“I am not willing to surrender the world to the jerky contortions of self-inducedly brainless bodies with empty eye sockets who perform in stinking basements the immemorial rituals of staving off terror, which are a dime a dozen in any jungle - & to the quavering witch doctors who call it ‘art.’”

Oh dear. I hope she wasn't talking about the highly skilled jazz musicians of her era with their complex rhythms and improvised melodies?

I would have thought that Jazz and Blues, Rock and Roll, and Rock would have been the natural musical choices for an Objectivist because of their emphasis on the individualist improvised solo performed by a freebooting self-employed musician, as opposed to the collectivist harmonies of classical music performed by insitutionalised specialists on a payroll, usually in a highly state-subsidised context.

In general, the scattergun assault on popular music contained in this article fails to distinguish between form and content.

If music grabs people viscerally because of its form, then I think it is objectively good music: it's fit for its intended purpose. By that standard, Hendrix is as good as Wagner.

You can, of course, make moral judgments about the content - the lyrics- of the music. But you can find life-embracing messages in Chuck Berry, and death-loving messages some rap, but also in "great opera" - e.g. I seem to recall an Egyptian princess who preferred to be walled up to starve with her lover. And, let's not forget that some of the greatest Classical music is to the glory of what we know to be a non-existent God.

So please, no more sweeping negative statements about modern music. It just makes Objectivists seem like socially conservative fuddy-duddies!
O

Observer wrote:

I would have thought that Jazz and Blues, Rock and Roll, and Rock would have been the natural musical choices for an Objectivist because of their emphasis on the individualist improvised solo performed by a freebooting self-employed musician, as opposed to the collectivist harmonies of classical music performed by insitutionalised specialists on a payroll, usually in a highly state-subsidised context.
 
What a load of crap! You couldn't find a more "freebooting self-employed musician" than Beethoven - a man who most certainly would have told your deadbeats where to go, and cuffed them about the ears at the same time. "Collectivist harmonies"?? Give me a break. What symphony has even been composed by a committee? The act of composing a great piece of music is an extraordinary feat of individualism.
 
Your suggestion that classical music is somehow inferior to rock & its ilk because it is often state-subsidised is a red herring - and you know it. No Objectivist would ever demand state funding for anything, let alone music. (Plenty of rock musicians & their advocates would, though. Wellington rate-payers were recently forced to subsidise David Bowie's recent concert in that city. And in New Zealand, at least, the Arts Council is extraordinarily generous with other people's money in paying for rock videos and the like of new "artists." So don't give me that "institutionalised specialists on a payroll" crap.)

If music grabs people viscerally because of its form, then I think it is objectively good music: it's fit for its intended purpose. By that standard, Hendrix is as good as Wagner.

So if I declare myself a rocker & stand on a stage, screaming hideously off-key with a timbre that would embarrass even Tom Waits, and someone in the audience is turned on by my vocal crimes, then I've somehow produced "good music"? That's the same argument that says that if someone performs a bowel movement in a museum & and another person acclaims it as "great art" ("haunting & provocative," no doubt, like the award-winning semen-stained sheets), then it must be so. But then, you probably already agree with that.

 

It’s nice to see such a high standard of discourse has prevailed over the weekend!

Others have stepped in to defend non-classical music more coherently than I can, so let me just respond to some of the points people have made with respect to my original posting:

Aida: The princess could have escaped, but chose to die with her lover, out of love. She wasn’t fighting for something worth dying for. She was just dying, and in doing so removed the hero’s consolation that his true love had survived. Nice music, but not very life affirming.

Anonymity (Mine): Is for rational, practical reasons (think Google), and my choice of pseudonym is honest in that it is obviously that. My offline identity should be irrelevant to whether my ideas are any good or not.

Bowel movements as art: No funnily enough, I don’t think bowel movements in museums are Art because (1) their visceral effect derives from what they are, rather than what the artist has done with them, and (2) they have little appeal of utility to the populace as a whole (as contrasted with a howling rock and roller helping an entire stadium to affirm life and let off steam).

Censorship: I wasn’t attempting or advocating censorship. I just thought the original argument more rhetorical than rational, and would have expected a higher standard of analysis to prevail on this site.

Eminem/Strauss: I ignored this point because it involved comparing life affirming classical music with death affirming popular music, and then generalising from predictable results. I’m sure there’s term for this kind of argument.

Gutless: In what context? I’m posting this, which shows that I’m not easily intimidated by rhetoric of mass destruction. As for physical courage: irrelevant. (But you would be unwise to attempt to prove your superior valour on my body unless you were a martial artist.)

Musical masturbation: Effective improvised solos use the same techniques as classical music – e.g. theme and variation, and phrasing. If, say, a jazz solo is musical masturbation, then so too is a classical piece, and a classical score  - to flog the analogy – is merely a used tissue, and that makes classical musicians… no, let’s not go there.