Ist Popmusik Kunst? - Is pop music art?
Is pop music art?
An enquiry by Al Gromer Khan (c)
There are many reason for us to look forward to a new age - pop music isn´t one of them. Brian Eno, former member of glitter rock band Roxy Music, producer of Bono and Bowie, art school, verbalizer, declares that pop music is modern art and has thus based his career in the music business on this premise. He now seems to see himself as a kind of professional caretaker of the London modern art scene. The idea of an artist who has entered dire straits through an idealistic lifestyle is to Eno a sentimental an antiquated, a slightly ridiculous one. He has for some time been in the position of all persons of power - capable of mercylessly running into the ground any phenomenon that isn´t designed to immediately ´generate income´.
One would have hoped that Eno had banked on his ambient-style and so become a torch-bearer for the translation of modern music onto a more subtle plane. Instead he has perfected the hardware and concept level of music and art. ´Nerve Net´ a techno album from the early 1990ies appears to have ended his capacityof creating the psychic space of his former Ambient work. Anyway, he doesn´t seem to have come up with anything of interest for genuine lovers of Ambient Music.
But how can pop music be art? The idea seems at least disputable. Even though art is subject to the Zeitgeist , represents the next higher and more subtle level of thinking, and therefore requires subtle tools. Pop music - in the ideal case an expression of teenage rebellion and entertainment, an expression of the Zeitgeist - does not possess these. Youth, whose universe rock and pop music stands for, also represents the mood of the times - the Zeitgeist. Youth is usually right, for it lays down the style for next generation, the next step of human evolution. But is it art? Shouldn´t art go beyond youthful rebellion? From ancient times art has tried to make something apparent that is beyond the visible world, taking into account refined aesthetics and open up intuitive channels and spaces. Pop and rock do the opposite: they coarsen expressions in order to make them accessable and digestible for the masses. Josef Beuys and many genuine artists before and after him tried to sharpen the artistic intellect of the viewers and inspire their minds. He therefore left many things unsaid, ambigiously lingering. Again rock and pop do the opposite: they usually overstate with a vengance, pronouncments of mutilated language - and a lot of noise. While art should put one into a mood of contemplative thoughtfulness, seduce the viewer, the listener, rock and pop rape you, even in places where you don´t expect it and where it is unwelcome: in shops, supermarkets, churches, restaurants, in cars, public places, on the beach, in underground stations, by day and by night, on working days, at weekends and on holidays.
While art and culture is supposed to lend meaning to life in general, for some time it appeared to want to replace religion. (Remember religion: this antiquated dogmatic tribal shit that has claimed to fulfill the longing in the human soul, but has caused almost only hate and war in two thousand years or so.) Modern art as the religion of the new age? It would have been nice: alert minds, sharpened intuition, refined emotionality, the emotive and thought process as the main course, instead of the product. Isn´t that what the Bhagavat Gita says?
Pop music, on the other hand, again does the exact opposite: gigantomania, excessive luxury, a life for the instant kick, the fulfillment of egoistical phantasy, often featuring persons of limited education (and, Alas! limited intelligence). Pop music endlessly blows up sujets of little content, it flattens nuances, robs the human ear of its fine tuning, its peace and quiet, ethical values to a point where performers masturbate on stage. (´Rock Bitch´) Pop music wants to attract attention at any price. For example at the prize of bodily harm through dezibel numbers, whereby the sensory organs of consumers are damaged, unable to percieve any nuances. And since almost anything can be brought out into the open through the power of the electronic media in order to make more money, the same anything goes of pop music lyrics has now influenced modern art as well. Does the modern art bubble stem from of pop music excesses? An interesting line of inquiry. Bigger and more is better than small and limited editions? Is Damian Hirst´s ´For the Love of God´ the limit? And where do you go from there if you are unable to translate to a more subtle and fullfilling plane of operation?
Pop and rock, starting from Elvis (Presley - not Costello) represented, amongst other things, the emanzipation of minorities: blacks, homosexuals, women, the working class Kerouac and Brando wearing their flannell shirts and blue jeans. But what started out exciting, even inspiring, soon appeared to be like a curse: the revenge of an African demon, avenging the slaves on the cotton fields of Alabama and Georgia. Gospel turned into dull and obtuse disco bawling, whereby African ambigous eroticism had to give way to pornophonic and furious exhibitionism.
There was money to be made - so the business people came into it. With the money cocaine came. Smiles disappeard from faces. The White Race is about money and power, rarely about joye de vivre. What was fun with Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis ( it took me about thirty years to realize what he ment with ´Tutti Frutti´) was systematically hollowed out in the course of thirty-odd years. What remained was an industrial product, a hollow shell, perfectly recorded, produced and blown up, distributed like margarine by cynical managers. The Homo Faber had replaced the Homo Ludens.
