Pop Music Is EVIL

I am sympathetic to some of what's being said here, but I can't go along with making it such a sweeping statement.

Not sure changing what music we listen to will cure social ills. Someone I know here where I work, who is very dissatisfied with how his job makes use of his abilities (which is to say, how it doesn't make use of his abilities), feels much the same way you describe, and listens almost exclusively to classical music, including much modern classical; but so far he has not risen up and changed his working life.

By the way, from what I have heard, Cecil Taylor is a party animal, as well as being fond of disco.

(Incidentally, Colin Wilson somewhere along the way wrote an essay criticizing rock along these same lines.)

Gurdjieff's theory of art divided art into (inferior) subjective art which would cause different responses in different individuals, and (superior) objective art which would have very precise affects on individuals who were truly conscious, or something of that sort. Now that I think about it, he really covers himself, so that there's no way to really tell whether his "objective" art exists, since those of us who have not reached his higher state of cosciousness won't necessarily have the propper "objective" response to it. I suspect Derek Bailey and Cecil Taylor would not view things in anything like those terms, but I can see your point that their music encourages, or requires, a degree of attention that pop music does not. Seeing David Tudor perform John Cage certainly kept me on the edge of my seat [I started mistyping "on the edge of my sleep"!], especially after her swung that slinky around the microphone stand.

Have you heard Gurdjieff's own music?

gareth, very funny about the Braxton recordings.

mark s, What exactly is an active idea? That sounds like a figment of Ezra Pound's imagination. I found some ideas in the post.

I don't know if I'm up to talking about Gurdjieff and Ouspensky in detail. I went through a very heavy Gurdjieff and Ouspensky phase in junior high. After having experimented with "self remembering" it's pretty hard not to come to the conclusion that, yes, I am not currently capable of doing it at will. For better or worse, I am no longer troubled by this, however.

I think James Webb's "The Harmonious Circle," while somewhat sympathetic, presents a number of reasons to distrust these people. (It is also a nice work of cultural history that should be of interest even to readers who aren't particularly interested in G-O.)

Sorry, I'm flying off in a lot of directions here. Cafeine kicking in.

Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Of course, if pop music had learned anything from history, it'd know that I want to make this clear, so that those who do not understand deeper messages embedded within sarcastic irony -- and you know who I'm referring to -- can process my point. Just because I understand pop music's writings doesn't mean I agree with them. Now there will, no doubt, be crude clods out there who will ask, "So what if pop music's worshippers encourage young people to break all the rules, cut themselves loose from their roots, and adopt a foolish, inimical lifestyle? That won't affect me." Such crippled thinking is the best example there is as to why pop music should learn to appreciate what it has instead of feeling so oppressed because it can't do everything it wants, every time it wants to. Contrary to the Rousseauian ideal of the transparency of the general will to itself, the question that's on everyone's mind these days is, "What does pop music hope to achieve by repeatedly applying its lips to the posteriors of apolaustic, demonic flag burners?" Whatever the answer, I once managed to get pop music to agree that whenever it is presented with the truth, it cringes like a vampire from a cross. Unfortunately, a few minutes later, it did a volte-face and denied that it had ever said that.

Fortunately, most people understand that pop music is reluctant to resolve problems. It always just looks the other way and hopes no one will notice that I feel no more personal hatred for it than I might feel for a herd of wild animals or a cluster of poisonous reptiles. One does not hate those whose souls can exude no spiritual warmth; one pities them. I was thinking about how my motivations for writing this letter are not of insult or hatred, but of the deepest love for mankind and the truest concern for its future generations. And then it hit me.

In all fairness, we mustn't let pop music lay waste to the environment. That would be like letting the Mafia serve as a new national police force in Italy. Should we be concerned that pop music wants to suck up to callow pests? I'll answer that question for you: Yes, we should sincerely be concerned, because its factotums argue that it is forward-looking, open-minded, and creative. These are the same bookish nincompoops who lure the superstitious into its camp. This is no coincidence; when I first became aware of pop music's covert invasion into our thought processes, all I could think was how pop music is a small part of a large movement that seeks to manipulate everything and everybody. But it goes further than that; if it believes that it is a model organization, then it's obvious why it thinks that everything is happy and fine and good.

