The avantgarde's relation to popular music

Toaster Mantis wrote: ExittheLemming wrote: OK, but 'cultural osmosis' re Post Punk is but a flimsy type of analogy to (cough) 'passive smoking'. Let's see, here's 3rd generation blow ya dig?: Zappa dug Varese, Faust dug Zappa, Mark E Smith (maybe) dug Faust ergo, the grumpiest man in Rock is influenced by Varese....It's not a massive step thereafter to stating that birdsong and motherese were pivotal ingredients in both the Rubettes and Henry Threadgill... (You'd be a shoo-in for a job at the Wire) Well, I'm not that convinced of that myself but it's what the article's point relies on as a central premise. Sorry I didn't make that clear enough.

Apologies for presuming you supported the article's premise

Ravel composed a blues. 

Edited by octopus-4 - April 06 2015 at 02:23

I refer to how The Fall and PIL might have absorbed and continued some of the innovations those classical and jazz musicians introduced without ever having heard or being familiar with them, because they absorbed them second-hand through Can, Cpt. Beefheart, Faust etc. Basically, they continue lineages without being aware of them.

My point is exactly that according to that article's theory, Lydon and Smith can be influenced by Coleman and Varese without ever having listened to either. Granted, what most of its target audience will conclude is more likely metal songwriters being influenced by older classical music secondhand or thirdhand through say Deep Purple or Yngwie Malmsteen's Rising Force.


Edited by Toaster Mantis - April 06 2015 at 03:57

Note to admins: I'm not sure this thread necessarily belongs in this particular forum, so if you feel it does not then feel free to move it. Maybe "Prog Blogs" would be an easier fit, but I'm far from sure myself.

The metal fanzine Black Ivory Tower, which has recently branched out into industrial/neofolk too, now published an article titled The Importance of the Underground which discusses the relationship of underground or countercultural music scenes to the culture at large. It starts out with an analysis of how in the world of classical/orchestral music, most of the basic theoretical grammar/language of Western music traditions was formulated and laid down by the avantgarde/elite music circles before being popularized and filtered down into more accessible forms of music. Looks like it has been that way for centuries up to and including the 20th century avantgarde classical as embodied by Schönberg, Stockhausen and friends. A central point in the essay is then that at some point in the 20th century, the "hard core" of countercultural music scenes that aren't strictly part of "high culture" then either take that place or become an integral link in the chain of disseminating avant-garde music ideas into the cultural sphere at large. I don't really consider it a coincidence that, perhaps because that's one music scene where it's the most transparent how new ideas flow downstream from the underground into the mainstream.

I'm posting this here for the reason that the essay actually uses avant-prog in general, Henry Cow and the Rock In Opposition movement in particular, as examples. This ties into the many "effort-posting" threads I have made concerning artists who are more influential than popular, as well as on how some music maintains intergenerational appeal and which does not. How much has not just the RIO movement, but more appropriately people like Captain Beefheart and Frank Zappa done to disseminate the innovations of innovators in modern classical and free jazz into audiences who aren't otherwise familiar with them or might not have heard of people like Igor Stravinsky and Ornette Coleman to begin with? This becomes even more "meta" if you consider how Beefheart and Zappa might be entering that "more influential than popular" zone, I think Beefheart himself isn't quite as popular as his disciple Tom Waits for instance. Then there's his (and by extension Coleman, Stravinsky, Varese etc)'s influences on post-punk bands like The Fall or Public Image Limited and noise rockers like The Boredoms by osmosis... where there's also another cultural generation gap. To make the whole thing even more confusing, there is again those groups' influences on the sorta-mainstream through much contemporary indie rock. This ends up with a sort of "infinite regress" of music influences that very few people have the time and resources to keep track of on an in-depth level of familiarity. I mean, I like quite a bit of the avant-prog mentioned in this paragraph but it's unlikely I'll ever have more than an entry-level knowledge of those parts of jazz and classical I mentioned. Maybe it'll be possible under the condition of a certain active initiative to learn, but that might be easier said than done.

Which brings us to the central thesis of that article: Its author makes the argument that for a wider music culture to advance, and for that matter any kind of cultural sphere as it also uses examples from the world of literature in T. S. Eliot and James Joyce, it needs some kind of avantgarde or underground that works from an in-depth awareness of their artform's history to advance the medium or genre's evolution further with no concern for whether or not it will appeal to a wider audience than an esoteric niche. Their impact upon the culture at large, even if it comes to reshape it, will then by necessity be through cultural osmosis. Everything genuinely original in more wider accessible, more popular culture will have to be downstream from the countercultural scenes' elite circles. This makes my namedrop of Zappa as an example interesting, perhaps as a basis for a potential counter-argument, since his entire mission statement or motivating artistic ethos was to bridge the gap between "high" and "low culture" if not eroding the border between the two.

Did all of that make sense? I'm not sure how much I agree or disagree with the argument made in the essay, but it does add an interesting new perspective on many of the debates we've had on this forum.