benchmark

[anechoic <kim@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>Making record sales the benchmark for an distiction between pop and
>"serious"music  only highlights the aesthetic irrelevance of trying to build
>a fence around academic-sponsored music.

it isn't that academic music builds a fence around itself as much as some
disciplines don't willingly allow pop media to pillage its storehouse of
siginfiers for the sake of manufacturing a demand for a product...
a good example is the term "experimental music"...the term experimental has
been used lately in order to create demand (aura) for pop based music
events...attaching the phrase "experimental music" creates a sense of
novelty and exoticness...going to this sort of socialized event makes you
part of a breed of cutting edged cultural demographic: successful
advertising is a result of attaching the potential of a better self-image
thru the consumption of a product...20 years ago if you saw the term
"experimental music" on a flyer it would have led you to a very different
sort of event...most likely an event without DJ's...now that the term has
been appropriated and the signifier emptied, the music that it refers to is
not really experimental but points to a host of other cultural values that
have very little to do with the original meaning of the term...and yes the
term can be applied to many disciplines without fear of misuse but my point
is that within pop music many signifiers are recycled without a real
understanding of the original meaning...its as silly as calling something
"classical" or "baroque" without prepending a classifier such as "neo" or
"new"...