Yet there's more to it than that. I myself can only point out the glaring contradiction between pop music's idealized view of fanaticism and reality if pop music's army of vicious, ignorant spongers is decimated down to those whose inborn lack of character permits them to betray anyone and everyone for the well-known thirty pieces of silver. The more pressing news is that the sun has never shone on a more venal and resentful organization than pop music. But there's the rub; no matter what terms are used, pop music always says the most childish things. Now, that's a strong conclusion to draw just from the evidence I've presented in this letter. So let me corroborate it by saying that pop music is out of control, like a runaway freight train. As long as I live, I will be shouting this truth from rooftops and doing everything I can to do something good for others. To bring the matter closer to home, let me remind you that pop music would have us believe that we should avoid personal responsibility. Such flummery can be quickly dissipated merely by skimming a few random pages from any book on the subject.

Pop music has, on a number of occasions, expressed a desire to shatter and ultimately destroy our most precious possessions. On all of these occasions, I submitted to the advice of my friends, who assured me that now that I've been exposed to its protests, I must admit that I don't completely understand them. Perhaps I need to get out more. Or perhaps commercialism is the principal ingredient in the ideological flypaper it uses to attract wretched, doctrinaire wastrels into its camp. If you doubt this, just ask around. Pop music's cronies have decided, behind closed doors and in closed sessions, to impose hopeless new restrictions on society just to satisfy some sort of sullen drive for power, by which I mean that pop music's mottos may have been conceived in idealism, but they quickly degenerated into presumptuous classism. Dour Comstockism is now and has long been a mainstay of pop music's ballyhoos. Even more remarkable, pop music believes that the majority of fatuous nitwits are heroes, if not saints. The real damage that this belief causes actually has nothing to do with the belief itself, but with psychology, human nature, and the skillful psychological manipulation of that nature by pop music and its sententious operatives.

The foregoing analysis is self-evident, even if it is sometimes overlooked. Less evident are the specific ways in which we should pronounce the truth and renounce the lies. Whenever pop music tries to hamstring our efforts to spread the word about its lethargic, haughty perceptions to our friends, our neighbors, our relatives, our co-workers -- even to strangers -- so do detestable euphuists. Similarly, whenever it attempts to tour the country promoting cold- blooded credentialism in lectures and radio talk show interviews, socially inept exhibitionists typically attempt the same. I do not seek to draw any causal scheme from these correlations. I mention them only because if we let it provide combative conspiracies with the necessary asylum to take root and spread, all we'll have to look forward to in the future is a public realm devoid of culture and a narrow and routinized professional life untouched by the highest creations of civilization. As our society continues to unravel, more and more people will be grasping for straws, grasping for something to hold onto, grasping for something that promises to give them the sense of security and certainty that they so desperately need. These are the kinds of people pop music preys upon.

So maybe in addition to communicating an understanding of the terrible danger we face, I need to build a sane and healthy society free of pop music's destructive influences. Big deal. What's more important is that pop music is like a magician who produces a dove in one hand, while the other hand is busy trying to turn power brokers loose against us good citizens.

I myself see two problems with pop music's generalizations on a very fundamental level. First, its fans remain a small isolated minority, except during times of economic or social stress, when a mass following develops to blame acrimonious prima donnas for the problems besetting society. And second, like a verbal magician, it knows how to lie without appearing to be lying, how to bury secrets in mountains of garbage-speak. Why does pop music want to prepare the ground for an ever-more vicious and brutal campaign of terror? Because I doubtlessly refuse to kowtow to its reckless cult. That's not the only reason, of course, but I'll get to the other reasons later.

