The Lights All Around Me Glow and Music Takes Me

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Will Lloyd:

This scene – a young person bored, with attention and time to spare, looking for music beyond the obvious and finding that music quite unexpectedly, then devouring it alone and in an almost embarrassingly profound way disappearing into that music and into the vision of the artist who created it – this scene no longer really exists.

…Spotify’s exponential growth and powerful machine-learning algorithms have changed the way music is consumed. Playlists, rather than albums are king; music is tailored to mood: chill, romance, focus; or to activity: party, workout, sleep. Pelly argues that this change has made music less diverse, less interesting and more like elevator muzak. Listening to music is not an aesthetic experience in itself (think Morrissey listening to Horses back in 1975) but something pre-programmed, inoffensive, ambient; an accompaniment to other activities. Streaming services have made entertainment feel like another form of work, another task, like answering emails, to be completed on a laptop or a smartphone.

Blockbuster movies, TV shows, and now music — I fear that before long, Mr. Lloyd will run out of predictable targets for his curmudgeonly rants. Judging by this trajectory, we can expect that by the time summer arrives, our critic will produce a column noting the signs of cultural decline in whatever fashions the kids are wearing these days.

DJ Nobody’s newest record was released last Friday. I downloaded it early that morning and took it with me on a 500-mile road trip. When I got home, I wrote to a music-loving friend and tipped her to listen to it. “Very nice, very sleepy,” she said. “How on earth did you stay awake while listening to this and driving?” True, it is a very mellow record, but nonetheless, it seems that any music that interests me acts as a stimulant on my brain. Even subdued, languid melodies can capture my attention and allow me to expatiate at length. I do most of my best thinking and writing while “high” on a new song. When I was probably three or four years old, my favorite song was Simon and Garfunkel’s “Cecilia.” I remember hearing it one day in the car and demanding that my mom play it again, as she tried to explain to me that she couldn’t make a radio station do that. Apparently I was already well-acquainted with the magic of rewinding cassette tapes to hear songs again. Once digital music brought the “repeat” option into existence, we had reached the pinnacle of technological achievement as far as I was concerned. I’ve been known to spend hours entranced by a song, sometimes discovering, to my surprise, that I listened to it more than a hundred times in a row without tiring of it. I understand some people snort Ritalin or Adderall to achieve that type of intense concentration and absorption; I seem to only need the right combination of melody and rhythm.

Anyway, I’ve been a fan of DJ Nobody for over a decade now. How did I discover him? By going to Last.fm one day and doing a search for artists similar to the Chemical Brothers. His song “Spin the Bright Sun Rose” came up and I was instantly enthralled. His collaboration with Niki Randa on Blank Blue: Western Water Music Vol. II was, amazingly, even better. I’m not sure, beyond some superficial similarities, how much his music resembles that of the Chemical Brothers, but I’m still grateful to whichever algorithm pointed me in that direction. Why would my love of his albums be more “real” if I had first heard a song on the radio instead of a streaming service? What is more “authentic” about picking up an album because of the cover art, as opposed to a “similar artist” recommendation? What does it even mean to say that this artist is “like” that one? What Procrustean violence there is in that common word! How many Janus-faced ambiguities there are in trying to meaningfully compare one “similar” song with another! How reductive, how insulting to imagine that there could ever be an algorithmic padlock so perfectly designed as to imprison us in our solipsism forever! Like a children’s game of Telephone, even a search for simple terms like “psychedelic indie rock” or “big beat electronica” can produce some unexpected results. What kind of, dare I say, narcissist thinks that his generation was the last one with the interiority or the technological means to truly appreciate music?

