DEMOCRACY IN MUSIC

I once worked at the classical music counter of an independent record shop, where a fellow classical expert was a music student and an accomplished violinist. He had played in the orchestra at Interlochen, and during the concert season he was a substitute violinist in several of the area's symphony orchestras. He once told me of meeting backstage a very famous young female violin soloist (who shall remain nameless) just after her performance of a concerto. In his palaver with her, my friend learned that she was unhappy with her life. "All I ever do is practice," she complained.

It is one of the distressing facts of classical music that the level of skill required to perform, say, a piano concerto or, the solo transcriptions by Liszt, or even much of Chopin's music, demands that one begin learning the piano when very young and practicing for several hours every day for years, and even then one must posses an extraordinary amount of talent. The music left us by the great masters is so formidable that only a tiny percentage of humans is capable of performing it. That, of course, is why we admire the great artists so much.

But consider the average 20-something slacker. As I previously discussed (see chapter I), young people want to identify with a performer. How on earth can they relate to someone who is doing something so utterly incomprehensible to them? Even if he were to immediately begin studying the piano diligently (granted, an unlikely hypothesis) and keep practicing for hours each day, chances are that even by the ancient age of 50 he would still not be able to stumble through the more demanding repertoire.

Such prospects vex and alienate the average youth of today. He can no more relate to difficult music than he can relate to Fermat's Last Theorem. The threadbare cliché popular in the US is, It's not rocket science—meaning that something is not especially complicated. But maintaining four individual voices when performing a fugue certainly is complicated. It's worse than rocket science—it's rocket science raised exponentially.

Another friend I made at the record shop is a bass player (and fellow autodidact) in various local alternative-rock bands. I've seen him play and he's quite good—at least by today's standards. I once asked him why it is that the bass lines in current pop music are so dull. Gone are the "walking bass" of jazz and the melodic ostinatos of progressive rock. In today's pop music, if the the harmony of a song is an E-chord for two measures followed by a D-chord for two measures, the bass player will simply play the note E for eight beats then the note D for eight beats. Why is this so?

"That's because they can't play any better," my friend replied. "And even if they could play something complex, the audience wouldn't like it—they'd say it was lame."

This gave me a certain pause at first, but it makes perfect sense once you realize that if the purpose of popular music today is to present something that the average youth can identify with, this would exclude any display of virtuosity. It is necessary for today's pop acts to perform at a level that is well within the ability of every member of the audience, even the least talented and unmusical, because the bond between the performer and the audience enables a sort of transference whereby everyone in the audience is thinking, I could do that! That could be ME up there!

And it very well could! If the performers are doing something that absolutely anyone can do, then the barrier between the performer and the audience has vanished. This is democracy applied to music—not everyone can grow up to be president, but absolutely anyone can be a pop star, and the proof of this is now on stage at an arena near you. Every kid in the audience there believes in his soul, he feels it, he knows it—That could be ME up there!

In a curiously transcendental way, it is every kid in the audience on stage, as anyone of them is interchangeable with the pop act. Gone are the austere Russian virtuosos wearing a white tie and tails, performing a piece that only three people in the world have mastered; instead, with the absolute lowest common denominator in effect, there is true equality in the experience. Everyone is now a star.

"The instinct of the herd considers the middle and the mean as the highest and most valuable: the place where the majority finds itself; the mode and the manner in which it finds itself. It is therefore an opponent of all orders of rank, it sees an ascent from beneath to above as a descent from the majority to the minority. the herd feels the exception, whether it be below or above it, as something opposed and harmful to it. Its artifice with reference to the exceptions above it, the stronger, more powerful, wiser and more fruitful, is to persuade them to assume the role of guardians, herdsmen, watchmen—to become its first servants: it has therefore transformed a danger into something useful. Fear ceases in the middle; here one is never alone; here there is little room for misunderstanding; here there is equality; here one’s own form of being is not felt as a reproach but as the right form of being; here contentment rules. Mistrust is felt toward the exceptions; to be an exception is experienced as guilt."

F. W. Nietzsche The Will to Power, #280, (Kaufmann translation)

This also explains why it is now important that performers not wear gaudy stage clothes in the manner of jazz singers or the rock acts of the 1960s. Young guys don't own fancy stage clothes; they wear worn blue jeans and dark T-shirts and sneakers. Therefore, to enable the audience to identify with them, to foster equality and interchangeability, the performers must all dress like their audience. Having to get dressed-up is lame, dude.

Once again, these changes which have occurred in music during the last fifty years are not merely symptomatic of a generation gap. It is not simply a case of old people reacting against the music of a new generation. This is an entirely new phenomenon. The principle of equality in music means that for the first time in the entire history of music, musicianship is no longer respected. Virtuosity is, of course, by no means limited to European classical music. Texas bluesman Sam Hopkins was called Lightnin' Hopkins because of the speed with which his fingers danced on the frets. Bluesman Robert Johnson was said to have, like Paganini, sold his soul to Satan in exchange for mastery of his instrument. Sitarist Ravi Shankar was idolized by rock guitarists of the '60s as well as classical musicians.

Now, for the first time ever, all that has ended.

In the coming years, mass entertainment will emphasize equality in music more and more. There will be an plethora of amateur shows on television where waitresses and parking attendants impersonate their favorite music stars, so the viewers at home can imagine themselves doing the very same thing. And why not? It's not as if it takes any talent or years of study to do. Who knows? Maybe your turn in the spotlight is next!

Isn't that a happier way of doing things? After all, how can you possibly enjoy music if you know your ability is not equal to that of the person performing it? Don't you find it depressing, even humiliating to witness someone who is doing something you could never hope to do? Isn't there something basically wrong with demonstrating such inequality? Doesn't it make you feel frustrated to know that someone is renowned and you are nothing? Don't such showoffs and know-it-alls make you angry? Don't you want to go out after the concert and vandalize something?

Isn't modern pop music better in this way? It makes many kids with no talent happy, and what's wrong with that?