Punk rock came, and with it the end of musical culture as we knew it. After that the fat bass drum. Florian Fricke, who I consider a rare musical genius of the second half of the Twentieth Century, never used a bass in his work. Bass comes at the expense of the finer intuitive sensory perceptions. Around 1980 I took a piece of music that I had written, one in which I thought the ´tantric wedding´ had been particularely successful, to Jurgen Korduletsch, a German music manager. A little too weak around the bottom.
I´ve got the power! Power. But wasn´t that what representatives of early human evolutionary states always wanted? Power. The SS guy who shot a young man at a concentration camp, because he thought that his scull would make a jolly good paper weight on his office desk. Power. Fifty years after Elvis and Big Mama Thornton who wrote ´Hound Dog´ (I semi-consciously wondered why Elvis sang to a male creature...) there is almost nothing left than the fat bass. (Or alternatively a hundred revivals.) The fat bass drum always stood for loss of innocence for me. And behind it seemed to be hiding a growing number of untalented and uninspired people, fat macho guys with fat gold chains around their necks stuck fat fingers in your face while muttering angry male chauvinist slogans. Was that art? And what about the fucking noise? If we have learned one thing the louder the sex, the less the feeling of the participants.
Once one has realized music as sacred, one begins to realize how horrible music can be.
Careful examination of the biographies of the Beatles, the Stones, Bowie - we are talking about the period when the white race took over black music for real tells us to what a frightening extend they were ready to enter into satanic pacts just to become pop stars. Any publicity stunt would do, just to get their records into the shops and sold. Let´s take Bowie, for example. Missed no opportunity to enforce this ambition the music business was tough, even in those days. Alternating Bowie was gay, black, bi-sexual, black-magic, white-magic, rocker, mod, alien, painter, actor, Buddhist, essayist, visionary, pervert, schizophrenic, intellectual, infantile. He was none of these, of course. He is a talented songwriter in the Vaudeville tradition, has impeccable style, English good manners, an attractive singing voice, perseverence, an alert mind and - according to credible sources - an oversize cock. Well, at least Bowie spared us the conversion to becoming a professional Muslim. Bowies talent extended to adopting attractive elements from Shakespeare, to Joyce, to T S Elliot etc., and changing them around to suit his purpose. With any of his titles one always had the feeling of having heard it - or something quite similar - before. From Stardust to Ziggy Stardast etc. But who was at the core of his glittering personality? What were his intentions? What his motivation? Throughout his career he seemed to try and lift the idea of his stardom onto an altar for him and us to worship the ego. He was not the artist, he was the product. He even took darshan of Andy Warhol, sometime in the late sixties. But who is this David Bowie? He doesn´t seem to exist, at least not in the spiritual sense. A good-looking elegant body, an intelligent, cold and smart mind not overmuch burdened with ethical principles, capable of securing his business advantages a perfect hard disc for saving illusion on, an empty reed through which every few years a new wind of fashion blows. That´s entertainment!
Somewhere along the way Eno (of Music for Airports fame) became Bowies producer. But is it art?
You could say that Jesus, Arthur Rimbaud, Van Gogh, Hank Williams were all media for the expression of the spirit of the times. Ah, but they failed because they tried to truthfully convey what they had found to be wonderful. Simple as that. I never felt that Bowie worked from that base of motivation.
And when Bowie appeared in a video in which he sawed apart dead bodies in a nighmarish situation and called the whole thing ´The Heart´s Filthy Lesson´ I asked myself, do we need this shit? Inevitibly modern art followed suit - success stories like this get noticed. And promptly there appeared Damian Hirst turning insides out, trying to shock, declaring it art and lo and behold, it worked. ´The dark side of the human psyche´ etc. Bowie had prepared the ground for this. Which reminds me of followers of New Age cults in the New Mexico or Arizona desert, listening to Wagner at 10000 Watts in order to experience ´the darker side´ - simple projections for puerile minds.
In any case, I would prefer the ambiguous hint to the spelling out. However, pop ist not suited for that. Like pornography, which doesn´t allow one to experience true erotisism, that wich pop music has latterly become bluntens the mind and destroys the soul.
Having said all this I should not forget some of the songs that represented the mood of a whole generation. But even this was music designed to accomodate teenage courtship rituals. Teenager and indeed puerile souls as such always need someone to collecitively worship and scream at. This is what pop stars are after, being worshipped. Anyway, it does not appeal to refined senses of intelligent persons.
