On the Dismissal of Music

It is simply not true that I need music every day. This is despite the fact that I have self-identified my place in the world of specialized labor as mostly associated with music, and have devoted a great deal of my psychic energy to it. In addition to my musical needs, because of my self-identification as mostly concerned with music, I have plenty of concerns about how to live, and how to continue to place myself in the world and keep my life. Of course, that isn't simple... I feel like I had a four month stretch where I conclusively disproved Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs with actions such as celebrating my ability to eat in between academic obligations by actually eating, sleeping on the floor of my office, building very little dependence on others, etc. In this period, private music listening time, my second or third most important musical activity, came to a near standstill (my first, composing electronic music, did come to a total standstill). The only time that I was really able to appropriate for music listening was semi-private, when I was overseeing a computer lab with few visitors, and this shaped my listening habits. In this environment I had to choose music that wouldn't interfere with anyone working in the lab, that is, something that wasn't overtly vulgar or aggressive, and something that I thought was worth hearing. If someone overhearing from the hallway were to engage, as I so often fantasize and only occasionally happens, I would be on point to offer an explanation as to what they were hearing, and why it should be valued, or, at least, not dismissed. I, at the lowest point being able to define my musical self, needed to be ready to defend the last thread of that identity. This situation illuminated for me a way that personal musical understanding spirals outward into a greater social context.

The two things that garnered the most attention from passersby and captive audiences were Brian Ferneyhough's opera Shadowtime and Burial's self-titled album. Each of these, of course, grabs different people for different reasons. Burial is a mystery to people who are both in and out of the Electronic Dance Music community; the album is brilliant in its understated, brooding moodiness and rhythmic peculiarities, unfolding a unique continuum of melancholy and implied human motion. Since it mostly describes a small range of emotional possibility, is fairly consistent in its construction, and appeals to bodily movement, it is not impossible to understand immediately, although it carries with it a plethora of details that rejuvenate its intrigue on subsequent listenings.

Ferneyhough's music, on the other hand, needed to be defended to a veteran jazz educator as "not that bullshit that you think it is." Even the most cursory survey of his work confronts the listener with difficulties in deciphering methodology (or worse, appears to be method that presents itself as something that it isn't), and inside of that style and method, determining the authenticity of the composition in place where people continue to put difficulty of performance and composer intent into a duality or continuum, where they would more easily work as independent variables. Since the professor was self-selecting that he would hear music for a moment, stopping to engage in a short chat about the compositional authority of "elite" academic composition and (to his thinking) its facades and internal vapidity, it is likely that there was little offense taken upon hearing the music. Our quick little exchange was moderate in nature, speaking in the particulars of Shadowtime versus the generalities of historical and contemporary compositional practices. I had to identify myself as someone who knew a bit about the historical situation of this music and offer particulars about that situation as a way of assuring that dismissal of this music was not going to look graceful or grant authority, because authority, in this conversation, relied with not hearing the music, but with knowing it beyond just its aural configuration. The music clearly affected me in my self, somewhere, and drove me to know it better. Besides, saying that "this music sounds stupid" is simply less charming than, for example, hypothesizing what Walter Benjamin may have thought of this work that attempts to depict him. My guess is that these people have it wrong.

This simple example of musical choice and relationship of listeners is one that I (and each of us) live with day in and day out, and constitutes the struggle of politics in music. Aligning one's self with a particular movement, particular artist, particular curator, particular ideology of music, is what's at stake in our habits, what happens as the real of music, and makes us into a being-in-music. While phenomenological accounts of being-in-music tend toward performativity (see Jeff Todd Titon's "Knowing Fieldwork" in Shadows in the Field and Thomas Turino's Music as Social Life: the Politics of Participation) there is clearly a being-in-music that has more to do with (Pierre Bourdieu's conception of) cultural capital and has less to do with the creation of music than it does the consumption. All of us participate in music consumption, DJs and critics do it professionally. It is a simple observation that it takes a personality, that is, a subjectivity to engage with music on an aesthetic level. If nothing else, our engagement of music on the personal level needs to be in (or work towards being in) totality with our self, something that shows and elucidates our self and how we engage in the world. In the professional contexts, this is building of a brand, for the DJ with their aesthetic preferences and ability to know their audience, for the critic with their prowess of analysis and the web of relevance that they tie their analysis to. Outside of the professional sphere, in this process music consumption is initially a social act, an exchange of musical work, which then needs to be processed in self-identification, or at the very least recognition of some content and applying the known world of the individual to that musical content, expressed by that self-identification.


