It's taken me this long to say out loud what everybody knew already, and it's not like I don't have 100 individual exceptions (though I'm not going to get into the inevitable debate of what they are), but but at this point I gave it the old 'college try' nearly six times over. I even tried to create a chorus for which I arranged the best of American popular music for vocal ensemble to sing alongside 800 years of classical choral music, only to generate no interest for it at all. For somebody who doesn't like it all that much, I've done a lot more service for it than most of the people who love it.
I've played in bands since I was 16. I may not know the lyrics as well as people who grew up listening to the music every day, but I know rock, pop, and all the related genres of music from the inside. I know how the song is made, I know how the performance is planned, I know every type of setback on the way to the stage, I know what it means to hustle gigs, and I know what it means to get cheated by venues. I know what it means to play gigs you have no desire to go to so that other musicians can help you with your gigs that they have no desire to play. I know the emotional steel it takes to get in front of a stage where a small audience couldn't care less about what you play. I know the sacrifices and volatility it takes to get a band good, and I know what makes bands break up. My esophagus and circulatory system testify to how well I know the musician lifestyle, and the ringing in my ears testifies to how often I endured playing loud music I wasn't even sure I liked.
I was even briefly a frontman, and to my surprise, I was good at it. And even if I wasn't, once you're a frontman, nobody cares whethr you're good or bad. Fronting a rock band the one thing everybody in America wanted to do but me - you put the most hated guy in America in front of a band, and he's sprayed by magic dust - people suddenly want his friendship, women want his attention, people care what he thinks, what he says, what he does. I don't know why that is, none of us got in front of a band by being mildly interesting anywhere but on a stage, but everybody in America behaves as though the guy in front of the band is an alpha male who's gamed the American system that demands a white collar job and a white picket fence and doesn't give a fuck about 'the rat race.' Let me assure you: there is no worse rat race than the music business...
And 'white' is the operative word. Not in this case because whiteness automatically denotes oppression, but because white denotes triviality and entitlement. What is white rock rebellion? It's the most trivial thing in the world - people at the top of life's food chain who feel hemmed in by their expectations of prosperity. The anxiety and depression of white people is very real, I feel it every day, but who cares about postwar middle class ennui when the world around us is burning? The whole point is that when the world is as bad as it is, our individual situations don't matter that much. You do your best to be gentle but firm with yourself, and help your friends and loved ones as much as you can, but outside of our little private spheres, the world matters so much more than we do, and using music to advertise our rebellion against our life's expectations just shows how much we still buy into every life expectation America sets for us.
The reason I really and truly love classical music is not because of its refinement or its status signaling, quite the opposite. While we, the world of rock and pop, were enjoying the most prosperous society in world history, the rest of the world saw horrific things we can only read about in papers and chose to ignore.
Within the story of classical music is contained the whole history of the world, both its triumphs and its many more oppressions. Lighter classical music is nice, but it doesn't interest me any more than pop music - it's enjoyable, but it's not something to understnd the world with.
The heavy stuff, on the other hand, speaks the suffering of generations and generations: you can't listen to works like the playlist below and not hear the cry of the whole world: This music speaks the speech not just of itself, but the cries of millions of marginalized whose voices were never ever heard, many of whom could only cry their oppression from the grave, from era and areas that knew tragedy so far beyond what we have experienced and may yet experience soon. And the very fact of its intellectual refinement means it can speak those tragedies with much greater specificity - music doesn't just express itself, it expresses ideas and thoughts, and speaks them much more precisely because it's so abstract.
Insofar as America has produced music that deserves history's attention alongside Shostakovich and Beethoven, it's the black genres. It's jazz, it's blues, it's R&B, it's soul, it may be funk or hip-hop but I'm not quite holding my breath, and oh my god is it not rock or punk or indie or country or bluegrass. Only a truly great musician and daring spirit could have made A Love Supreme, Remeniscing in Tempo, Black Saint and Sinner Lady, or Hellhound on My Trail, or Strange Fruit, or King Heroin, or Come Sunday... and hell, there are a few white ones that are canon worthy too... but we under-deliver. Artistically, we think like children because we still suffer like children.
But that may change soon enough. Most of the greatest music and art and books in this country have yet to be made, because the arts exist to capture those elusive, ecstatic truths that only come out of the most complicated moral situations - loss, guilt, complicity, heartbreak. Not the trivial version of those where you know that one day everything will mend itself and you will move on, but real brokenness, where nothing can be put back together.
One day soon, America may very well know what that's like, and no amount of great art can fill the hole the lost will leave in our spirits. The people who are left will come face to face with enormities they'd never fathmed, and most of what once gave them consolation will not be big enough to process what we're thinking and feeling.
Most political movements are a religion like any other that dictates what the neural pathways of your mind make you think and feel - and more and more, art in America is viewed as an arm of politics. That's an inevitable byproduct of thinking of art as a space for simple sentiments. Art is not politics, and it's not a religion, it is a space we have so we no longer need religion. It challenges every preconceived notion, makes us think differently, makes us realize that life is never as simple as it seems, and gives us the context for what we experience so that our limited perspectives are no longer quite as limited.
And besides, even if anything I say isn't true, what can be more rock'n roll or punk than saying on social media that you hate that music? It's like walking into the middle of a crowded town square, taking a dump and spitting on everyone who walks by...
A Playlist:
Don Giovanni (the sins of every aristocrat are finally punished)
Boris Godunov (the guilt of monarchs everywhere)
Verdi Requiem (hell itself)
Mahler's Resurrection (the last judgement)
Mahler 6 (the battlefields of World War and the blows of fate)
Mahler 9 (death itself)
Shostakovich 13 (the Shoah and life in the Soviet Union)
Shostakovich 8 (the experience of war)
Shostakovich 10 (life under Stalin)
Jenufa (inside the mind of child murder)
Wozzeck (inside the mind of a post-traumatic wife killer)
From the House of the Dead (prison life)
Winterreise (the world of loss)
Beethoven 5 (you know)
Beethoven 9 (you know)
Missa Solemnis (what humanist religion sounds like)https://youtu.be/P0EA9yNuOXQ?t=646
St. Matthew Passion (the plight of the whole world)
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