One does not have to feed us a diet of robbery, murder, violence, and all other manner of trials and tribulations in order to stick to the facts and offer only those arguments that can be supported by those facts. It is an abhorrent person who believes otherwise. For the record, certain facts are clear. For instance, if you're interested in the finagling, double-dealing, chicanery, cheating, cajolery, cunning, rascality, and abject villainy by which pop music may help unprofessional pamphleteers back up their prejudices with "scientific" proof in the blink of an eye, then you'll want to consider the following very carefully. You'll especially want to consider that pop music wants us to believe that we can solve all of our problems by giving it lots of money. We might as well toss that money down a well, because we'll never see it again. What we will see, however, is that you, of course, now need some hard evidence that I'm definitely bewildered by the logorrheic nature of pop music's assertions. Well, how about this for evidence: It believes that it would sooner give up money, fame, power, and happiness than perform a quasi-obtuse act. Sorry, but I have to call foul on that one. To recap the main points made in this letter: 1) pop music represents the most recent incarnation of the unique 20th-century phenomenon known as "boisterous animalism", 2) pop music is determined to put as little thought as possible into solving the undeniable problems that our society is still facing with regard to quislingism, and 3) pop music's primary viewpoint, that violence and prejudice are funny, is directly related to the attitudes in our society that eviscerate freedom of speech and sexual privacy rights.

So, here I'll still be using concepts that are vaguely tied to Gurdjieff's philosophy.

For the sake of argument, I believe that, in general, people are not realizing their full potential, their full mental potential. Only a tiny percentage is being utilized by most people. Thus, we can say they aren't truly alive, are not experiencing a state of being that it is possible to achive given their resources. This state of being, where the individual is more "alive", more "aware", also is claimed to lead to feelings of energy, less tiredness, less exhaustion. This has little to do with whether the person is more intelligent, in fact striving for this state solely using the intellect is reckoned to be a complete dead end.

So, people aren't realising their full potential, can be send to be in a sense, asleep, why? Well, people tend to perform actions without really being aware, or fully conscious while performing them. Usually, this is done in the interest of saving mental energy, they shut off after a point. Following on from Heidegger, designers consider the mark of a good tool to be the fact that the user doesn't even notice that they're using it, doesn't have to consciously plan and follow every action. People shut off. This is useful when you're working in a factory all day picking out defective components or a prostitute entering into sexual congress solely for the money. The point that has been made is that this doesn't apply to some actions we perform, that we consider to be mundane, but that it applies to almost all actions we perform, that it is the norm rather than the exception. That we live in a state of perpetual unawareness. Another way of looking at it is that we are either aware we are looking at something, or that we are introspecting, looking inwards, but hardly both at the same time.  It is by learning to be constantly more aware that we can access this extra energy, be, in an ecstatic state always, similar to the awareness that is said to occur after imbibing LSD or other drugs.

Where does music, and especially the vaguely defined "pop" music come into this? Well, most music, IMHO encourages this state of slumber by the sheer fact of its mundanity. Music that strictly follow rules that are implicit in its genre without any sense of significantly playing around with them or without creating any dissonance. Music that panders to the lower fourth circuits, our reptilian and mamilian brains, sex, territory, etc. Music that encourages us not to listen to it moment by moment, but to listen out for occasional changes from the formula. Pop music, on the whole, seems to be the most ugly and formulaic music. On the other hand, music that seems to acknowledge its extreme repetition and encourages the listener to appreciate this as a form of change (did Eno say this?) seems to avoid this. Of course it does heavily depend on the listener, if they choose to they can make themselves more aware of any kind of music, just as they can make themselves more aware when they're doing repetitive tasks for hours on end, only it's much more of a challenge, and very discouraging, although maybe if you are REALLY commited....Finally, those who run the large corporations want more productive employees, so it's always going to stir trouble when the workers begin to think for themselves, this is a separate but connected issue, I don't think I made that clear. After all I don't think Gurdjieff had any particular socialist inclinations, most of his disciples came from well-off backgrounds (apparently he thought that poor people didn't have the instinct to exploit their environment to their benefit to the extent that rich people had, but what about heredity?)