The Current Musical Cultural Institution

By observing this process continually, I understand that music offers different things to different people, despite, in my experience, being able to map this onto class and social capital, and more specifically, with the lower classes and those with less social capital having better relationships with their musical choices. I see this process in the terms of a social institution that shapes musical interactions and ideologies based on our economic and material situation, a symbiosis between our education and conditions that tell us how music is to be used. Max Horkheimer suggested that social institutions are the form of social exchange that continuously and repetitiously present the ideology of our material relationships, and the authority (or power to which we can defer action) which shows us a more or less effective way to operate in our society; essentially, this process shapes the realm of necessity into the ruling ideology's ideals. We can see this invisible cultural institution as a disorganized mass of authority that mimics the haphazard organization of our  "economy." There are, within this cultural institution that governs and dictates how we interact with music as individuals, a number of forms of engagement, in which we can use our "freedom" to choose which music we engage with and which we do not. It is also important to note (although it will not be thoroughly discussed here) that this governing authority of music consumption is itself the generative system for music as well.

Before looking at the implications of this system for the individual, let us scrutinize this overarching institution on this scale. The musical marketplace exists, as does each marketplace, as a collection of harshly random transactions beyond us. The fact is that the entirety of the music word is based on these transactions that touch on every social aspect of life: production, education, scientific inquiry, socialization, and every other element of social life. Whole musical genres are built, currently, around particular manufactured pieces of equipment (violins or Roland's TB-303) in the same way they are around particular musical techniques (singer/songwriters or serialism) and in the same way they can be linked to particular spaces in the world (rock and roll, Sundanese jaipongan, or the scene at your local bar). Each of these types of music commingle with every cultural situation they live in, born of ideals or traditions and modified by their consumers or participants based on the reality in which they exist. This dialectic is played out in an ambiguous cognitive dialog: great synthesis of musical/cultural knowledge exist in the same form that great travesties of musical misappropriation do. The transactions of the former are, in my view, made of understanding ideals of the constituent musics, and the latter, of ignorance. The exchanges do happen regardless, and their validity is based solely on the authority we ascribe to these exchanges; they are a reflection of our current situation, not inherently generalized or fully understandable at any given time.

On one hand, if music can reside inside of this exchange between its ideal form and realized form, it still says very little of the system that allows us to judge it, because, on the other hand, a great ability of this exchange is to make it look as though we are free to make that judgment for ourselves and put to work our own form of musical reason. Sadly, based on how we produce music and how we consume it, this is merely an illusion. We have no freedom, as consumers of music, to choose something that isn't economically viable, unless the music itself was made out of that freedom in the first place (the freedom from necessity). It is simply improbable, because of the abstract communication that happens in musical work, that we could decipher the actualities of its creation. Because the relationships that we make with mass-produced music are actually relationships with the organizations that create it, we have an impersonal relationship with it, not detailed but conglomerated. Even more, the way that we have musical relationships makes it so that musical elements, for the average listener, appear as (I assume) blurry constructions that can only exist as qualitative features. The average listener, I think it is fair to say, has little ability to parse out instruments, conceive of the music as carefully constructed, and instead lay great importance on the text of the lyrics because the ease at which they are engaged. None of these generalizations are scientific, but they are what I can see from asking people about musical their own engagement with music.

I recently asked someone with no musical training about a particularly nefarious song that is currently high on the Billboard charts. I was wondering why someone would want to listen to four minutes of two pop superstars complaining about being famous, exemplified by an allusion it contains, which purports that choosing a life of fame is on par with committing suicide. The answer I received was about the metric/tempo component of the song, when rhythmic density increases during the verses (my informant had not engaged at all with the lyrics of the song). The metric/tempo construction of the song is the most common construction in music today: backbeat at ~60 BPM. Since the significance of this derivative and homogeneous construction is lost on many listeners, they may simply not understand that there was very little thought or care put into the construction of the elements that they most identify with. What I think is happening in my informant's analysis is described by Walter Benjamin, in Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, as the distracted masses ability absorb art, but only as entertainment and not as critic. It is unclear, in this case, how much education would defeat this fogginess, since the problem of the lyrics and message would still exist. (Hopefully this dismissal is substantive enough to show that I am not merely dismissing this music out of elitist compulsion).

The lack of understanding musical elements works for the cultural institution of music as a mystification process, that is, what happens in the backstage of music, as Erving Goffman would put it. Since there is vagueness, something that the audience is not privy to about how music is created, and since they are unable to completely reverse engineer musical constructions, we are not able to immediately figure how much authority to afford the musician. Of course, the back area is built just as much of the author's understanding of what they are doing, their real connections to the productive forces of music, their historical situations, their understanding of their consumers, and even, their ignorance of the world they live in and the world we share with them when we come into dialogic consumption of their product. Further, this back area is what affords creators to re-conceptualize and present their work in whatever way they please, with whatever degree of honesty they wish, but also in a sphere which lies not necessarily under the scrutiny of a scholar or in a place where further justification for actions are necessary. The ability for artists to employ a backstage of consciousness is a simple way to reinstate the Romantic myth of genius, the occulted creative process, the disregard for the need to fit their work into the world at large, or worse, to seek to not change the conditions in which music is made and distributed for the better, but to tacitly and uncritically continue within failing or unsatisfying modes of production.

