Duke Orsino:
If music be the food of love, play on,
Give me excess of it; that surfeiting,
The appetite may sicken, and so die.
Two posts on the SF Gate caught my eye this morning, one about the highest paid musicians of the year, and the other about the music that U.S. interrogators used to torture suspects caught up in the web of renditions and extrajudicial lock-ups of terror suspects
I didn’t cross reference the two posts to see if there might be some overlap, but extrapolating from the titles gives me cause to bemoan the state of culture, and particularly music, in our current version of what passes for civilization. I wonder if the torturers had this in mind as they blasted eardrums with the abrasions of what their victims might otherwise have been able to have passed off as simple bad taste:
Musick has Charms to sooth a savage Breast,
To soften Rocks, or bend a knotted Oak.–William Congreve
It reminds me, in a way, of many conversations I’ve heard over the years, in some of which I’ve been an active participant, about who is the best musician, the best instrumentalist, the best technician, the best whatever, until somehow some of us arrived at the point that this was primarily a matter of personal taste and stopped scoffing at other people’s assessments and also stopped particularly caring what others thought of what pleased us, or displeased us. Somebody likes almost everything and let ’em have it, but the desire to label the music that sells the most as the best (isn’t that what it is?) speaks really poorly of a culture that bows down to common taste and forgoes discussions of the content of the music. Conversely, it is almost perversely appropriate that we should torture captured souls from other cultures with the worst products of the sick society against which they are likely railing, such that they would know the righteousness of their cause even as their minds turn to jelly and scream out for relief before they move on to the next dimension. I once really believed that music was a force for good in the world until it became so commodified and misused that it became part of the destruction attendant upon people so distracted that they fail to see that their cultural icons, if they follow the mainstream, are most often in cahoots with the authors of the breakdown of any sense of community. Oh, darn, I’m starting to sound like Tipper Gore crusading against the moral breakdown of society through naughty lyrics in pop music.Torture and Big money: something to consider (now I’ll go back to my Eric Dolphy recordings).