I'm old and I torrent everything because fuck the system. I don't give a shit if it collapses and we all go back to singing madrigals in our front rooms. That would probably be better for us in fact.
Now that music isn't a meal ticket anymore only people who really love making music will keep doing it. This will mean less dross, more quality. Think troubadours.
A friend once wrote:
"The second thing one needs to understand is why culture has come to seem to matter so much in the modern world – as something people are conscious of and concerned about, as if it really mattered what sort of culture they lived in. Modern living requires human beings to engage with the world on a practical level in ways that are far more complex than was ever the case before, and we have looked to the idea of culture, as something that links art, religion, etc. with ordinary life, as if they were elements of a greater whole, as the way to preserve or recover our specifically human values. We have done this – most obviously in the case of European, Christian high art and culture, but also in the case of modern popular culture and its 'quasi-ethnic' offshoots – by attempting to make the idea of the human itself something that is as real and palpable as the
practical realities that we have to deal with, while at the same time also trying to present it as something quite different from these.
"The central experiences of these cultures are those in which we contemplate the faces and voices and bodies of individual persons (in art, music and poetry, dance), stripped of the actual contexts in which we
could understand these as revealing anything about any actual, real persons. We are invited to contemplate the human per se, even though the very idea of 'the human' makes no sense when abstracted out from actual
practical existence. It becomes an empty negation, but unlike the Jews, who accepted this logic, we moderns require this negation to itself have a positive, experiencable form – so that we can look to it to reassure us
that there is still something distinctively human in our modern world.
"If the Muslims (or anyone else) triumph in our technologically advanced world, I think that they will quickly come face to face with these same issues and their culture will face the same impossible choices that Europe
did: either accept that there is nothing more than what is 'out there' (= the Greeks), or accept that this 'more' can only be 'more' by not being any existing thing, but only an idea (= the Jews), or play the European game of juggling these two options in the hope that one day they'll fit together, as if by magic.
"So in short, I think that the reason we Europeans find it so hard to look past culture to the essence of things (as the Greeks and the Jews both did in different ways) is that we look to culture, rather than to the real world (or its conceptual negation), as the repository of the human – which is what we want to see. We have effaced the human from reality, through science, (we 'see' molecules and forces instead of trees, colours, faces…) and we look to culture to give it back. But deep down we all know this is pure fantasy, because culture doesn't have anything to do with how things are."
Comments