Where we lack freedom, then, arises from this back area. Here is music, built of conditions that are not expressly communicated by its medium, although this is on a continuum itself. Mystification and occult motivation serve both as the creation of the listener's interpretive function and as the creation of authority to subvert the listener, allowing one the ability to submit to hidden authority in ways both musical/ideological and economic/material. This authority can be seen as docile or nefarious, relevant or not, on an individual basis, but only because of the lack of freedom to choose music to self-identify with. The freedom that we do have is to not be forced to engage with music on someone else's terms. This, however, does not guarantee the fact that we will have music to engage with on our own terms. As long as music needs to be created inside of fortuitous (enough) economic circumstances, we run the risk of having music only created in a system that is intent on forcing us to process whatever ideology that the industry wants us to.

(Here, I must point out, that nothing that I've said so far about the macro-structure of music as part of the bourgeois culture industry has not or could not have been said by Theodor Adorno, besides my thinly veiled dismissal of Jay-Z.)

Of course, there are plenty of independent musicians in the world, and plenty of alternative sources of music for us to consume. There would be, in a more just world, a far wider variety of people making music, and a far greater amount of musical diversity and progressive thought in musical elements and construction, were musicians (and everyone) more able to follow their intuitions toward freedom of expression, instead of attempting to homogenize to whatever the industrial standard currently is. Again, there is plenty of music created independent of the capitalist musical mode of production, but there are two reasons why this is not good enough.

First, the lack of support for independent musicians means the lack of distribution, and requires personal research to even know that it exists in order to consume it. The devaluation of work is a simple result for the independent musician: the world of listeners is not able to spend a proper amount of time finding music that really suits them for expressing their identity, opening worlds unknown, and creating healthy discursive relationships between listeners and artists. There are, as ever, great musicians doing phenomenal work that lack the economic and cultural support, cyclically stopping them from making their music, doing more work, because they are not already successful. For these artists, the realm of necessity gets in the way of their expression, making them lose their footing in the realm of freedom in which real musical work is done.

Second, the success of something which comes from the mass-produced musical world is based on a system that does nothing but uphold its own status quo, and purveys a strong message of bourgeois ideology. Since these songs are far more accessible (and by that, I mean, are shoved in the face of the average American), they are more likely to help formulate ideas in a wide portion of the public. As with my example above, with no understanding of the technicality of music, with no ability to identify what is even pleasurable about music, and with no critical engagement involved in the self-identification process of consuming music, the world of listeners stands to accept, uncritically, messaging and ideology simply because they do not see the harm in it. Just as Horkheimer believes that the structure of the bourgeois family is more important in training a child to submit to authority, so does the structure of bourgeois music creation and distribution condition the listener to submit to cultural authority. Tacitly, the reproduction of this system simply happens through the same method: as long as we think we are free to choose the music we self-identify with, we will have plenty of music to submit to. Or will we?

These two perils of the musical cultural institution highlight a disastrous question: is there actually any realm of freedom to be found in musical consumption that is analogous to the realm of freedom that arises in musical creation? Despite the enticing nature of this question, it is immense and must be addressed at later date. What we do know is that musical self-identification can happen for a number of reasons, but self-acknowledgement of what an individual attaches themselves to is the crucial element of understanding music and creating musical meaning. Blind submission to musical commodities, in other words, is not actually expressive of the listener's character, besides the lack of character that it shows.

Much like the authority that operates on the large scale as a distribution system for commodities backed with authority, interpersonal exchange of musical thought has a micro-economy of personal authority that works separated from the large-scale structure. Personal exchange (that is, exchanges that we are directly or closely related to) shape our view of music, act as curation, and make a small scale distribution channel with attached personal values. This could be in the form of a trusted critical source, a more or less personal exchange of aesthetic information in varying degrees of formality. It could be a neighbor, friend, relative, stranger with a blog, etc. Inside of these discourses, level of technical knowledge of music, personal preference and self-identification with particular modes of music making, and the totality of basic interpersonal dialogic concerns (trust, manipulation, style of dialog, any other determinant of the two parties' relationships) become a part of the musical discourse. This means that, on this small-scale, the psychological-social element is key to the musical dialog, not only between artist and listener, but between any intercourse of musical knowledge.

What this means for us is that musical engagement becomes both the outlet for and a cause of musical self-identification. If it has been unclear to this point, this musical self-identification can be seen as musical preference at any level, that is, what you like to listen to, what music concerns you, or what music instills passion in you. The level of self-identification resides on a continuum (or possibly, depending on personal preferences, on a Mobius strip of metanarratives and quality inversions, such as dadaist art or appreciation for failure), which more or less represents a level on which the music is enjoyable, i.e. whether the music performs its work for a given individual. This gives us a wide range of individual musical engagement, supported by dialog and availability, knowledge of music's existence, and the limits of the discourse that proves that any of these things exist in a given situation. In the ideal musical dialog, that is, the fully functional one, the two participants in the conversation will have a shared language or, at least, the ability to form one in the course of the dialog and with this common parlance of aesthetic and historical meaning are able to create meaning through exchange and relations. The free dialog on equal footing would result in knowing the real tastes of a person, the real course of their musical thought, and would allow each party to form a relationship that is meaningful because of it. This differs from a conversation without that freedom, or one where authoritative jockeying and power imbalances are formed. Further, this mode of dialog can exist as an actual exchange of music (group listening and conversation, in real time or not). These two types of exchange (free exchange and unfree exchange), again, can vary to whatever degree the situation calls for. But knowing someone for their real tastes and self-identification, and any other personal knowledge that attaches itself to the discourse, may not necessarily mean to know the person holistically. This, of course, would depend on the level to which the participants are able to critically identify their choices. These choices probably cannot, because of the différance that exists in linearly time-progressive signals like music and language (even in repeated listenings, music is not consistent), be fully communicated, and because it would take the expression of the totality of our consciousness to create an identical listening of a musical work for our dialogic partner(s). Despite the incomplete nature of these conversations, or side-by-side occurrence of both the intuitive and rational in their substance, outcomes for the engagement in this dialog still fall into a number of possible categories or forms.

