That Rock-n-Roll Music

Well it has certainly been a wild week; most of it blurred together, a hodge-podge of parenting, chores, and home improvement projects. It has been non-stop for the most part, and it is all about to change again as I go back to work on Monday, Jenny flies back home, and the kids start their regimen of summer related activities, swim lesson, gymnastics, and the general summer ruckus

I was pretty excited Tuesday evening when a friend called me out of the blue and said his wife had foregone the opportunity to see the Cure in concert, and would I like to go instead? A Friday night break from the kids aside, what a great opportunity. The Cure is one of the first great alternative bands to achieve the level of popularity at a time when big hair rock defined commercial success. (Poison, Ratt, Whitesnake) Early devotees were easy to pick out owing to their wild hairstyles, pale complexion, smudged lipstick, and excessive use of black eyeliner that blurred gender distinctions.

Still, I liked the Cure, with albums like Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Standing on the Beach, and Disintegration, to name a few; only to have my budding interest in the Cure interrupted by the rising fame of Jane’s Addiction in the late 80’s, and the emergence of grunge groups like Nirvana in the early 90’s. A Google search on “Alternative Rock bands” reveals the litany of my musical tastes from grade school to college. As a musical genre, alternative rock consists of a myriad of subgenres that emerged from the independent music scene in the early 80’s. These genres, in turn, owe their genesis to punk rock, which laid the groundwork for alternative music in the 1970s. None of this, of course, captures the feel of the music, or the spontaneous generation of so many bands during such a fertile time of music making.

The difficulty, if there is one, in talking about the evolution of music is, how do we conjure an explanation of the phenomena of music which will be satisfactory to the average musician or devotee, a difficulty that is rooted, perhaps, in the vastly different standpoints from which individuals, like artists and or fans, regard music. Music to the musician is a perfectly natural activity, like breathing or walking, to the composer of music it may even come to dominate a larger portion of both their conscious and unconscious mental activities. Though, most of us, I think, look at music through the other end of the telescope, seeking an explanation or an evolution to the music, an excuse to talk about the presence of music in our lives, indeed, in the world as a kind of abstract truth about which we are a bit unsure…

Music holds a special place in the Arts. Where a painting or a sculpture is usually scrutinized, examined and ultimately dissected, as in: “Yes but what does it mean?” Music is in a class all by itself. While lyrics may communicate a certain meaning through poetry associated with the instrumental strains of song, music itself is not bound to any particular meaning, object or idea. How do you validate a piece of music against the things of the world? The artist Kandinsky proposed this problem in his “Concerning the Spiritual in Art” and sought to create a kind of art that was more like music, not tied to any particular real world object.

Another author, the philosopher Schopenhauer, also romanticized music in this way, “To stimulate the knowledge of these Ideas by depicting individual things… is the aim of all the other non-musical arts . . . [but] music, since it passes over the Ideas, is . . . quite independent of the phenomenal world, positively ignores it, and, to a certain extent, could still exist even if there were no world at all, which cannot be said of the other arts” Music, then, for Schopenhauer, dwelt somewhere in between our world, with its notes and chords, and the world of Platonic forms transmitting the noblest of truths to the human soul.

Music "stands alone, quite cut off from all the other arts." What is it about music that affects the inmost nature of man so powerfully and is so entirely and deeply understood in the deepest parts of our (un) consciousness? Schopenhauer believed the function of art to be a meditation on the unity of human nature, with the power to communicate to the audience a certain existential angst for which most forms of entertainment—including bad art—only provided a distraction. In short, it is music that unites us and taps the still, mysterious deep well of our emotions, preparing the soul, and binding us together. Perhaps that is the best thing I can say that communicates the feel of music, short of picking up my guitar.