"Marcin Gokieli" <marcingokieli@go2.pl> wrote:
This book is, along with Adorno's 'Philosophy of new music' and 'Dialectic of Enlightenment', my main ennemy among written things ('three tenors' are the target among musical objects). Parts of the critique are interesting, but his agressive self confidence and hate towards what he sees as popular culture make it a monster. Yet another opinion form mr. academic teacher on the eternal topic of "now wouldn't this world been much better had everyone ACTED JUST LIKE ME AND AMDMIRED THOSE NICE THINGS I DO, but they are just to silly to to that". As for his view of rock, he treats it as something that makes life 'a comercially confected masturabational fantasy' (my retranslation from polish edition), no mer, no less. Needless to say, there's no single musical argument in the chapter devoted to it, just plain 'what's that horrible violinless thing' atittude.
and
The problem is, however, that he does not say anything more interesting about music then 'rock sucks, mozart is OK' (maybe besides his reducing music to a kind of educational tool, which i find deeply mistaken), and it makes the discussion with him pretty useless. And as a person who has spent much of time on listening and creating music at times close to rock, I feel very offended by such treatment of this kind of music.
Dismissing Bloom, & Adorno, simply because they badmouth music that you like isn't too different from their dismissal of that music; you're dealing with symptoms and not causes. All of us who've been on this list for a while have seen some interesting and complex discussions that make it clear that, though we may share a general interest in one (very amorphous) area of music, we don't all agree on the details of what we do & don't like. The fact that there aren't many more such discussions is due more to restraint on the part of various list members than it is to any actual consensus of taste. Both Bloom and Adorno's writings about pop music are instances or examples of a much more nuanced discussion about how culture and history operate. In Bloom's case this is set out in earlier chapters of his book, in the case of Adorno, it pervades a large body of work written over many years. Trying to refute specific comments they've made about specific music, without dealing with these larger arguments, is pointless, no matter how frustrating you may find their musical opinions, because you haven't dealt with their main arguments. There is a LOT to criticize in Bloom and Adorno; I agree with very little that I've read by Bloom and somewhat more of what I've read by Adorno. But a critique of their work that is limited to discussing their responses to electric guitars or pop crooners, doesn't come close to addressing their overall approach. These details are matters of personal taste that have little to do with the actual shape of their arguments. Marcin's comment about "three tenors" may make this a bit more clear. Based on Bloom's and Adorno's writings, one can very safely say that they would have found this kind of marketing of "classical" music to be even more despicable than Marcin does. If you just have a knee-jerk dismissal of Bloom based on his comments about pop music, there's no clear understanding of why you may agree on other issues. It's easy for me to imagine someone agreeing with Bloom's overall argument, and differing only on details like their response to rock, TV sitcoms, or other cultural manifestations. There are people who make the same kind of arguments based on valuing a particular creative period of the past but draw their aesthetic lines at different points because of their own tastes in art. I've seen very similar arguments from people who like jazz more than Adorno did or who like rock more than Bloom did. The arguments are no more or less flawed simply because I may share more musical tastes with the author. -- Herb Levy P O Box 9369 Fort Worth, TX 76147 herb@eskimo.com