Descartes infamously thought that animals, lacking souls, could not feel pain or emotion, and dismissed their whimpers and cries as equivalent to the sproings and clangs of faulty machinery (his student, Malebranche, put theory into action by kicking a pregnant dog as a demonstration). I feel pity for these modern Cartesians who coldly dissect mere “popular” music into its constituent parts, finding no “soul” among its studio wizardry and formulaic songcraft. Well, ’twas ever thus, Sturgeon’s Law. There have always been hack performers and unsophisticated groundlings. Devoted listeners, like devoted readers, have always been a tiny minority. Fortunately, despite the failings of both artists and audiences, there is still an unquantifiable space where the magic effect of music is produced by some strange alchemy. The sense of certainty in being a doomsayer is comforting in its own perverse way, I suppose, but I prefer to make the effort to keep my ears open and be ready for surprises.

Noteworthies (47)

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Just a miniature edition of Noteworthies this time. I’m still recovering/getting caught up after a busy week of work and travel. However, I did want to recommend a couple of interesting interviews. First, a Five Books interview with Melissa Mohr on swearing, and then an interview with Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter on the fifteen-year anniversary of the publication of their book The Rebel Sell (published in the U.S. as Nation of Rebels.)

With Hope In Your Heart

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David Lynch:

Jurgen Klopp said before this game that if Liverpool had to fail, then they should at the very least “fail beautifully”. This was the footballing equivalent of having your cake and eating it: winning beautifully, doggedly, and when nobody gave them a chance.

Few would have thought this possible at full-time in Spain, even fewer when Mohamed Salah and Roberto Firmino were ruled out of the second leg. But Klopp did, and he is quite a persuasive character – as his players proved in, somehow, beating Barcelona 4-0 here. Doing so not only guaranteed them a Champions League final berth, but also a place in Anfield history. They are men behind its greatest ever European night.

Nights like this are why I love this sport, this club, and this manager. My God, what a game.

Deus Ex Machina

By in bread and circuses, religion No Comments

Ross Douthat:

I was less churlish after finishing Endgame’s immediate predecessor, Avengers: Infinity War, which had a rare weight among Marvel movies because alone among them it let its caped and armored heroes fail, and even saw many of them die. But that failure, the failure to stop the semi-genocidal Thanos (Josh Brolin, but purple) from wiping out half the population of the universe, was always destined to be temporary, and here we are back again for an Endgame in which the remaining superheroes will inevitably find a way to reverse the villain’s victory.

I agree. Guarantees of inevitable victory and miraculous resurrection only cheapen the experience. Pathos dwells in the particular, the irreplaceable, the dissolution of individual perspective within the flow of time. Wait, are we talking about movies, or…?

For a Vision of the Night, Turn Off the Light

By in books, foolosophy 2 Comments

Evan Selinger:

And that’s the problem. Smith’s overly precious desire not to be identified with what’s trendy (or trending) but with what’s ornamental gets in the way of his writing a book that most of us can find illuminating.

I fail to see the point of reviews which say little more than, “I wish the author had written a different book.” Selinger drums his fingers impatiently throughout his review of Irrationality: A History of the Dark Side of Reason, waiting for Smith to get down to the serious business of illuminating current events and providing solutions to “the issues of our time.” He starts off by wondering why the behavioral sciences and cognitive biases are largely ignored here, and later complains that “Smith simply isn’t interested in concretely sullying his hands, as it were, by trying, for instance, to improve legal or corporate policies, or enhance educational curricula, pivot politics, or resolve interpersonal conflict. Nor is he interested in redressing thought distortions that make for dangerous-for-us-all decisions.” I couldn’t help but be reminded of one of the most stupidly, proudly philistine things I’d ever read on the web, where one of the LessWrong rationalists suggested that we replace philosophy classes — a “diseased tradition” focused on “old dead guys who didn’t know the slightest bit of 20th century science” — with the study of mathematical logic, heuristics and biases, probability theory, and Bayesian rationality. (As it happens, Smith did briefly address that species of delusion in the book, suggesting that the rationalist community would have done better to read Plutarch and Cicero.) I’m not sure where the dividing line is between a healthy desire to avoid the trendy and trending and an “overly precious” one, but I suppose I’m prepared to err on the side of being a hothouse flower.

