Beyond Thee Infinite Beat
Some nerves seem to have been hit last week when I suggested having some discomfort with the seeming total ubiquity of music with extremely prominent metrical patterns, e.g. music with a strong beat. But please don’t misunderstand me. I don’t think and didn’t mean to imply that strong beats connote musical inferiority. Quite the contrary, a great deal of music I love is beat saturated—whether it’s European Baroque concerti, Indonesian gamelan music, the amazing and now endangered Chopi Timbila music of Mozambique, or any of the output of the British post-punk “anti-band” Public Image Ltd. masterminded by the utterly brilliant and always contentious John Lydon.
But it feels to me that too much of any good thing—no matter how good it is—is too much, whether it’s having a beat or not having a beat, having a tonal center or assiduously avoiding one. Indeed, we could be living in a truly golden age of pluralism and possibility. We can theoretically create and listen to anything we want. There is no longer a meaningful mainstream, or at least there shouldn’t be one.
What could or should be, however, is very different from what is. Nowadays it frequently feels even more difficult to challenge received wisdom than it used to. Hive mind group think and easily digestible sound-bytes have taken the place of research and considered debate. By being able to choose anything, we only choose what we think we want and in the process can’t learn about what we think we don’t like, which we could in fact wind up liking even more if we bothered to give it a chance. We sometimes conform, not because someone is telling us to, but because we repress what we truly want to say for fear that it will not be popular among whatever peer group we seek recognition from. And even though it’s possible to listen to anything and everything, our modality for listening is often one that cuts out the outside world, which oxymoronically means we’re actually listening to a lot less than we would (the world around us) if we weren’t listening to anything (the stuff we personally choose, often based less on personal choice than effective marketing or a conformist sense of what we should be listening to). We have tools to make and disseminate anything and everything, but those tools also have built-in limiters (e.g. notation software presets that can’t be overwritten, quantization or pixel resolution, etc.)—to facilitate their ease and speed—that in turn limit what the possibilities are. When it’s so gratifying to do something easily and quickly, the challenge to learn and grow is somehow thwarted.
As for that mainstream aesthetic that may or may not exist, here’s a sobering set of statistics from the Nielsen ratings (they’re still around): last year more than 80 percent of album sales were for only 1 percent of what was available. While this is slightly down from 2009 (83.3%), it has been a steadily rising trend since 2005 (when it was a mere 75.5%). Paul Resnikoff, the Toronto-based publisher of Digital Music News praised Canadian consumers in a post last Thursday for having a greater breadth and diversity than their U.S. neighbors—the top 1% selling albums last year only account for 57.6% of the sales there. How is such a disparity possible? You may counter those stats by claiming people listen to a greater variety of music online than what they are paying for. But then the question becomes how folks can have an economically viable means of sustenance in the long term if people aren’t giving financial support to them to hear their music. If the only music that can survive and in fact thrive economically is an extremely narrow fragment of the total music that is being made today (one percent), what does that say about our possibility to do anything and everything?
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There is more than one way to prevent the dissemination of information. While out and out censorship and rigidly imposed attempts at group think are obviously wrong, the results of economic “survival of the fittest” are often the same—i.e. when a book goes out of print the information is as inaccessible as it would be if the book were actually banned, perhaps more so since banning a book gives it a form of notoriety which often makes the book in question even more popular even if it needs to be obtained through underground means. So might the music that people are not buying and most people are not even listening to ultimately have about the same impact on society at large as it would if it did not exist? I believe this is cause for concern.