Led Zeppelin is my favorite band ever/in the whole world.

Mesh, here's another take on the "meme" theory. The source might betray my radical/anti-Walmart tendencies.

http://adbusters.org/magazine/32/meme.html

Adbusters is so cool. It's the coolest thing out there right now. Supposedly they've got a new music video coming out. I'm voting for it on TRL...

I feel that as the resident musicologist I'm obligated to make a few comments. However, these are just my gut reactions and I'm not trying to be all professional about them...or whatever.

First of all, I appreciate how the author decries the notion of "genius", which is something we still battle in the classroom with folks like Bach. When I lecture about Bach, half the time is dismantling the myths. Did you know he was rather cantankerous and actually beat up one of his students? That he was considered old-fashioned and prosaic in his own time?

Another point in the article is somewhat amusing to me since it was a hot topic recently on a musicology student listserv I'm part of...offering pop music classes. Some people do it just to "reach out" to people who wouldn't otherwise intellectually engage with music. They figure that if they can start with the familiar, they can later open doors to the "classics." Others have the view that if they are to study music then they must understand what has the most impact culturally here and now...largely context and popularly driven.

The reason musical scholars feel such distance and disconnect from the larger audience is precisely in line with the author's own prejudices of what is just the academic world. That he bailed out when he heard so-called "nerdy" language is so puerile! Scholars analyze, scrutinize, and connect. That is what they do. If you don't want that, don't look at scholars. "music for its own sake" is such an inane idea anyway! (I also found it amusing that he went into such great detail to describe the format of a typical academic conference.) Now I realize part of what he is reacting against is the working "myths", but he can't run when people want to get a little technical.

I'd also like to clarify a point: "chacona, or chaconne, which has appeared in so many diverse places in the past five hundred years that it could be considered one of the iconic images of the universal language. It is identifiable by its bass line: a constantly repeating, often downward-plunging figure, over which higher instruments and voices play variations." I really think "iconic image" is much too strong to give to the importance of a chaconne. What he is describing in this article is actually a passacaglia, wh. in the 18th c was a term sometimes interchangeable with a chaconne, though often distinguished by composers, and later the chaconne developed its own identity. Also, it doesn't have to be a descending bass line...just a repeating bass line...with variations over it. Like Pachelbel's Canon, for example. Sometimes a descending bass line was used to show sadness, like Dido's Lament from Purcell's opera Dido and Aeneas (wh. is a passacaglia, not a chaconne, as the auther states). The chaconne is a brisk dance usually with variation, but doesn't necessarily have to have a repeating bass pattern. I don't know where he came up with the idea that it started in Cuba and got slow when it came to Europe. All the chaconnes I know of are quite brisk. I could on and on about how amateurish and misinformed his discussion is here. A simple understanding of what a chaconne really is pretty much breaks down his musings.

And perhaps if this author knew better than his prejudiced accounts of the world of classical musicology, he wouldn't write it off so quickly. Sure pop-music studies is pretty small, but it's not blanketly written off. Equally small is the world of pitch class set theory to which the author inimically refers.

"And those of us who write on classical music have a lot to learn from pop studies. It exposes the hard realities of how music is made, how it is paid for, and how it is consumed. To understand music only as art and not as entertainment, as classical scholars tend to do, is to dehumanize the past. For all we know, Bach may well have rolled his eyes and munched on a pork chop whenever someone asked him about his relationship with Palestrina." Groooan. And, author, you don't know much. Living a century apart Bach and Palestrina weren't even contemporaries, and Bach was quite earthy. Aaargh! What does he think classical musicologists spend their time doing? Many, many musicologists really DO look at the hard realities of how music is made and consumed. There's a whole vein of study called "performance practices"...looking at the entertainments as far back as ancient Greece. The author obviously needs some deconstructing of his own if he thinks musical scholars are out on some quest for "art." Whatever that means.

Except for some vague comments about the overratedness of "genius" I found this article really frustrating. (wow. this comment got really long. sorry)

No, Josiah, you've got it wrong.

The boys over at Adbusters are actually coming out with their own music video station. The musical line-up is rumored to include "underground, local, post-marxist garage band-types," and Zack de la Rocha has signed on as the face man for the stations flagship show, "UnCool." The stations first major sponsor is PBR.

Man...I don't know whether or not you're being serious, 'cause that seems totally believable...

Benny. Go into Lupiz sometime and pick up the neo-anarchist magazine "The Fifth Estate." It's hilarious...