Sometimes, when writing a post, a subject’s name triggers a faint memory, and I’ll go looking through my archives to see where it comes from. In Selinger’s case, it was precisely six years ago that I found him jumping to strange conclusions after seeing a Facebook ad. I suggested that perhaps David Hume, along with a wider perspective, could have helped him avoid such logical pratfalls. I think I see a theme developing here!

It Is Not Meet That Every Nice Offense Should Bear His Comment

By in art, bread and circuses, the statusphere No Comments

Will Lloyd:

Romain Rolland once complained that ‘there is too much music in Germany.’ Today there are too many television critics in the world. Some of the finest writers of multiple generations spend most of their writing lives recapping last night’s television. Is any of it really criticism, or are thousands of words agonizing over, say, Don Draper, adding up to anything more than the digital equivalent of chip wrapping?

…Imagine living in a world where Mrs Dalloway and Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon exist and thinking that Game of Thrones (which is entertaining, don’t get me wrong) is a work of art. Then imagine making a career out of typing up little takes about it. And then imagine this defining your career as a critic!

Critics who only write about shallow subjects will only produce shallow writing. How television became the most critically examined art form of our century remains a baffling mystery.

Even worse, imagine being an enlightened critic who has scaled the heights of True Art and nonetheless is compelled to hawk his bloggy wares in the marketplace like any other word-merchant, forced to take his cues from whatever the fishwives are yakking about today! Is there no dignity? Is there no honor? Ah, fie, fie upon’t.

I’ve never watched Game of Thrones. However, in one of those strange twists of fate, I have seen almost all of the Marvel movies in the last few months. I didn’t plan this. No, seriously, I swear on my sainted grandmother, last December, I suggested to the Lady of the House that maybe it would be fun to read Shakespeare together. Out loud, on winter evenings, sitting around the fire, and all that. Somehow — and I’m not clear on the precise details — that project morphed into me reading Shakespeare and us watching the MCU productions together. (Cue Henry Higgins singing, “But let a woman in your life…”)

I kid, I kid. For me, popcorn entertainment falls under what the Stoics called “preferred indifferents.” It’s not something I would normally seek out, but it’s not something I’ll make a pretentious spectacle of refusing, either (in this case, when the movies are available for rental at the library we’re already patronizing, sure, why not). I have little patience with those who stack the deck by assembling a greatest-hits compilation of artworks from the previous few thousand years, comparing it to the last few years of pop culture, and sniffing about what a tragedy it is that they should have been born in such a pigsty of an age. I’m of the more sanguine opinion that there is uplifting and ennobling work to be found in many surprising places if you work hard enough to look for it. Profound conversations about perennial themes of human nature can sprout from humble origins, like Thanos in Avengers: Infinity War, willing to sacrifice love to his “ends justify the means” vision of a grateful universe in “balance” under his enlightened oversight. Some of the Marvel movies were indeed terrible, but then again, some of Shakespeare’s work doesn’t recommend itself for re-reading either. That’s not an endorsement of relativism in aesthetic judgment, of course, just an assertion that your antiquarian taste alone won’t get you into heaven.

When we last left Mr. Lloyd, he was connecting tendentious dots to claim that Marvel movies were somehow slightly responsible for the election of Donald Trump. It may be ad hominem, but I can’t help but wonder sometimes: when so many people like this come across as bitter, sour, old cranks, why am I supposed to be motivated to contemplate the things they insist I should? Whining and complaining is repulsive. Okay, so you spend your time marinating in the most sublime art ever produced. Is it because of or despite that that you appear to be a stuffy, humorless scold? I understand from reading this that Mrs. Dalloway and Barry Lyndon are the sorts of books and movies I should be enjoying if I want to be thought well of by curmudgeonly critics, but if there are good reasons for doing so, he couldn’t be bothered to elaborate here. All that does is encourage the all-too-common scourge of signaling. Like CliffsNotes for social climbers, these dyspeptic rants provide cues without context. It would be far better to write a paean to the art you love rather than moaning that other people are enjoying the wrong things, but it turns out that even our moral betters are prone to finding fault rather than providing a better example. I find that one of the most tedious characteristics of conservatives, both political and literary: too much darkness-cursing, not enough candle-lighting. It’s easy to get the impression that they’re not lamenting wasted intellectual and imaginative potential so much as the disappearance of a cultural caste system that favored them.

