What role theory can or should play in conceptualising musical style and its change over time (or 'diachronically') has been a major theme in writing on method in music historiography for quite some time. Among the many others, heavyweights of mainstream musicology Dahlhaus and Treitler went there in the eighties, and I can’t help but wonder what they would have had to say about writer on music par excellence Simon Reynolds’s notion of a ‘hardcore continuum’ and the encouragingly lively but often exasperating debate over its existence, relevance and current status. ‘The nuum’ to its friends, it purports to describe a more or less linear if dialectical continuity through various styles of UK dance music including, in order of appearance, hardcore rave, jungle, 2-step garage (at which point Reynolds named the nuum), grime and dubstep. The concept makes a lot of sense, particularly as a body of related work and ‘scenes’ (‘macroscene’?) and it very much deserves to stay, but some of the terms on which it is discussed would certainly have raised the eyebrows of the above-mentioned, fairly venerable musicologists. Because, as some of its proponents would have you believe, the nuum is more than (at the end of the day) a certain assemblage of certain interrelated scenes, institutions and events and a certain assemblage of certain tracks with certain family resemblances, all assembled according to certain parameters and linked in a certain diachronic narrative thread by a certain subjective mind in the pursuit of historicised knowledge, but actually an ‘empirically verifiable’ ‘fact’, and even an ‘objectively existent entity’ (00:39-00:43).
I’d say the hardcore continuum can no more constitute an ‘objectively existent entity’ than ‘the Renaissance’ or ‘Romantic music’ (a much, older, bigger, more powerful continuum in its time) can. But ultimately that’s the nominalist (“categories of particulars are constructs: artificial, arbitrary, and practical, valued for their usefulness in the management of data”*) versus realist (“particulars are grouped together because of properties held in common, and general terms derive their meanings from the real features of the objects to which they refer – for the realist, the common features of particulars by which they are set off in categories are independently “true” and are to be discovered”) debate. I personally believe that the nuum, since its data set is so broad and complex, is best expressed in nominalist terms, but as it’s plain to hear in his Fact talk, Reynolds is clearly a realist, and that’s fine as far as it goes. But the danger of this sort of realism is that it’s the gateway drug to essentialism, in which “works are no longer [merely] particulars that share certain properties; they are individual embodiments of a single essence” - and some of the language that the nuum’s proponents have dressed it up in is at times decidedly essentialist, here at 01:17:40 - 01:18:54 for example, and with that sometimes bizarrely organicist.
Unless you've already got it, the reason behind these pictures from, ahem, epic space opera Dune will become clear if you bear with me.
I’ve come to believe that, apart from in a few specific instances (in particular kinds of feminism and other minority studies, for example), children should be inoculated against essentialist thought from an early age with “Say No To Essentialism” campaigns. Because it plays down the difference, independence and complexity of things by trusting in some hypothetical underlying continuity, it distorts perspectives, it’s reductive, prescriptive and restrictive, it’s ideological, it feels it can predict things and in so doing makes an ‘ass’ out of ‘u’ and ‘me’, and it’s one of the pollutant-spewing engines of racism, sexism, homophobia etc. The nominalist says that all women are different, and that ‘woman’ is just a practical term useful to (though suspiciously required by) the society we live in, while the essentialist, like some dick who gives you that horrible sinking feeling when you realise what you’d invited to the party, says ‘nah, deep down women are all the same, they all spend too much money on shoes! Am I right or what lads?’
Besides which, in formulating the nuum in these realist terms, Reynolds (well-meaning as he surely was), by providing a description and talking about it like it was a thing, inadvertently kick-started a canon: a dodgy, prescriptive/reductive, ideological value-judgment machine, in which there are winners and losers, and even the winners can be losers. It’s this canonical consequence, or resonance, of the nuum idea that led in part to frustration and raised temperatures in the nuum debates, both for those who believed in it (who were often disappointed or angry that new musicians weren’t living up to the rules of its canonical ‘essence’) and those resisting the idea (or the parameters of the canon). Calling the nuum an ‘objectively existent entity’ and then praising its excellence horribly exacerbates the unhealthier consequences of having a canon, and piling on the imperative for ‘progress’, as some have done, makes things still worse.