Of these resultant forms of engagement, I find the most difficult to be, first, the tacit acceptance of music (of which I spoke briefly above), and second, the dismissal of music.


Dismissal of Musical Work

It takes virtually nothing to dismiss music. "Too aggressive," "too docile," "too sad," "not sad enough," "too happy," "too much improvisation," "too much control," "too eccentric," "too formulaic," etc. are so readily available in the vocabularies of any listener. Even more concerning is the "I respect it, I just don't like it" response, which doesn't carry a dichotomy, an excess or lack, success or failure, but a marked inability to describe the listener's own internal engagement with music. I must point out that this last answer can always be modified to clarify that critical engagement exists, by evoking what there is of interest in the musical work, and how it doesn't surmount its shortcomings, i.e. "that part/aspect is interesting, but doesn't redeem the whole work because of these shortcomings or even, ''this is bad music because...''

So much personal authority is able to come, as a consumer of musical work, by dismissing a mode of music making, that is, wholesale dismissal of music at some generalized level. This could manifest as "hip-hop isn't even music," or "[some country] has no worthwhile music," or "serialist technique is not music, it is math." It is, at its core, our own sensibility, our own place in the music-world, that can determine how musical work being done is utterly useless to us as listener, and something that, hence, is useless as music, and even extends this judgment to others by casting their musical taste as useless or misguided. It is important to keep in mind that this works fluidly in discourse, and takes the constant appraisal of the dialog and its dynamics to work. This, nonetheless is conversation, and requires the totality of the relationship. If non-musical power structures exist in the dialog, they are easily transposed into musical authority.

However, we can also see authority applied from the personal sphere to the production process, and there are a number of ways that music can be dismissed in this way. The excessives mentioned above illustrate this. If we hear something that is not congruent with our conception of music, identification processes in music, ethics of music, or aesthetics of music (which must be based on our own experiences, expectations, and conceived functions of music) then we can just dismiss it as not counting as musical work. This illuminates the fact that we are able to dismiss the work of people who create things that lie outside of our frame of reference, our understanding of music. If, as we can now say, there is a fundamental flaw in the construction of the music, a faulty impetus, a foreign agent proposed for our consumption, then we can, because of its coherent nature as a musical gestalt (comprising of its history, musical elements, lyrical content, method of distribution) treat it with wholesale dismissal as music. As it has undergone creation and still, ultimately, strikes no accord with us, we may dismiss it as a letter put in the wrong mailbox, conceding that not only would we have no understanding of the context behind why it was sent, but we cannot use it for our own gain; it is entirely foreign to us, despite its own existence as music to be experienced. Music is a discrete object in the form a performance, recording, or concept, presents itself as particular, not a generalization. If the wrongly delivered envelope is filled with a generalized currency (money), then we could certainly appropriate it for ourselves, but this relies on our own personal credos, or better, our rationalizations thereof. In fact, we may even feel resentment that it does exist as a sign of the way our society is mishandling its productive forces and personally subjecting us to mistreatment through malfeasance by delivering us the wrong goods.

We have a tendency to treat all interactions in the same way that our mode of production treats interactions: in this generalized way. By treating all music as it is a generalized product, as though it has the same use, and is valuable in a homogeneous, generalized way, we ignore all relational value, context, and understanding of music as freely produced music. Our dealings with generalized currency throughout our lives promote this viewpoint and defeat the social aspect of purpose in the same way generalized currency defeats our relationships by obfuscating them. Clearly, if we are delivered something that is not generalizable, but needs particular understanding and intention, it may or may not be for us, may not be fortuitous for us to receive it, and may not have use-value for us. Because of this, we have a dualism that is reinforced on the consumption side, immediately defeating intention. It is our standard mode of operation to generalize success as qualitative judgment ("how else would we know that music is good beside the fact that people like it?"), simply because the industrial concern is so intoxicated with this aspect of commercial appeal. Retrospectively, we can view commercially successful music as basic, that is, fulfilling the most needs for the most people, the most generalizable musical content possible. Real use-value of music is not in antithesis of this generalizable value; real use-value and generalizable (marketable) value of music are separate functions, and musical work can be both musically valid and economically valuable in uncorrelated ways.