A Cage In Search of a Bird

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Gabriel Schoenfeld:

In any event, given that Deneen contends that liberal democracy is already a form of despotism, he is singularly ill-equipped to draw distinctions between political movements that support freedom and those that would trample on it should they ever come to power. In this respect, as in others, Deneen is in alarming congruence with the leftist intellectuals of the Cold War era, pointed to by Ravel, for whom “the faults of free societies are so magnified that freedom appears to mask a totalitarian reality.” Indeed, Deneen echoes no one so much as Herbert Marcuse, the quasi-Marxist philosopher of the Frankfurt School, whose contempt for the “false” freedoms offered by liberal democracy provided inspiration to the New Left of the 1960s and whose doleful influence lingers to this day.

Like Deneen, Marcuse regards liberalism as a mask for tyranny. What Deneen calls “liberalocratic despotism,” Marcuse calls a society of “total administration” and “totalitarian democracy.” In his 1965 essay “Repressive Tolerance,” Marcuse insists—in language which Deneen closely maps—that the promises of liberalism are actually camouflage for social control: “What is proclaimed and practiced as tolerance today, is in many of its most effective manifestations serving the cause of oppression.” To Deneen, the pernicious promises of liberalism are also camouflaged: Liberalism, he writes, is “a pervasive invisible ideology” that “surreptitiously” remakes the world in its despotic image.

Thank goodness someone’s finally calling it for what it is. I read Deneen’s book (and Ryszard Legutko’s) last year and wasn’t much impressed. (Neither was Deirdre McCloskey.) I was wondering when the trendy intellectual infatuation with their brand of illiberalism was going to finally wear off. Now I’m just kicking myself for not seeing the obvious parallel to Marcuse earlier.

Wronging the Ancientry

By in foolosophy 2 Comments

Theodore Dalrymple:

But what made him a truly tragic figure was not his physical handicap (of a type that many – perhaps most – of us will experience if we live long enough) but his insistence on dressing like an adolescent in jeans, a flowered short and basketball shoes, with a single, large gold earring and a Keith Richards coiffure circa 1970, except for its greyness.

Here was a man who had not (as Mr Blair would no doubt have put it) moved on. He was caught in adolescence as flies were once caught in amber. And this was a tragedy not only for him as an individual but, on the assumption that he was far from alone but rather representative of a social trend, for society as a whole: for as everyone knows, having once been adolescent themselves, adolescence is a time of extreme bad taste and what might be called conformist rebellion, or rebellious conformity. It was a tragedy for him as an individual because it made him dream an impossible but also worthless dream; it was a tragedy for society because it made immaturity the highest good.

When I was in my early twenties, I had long hair that reached below my shoulder blades, which I often wore in a ponytail extending out through the back of a baseball-style cap. I preferred wearing XL shirts rather than the mediums which would have fit me. And as silly as it looks to me now, I did favor worn, tattered jeans. To be fair, I worked in my family’s newspaper distributorship, where most of the non-office work was the type to get your hands and clothes dirty. While we weren’t “working-class” (assuming such terms haven’t long-since lost whatever usefulness they once had), we simply rarely had occasion to go around in business casual.

I remember one day, walking out of a mall, where I had been collecting payment from one of our client stores. (Yes, this was before electronic billing, back when malls still had bookstores which sold newspapers.) There were a couple of old men perched on one of the benches outside the entrance. As I walked past, one said to the other, in a stage whisper (or perhaps they were both just hard of hearing), “The youth of today!” I thought I could hear their neck tendons creaking as they shook their heads disapprovingly. For a moment, I wondered if it wouldn’t be funny if I walked over and politely explained to them that, yes, while I may look shocking to their sensibilities, I was nonetheless working a full-time job while helping to raise my girlfriend’s three-year-old son, and isn’t that sort of responsibility what’s really important? I didn’t, of course; I just drove off and left them to their bitter reminiscences.

