Re: [microsound] being 'political' in non-verbal music

[Bill Ashline <ashline@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 6/22/05, graham miller <grahammiller@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> what???
> 
> so what you're saying is instrumental music is fundamentally apolitical?
> no message. period. sound without meaning. buzz. blip. blop.
> 
> hendrix's star spangled banner?
> 
> muzak?
> 
> white people playing jazz in the 50s?
> 
> hardcore?
> 
> pirate radio of any kind?
> 
> bootlegs?
> 
> hava nagila?
> 
> i can't believe anyone would think that, especially on this list... why
> bother making music at all...
> 
> people can read anything they want into language as well... i don't get
> your point.

Nice to see you gettin' political there, Graham, but you're not really
getting my point.  There's nothing inherently political in sound and
it's arrangements.  It's the culture that surrounds it.  You mentioned
Hendrix.  yes, very political piece that derives its political message
from the cultural recognition of the number being played.  yes, pirate
radio is political too.  Again, that's the culture surrounding a
musical form.  There's lots of political music.  That's not what I'm
saying.  the question was whether a sound devoid of such a context,
such a cultural trope, can be inherently political.  I'll recall Achim
Szepanski's point on this:  "Music does not function as a carrier of
messages but offers nothing but empty signification and resists any
attempt for decoding. So it more or less allows any form of
interpretation. Its only content is that of its own sound and the
sound of a reality existing outside."  But when you add lyrics, when
you add a title, a rhetoric and discursive practice of transgression,
like pirating a radio signal, then those sounds acquire a political
dimension--after the fact.  I'm all for that, of course.  But sound
itself is just sound--nothing more.


-- 
What to the American slave is your 4th of July? I answer: a day that
reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross
injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your
celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your
national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are
empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted
impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your
prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your
religious parade and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud,
deception, impiety, and hypocrisy--a thin veil to cover up crimes
which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on    
  the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the
people of the United States, at this very hour.--Frederick Douglass

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