(BLOG SERIES) Rebel Music - We Sing, Therefore We Are [Part 4.2]: The Dictatorship of Pop
The dictatorship of Pop
“I don’t like pop,
generally speaking. It all sounds like bad 1970s disco to me, and I didn’t like
bad 1970s disco.”
-
Dr. Jordan B. Peterson[i]
Remember our discussions above: The Platonic/Thomistic tradition on
beauty that built western civilization (which later built the places the
westerners have colonized) is a tradition that is connected to religion
(specifically Christianity, of course). Art was supposed to be a reflection of
the beauty of God. As Ockham kicked off the philosophical revolution (we can
even add the Protestant revolution started by Luther and Calvin) against
Thomism, our standards for art and religion (together with the culture it
supports) declined. The denial of natures lead to a denial of standards for
truth, goodness, and beauty. Relativism, then, became a substitute for
religious belief and art founded on objective reality.
 |
| Lady Gaga, American Pop Star |
As pop culture advances its agenda, it has left a God-shaped hole in
the heart of man, together with a beauty-shaped void in man’s soul. Once again,
Roger Scruton nails it by saying that in denying beauty, its objectivity, and
the fact that it is a human need, “we find ourselves in a spiritual desert.”[ii]
Pop culture, once properly analyzed, is the modern world’s attempt to
fill these holes, while at the same denying those which are the only ones who
are able to fill them. Their main tool in doing this is pop music.
We have already seen how modernity is a busy generation, a generation
that seems to forget its rationality while giving excessive attention to its
animality. It just works and works and works, forgetting that sitting down and
reflecting on one’s life and one’s world is also necessary for human growth. If
modern architecture is the perfect imagery for such a way of life, pop music is
precisely the perfect background music for it.
The standard pop song’s melody is uncreative, always repetitive. It has
no musical thought. Pop’s melody is always “trite”, with “standardized units
that could be rearranged in any order without losing the effect”[iii].
Its structure is cyclical. The chords and sequence get repeated and repeated,
until the music just fades away. It has no “argument” that allows one to reach
a musical conclusion. If pop music is indeed a real argument, it will be guilty
of the fallacy of circular reasoning. Theodor Adorno (1903 – 1969), a German
composer and Philosopher, has the same observation. Commenting on American Pop
music, he states:
That which was once the free expression of a sincere faith has entered
the world of commodities, there to be deprived of its aura. It has become a
consumer product, addressed to the addictive ear, part of the “regression of
listening” which refuses true creativity in favor of the predictable, the
effortless, and the banal.[iv]
This is exactly that which fits the ears of the modern man, who is busy
with his daily, mundane affairs. Because of repetition, it helps the listener
to “listen without listening”, to play it without paying attention to it. Pop
songs, then, are not really listened to. It’s actually just overheard. This is
pop’s huge difference with classical music. In classical music, listening to it
requires attentiveness. You have to set things aside in order to appreciate it,
because it has an “argument” that you have to properly perceive in order to
understand. It gives you a “break” from the ordinariness of day-to-day life.
This is more evident when you compare a pop concert from a classical concert.
You can’t attend a Beyoncé concert and just sit down. You have to jump around and
dance! In short, you have to do your own work, which treats the songs as mere
“support” for what you have to do. A classical concert, on the other hand, has
its audience silent, prohibited from screaming or even clapping while the
musical piece is still unfinished from being played. You have to listen,
because there’s beauty in it that you’ll miss if you do otherwise.
And since pop is a mere background sound, it
doesn’t actually speak to you and therefore doesn’t really educate you. This is
another bad aspect of modern pop: it doesn’t give you knowledge; you learn
nothing from it. David Corey gives a great analysis on this point in terms of
pop’s inability to produce emotional learning through experience:
The range of emotions expressed in the best
classical music is so vast that our language lacks names for them all.
Listeners are thus schooled in a highly refined, minutely differentiated
emotional and spiritual landscape that literally educates us about ourselves.
Insofar as we successfully resonate with passages of, say, Mahler’s 8th
Symphony or Beethoven’s last piano sonata for instance, we experience feelings
about life, death, consolation, and redemption that are so subtle as to elude
description. Such experiences call us one by one to embrace our common human
condition and shelter us from meaninglessness. The problem with the pop music
of our youth culture is that it equips listeners with little to nothing by way
of emotional range that would not be perfectly accessible to a 12-year-old.[v]
The rhythm of pop is also where what Scruton calls
the “externalization” of musical movement is too evident. What he means is that
the rhythm is commonly forced, always coming “from the outside”, as it were,
instead of following the logic of the musical piece. There’s no real
instrumentality (consider the fact that many pop songs today are produced
electronically, without any intervention from a real musician who can play real
instruments) in it, no “chain” that the listener can follow to, no path were
the pop star can lead the listener carefully, while holding his hand, little by
little, so that the listener may not stumble. Externalization of music seems,
instead, to suddenly push the listener off a cliff so that it may die.
A good example of this “forcing” is with Oasis’
song, “My Big Mouth”. There’s just the sudden strum of guitars, producing
irritation to a virtuous listener’s ears instead of pleasure. There’s no
percussive appeal to it. It just goes “boom”, like a bomb of a terrorist. To
add Scruton’s comments once more: “The percussive sounds that generate the
rhythm… have little or no relation to anything else that is happening.”[vi]
Or, to use once again the “bomb” analogy, if you
are not familiar with “My Big Mouth”, you are most probably familiar with K-Pop
girl group BLACKPINK’s song, “Kill This Love”. The intro literally just
explodes in your ears! You were never warned, were you?
With regards to pop’s harmony too, it only treats
chords without the acknowledgment of the natural diversity that comes with
them. Guitars, for example, just strum and all that boring stuff. Remember that
a criterion for beauty was proportio, a unity in diversity. This is
precisely what pop’s harmony sequence seems to be in rebellion against: proper
proportion. An example of this is Nirvana’s song “In Bloom”. It’s easy to play
from a musician’s perspective. All you have to do is to move your hands up and
down before guitar strings.
Scruton notices also that all the ordinariness of
pop has a purpose: it aims to divert your attention to the pop star[vii].
In the midst of the low-quality music of pop comes the very unique personality
of the singer. Once more, we see here a reversal of how music is done: in the
classical tradition, the singer is always the servant of the music. He sings in
order to make the message clear, while his personality remains veiled as long
as he is on stage. This is not the case with people like Bruno Mars or the very
famous boyband BTS. They are on stage, as if telling us, “hey, notice us! The
spotlight is ours now and we demand your full attention”.
[ii]
Scruton (2009), BBC Documentary Why Beauty Matters
[iii]
Scruton (1998), Youth Culture’s Lament: Pop Culture’s noise and glamour try
to fill in a gaping void: https://www.city-journal.org/html/youth-culture%E2%80%99s-lament-11849.html
[v]
Corey, Music and Our Cultural Decline
[vi]
Scruton (1998), Youth Culture’s Lament
[vii]
Ibid.
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