It's often said that we live in an empire of images. While in the
beginning was the Word, in our ending flesh has become image. The
eveningland on which night has fallen is lit by a flickering
marker that guides the roving eye through the labyrinth of speed.
In this dreamland Reason can no longer write its name and become
a PIN code. Uprooted metamorphoses herald our downfall while we
watch, struck dumb, fascinated by the visual beauty. Involvement
has a force of zero in the mediacracy. So power runs no risk,
and is hard for the stupefied senses to locate. The above
spectre, propagated by the conservers of culture, is meant to
avert the impending decline in literacy by restraining the
consumption of images. Language as a vector of one's own culture
guarantees depth, in contrast to the addictive superficiality of
R/TV/CD/PC/VCR which only stimulates passivity. The bourgeois
character, apparently immune to fascism and communism and doing
so well materially, will collapse, bombarded by zappable
impressions, under the third dictatorship of image, from the
inside this time.
The spectre has an audio equivalent. The ear has now been torn
to shreds and is at the mercy of the senseless but excessive
noise of trail bikes, fighter jets, loudspeakers, electric saws,
dogs, factory floors, cloudbursts, carnivals, loading and
unloading, parties. Parallel to their literacy campaign, the
opponents of noise are lobbying for the allocation of
sanctuaries, where tractors are replaced by horses and the scythe
sings again. What can be heard there is the voice of nature,
which the mensch, with all his rights, must obey, under penalty
of mutation. The preachers of pure sound and vision are
supervising the disappearance of the sound and image culture
created by Goethe, Rembrandt and Bach. The task of their
civilization was to fell the enchanted forest with its cracking
twigs, indistinct fluttering, staring eyes, its rustle of leaves
and nocturnal animals. The acoustic space of the first human on
earth was a continuous stream of aural input without a locatable
sound source. Civilization's mission was to arrange deforestation
and local silences, which could then be filled with the mystique
of the unreproducable work of art.
These highlights and unforgettable hits were part of a soundimage regime that imposed its coordinates by means of the clock
tower with its 3D face and its carillons. The image ensured a
constant measure, but it was possible to ignore. The intermittent
pealing every quarter and full hour, on the other hand, had a
range you could not escape. Until, when the industrial machinery
was started up, the volume knobs in acoustic space were turned up
and the masses were subjected to a constant acoustic pressure.
The image got the opportunity to ascend to dominance in the
dispositive of sound and vision. Its limited availability gave it
the discontinuity without which power can keep no secrets.
* The Volk among themselves have been shooting the bull since time immemorial, but when politicians start to rap, to the people it's a load of stupid crap. "Show us something!" is the ultimate challenge it then poses the politicians, who proceed to fall flat on their faces in the television democracy at formal dinners andr bicycle competitions. The world musician follows the opposite path: only when he makes himself visible to the world comsumer will his speeches be listened to. A following generation of musicians made music out of the oration in order to better make their own race visible. While in the fifties sound formed a coalition with image, the nineties do it by using the word. The taboo word, beeped out, is joined seamlessly with the taboo image, in which a bird, arm, wave, break or cutout always just blots the disgraceful image out of the peep show. The secret everyone knows poses the challenge of staying turned on for the disclosure of the image which will never come. On the rare occasions that it does, it is zapped away.
*
Musical preference, through the flexibilization of taste, has
become a densifying factor in the globe and historyspanning
network of styles, trends and genres. A music for every state of
mind and vice versa, and that twenty times an hour. The listener,
once subculture and identitybound as a fan, has all at once
become open to every sound wave. In the fifties the parents
weren't physically up to rock and roll, but nowadays marginal
bodily experiences have lost their age and groupbound
character. The dislike of certain videos is an effect on the
social body similar to swing on the lipsynch show. Anyone can do
anything, but reserves the right to timebound favorites. After
all, every viewer/listener can read and place any type of music.
The sociological approach to the phenomenon of music has made it
generally understandable.
A precondition of this is that music, which is always the result
of a local experience, was freed from its origin to become a
contextless global language which is universally understandable.
What we see on the screen of the 1960s' experience media is
another time, with a freshness and radiance that we classify as
original in the age of the digital drone. The universal musicalsociological retraining of the ear has brought to life an immune
system which prevents music from penetrating to the layers of the
brain it might otherwise affect.
Music, the dominant mechanism of the social organization of
memory, makes us immediately forget the misery which has been
turned into the sound. But if someone adopts the guitar style or
singing voice of some illustrious prematurely dead predecessor,
it's immediately picked up on. Pop musicians who understand this
battle against the transparency of their style, trying with
increasing complexity to render the individual and classifiable
elements of their method more opaque. Openness to all continents
and eras demands that you break out of accessibility. But pop
music knows its own history and can continually and
rhizomatically refer to it in a way that is almost effortlessly
shared by the whole media mass. Is timelessly abstract pop music
possible?
*
The limitations of pop music lie in its technical a priori. Not
only is music easy to date based on the samplers used, the
transition to new information carriers filters out an entire
collection of music into the hole in the memory of history. Who
will switch over to the CD phase, who will stay magnetic forever
and disappear into the hobby sphere after an unfindabler
replacement stylus in the racks where right now there are still
78 rpm singles? And music is reacting again with a defensive
attack. If initially people sang directly onto wax discs, and
after that live interpretations were cut into vinyl, in a later
phase studio recordings were made in which no live registration
was involved, and in turn, in the terminal phase of the
phonograph medium, were the raw material for the live scratching
process. And the LP is still attempting to become the content of
the CD, which is already busy digitally emancipating itself from
its source material, and will autonomously become the basis for a
subsequent round in the marketechnically inevitable switch to a
new type of noise carrier.
The producers of music blindly submit time and again to the
secret power of the medium available to them. There used to be a
guitar or piano; now there is an integrated sound and image
circuit. Acoustic emptiness screams to be filled as it deserves.
Not only does power produce images, it always makes a sound; it
forces its way via ears and eyes into bodies. The guitar needed
the guitarist's fingers and the shindig; today the beat box
needs no bodily movements. The musician did not control his
instrument; the keys imposed a theory of movement on the hands.
The musical mechanism wanted to get away from being touched by
soft machines and smooth operators. Punk understood this and
reacted with an unrestrained attack on the instrumentarium,
yielding more material for a cool compilation CD. The stereo
system is not, after all, cathedralshaped. The church was the
ear and the eye of God, the Image and Soundless the monument
to his absence. For the new music we can stay home.