That's Brad Dourif on the right. Easy to forget he's in this.
This is where music criticism can begin to have a detrimental effect on popular musical aesthetics – on the ways in which music is perceived, received and produced. How many independent, innovative composers were dismissed and banished into obscurity because, when peered at through the ideological lens of the Classical Music Canon, the lack of certain requirements in their music reduced them to a poor, unprogressive version of Beethoven or Brahms (Chopin, too stylised, too Polish, too effeminate, nearly could have been one)? What of the music that the UK Hardcore Continuum’s disciples deem, in the same way, to be ‘bad’ or simply not good enough? (I’ll consider the music of Joker, Zomby, Starkey, Rustie, Moby etc, the ‘mallet to a mountain range’, here sometime soon).
Dan Hancox, in response to k-punk illustrates the shortcomings of excessive theorising (and by extension those of essentialising canons) beautifully by using the analogy of the Procrustean bed. Another beautiful analogy describing the ideal use and role for theory is from Reynolds, who at the start of his Fact talk put it absolutely perfectly: ‘Theory is the spice of critical life’. A teaspoonful of cinnamon in the apple pie, a pinch of jerk seasoning in the soup – a little bit of theory added accorded to taste gives dishes interest and flavour, turning them from swill into cuisine. Since watching Reynolds’s Fact talk, reading Hancox’s piece and attending a seminar on the hardcore continuum last week, these analogies have been ricocheting around the bonce. I was groping for a new one that would illustrate the benefits of theory in moderation but also warn of the dangers of its excessive use. Since the only commonly known danger of overdosing on cinnamon is a mildly annoying dry mouth, I turned to alcohol. To adapt Reynolds’s metaphor slightly, I’m going to imagine theory as the alcoholic spice of a night out in good company.
In a shot that screams 'Look, please pay attention, we've spent a hell of a lot of money on this', Kyle MacLachlan takes on Sting while Shakespearean actor (and star of 3 X-Men films, 4 Star Trek films and 179 episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation) Patrick Stewart looks on.
But even between strangers, a few pints promote an atmosphere of discussion, bonding and understanding. They get the mind going, raise confidence, refresh and satisfy the taste buds. Depending on how well you can hold your alcohol, though, things can soon start going rapidly downhill. Reality becomes strange and unmanageable as your stumbling hands and feet discover that things apparently aren’t where you thought they were or where they’re supposed to be: the real world doesn’t seem to make sense to you, though you may be able to ignore this and believe that it’s making more sense than ever, and this newfound 'clarity' can cause a proportional escalation in emotional state. People seem a lot nicer or a lot meaner than they were before or would be otherwise, and you feel you have to address this. You become over-confident, excitable and randy, so you shout and wave your arms around, drawing attention to yourself, but when you try and act on these new desires, it's awkward, difficult and embarrassing for those who aren't as drunk as you are. And despite all of this, you still think you and your actions are bloody amazing.
At college, you learn that critical theory and alcohol are quite similar in that they're both really great up to a point, but too much of either can turn good people into twats. Director David Lynch's own cut of Dune was three hours long - the scene above, though it was one of his favourites, was cut before general release.
Drunk on theory perhaps, but then another thought occurred to me. What if theory, as the spice of life, was actually the Spice from Frank Herbert’s series of Dune novels (and the film – 1984 and most certainly counting – and the obscure Sci-Fi channel TV series oddly staring a young James McAvoy), melange? In this analogy, theory is a psychotropic drug made out of the dung of colossal sandworms that live on the desert planet of Arrakis. A little bit of it in coffee tastes splendid and gives the eyes an attractive shade of azure. A valuable commodity and a sign of considerable wealth, it gives you heightened awareness, a longer life-span and the ability to predict the future. Prolonged exposure to the spice gives you the power to warp space and time with your mind alone, so that two incredibly distant points in space can become close enough together that an entire fleet of spaceships can pass through this fold in space-time without moving and thus travel through an enormous and complex universe with the greatest of ease, but the downside to this is that at this point of exposure you’ll die if you go without it, so you have to be kept permanently in an atmosphere of the spice in its gaseous form, which mutates your body until you look terrible, and, with a face like a giant pair of bollocks, you have to be carried around in an enormous canister by weird fellers with extreme speech impediments and bad dress sense.