In your factory scenario, it seems to me there are two people who can achieve the contemplative life. One is the owner of the factory who can pay other people to bother with the intracacies of his business (and boy aren't those workers rat bastards if the interrupt HIS attempts at enlightenment by striking or whatever). However, it's possible the worker, too, might also reach great awareness by attending to his drearily repetitive duties with an insane level of commitment...of course, most likely he won't reach contemplation 'cause, as you say, that's the HARD way, and as such he'll still be stuck in his shithole state of existence.

A socialist might say such a scenario is repulsively counter- revolutionary; a liberal ironist like myself would say it's repulsively anti-democratic. Whether this makes any difference to you, I don't know.

Anas FKs point about pop music is based entirely on a (factually unsubstantiated) judgment of other people's intellectual activity.

Fair enough point, there aren't any statistics or quotes from or references highly respected scientific sources. I was, though, relying more on the experiences and intuitions of the reader. For this particular issue, I think these intuitions render my hypotheses highly plausible, though I would recommend that you read Gurdjieff's works if you want more convincing. Anyway, as I say, I'm not really a great fan of current scientific, computational models of the brain. They somehow, seem to leave out significant phenomena, and yes, this includes Freud's (but I am pretty impressed by Neural Networks, they're cool). Yes, it is other people's intellectual activity, but I think this model seems to explain and predict a lot of phenomena/behaviour,( though I prefer Leary's see the RAW discussion earlier), which is prolly the best we can hope for at the moment.

 I do agree - in principle, anyway - that the best music shocks you into a heightened state of awareness, "the perfect moment", etc. But such a state can be achieved through a number of methods (drugs, meditation, even - gasp - pop music!), and what's more, what will induce these states is largely completely dependent on the individual and the context they're experiencing it in. To just toss off this sorta elitist "the masses are drugged and stupid" premise is completely irresponsible.

I tried to give an explanation  of  *how*  "shocks" could occur and what they could be in terms of Gurdjieff's model. At the same time I wanted to, in terms of G's model, explore what would inhibit this kind of awareness, impair human ability. I believe that pop music, on the whole (and I am guilty of vagueness/gross generalisation) does have this effect. I tried to give my reasoning. My contention is still that most pop music does have this effect, I don't see how it is reasonable to hold this view.  Yes, what will induce this state is dependent ("largely completely"? does that makes sense?) on the individual and the context, but to what extent? Taking LSD or a course in meditation, it's more probable that you will reach some kind of what seems as far as we can see a higher level of consciousness( though how we determine this state is reached is another question and what are its characteristics across different individuals another entirely), than if you listen to DJ Otzi, but it's only a probability <1, IMHO. So there is a certain level of uniformity, and we have to exploit this, of course we can't have cold "scientific" results, but we can still build models that we can use for prediction, as I said earlier. The masses are drugged (you seen the shit they put in the food supply, all manner of pesticides and shit, levels of drug use, including legal like alcohol, are v. high, as well as medicine's for controlling depression, etc) and I don't know where you live, but I'm betting it's likely that the schooling system for the majortiy of people isn't too hot. So, even if you decide not to accept my other arguments, calling that statement completely irresponsible is odd. Isn't pointing this out (drugged and stupid)  a good start, an acceptable premise, again, I think intuitive to all but the most unaware?

I think this is still an implicit current through much contemporary thought

A socialist might say such a scenario is repulsively counter- revolutionary; a liberal ironist like myself would say it's repulsively anti- democratic. Whether this makes any difference to you, I don't know.

I'm an anarchist, make of that what you will.
 
 

Also: you say that "people are not realizing their full potential, their full mental potential. Only a tiny percentage is being utilized by most people." This is more than a little reminiscent of the old saw that "we only use 10% of our brain power at any given time or ever)," something most cognitive scientists believe, to be blunt, is demonstrably a crock of shit. Mind you, this only trumps you if you equate mental capacity with brain capacity, but that's something highly suggested by your associated talk of the "lower circuits" and "reptilian brains."

