Adorno-- Art is an Uncommitted Crime

Disintegration and Interpretability in Non-Western Music

This clip is taken from the documentary, Ginger Baker in Africa. In it, Fela Kuti performs with his Afrika '70 band in the city of Calabar, Nigeria. The performance takes place in 1971, shortly after the Nigerian Civil War, and the scene is a truly amazing spectacle. Rain pours from the sky, but it can do nothing to dampen the electrical energy of his performance. Wild-eyed and proud, Fela dominates the floor. Around him, scantily clad women gyrate in ecstasy, their bodies dripping wet. At the end, one of the musicians starts rolling around on the ground in a convulsive fit while Fela slaps his back. It looks like the religious experience of someone who has been seized by a divine encounter with the sublime.

To give a little background information on the politically charged and controversial history of Fela Kuti's music, I've excerpted the following from his Wikipedia article:

Fela Anikulapo Kuti was a Nigerian multi-instrumentalist musician and composer, pioneer of Afrobeat music, human rights activist, and political maverick . . . After Fela and his band returned to Nigeria, the band was renamed The Africa '70, as lyrical themes changed from love to social issues. He then formed the Kalakuta Republic, a commune, a recording studio, and a home for many connected to the band that he later declared independent from the Nigerian state . . . Fela also changed his middle name to Anikulapo (meaning "he who carries death in his pouch"), stating that his original middle name of Ransome was a slave name . . . As popular as Fela's music had become in Nigeria and elsewhere, it was also very unpopular with the ruling government, and raids on the Kalakuta Republic were frequent . . . In 1977 Fela and the Afrika '70 released the hit album Zombie, a scathing attack on Nigerian soldiers using the zombie metaphor to describe the methods of the Nigerian military. The album was a smash hit with the people and infuriated the government, setting off a vicious attack against the Kalakuta Republic, during which one thousand soldiers attacked the commune. Fela was severely beaten, and his elderly mother was thrown from a window, causing fatal injuries. The Kalakuta Republic was burned, and Fela's studio, instruments, and master tapes were destroyed. Fela claimed that he would have been killed had it not been for the intervention of a commanding officer as he was being beaten.

Now, simmer on that while you watch the following clip from a 2009 Broadway production of Fela! :

It's almost painful to watch, isn't it? Someone had the brilliant idea to appropriate Fela's music for commercial consumption in a milieu almost certainly made to appeal to -- let's face it -- white people. The music, the dancing, the traditional African garb are all there, but the production itself is sterile, inoccuous, boring. The gesture has been completely de-politicized and what's left is nothing but an empty husk. Watch and listen to the way the female vocalist performs. Her gestures and gesticulations are so dramatically contrived. You can also tell she's received formal voice training -- this, and her emphatic pronunciation of every word she sings, contrast starkly with the original music. You can hear contemporary Western influences in the way she sings, but not in the instrumental music itself, which all lends to create a really cringe-worthy experience.

What do you guys think of this contrast? Is Fela rolling in his grave or what?

Adorno’s discussion in Night Music concerning the loss of interpretability of works due to the transformative catalyst of history resonated with me in regards to a key controversy of the straight edge sub-counterculture movement. The founding principles of straight edge were unintentionally delineated in the song “Out of Step (With the World)” by Minor Threat; lead vocalist Ian Mackaye is credited with coining the term “straight edge” and is considered a legendary idol in the hardcore/straight edge community, despite repeated statements disassociating himself and his values with any cultural movement. Regardless, his lyrics in “Out of Step” serve as the basis for the straight edge philosophy, first interpreted and developed in the 1980s. Since that time, the biggest controversy has been the very nature of the “three rules” (don’t smoke, don’t drink, don’t fuck) and the lesser known, but more rhetorically significant, implicit philosophy of “at least I can think,” insofar as their clarity is still somehow obscure: differing interpretations of these lyrics, then and now, have resulted in multiple, often exclusive, versions of straight edge (all of which, incidentally, are denounced by Mackaye).

Adorno claimed that “the impossibility of interpreting historical works adequately is becoming increasingly evident…the works themselves are starting to become uninterpretable. For the essences which interpretation seeks to access have been wholly transformed in reality, and thus also in the works, which are located in history and participate in living history.” Considering “Out of Step,” it seems very possible that the implicit philosophy of the song has suffered the fate of lost interpretability. “Out of Step” was written as a very personal account of a subjective moment in history, that of Mackaye’s own youth and beliefs; but as history continued, the song was transformed into an anthem of an underground movement, the doctrine of a radical counterculture, and a chorus of the masses. Who can adequately interpret the song now, 30 years later, when even its creator claims to be unable to do so after its appropriation by the “edge” masses? Adorno offers a possible option when he says “it would be conceivable for the history of the interpretations of works now receding into the past to find its continuation in the history of their derivatives,” which could mean modern music derivative of hardcore punk, foremost being the broad spectrum of music under the umbrella genre called simply “hardcore.” However, musicians of this category can only “wander aimlessly between fragments” of “Out of Step,” as history has “revealed the original essences” and caused the “disintegration of [the] morphological unity in the form of the work.” The implicit meaning of the song has been undeniably decided for many, in light of what may be considered its “original essence,” and its interpretability has been sacrificed to an absolute doctrine for the close-minded members of the movement.