Recently, we were in a country club for a dinner and meeting, where the guest speaker was my former philosophy professor. One thing I noticed, because of its incongruity, was how many people, the men in particular, were wearing running shoes with their jackets and slacks. Judging by my own father’s experience with fallen arches causing swollen ankles, I assume this reflects the need for ease of mobility. When walking is difficult enough due to aching, arthritic joints, why compound the misery by forcing your feet into uncomfortable dress shoes for vain appearance’s sake?

While it may be true that society collectively promotes and rewards immaturity, it nonetheless doesn’t follow that one can diagnose Peter Pan-syndrome at a mere glance. Whenever Dalrymple seems to lack inspiration for an essay, he resorts to curmudgeonly ranting about how we’re all going to hell in a handbasket because grown men wear jeans and tattoos aren’t just for sailors and prison inmates anymore. It’s an unfortunate reminder that being shallow is hardly exclusive to youth.

Nor Awkward Claim Picked From the Wormholes of Long-Vanished Days

By in books, history, the geist of the zeit No Comments

Of course I knew what to expect when I picked up a copy of Stephen Greenblatt’s Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics. Still, though, there are times when I feel like turning around to tell Greenblatt that it’s hard to enjoy the book with him leaning over my shoulder, breathing on my neck, trying to make sure that I don’t miss any of the unsubtle parallels he draws. I mean, really — Jack Cade, in capturing Lord Saye, “has in his hands the realm’s highest fiscal officer, the emblem of the swamp that he has pledged to drain”? “He promises to make England great again”? Countless other examples, without being quite so on-the-nose, are still framed in unambiguous ways, as if we can’t be left to draw our own conclusions. Much of the book, simply by virtue of centering on  Shakespeare’s plays, is enjoyable enough to read — that is, when the reader is allowed to forget for a moment that THERE’S A RELEVANT LESSON TO LEARN HERE.

As it happens, I’ve added Shakespeare to my book-juggling routine these last few months, trying to read a scene here, a scene there, a sonnet before bed, etc. One of the many enjoyable things about doing so is that it’s a break from the incessant cicada-drone of omnipresent, up-to-the-millisecond media and its infatuation with the Eternal Now. At the risk of making it sound like just another utilitarian, productivity-enhancing “hack,” it’s good to spend some time considering the differences between, say, Elizabethan England and our own time. Granted, there are constant themes in human nature and history which we can’t help but notice. But we have to be careful not to force history onto the Procrustean bed of our fleeting obsessions, lest we end up finding social media in ancient civilizations, or Silicon Valley start-ups in colonial America.

Bookshelves

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We devoted readers love to talk about our books, but let’s take a moment to appreciate the supporting cast — the bookshelves themselves. I’ve only recently graduated from bookshelf-beggar to bookshelf-chooser. That’s not to say I’ve suddenly acquired taste and discernment, of course, just that I’m no longer dependent upon particle-board shelves from big-box stores. The Lady of the House keeps a Facebook alert for bookshelves for sale within the area, and I’ve found a few really nice ones in the last couple years. I just got this one last week for fifty dollars. Over six feet tall, and made of real wood, even! Look at all that empty space. Doesn’t the potential of it just warm your heart? How many books that I have yet to discover will eventually come to roost there?

It was almost exactly two years ago that I got this other one. (It’s long-since filled.) I boasted to a co-worker that it only cost me twenty dollars. Maybe this will become a spring ritual of mine? The air is warming, the earth is coming back to life, people are cleaning out their houses, and library sales are blossoming again. What better way to celebrate than by getting a new bookshelf?

 

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