The dismissive listener's judgment is that ultimate credibility lies within our self as if we are authoritative as to what music can and cannot do for people, what music can and cannot exist in the world, or with certain elements of musical validity and economic viability added as elements of the suspect musical experience. We rely on our judgment because we are, in fact, individuals with different experiences, different products of both nature and nurture, and because we can only see the world that is constructed by these inherent determinants of our consciousness. A thorough understanding, then, of musical creation, is a dire prospect that can rarely emerge. The unending scrutiny of Common Practice Period music still unfolds new conceptions of pieces composed hundreds of years ago, simply because this fact exists. Since no living person has experienced any of this music in its original context means that even playing it comes with a great responsibility of criticism. This is not to say that formalist/structuralist theoretical analysis is going to necessarily uncover any "correct" performance technique, but at the very least, I think, a performer should understand music at a level where they can articulate a good reason for its performance (either in formal language or in musical language). As much as I would like to dismiss much of the music of this era as lacking current relevance, that's simply not true in every cultural circumstance, and far too broad a generalization anyway.

In contemporary music, this question of the authoritative listener falls again to the question of the front presentational space and the back creational space. Cognitive spaces for both conception and performance are separate spaces with ambiguous limits and have a lack of necessity for explication. The back area of cognition is virtually inaccessible to those who are not individuals who create music, and dismissal of the work that exists there is always done without a full knowledge of the process (again, it would take the transmission of the creator's total consciousness to meet this requirement). The world of the composer, in other words, is the initial world of the work, inaccessible in toto in the way the human mind is inaccessible and unwilling to easily give of its secrets and motives since these are possibly not even important to the composer. To know musical work in its totality is to know it in each way it is knowable, including the situation of the composer. History, however, is always incomplete and perpetually tenuous and liminal, useful only in as much as we can make it so to reform our own human works and build understanding of the world around us. This, again, is manifest as the cognitive back area, remaining mystified as long as the conditions are left uncovered. Our incomplete knowledge of all transmitted signals (because of the impossibility of intention) inherently makes listeners into interpreters. In perfect signals, knowing is exacted and called "copying," something that we can easily see is not the reality of the listening process because it would homogenize results. Those who purport full understanding of a musical signal are likely giving themselves a status of copyist, not analyst, en route to referring to themselves as extender, the role of the heroic trailblazer inside of their uncritical knowledge and ultimately the perpetuation of their own slavery to other work deemed heroic and beyond reproach.

Wholesale dismissal, then, becomes problematic because of the interpretive quality of music (or language, or transmission of any kind when the sender is not the receiver in ideal conditions, hence, where there is no distortion possible). The dismissal of music can also appear in variously severe ways, three of which I will identify (there are likely more). The first is this wholesale dismissal of music as "not music," the second, dismissal of the production and distribution systems of music, and third, the dismissal as not applicable to one's individual self. Each of these happens in musical dialog, in part, because of imbalances of perceived musical or personal discursive strength, and each can serve to torment or enlighten others. Dismissal can then proceed as these different functions, a process of gaining or rebuking authority, and creates a space, if the participants are articulate enough of criticism or vapid enough to illuminate ignorance, for the sharing of musical and aesthetic information.

The first and strongest type, wholesale dismissal, serves to undermine every step of the production/distribution/listening continuum, judging the work put into the music as not musical work. In this way, the people who made it were wrong in the first place, and don't understand how music is supposed to function in whichever context it is being judged. This means that the labor that made the music, the experiences leading to it, the confidence of the industrial support of the music makers, and anyone who would find it appealing as musical work are on the wrong side of the judgment of the critic.

In Western "classical" music, this is commonly applied to two opposite poles of music making, that which lacks organization, and that which employs total organization. What's interesting about these two extremes getting the same treatment for opposite methods is that the person dismissing these two types of music usually employs the same tactic: claiming insider authority to say that they know every element of the music, usually through experience or assumptions. In the case of music which lacks organization, it is often stated as "anyone could do this." Indeterminate music commonly suffers this charge, since, literally anyone could make it if only they had the tools, understanding of the stylistic goals, the desire to make it, financial support, and an audience to do it for. Highly organized music tends to undergo the same scrutiny, with someone dismissing it because all you need to make it is an understanding of the organizational methods, the aesthetic aims of the end result, the desire to make it, financial support, and a receptive audience.

Educated musicians tend to think that the point of music is the process of creating it, how you become novel and distinguished as a composer, or what performative challenges you can present (these things, of course, must remain a form of mystification for the audience to create interest). This generalization all too often lacks exactly what this list lacks: the aesthetic understanding and contextual history needed to frame musical work in its environment and establish meaning. Again, music presents itself as particular, meaning it has relationships to other materials and ideas, and cannot, in my view, remain autonomous, although its aesthetic qualities can certainly work toward autonomy. Were it entirely autonomous, it would cease to have a use-value, because it would have no ability to create aesthetic engagement with the intellectual work of the listener (which, if I follow that logic, would make it invisible music). It is a fundamental flaw to think that musical work happens in a total vacuum, no matter how detached it can ultimately appear. What is more important to recognize here is that it can be autonomous of any individual material or idea in existence, but not all of them.