The final resting place of theory: a hermetically sealed sarcophagus full of gaseous, psychotropic worm turd. No, I'm deadly serious.
Consider those two close analogies (theories themselves) of the consequences of excessive theory - recognisable, sense-making but naturally imperfect narratives with a merely analogical relationship to reality - to be 'empirically verifiable'. It could happen to you.
And if you haven't seen Dune yet, you really should.
*I'm quoting from Leo Treitler’s Music and the Historical Imagination, Chapter 4: ‘On Historical Criticism’ (1989). I’d recommend veterans of the nuum debates give this and the two subsequent chapters (‘The Present as History’ and ‘What Kind of Story is History?’) a look, as he shows that the idea of organically evolving musical continua is hardly new (to the point where eyes will widen considerably with déja vu) and clearly explains the bases for these conceptions of music history and why they’re to be discouraged.
I’d say the hardcore continuum can no more constitute an ‘objectively existent entity’ than ‘the Renaissance’ or ‘Romantic music’ (a much, older, bigger, more powerful continuum in its time) can. But ultimately that’s the nominalist (“categories of particulars are constructs: artificial, arbitrary, and practical, valued for their usefulness in the management of data”*) versus realist (“particulars are grouped together because of properties held in common, and general terms derive their meanings from the real features of the objects to which they refer – for the realist, the common features of particulars by which they are set off in categories are independently “true” and are to be discovered”) debate. I personally believe that the nuum, since its data set is so broad and complex, is best expressed in nominalist terms, but as it’s plain to hear in his Fact talk, Reynolds is clearly a realist, and that’s fine as far as it goes. But the danger of this sort of realism is that it’s the gateway drug to essentialism, in which “works are no longer [merely] particulars that share certain properties; they are individual embodiments of a single essence” - and some of the language that the nuum’s proponents have dressed it up in is at times decidedly essentialist, here at 01:17:40 - 01:18:54 for example, and with that sometimes bizarrely organicist.
I’ve come to believe that, apart from in a few specific instances (in particular kinds of feminism and other minority studies, for example), children should be inoculated against essentialist thought from an early age with “Say No To Essentialism” campaigns. Because it plays down the difference, independence and complexity of things by trusting in some hypothetical underlying continuity, it distorts perspectives, it’s reductive, prescriptive and restrictive, it’s ideological, it feels it can predict things and in so doing makes an ‘ass’ out of ‘u’ and ‘me’, and it’s one of the pollutant-spewing engines of racism, sexism, homophobia etc. The nominalist says that all women are different, and that ‘woman’ is just a practical term useful to (though suspiciously required by) the society we live in, while the essentialist, like some dick who gives you that horrible sinking feeling when you realise what you’d invited to the party, says ‘nah, deep down women are all the same, they all spend too much money on shoes! Am I right or what lads?’
Besides which, in formulating the nuum in these realist terms, Reynolds (well-meaning as he surely was), by providing a description and talking about it like it was a thing, inadvertently kick-started a canon: a dodgy, prescriptive/reductive, ideological value-judgment machine, in which there are winners and losers, and even the winners can be losers. It’s this canonical consequence, or resonance, of the nuum idea that led in part to frustration and raised temperatures in the nuum debates, both for those who believed in it (who were often disappointed or angry that new musicians weren’t living up to the rules of its canonical ‘essence’) and those resisting the idea (or the parameters of the canon). Calling the nuum an ‘objectively existent entity’ and then praising its excellence horribly exacerbates the unhealthier consequences of having a canon, and piling on the imperative for ‘progress’, as some have done, makes things still worse.
