“I can’t understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I’m frightened of the old ones.” - John Cage

 on the limited value of the memoiristic approach to music criticism

"for some of us music is your life, rather than something that accompanies life. The adventures are in music, rather than a separate category of life that then has this incidental soundtrack. Records don’t become biographical markers, an index of the passing of time. Well, okay, some do, and there are adventures and experiences and woes happening concurrently, to which in some cases a song gets attached, whereas in other cases, that doesn't happen. But most of the music that matters to us exists in its own autonomous realm of significance unto itself. Our memories are of getting into the music - discovery - being taken places by the music - rather than the other stuff that was going on in our lives in a completely separate channel"

positive unoriginality

"Originality is highly personalized, often willfully quirky. 

"Innovation is more impersonal, often more technological - and it's something that other people, potentially lots of people, can adopt and buy into. And if you innovate, that's really what you want to happen - that it'll be adopted. 

"Originality is signature

"Innovation is trademark

"So from that, I realised that you can be unoriginal but innovative (in the sense of participating in an innovation, propagating it) 

"But equally you can be highly original but not actually innovative e.g. any number of cult figures with very quirk, eclectic sounds they've pieced together, often raiding the archives of history, and also maybe an unusual lyrical perspective or vocal mannerisms.

"Innovation is like when Timbaland came up with a new beat structure and all the other R&B producers copy it, and the whole sound of the radio changed. Or Joey Beltram coming up with this apocalyptic bombastic synth sound and 1000s of producers jumping on it. I can see the value in both originality and innovation, but I suppose I'm arguing here that to be sui generis is over-rated and that whatever the Latin for the opposite of that is, is better. it's a huger achievement to have propagated generic-ness - when that genericity is establishing something new.

""There was a time wasn't there, when most working bands didn't even do original material - it was all their version of what was in the Top 40 plus various 'standards' of whatever their genre was. Excellence was delivering an already-known and loved tune with gusto and precision. So that is the ultimate in "positive unoriginality" - turning the new songs into standards, standardizing an innovation until it's installed culture-wide."

 style IS redundancy - it is what is extraneous to clear communication. it's the difference between walking from A to B in well behaved linear fashion or traversing the same distance with a swagger, a prance, or an Olga Korbut sequence of leaps and flips

 "[Music] must represent the spirit of crowds, of great industrial complexes, of trains, of ocean liners, of battle fleets, of automobiles and airplanes. It must add to the great central themes of the musical poem the domain of the machine and the victorious realm of electricity" 

- Balilla Pratella, Technical Manifesto of Futurist Music (1911)

 Naming isn't a neutral act of referring. Naming produces surplus value, something that wasn't already there in the first place, resonating with a collective unconscious. 'Jungle' is a classic example of this: the name didn't just describe a style, it provided an instant mythology

- Mark Fisher

With the rave as working class blowout idea, I always come back to this 1966 song by The Easybeats, "Friday On My Mind" 

It's written from a Sixties mod perspective, but it foreshadows the mechanisms at work in Northern Soul, disco, rave  - every kind of dance culture in which pills are used to intensify leisure time to the utmost, but then it's back to the 9 to 5.  This is the key verse --

Do the five day grind once more

I know of nothin' else that bugs me

More than workin' for the rich man

Hey! I'll change that scene one day

Today I might be mad, tomorrow I'll be glad

'Cause I'll have Friday on my mind

And then there's the chorus 

Tonight I'll spend my bread, tonight

I'll lose my head, tonight

I've got to get to night

Monday I'll have Friday on my mind

Musically the verses have this sort of tick-tocking tension, like the treadmill of workaday time, as he waits for the big blowout of the weekend (the euphoric chorus). It's two different kinds of time:  chronos versus kairos

Lyrically the key line is "hey! I'll change that scene one day"  - I find it incredibly poignant - it could just mean "one day I'll get started on my career / start a business and I'll be the rich man / boss" or it could mean "one day me and the rest of the proletariat will organise at the site of the means of production and there'll be a revolutionary transformation in political economy, no more rich men, no more bosses"

but it's clear that he's so caught up in this nightlifestyle that he'll never get around to either the individual or collective escape route

I tend to see the essence of rave (and its precursors) as dissipatory 

but (like a lot of music in different ways) it points towards an unalienated life - one that it can't actually make real  in the outside world, but can only institute in the small areas of space and time it can command

of course, the troubling thought is that the momentary release of the ecstatic all night dance is actively working against the total and permanent change he and everyone else should be working for (and which would necessarily involve more drudgery and deferment of gratification in favor of the long term goal - duty for the future being the essence of political involvement) 

there here-and-now utopia / TAZ is taking away the possibility of a soon-to-come PAZ (permanent autonomous zone)

Flowered Up's "Weekender" film is an update of this notion of the  blow out cycle as counter-revolutionary. It's totally mod - indeed directly influenced by Quadrophenia, the mod revival movie of 1979 - indeed there's a sample of the Phil Daniels character's rant about how they can take his office drone job and stick it up their arseholes

in Quadrophrenia, the key scene of disillusionment for the mod protagonist as played by Phil Daniels,  is when he comes across the scene's leading Face - the coolest of the cool  - in his civilian life, where he is a porter in a posh hotel, being ordered around by rich men... 

Another song about the blow out - there's a verse about "going to the disco" in this otherwise gritty funk-blues song about how tough life is economically by the great Johnny 'Guitar' Watson, the king of "proletarian funk"

Got to go to a disco

Throw your troubles away

Dance to the music

That the DJ's play

And then the lights come on

Like you knew they would

Go home and face the music

That don't sound to good

 Let’s agree there is such a thing as inner freedom. Then I would say that art has a role of building or enlarging various senses of inner freedom, in opposition to various senses of tyranny. For if there are other senses of freedom than the usual political sense, there are other senses of tyranny or oppression or totalitarianism than the kind exemplified by secret police and gulags and lagers, and the imperial takeovers of small countries. There is also the tyranny of inanity. There is also the tyranny of shallowness. There is also the tyranny of mindlessness. There is also the tyranny of a culture that makes people ashamed of being serious—that severs the links between their consciousness and their lives, which makes seriousness possible. This suggests another oppositional role for culture, another way that the arts can defend human dignity.

—Susan Sontag in conversation with Vytautas Landsbergis, Nam June Paik, and Jonas Mekas, 1994

(via Tone Glow)

“To survive reality at its most extreme and grim, artworks that do not want to sell themselves as consolation must equate themselves with that reality… the most advanced arts push this impoverishment to the brink of silence.” 

Theodor Adorno, from Aesthetic Theory

(via Tone Glow)

 “The bourgeois want art voluptuous and life ascetic: the reverse would be better.” 

- Theodor Adorno (from Aesthetic Theory)

(via Tone Glow)