Critique of Modern Music

This is the first decent philosophical critique of modern music I've come across.

I am talking about the musical experience. It is surely right to speak of a new kind of listening, maybe a kind of listening that is not listening at all, when there is no melody to speak of, when the rhythm is machine made, and when the only invitation to dance is an invitation to dance with oneself. And it is easier to imagine a kind of pop that is not like that: pop that is with the listener and not at him. There is no need to go back to Elvis or the Beatles to find examples.

Faced with youth culture we are encouraged to be nonjudgmental. But to be nonjudgmental is already to make a kind of judgment: it is to suggest that it really doesn’t matter what you listen to or dance to, and that there is no moral distinction between the various listening habits that have emerged in our time. That is a morally charged position, and one that flies in the face of common sense. To suggest that people who live with a metric pulse as a constant background to their thoughts and movements are living in the same way, with the same kind of attention and the same pattern of challenges and rewards, as others who know music only from sitting down to listen to it, clearing their minds, meanwhile, of all other thoughts—such a suggestion is surely implausible...

Likewise, to suggest that those who dance in the solipsistic way encouraged by metal or indie music share a form of life with those who dance, when they dance, in disciplined formation, is to say something equally implausible. The difference is not merely in the kind of movements made; it is a difference in social valency, and in the relative value placed on being with your neighbor rather than over and against him. The externalized beat of pop is shoved at us. You cannot easily move with it, but you can submit to it. When music organized by this kind of external movement is played at a dance it automatically atomizes the people on the dance floor. They may dance at each other, but only painfully with each other. And the dance is not something that you do, but something that happens to you—a pulse on which you are suspended.

When you are in the grip of an external and mechanized rhythm your freedom is overridden, and it is hard then to move in a way that suggests a personal relation to a partner. The I-Thou relation on which human society is built has no place on the disco dance floor. Plato was surely right, therefore, to think that when we move in time to music we are educating our characters. For we are learning an aspect of our embodiment as free beings.

And he was right to imply that embodiment can have virtuous and vicious forms. To take just one example, there is a deep distinction, in the matter of sexual presentation, between modesty and lewd- ness. Modesty addresses the other as someone whom you are with. Lewdness is pointed at the other, but is certainly not with him or her, since it is an attempt to impede the other’s freedom to withdraw. And it is very clear that these traits of character are displayed in music and dancing. Plato’s thought was that if you display lewdness in the dances that you most enjoy, then you are that much nearer to acquiring the habit.

There is plenty of tuneful popular music, and plenty of popular music with which one can sing along and to which one can dance in sociable ways. All this is obvious. Yet there is growing, within pop, another kind of practice altogether, one in which the movement is no longer contained in the musical line but exported to a place outside it, to a center of pulsation that demands not that you listen but that you submit. If you do submit, the moral qualities of the music vanish behind the excitement; if you listen, however, and listen critically as I have been suggesting, you will discern those moral qualities, which are as vivid as the nobility in Elgar’s Second Symphony or the horror in Schoenberg’s Erwartung...

The whole thing is well worth a read.