Yes, that's subconsciously (if my subconscious exists!) where I got the wording from, but no, I don't think we use 10% of our  physical brain. But it's not so outlandish to think of people using more of the functionality of their brain than others. For example, a professor of calculus and someone who works on a fruit stall, we would probably say are using their brains' to different extents, using different capacities of their brains to different extents. By this same token, there maybe aspects of the brain's functionality that we haven't fully been able to appreciate up till now using conventional methods.   My talk of lower circuits was based on a model of the functionality brain in terms of circuits not its physical structure, similarly with reptilian brain, mammilian brain.

Tracer Hand, there's a track from National Lampoon's GOODBYE POP LP that describes this exact scenario (not R.A. Wilson or Philip Glass but I trust you to make the proper connections). You'd get a kick out of it.

Oh know, I agree. It's not outlandish. Let's drag out the utterly inevitable computer comparison...two guys, two computers, two of the same computers in fact. One guy uses every feature and every pre- loaded program on his machine to help run every part of his life. Another guy uses it as nothing more than a very pretentious typewriter. The first guy uses his machine to the utmost of its functionality. He works for Circuit City and has an obsessive- compulsive disorder. The other guy is Saul Bellow.

For example, a professor of calculus and someone who works on a fruit stall, we would probably say are using their brains' to different extents, using different capacities of their brains to different extents.

Not at all. I would say their brains are doing different things, or that different things are going on "in there," or their brains are making them do different things, or that the results of these two brains' activties are different. But does this mean the stuff inside Professor Plum's head is doing more of something than Mr. Hooper's? Damned if I know.

My talk of lower circuits was based on a model of the functionality brain in terms of circuits not its physical structure, similarly with reptilian brain, mammilian brain.

I cannot parse this at all.

I've turned to listening to the 80's. The songs back then weren't about "give me what I want, basically your ass on a platter". Instead, they help me to feel soft emotions. None of that divide-and-conquer attitude. And some of it promotes self-awareness and approaching the world with an attitude of curiousity.

"It's Like That", "I Know What Boys Like", "Sweet Dreams (Are Made Of This)", "Material Girl", "I Want Your Sex", "What's Love Got To Do With It?", "Let's Go Crazy", "Physical", plus assorted Duran Duran videos.

And I still find this thread entertaining as hell, no matter how many times I read it:

Popular music with its inane, extremely stupid lyrics, pandering to our basest instincts (i.e., sex, driving cars, football, etc)

...is a personal favourite

NOT about pop music specifically. But did anyone ever have a demo of why rock music was evil, where they'd get like a muscly dude up all musclin' out, and the person arguing rock's evilness would tap a "typical rock rhythm" out on the muscly dude's bicep, and then suddenly his biceps were comically useless? Like I saw this once – he was all lifting some weighty brick but then he dropped the brick. The whole thing seems like bullshit, doesn't it? But of Penn & Teller were here to explain why this was bullshit, what explanation would they provide (sans the cusses & libertarian editorializing)?

They made us lift weights in sunday school listening to rock and then xian music. Results were pretty inconclusive and I could tell the teacher was p disappointed. I was mortified because I was a skinny kids so weight stuff was embarrassing jesus or no jesus

evil

The latest: "It's getting hot in here, so take off all your clothes" ??? Guys actually make these comments to girls, in all sincerity. I never would have guessed one of them would ever get handed a record deal. And you're right; they don't even have the decency to put it to an edible beat.

well i never

Q: can a beat be both tasty and inedible?

A socialist might say such a scenario is repulsively counter- revolutionary; a liberal ironist like myself would say it's repulsively anti-democratic. Whether this makes any difference to you, I don't know.

― Michael Daddino, Tuesday, June 25, 2002 8:00 PM (sixteen years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

hey, richard rorty

Yeah, I read *Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity* and wasn't afraid to let people know it.

solidarity my man