Of course, this same wholesale dismissal can be employed against popular music, rejecting the entire process of conception, composition, performance, or distribution processes of the popular music industrial mechanism. As a commercial product from the start, all it takes to give life to pop music is an understanding of mass appeal (individual taste on a generalized scale), the capital to enlist experts in the know and performers that can execute these idioms, organization of all of the laborers, and an understanding of the distribution system for that particular genre. Clearly work is being done here. Its aesthetic component, however, is transposed into appeal, changing the nature of its work from the realm of intellectual use into one of exchange. Theodor Adorno's conception of this is as the creation of an already fetishized product, that is, the making of an exchange value masquerading as a cultural fetish. This, of course, has a few logical consequences for bourgeois culture, its renewal, and its proliferation. The narrative here was spoken of earlier, but in ways that addresses this as a structure, although content itself is still important (if only less important than that structure).

The reason why both structure and content of the cultural institution of music both matter is that aesthetics can be employed as subset of appeal. These divergent terms already form a possible complementary function, where the former is about active perception of a beautiful object (originally from the Greek aisthesthai, beauty is added to its sense in 18th century German) and the latter relates to the passive objective conveyance of an idea (from the Latin appellare). Despite being created out of a sense of mass appeal, a musical object can still carry beauty with it, but does not necessarily. Because of this, the wholesale dismissal of commercial music is not necessarily a rejection to be made out of aesthetic vapidness, but it does still present itself as problematic along the lines of the realistic versus the ideal spheres. Ideally, conflations of intellectual work and exchange value wouldn't exist in music that comes out of the realm of freedom (reflexively stated, the place where idealism is put into action), but with the global domination of the capitalist mode of production, the two realms form a dialectic with one another, despite any idealistic formation. The wholesale dismissal of either entirely aesthetic or commercial music then creates itself into a dismissal of some mixture of both, precluding an absolutist conception or ethic based on participation in either mode of production.

Adorno's rejection of any and all commercial music existed in a time where there were alternatives. First, bourgeois musical culture had found itself as a function of the "greater good," one that could escape the realm of economic ruin through the subscriptions and philanthropies of industrial giants who could affix their name to bourgeois educational music, symphonic music that tacitly endorses itself as the "logical" greatest achievement of artistic expression (see Lawrence Levine's Highbrow/Lowbrow). Second, driven musicians of the so-called "New Objectivity" who tried to make music into a vehicle for social upheaval, like Kurt Weill, created works that subverted this type of pageantry in their own settings, but did not have industrialists bankrolling their performance, which detracted (and detracts) from their accessibility. The world that we exist in barely has reminiscences of either movement, having been fully conquered by the realm of necessity. What we currently have for a social situation of music is a pervasive necessity, a realm of freedom entirely subjugated to the realm of necessity.

There is very little music which can operate freely, but there is also no necessity that can entirely eliminate the possibility of freedom. Pop songs still do genuine musical work; nothing can eradicate, fully, the sense of true freedom from music, for two reasons. First, because of the mystification of the creation process, and the need for even minute variation in the most mundane of genres, musical work will exert free tendencies and ultimately land on real musically free production, intentionally or not. Second, there is no place left to find music produced entirely in the realm of freedom because of the necessities of distribution; even the works that exert the greatest amount of freedom are still in the realm of necessity when it comes to being able to consume them. For instance, distribution models immediately grant levels of engagement with levels of material support. No artist, no matter how noble, can continue their work without participating in capitalist distribution. Ideals against bourgeois ideology, at this point, are dormant fantasies, and create an opposition that manifests as the isolation of non-bourgeois ideology, as it has been so effective at isolating individuals who do not subscribe to it. Modes outside of bourgeois distribution models are currently impossible to imagine; fungibility of conformity moves outward from musical work in production and consumption. The artist who could escape necessity and make free music must conform to some standard of bourgeois success outside of their music.

The listener will gravitate to any musical work that they self-identify with, regardless of its industrial character, because some music from the popular industrial system will have some valid work to offer as a token of self-identification, even if it exists in a milieu of aesthetic vapidity. Again, in the consumerist mode of appeal, aesthetics may not even be attached to musical work. The tokens of musical work that still exist in this system are still necessary for social engagement, especially as the freedom of music becomes rarer. Better yet, the systems of free musical work that did exist in the early twentieth century are not only (going) extinct, but have caused the separation of the uncritically minded from the ideas that would counter the ideological deluge that they exist in. Adorno's attacks on "light music" show a dismissal on grounds that were newly gained by the culture industry; today, these lines are not even drawn, because the culture industry is the only thing accessible to the average person and anything outside of it causes scrutiny and repudiation. Marking off these sectors of musical work as only supportive of bourgeois ideology is itself anti-dialectical over a window of time, as the discourse needs the involvement of new minds, i.e. it needs its own rejuvenation system counter to the ruling ideology. By dismissing commercially produced music entirely, we also inherit the side-effect of dismissing a way to generate discourse and create a force of criticism inside of bourgeois culture and begin to loosen its contradictions. Dismissal on grounds of industrial origin, then, cannot be followed as an ideology, simply because our reality no longer presents this option as viable.