Having been part of flower power, having met a numbe of visionaries, real artists, one had hopes and expectations. The contemporaries had convinced me that an interesting new age was just around the corner. Some of them were working class, black, gay, eccentric, Buddhist, schizophrenic, ecstatic... I´d allowed them to influence me because they were great artist, intelligent, sensitive, creative, genuine artists. But many of them failed. In Eno´s world they don´t exist. These ´beautiful losers´ had opened up new horizons for me, when I was a young man, suggested a future with real alternatives, new aesthetics, human trust, environmental plans that made sense. But it was the Jaggers, the Bowies, the Madonnas, the Stings, the Bonos, the Phil Collinses with their tax-oasis´, their country homes, their cocaine, their Maybach-Limos, their mediocrity of thinking, their obscene riches that prevailed and lasted. One´s own corruption projects corruption into everybody else and then most human phenomena are seen with a cynical eye. And so life, music, art begin to degenerate into a purely physical matter, devoid of poetry, devoid of any spiritual dimension. The technocrat´s, the natural science wallah´s, the industry´s, the yuppie´s paradise: a measurable, a calculable, a manipulable world. And the world is sitting at the abyss...
I maintain that popstars could have given good examples by living interesting, more generous, humbler lives, but it wasn´t within their capacity. Instead they demonstrated global economic darwinism of the worst kind Bowie with his public limited company as a leading figure. Is this the dark side of the uneducated working class hero? More is better...? The Bowies, the Bonos, the Jaggers show us the type of luxurious life that makes with Paul Theroux´s words ´anything less look like punishment´. Luxury, vanity and waste became desireable until self satisfaction became ´self realisation´. The internet has replaced telepathy and mathematicians have replaced the bohemian mystics - to construct was soon called ´to create´.
I seem to remember Paul Mc Cartney in a television show around 1970. With his index finger raised he spoke. "If you have power use it for the good!" I was impressed. Then he couldn´t think of anything more interesting to do than creating a huge capitalist empire, hoarding money without stopping till he had the billion. (That´s a thousand million pounds). Does this sound familiar? Politicians and religious organisations do it: fulfilling the public´s expectations and then doing exactly the opposite - something that gives you power or helps you maintain it, or serves those who have power and will in turn keep you in power. However, our friends the popstars didn´t stop there. Like Bill Gates they did not wish to look like satanic beings who only lived for the vain and busy boredom in abundance. No, they wanted the other thing as well as Gutmenschen they colonised the good-zone as well. So the Bobs and Bonos and Maccas looked for some evil in the world, joined hands with the politicians and started singing out against it. ´All part of a game in which the humanitarian mask only conceals the economic exploitation´, said Czech philosopher Slavoj Zizek in this context.
I´m not saying that to fail certifies artistic genius I´m not that silly. However, when artists continue their search into the unknown, continue to explore side channels of the psyche, with themselves the object of the experiment, as intoxicated by their art as Van Gogh was, intoxicated and absorbed, then he/she will very likely stop speculating about what the masses want or are ready to accept. As a consequence in this age of competition it becomes very likely that this artist may fail in the visible world. For the simple reason that one is far too occupied making experiences, rather than using other´s experiences to show off, like Bowie did, making this age of plagiarism possible. Personally I have always favoured the miniature, the nuance, the understament but who could, for example, make an impression in today´s art market with small format pencil drawings?
And then there´s this thing about multiplication. Most ancient mystical texts warn us: the great number is diabolical. During the education in my formative years I learned that the typical thing about art was the edition of one das Unikat. The aim in rock and pop, however, is to sell as many copies as possible. You are rewarded with gold or platinum for high numbers. These numbers suggest reality in a fragile world how can we be wrong´if we sell so many records and so many people worship us? These sales generate unbelievable amounts of income that, in turn, spoil the personalities of the ´artists´ and destroys the soul.
Herr Eno creates ´70 million paintings´ - this, in case you didn´t know, are millions of computer-generated variations of a visual theme. Eno is not slow to point out ´how happy he is with Apple computers´ Rates and council tax must be high at Blenheim Crescent, Notting Hill. But seriously: this again shows the dubious influence pop music has had on modern art. What about one painting, Mr Eno - an interesting one?
No, pop music isn´t art. Sorry, Brian. Both exclude each other. No, not in the way diametrically opposed things exclude each other. Rather they exclude each other as pretense as opposed to genuine, original to copy, as arts and crafts to art. And ... yes, here we go again, as indeed art and entertainment exclude each other. And not because fame and money on one, and art on the other side exclude each other. They exclude each other for a different reason: in pop the central motivation is vanity, and in art it is spiritual growth.