LITMIR.BIZ

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bargain with recording. I will leave aside for now the ubiquitous gripes about “commercialism” ruining genuine musical expressiveness or authenticity; often enough this kind of complaint arises from an ill-considered, left-over form of romanticism whose incoherencies are only slightly more amusing than its hypocrisies. More interesting is the accusation that by allowing music to play constantly “as background,” by in effect hearing it too often, we damage our ability to notice it. The underlying analogies seem to be with addictive drugs, or exciting erotic twists, or even elaborately spicy dinners. If we do it too often, maybe we will begin to enjoy it less. Maybe we will be spoiled for simpler or more ethereal pleasures. Maybe we will need increasingly bigger and more dangerous jolts to give us the old thrill again. The fear that music will be spoiled by overindulgence, and spoil us in turn, has a long and distinguished tradition. Philosophers in the ancient world exercised themselves over the need to manage music’s power, but by the nineteenth century, it was not clear whether the danger lay within ourselves or within the music itself. In the 1800s, music could be reinterpreted as a species of religion, and it was a cult with sacred scriptures (symphonies, string quartets), prophetic figures (especially German ones), rites (the concert), and an eccentric clergy (the performers, and even the critics). The religion of music assumed that pieces were potentially lethal, precisely because they were so very holy.

      Another form of protest took off from Immanuel Kant’s categorical imperative. To put it simply, in the Kantian-influenced moral world, we are never to treat a person as a means to an end, but rather as an end in him/herself. That is a really good rule in Kant’s frames of reference. And many musicians and scholars of all levels, from the most arid of academics to the autodidacts whose song lists and data compilations flood many Internet websites, would all agree to expand this imperative to include music. It is a long-standing implicit assumption of many devoted listeners that music (or at least “good” music, “great” music) ought to be given the same consideration as people. If you treated the products of the human mind so cavalierly, after all, might you not do the same to actual humans? Such a train of thought easily leads us right back to claims about the holiness of music, perhaps with a secularly humanist inflection.

      From either point of view, the proliferation of music into everyday space creates serious dangers. We are harmed because we grow coarsened or ungrateful. We come to think of music as something trivial and commonplace. As a result, we disrespect the music and we disrespect our powers as listeners. Now we sin not only by flaunting our own narcissism, but also by brutalizing music (and the memories of its creators) for our shallow pleasures. But such excessive scrupulosity ends up by damaging the very music that it sought to protect. It recalls those legends about ladies who cover their furniture with vinyl so the fabric will not be ruined or keep their good china locked away forever; men whose baseball cards are locked up in plastic sheaths instead of being handed around and traded to remind us of the pleasures brought to us by the players of the game. Museums do serve a purpose, but that does not mean that we should want to live in them.

      By contrast, consider an everyday object to which we may be greatly attached, such as an old sweater or a favorite pair of shoes. We probably do not treat it very well. It has lost shape, gotten stained or burned. It has been patched. Its shapes have been distorted by intimate contact with our bodies and customs. In being knocked around, it has absorbed qualities of ourselves into its materials. Maybe we have absorbed some of its qualities as well. Is a thing like this even an object in the usual sense anymore? I do not want to throw out those favorite shoes, even though I never wear them, and not because I plan to put them on again in the near future. Instead, I just want to keep them because they have to do with how I keep myself.

      Recall that the commonplace word habit has been used to refer to clothes, outward appearance, and repeated actions that signal an inner state of being. (The range of the word was already fairly well developed in Latin before it came into Old French and on into English.) Is a habit internal or external? Is it an object, an action, or a state of mind? Is it something that we put on, or something we cannot get rid of? Something to break or something to acquire? Maybe modest songs are like habits. They are things that surround us in the most unremarkable of manners. And yet, if we stop and examine them, we can find them to be enormously interesting.

      In teasing out the possibilities that lie within modest songs, we constantly find ourselves coming to terms with varieties of repetition. The fundamental stakes with respect to various kinds of repetition might come from how musical qualities are imagined to embody various forms of simplicity and complexity. We care about both of these abstractions in a multitude of ways, of course, and are apt to praise and blame music for both conditions, depending on our sense of what is valuable in a given context. For instance, if I laud Erik Satie’s Gymnopedie No. 1 for its “simplicity,” then I must intend to point out such features as its spare texture, consisting mostly of melody with light chordal support, and its relatively “white note” palette, enabling even an incompetent pianist like myself to get through it without too much humiliation. On the other hand, I could just as easily say that I prize the piece for its nuanced emotional ambience—I think it is some species of melancholy, but I could not be more specific without explaining at length—which suggests “complexities” of situation (I mean the peculiar interactions between poetic stance and listener address) that seem to ironize the directness of the musical surface. The reverse situation, between a “complex” surface and a “simple” situation, might be argued in the case of a piece such as Stockhausen’s Kreuzspiel.

      With respect to modest songs, our only purchase on these questions comes from a consideration of how they are situated; and those locations, as I have already suggested, are endlessly mutable. We are implicated in those modest songs in such a way that we can afford ourselves little cover. To be sure, such vulnerability must be the rule in any interpretive moment. The critic George Steiner movingly asserts that “all understanding, and the demonstrative statement of understanding which is translation, starts with an act of trust.”²⁶ But trust is a difficult critical place from which to begin in the modern university world (the mainstream rock critical world, for that matter), where the hermeneutics of suspicion is the rule. Determined not to get fooled again, we try to take refuge in tough-mindedness. Although we may acknowledge the pleasures of our culture’s pretty lies, we try to be realists, moving quickly past the fun to get at those abstract values that sit under the brightly sensuous surfaces. Such austerity is death to modest songs, where pleasure is the major point. If we are to have any hope of understanding their power to matter, we must trust ourselves to risk the banal. We must trust that our accounts, always incomplete and so rendering the world piecemeal, can nevertheless congeal into some form of significance to the interlocutors we desire.

      KITSCH, OR THE ECONOMICALLY ABJECT

      I will be talking about songs that many listeners, whether devotees of rock or “classical” music, would immediately label kitsch. The inexhaustible power of that epithet deserves a little unpacking. The painters and art dealers of Munich during the 1860s and 1870s seem to have been the first to use the term (originally meaning trash) in a way that directed it toward its modern meaning: for them, kitsch referred to inexpensive souvenir art, possibly mere sketches of dubious aesthetic and therefore financial value, sold especially to Anglo-American tourists (more on this point later).²⁷ Its entry into English took place in the twentieth century. One of the earliest uses of kitsch comes from the 1930s in The Partisan Review, which gives us some idea of the high seriousness that made the word so attractive to a certain mind-set.

      

      Strictness about questions of art and value is what gives the term its charge. The accusation of kitschiness is one of those places where morals merge with aesthetics, since the badness of kitsch almost always has to do with the problem of truth and lies. We think of the kitsch artifact as “too pretty”; it has been described as “beauty with the ugly taken out.” The world it portrays has only positive moments, and the glib idealizations of the content represented through the object allow those of us who appreciate the object to pretend that everything is, simply, “nice.” If such an object evokes the specter of “high art,” as kitsch often does, nevertheless its formal and expressive solecisms inevitably remove the ascetic challenge that “high art” is supposed to produce. It is this excess of flattery, in which the narcissism of the kitsch-lover expands unimpeded, that so

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