Personal sacrifice of something that can be beautiful or enriching because of the realm of necessity from which it comes seems like an untenable and distasteful position, but points out that any involvement in it constitutes supporting the regeneration of the bourgeois cultural institution. One would necessarily need to become a reactionary or stop participating in musical consumption by looking backward for music that cannot support the bourgeois ideology or abandon musical consumption altogether. Either way, these ideas would not possibly enter into the dialog of the overwhelming majority of consumers in the first place. Again, with the unjust state in which we find our world's order, pedagogic dialog is simply too important to warrant isolation from large swaths of the world's cultural formations, if only because this could create a lack of ability to connect with people who know not which realm they operate in or which "natural" parts of their life were forged by humans to create oppressive ideologies. Theorizing changes in the mode of production starting from musical-economics is severe enough that it warrants this simple reminder: the reordering of all facets of life to be more humane, just, and thoughtful would have effects that ultimately reshape this mechanism in a way that will present fewer contradictions and difficulties. It has not been determined that music can be a leading indicator of social change, even when presented as overtly political work.

Any wholesale dismissal of music (at any level) should be suspect of not having critical engagement behind it, unless it reaches that level of critique that involves the entirety of our historical moment. My guess is that there is not a single musical work in existence that makes it worth going fully into that mode of protest, certainly not if it is commercially constructed. On the other hand, I really dislike what Jay-Z's Holy Grail means about our state of production and ideology formation. But as stated above, it was made with some actual work, however ineffective and offensively ill-conceived that work was. To blame the song for the problems of world-historical modes of production is a bit too far, and having critically engaged with it, my dismissal does not constitute wholesale dismissal, as I still grant that it is, indeed, music. Had I decided that it is not worthy of being called music, then it constitute wholesale dismissal, and our dialog would have taken a different tone entirely.

Were I to say "this song is not even music," what would be aim, in dialog with you, the reader? I have offered some analysis that is, as a professor of mine likes to call it, "a gentlemanly shiv" to an entire industry, and am currently mounting an attack on individuals who are incapable of using their critical faculties to engage with music. By dragging down the productive process of music to the level of meaningless toil instead of critically engaging, I would be saying that I do not recognize the producers' having even done their jobs in creating music, and labeling them as failures. Clearly, this type of dismissal serves to show my conceptions of music as superior to whomever I dismiss. But the producers are not the only ones whom I am judging.

My analysis of this song almost certainly varies from the mass reception of the song (or else it would not be on the radio). It is clearly being supported, however organically through the endorsement of the public or artificially through a marketing push (or, as I often dream, the tastemakers of the media industry completely misreading or misrepresenting the tastes of the public). If you, the reader, as a musical consumer, enjoy the song and self-identify it as in some way reflective of who you are or what you want, then you have, to some extent, also been dismissed by me. My conception and analysis of music, in my view, would be stronger than yours, at least in this case, and I will have exerted that strength. Of course, a rebuttal, real or imagined may form, but if I exert enough strength, and garner enough musical authority, there's a possibility that the conflict ends in your conceit, having more or less violently reformed your ideology. This could be for any conceivable reason in the course of our relationship, our dialog, our interaction.

Further, it does not matter how substantive my dismissal and attack are, because my authority is only based on the appearance of strength, that is, the signs that I use in our dialog to say what I know. The only way I could have brought together a reasonable amount of strength is by criticism and/or knowing the subject, and enough context to sound strong. It is likely that the more detailed my understanding of the music appears, including its technical details (or empirical trivia), it will seem as though I have a greater understanding of the back-stage in which the music was forged. If that amounts to me claiming that there is no possible way that this comes into something called music, because the work that built it was amusical, then it is an artifact made of something else, an illogical conception, perhaps. But, the contradiction here within my wholesale dismissal is inversional: if I do have musical authority, I'd have to either be wildly over-dramatizing the failures in the process, or, I'd be claiming to have so much musical authority that I also have amusical authority (or illogical conception authority), authority that transcends what I claim to know and branches out into something that I only know the opposite of. I'd venture as far to say that it is highly unlikely that I am so specialized in musical knowledge that my musical knowledge automatically grants me authority in charlatanry, which is more likely not based on knowledge of music, but simply on wider critical abilities.