Yet, the interpretability of “Out of Step” may still exist; for as Adorno said, “the ‘work-in-itself’, which can in reality never be separate from the work in its historical manifestation” will be dead only if “one day, nothing remained but this ‘work-in-itself’.” The historical manifestation of a work plays a critical role in its interpretability – the very component that disintegrates the “morphological unity” and reveals the “original essences” of a work also defines its objectivity. So long as “Out of Step” is considered not only in terms of its abstracted philosophy, but its relation to history and the culture of that time, we can engage in what Adorno called “playing off the past against the present.” The reconciliation and subsequent interactivity of the historical manifestation of “Out of Step” as Mackaye’s personal beliefs, formed as subjective principles in the midst of an apathetic and unaccomplished culture, with the modern manifestations of the song’s implicit philosophy, extolling the value in living with a kind of rhetorical virtue, allow for the interpretability of the song to endure and its musical materialism to be understood.

Adorno Night Music--Interpret? Interpretability?

Sid Vicious "My Way"

The Beatles' Ode to Joy and Adornoa

"It was only the rudiments of the European faith in education that once protected Mozart and Beethoven, who have now been integrated into cinema, from more energetic use. Surrounded by noise, the works preserve themselves in silence." Adorno, Night Music, p. 86

Adorno Night Music Interpretability

"Many a female pianist will, her hair flying about her, pour out the private longings of her soul into the blind alleys of Schumann's forms, not realizing in her vanity that her own echo is audible only to herself,; she may find the trace of the soul's halting, lost utterance within, but can no longer bring it back to life." Adorno, Night Music, p. 90

Sid Vicious "My Way" Cover

"It is vital to remain mindful of the fact that changes take place within the works, not simply in the people who interpret them. The state of turth in works corrresponds to the state of truth in history. This is the only convincing way to disprove the objection that one need only change people sufficiently, reawaken their lost sense of scale, form and inwardness, and works that bore them today will bloom once more for them, inducing them to turn away from kitsch in favour of the true originals." Adorno, Night Music, pp. 86-7

Sinatra "My Way" One Version. Post 1 of 2 of My Way

A Fifth of Beethoven

..." however the depravation through kitsch that displays the powerlessness of the great works also reclaims their leftovers for society, which because its own order is no less illusory than kitsch, is oonly capable of experiencing them as such" Adorno, Night Music, p. 85

Beethoven's Symphony No. 5 1 of 2

Adorno and Beethoven Dame Myra Hess

"Lehar's boring Frasquita is an exemplarily strict transformation of Carmen as a whole, who, as kitch, finally separates the traits of opera from human experience as fully as those traits had lain hidden within its authentic form."

A Fifth of Beethoven

"A Fifth of Beethoven" is a disco instrumental recorded by Walter Murphy and the Big Apple Band. It was adapted by Murphy from the first movement of Beethoven's 5th Symphony. The record was produced by noted production music and sound effects recording producer Thomas J. Valentino.^[1] It was one of the most popular and memorable pieces of music from the disco era. The "Fifth" in the song's title is a pun, referencing a liquid measure approximately equal to one-fifth of a gallon (757 ml), a popular size for bottles containing hard liquor, as well as Beethoven's Fifth Symphony from which the song was adapted.

"Fifth" was released in 1976 becoming Murphy's best known work and his only Top 40 hit on the Billboard Hot 100, where it reached the #1 position for one week. It also went to number 10 on Billboard's Black Singles chart in the same year.

Even though Murphy played nearly every instrument on the instrumental, his record company cautioned that the record would stand a better chance if credited to a group rather than an individual. To Walter's annoyance, they came up with the name Walter Murphy and The Big Apple Band, only to discover two days after its release that there was already a Big Apple Band. The name on the label was changed to The Walter Murphy Band and then simply to Walter Murphy.

The song when released entered the Hot 100 at number 80 on May 29, 1976, and took 19 weeks to reach number 1, where it stayed for one week. Early in 1977, it was licensed to RSO Records for inclusion on the soundtrack to the movie, Saturday Night Fever.

The song was listed at #94 on Billboard's Greatest Songs of all time.^[2]