching music, he was the turning of rap/hip hop into popular music. His presence, his repetition of tropes but abandonment of what made them meaningful, made rap music safely consumeable.

Word to your mothers, Birney out.

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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.