Rockism Without Rock!

"Where does music come in? Music is both a balm for loneliness and a powerful, renewable source of meaning—meaning in time and meaning for time."

And it got linked on Arts & Letters Daily, no less! It's symptomatic of the onset of the Bushization of snob culture. Apparently, those ivory-tower libruls views are bad, so we have to replace them with intellectually void ivory-tower conservative ones. DAVID HOROWITZ TO THREAD (well, not really . . . since if he showed up I'd have to stab my eyes out)!

The only problem is, the same critizism of contemporary "classical" music has been around ever since the "Rites Of Spring" premiered in 1913, and the arguments made just as much sense back then as they do now.

Most people don't give a damn about classical music anyway, particularly not classical music that is more recent than the 19th century. Which means that today it is a lot more important to save melody in popular music from the tyranny of dissonance (or, more prominently, the completely dominance of rhythm and a lack of tunes or harmony)

damn, if not for that ted leo album someone could use that for an album title!

this is actually a better album title, though the tyranny of dissonance comes close.

(whatever that strange phrase means)

This friend of mine is a remarkably intelligent guy, a Ph.D. economics professor, and someone with wide knowledge outside his field, good judgement, and refined tastes in many things. Yet his musical tastes are similar to those of my non-music major students: popular music, specifically rock-and-roll in all its distinctions that are the mainstays of commercial radio. There was another fellow there, a physician whom I'd met at other gatherings, who was too apparently an avid rock-and-roll fan, judging from his guitar playing later in the evening. And yet another friend, an extremely intelligent engineer, joined in the guitar-accompanied sing-along that, for me, signaled time to leave. It was becoming much too much like some kind of hootenanny. I began to feel really the outsider. Mind you, all these guys are very smart, very accomplished, professional, and really decent people. They go to work, do their jobs well, have wives, girlfriends, families, pay their taxes, return their library books on time, pay their parking tickets, vote, contribute to charity . . . in short, are exemplary members of society. Yet when it comes to music, they're (in my mind anyway) completely backward.

jeezo beezo.

I think this should be an album title . . . for SLAYER! Can't you just envision the cover?

This angers me on more levels than I care to explain.

http://spotlight.siu.edu/10192005/KevinDettmarbook.html

I think his overall point that rock goes through cycles and isn't necessarily dead is a reasonable one, though it'd be easy to just write him off: "English professor proves Rock not dead!" "Anthropologist finds folk traditions still alive and well!"