To Tell the Truth

In the context of last week’s not-especially-choate meditation on sounding good, a respondent offered the following question:

“I want to write music that sounds good and, perversely, makes you feel bad—music that can’t be taken at face value and demands to be second-guessed.”

Why?

Why not just be honest from the get-go and allow your ideas to dwell in subtlety?

If I could go back in time and issue one commandment to my younger self that might have subdued my later aesthetic thrashings, I’d tell him that he should write music that reflects his experience and understanding of the world. This seemingly innocuous, new-agey mission statement conceals a significant implication: You have to a have a Weltanschauung. And for the artist, that’s but a step away from having an ideology—to paraphrase Althusser, an imagined relationship with material circumstances.

The field of contemporary music attracts no small number of ideologues. Their shootings-off at the mouth, taken as a whole, have probably done their successors (i.e., us) harm and good in roughly equal amounts. Nonetheless, I’d maintain that concert music lives up to its potential when it’s an expression of ideology, an imagining of one’s relationship with the world. To compose music toward this end is a fundamentally dishonest—fictive, at least—act, but it requires some genuine insight about those material circumstances I mentioned earlier. In that respect, I’d argue that to capitalize (pun intended) on the salability of the artificially sensual is absolutely honest—it’s the order of the day, in fact. Just the same, however, that very fictive critical protest that instills one’s treatment of 2009-model life with a skeptical and dissenting conscience is no less essential. In short, you have to tell the truth in order to lie, and you have to lie in order to be a functioning organ of society.

Long rhetorical answer to a short rhetorical question. Can I just review a mixtape off okayplayer.com next week?