It is even more interesting to look at this question with a non-musician leveling the charge of "that's not even music." The claim here is that even someone who does not have technical knowledge of what they are listening to can (although their labor specialization is in another field) identify musical work as charlatanry. This awkward construction is discursively impenetrable, proscribing critical engagement and probably relating more to the particulars of the discourse as much as an actual judgment of musical elements. Granted, there are people who dismiss whole genres of music based on an inability to endure certain sounds that are hallmarks of those genres (hip-hop and metal come to mind), and they cannot be asked to engage critically with the particular musical elements. Of course, sound is merely sound at some point, and the irritations caused by sounds are acculturated, meaning that their applicability as musical elements are simply part of the genre-complex the musical work is being done. Interestingly, the timbral and lyrical qualities are foremost in this difficulty, at least from my experience. Other sonic qualities seem to have little impact, or are, at least, haphazard.

A common place for this discursive dismissal to take place is in the family, when a younger generation adopts seemingly radical music to self-identify with. The process of defining one's musical self depends on such a great deal of factors, and I cannot do much more than relay my own conception of my formation to help construct it and will not do so here. However, it's important to point out that the rebuke of musical choice at an early age creates a conflict with authority on the same level of any other drive for pleasure. Music can be particularly dismaying in this fashion, since a young person may not be able to understand why they identify with the music they do. The authority of the parent in dismissing music that appears radical to them is part of a complex of acculturating the submission to authority or defiance of it. Conflict over music can be, however thinly veiled, a conflict over identity, a conflict over choice and aspiration. The archetypal teenager who responds to a parent who disparages their musical identity by saying "you don't know me," is a trope that everyone knows, but we probably afford little thought to how real the sentiment is.

Disparaging or dismissing the music that someone loves fractures their sense of identity, and marks off a part of them that cannot, through any means, be communicated to a particular person because they are unwilling to engage. Inside of a relationship (in any sense), it stops people from being able to express themselves and be known in whole, and the brute force of the assertion likely does not stay isolated as "you don't know a part of me," but creates conditions that are more like the violent suppression of individuality that we would expect from an authoritarian discourse. Spiraling outward from discourse, musical identification can affect the ways we see people, offer insight into their judgment, and builds a more holistic view of a person. If we are not offered social interaction with our musical self, we are being denied freedom to identify and share ourselves. This leads to a decrease in the ability to know each other, with our discourses lacking a conduit for certain ideas or beliefs that would be created by common identification. As we saw before, one member of the discourse can appear to have enough strength to overpower the other, whether it is a just authority or not; the same is true of commonality and sharing identification through musical means, as self-identification of music is probably one of the most individualized aspects of our culture, due to music's lack of formal communication and the upholding of musical mystery as personal freedom.

As I mentioned above, wholesale dismissal is not the only form of dismissal that happens in musical discourse, and dismissal can happen in forms of partial acknowledgement, which tend to open the ability for sharing musical conceptions. They are not irreducibly vile in the same way that wholesale dismissal is, because they always allow for a certain amount of discourse. Of course, their ability to transpose into broken discourses always exists, but the exchange of musical knowledge is not tarnished by the fact that they can be reinterpreted as negative discourse. The fact that people can have a reasoned exchange of musical ideas matters, because it is the only thing that exists as retaliation against (bourgeois) musical ideologies, and only if done responsibly. What little work can be done in these discourses is important, offering people, possibly not in real-time conversation, contrasting views that allows them to access other interpretations, instead of meaninglessly nodding along to an ideology they do not understand.

Discourse about musical work is, itself, musical work. There is no way to create music in an autonomous environment where social relations are invalid. Support for musical work is, undeniably, the only thing that keeps musical work possible. This is done by all listeners in their discourses, self-identification, and our material transactions that relate to music. To think that music is an isolated area where our conceptions are free to fall however they may, that we take what we are given and make the best of it, induces a lack of criticism that cannot sustain music in any reasonable way. If we cannot talk about music in an honest way, elucidating meanings and explaining histories personal and general, then we relent to ideology. The cards are stacked against us, because the culture industry is in full control and unrelenting. Interrupting that machine, in honest, small, interpersonal dialog is one of the few things that we have access to on a daily basis. Creating an environment where music functions with our lives, not as a hidden compartment within it to hide ourselves, constitutes real musical freedom, and freedom for us to pursue meanings that could not be found otherwise. Not understanding or being able to communicate our musical lives leads to musical isolation that looks the same as philosophical isolation, religious isolation, or physical isolation, because they are all ways of organizing our identity. Musical discourse, intimate or cursory, tells as much about us as any other self-identified feature, and the way we carry ourselves in the musical world is simply another facet of how we carry ourselves in general.

On forgiveness:

A friend asked me to write an introduction of my short poetry collection Forgiveness: Instructions on Formalizing Rational Love with the method I used to write the poetry:

My will wasn't interested in your kinds of structures, so they haphazardly appeared, I stripped extra items out of their leaky homes, and built habitats that undermine their habitus. The vault opened a torrent inside words themselves, opening around charred and fixed stone and reading ancient emissions until the machine’s will replaced mine, and then I created its will. Birds fell from the sky and I reported it, contorted it. Whether whomever knows, it matters less than you would think. Neither punish every route nor ignore your own. Likely, these things were and I moved around what was known. Prior to knowing, one confused mention along the way to digression unfolded completely and here we are. The recipe was straight forward: the result is straightforward.