This is where music criticism can begin to have a detrimental effect on popular musical aesthetics – on the ways in which music is perceived, received and produced. How many independent, innovative composers were dismissed and banished into obscurity because, when peered at through the ideological lens of the Classical Music Canon, the lack of certain requirements in their music reduced them to a poor, unprogressive version of Beethoven or Brahms (Chopin, too stylised, too Polish, too effeminate, nearly could have been one)? What of the music that the UK Hardcore Continuum’s disciples deem, in the same way, to be ‘bad’ or simply not good enough? (I’ll consider the music of Joker, Zomby, Starkey, Rustie, Moby etc, the ‘mallet to a mountain range’, here sometime soon).
Dan Hancox, in response to k-punk illustrates the shortcomings of excessive theorising (and by extension those of essentialising canons) beautifully by using the analogy of the Procrustean bed. Another beautiful analogy describing the ideal use and role for theory is from Reynolds, who at the start of his Fact talk put it absolutely perfectly: ‘Theory is the spice of critical life’. A teaspoonful of cinnamon in the apple pie, a pinch of jerk seasoning in the soup – a little bit of theory added accorded to taste gives dishes interest and flavour, turning them from swill into cuisine. Since watching Reynolds’s Fact talk, reading Hancox’s piece and attending a seminar on the hardcore continuum last week, these analogies have been ricocheting around the bonce. I was groping for a new one that would illustrate the benefits of theory in moderation but also warn of the dangers of its excessive use. Since the only commonly known danger of overdosing on cinnamon is a mildly annoying dry mouth, I turned to alcohol. To adapt Reynolds’s metaphor slightly, I’m going to imagine theory as the alcoholic spice of a night out in good company.
But even between strangers, a few pints promote an atmosphere of discussion, bonding and understanding. They get the mind going, raise confidence, refresh and satisfy the taste buds. Depending on how well you can hold your alcohol, though, things can soon start going rapidly downhill. Reality becomes strange and unmanageable as your stumbling hands and feet discover that things apparently aren’t where you thought they were or where they’re supposed to be: the real world doesn’t seem to make sense to you, though you may be able to ignore this and believe that it’s making more sense than ever, and this newfound 'clarity' can cause a proportional escalation in emotional state. People seem a lot nicer or a lot meaner than they were before or would be otherwise, and you feel you have to address this. You become over-confident, excitable and randy, so you shout and wave your arms around, drawing attention to yourself, but when you try and act on these new desires, it's awkward, difficult and embarrassing for those who aren't as drunk as you are. And despite all of this, you still think you and your actions are bloody amazing.
Drunk on theory perhaps, but then another thought occurred to me. What if theory, as the spice of life, was actually the Spice from Frank Herbert’s series of Dune novels (and the film – 1984 and most certainly counting – and the obscure Sci-Fi channel TV series oddly staring a young James McAvoy), melange? In this analogy, theory is a psychotropic drug made out of the dung of colossal sandworms that live on the desert planet of Arrakis. A little bit of it in coffee tastes splendid and gives the eyes an attractive shade of azure. A valuable commodity and a sign of considerable wealth, it gives you heightened awareness, a longer life-span and the ability to predict the future. Prolonged exposure to the spice gives you the power to warp space and time with your mind alone, so that two incredibly distant points in space can become close enough together that an entire fleet of spaceships can pass through this fold in space-time without moving and thus travel through an enormous and complex universe with the greatest of ease, but the downside to this is that at this point of exposure you’ll die if you go without it, so you have to be kept permanently in an atmosphere of the spice in its gaseous form, which mutates your body until you look terrible, and, with a face like a giant pair of bollocks, you have to be carried around in an enormous canister by weird fellers with extreme speech impediments and bad dress sense.
Consider those two close analogies (theories themselves) of the consequences of excessive theory - recognisable, sense-making but naturally imperfect narratives with a merely analogical relationship to reality - to be 'empirically verifiable'. It could happen to you.
And if you haven't seen Dune yet, you really should.
*I'm quoting from Leo Treitler’s Music and the Historical Imagination, Chapter 4: ‘On Historical Criticism’ (1989). I’d recommend veterans of the nuum debates give this and the two subsequent chapters (‘The Present as History’ and ‘What Kind of Story is History?’) a look, as he shows that the idea of organically evolving musical continua is hardly new (to the point where eyes will widen considerably with déja vu) and clearly explains the bases for these conceptions of music history and why they’re to be discouraged.
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