Music Becomes A Whore

'Using music like a drug is stupid. One shouldn't do that: music is the product of the highest human intelligence, and one of the best senses, the listening senses and of imagination and intuition. And as soon as it becomes just a means for ambiance, as we say, environment, or for being used for certain purposes, then music becomes a whore, and one should not allow that really; one should not serve any existing demands or in particular not commercial values. That would be terrible: that is selling out the music.' - Karlheinz Stockhausen

Twenty years ago Radio 3 reporter Dick Witts sent Stockhausen music by Aphex Twin, Scanner, Plastikman and Daniel Pemberton to see what he made of it. The quote above is part of his general response to what he heard. The use of repetition particularly annoyed him: 'I know that he (Plastikman) wants to have a special effect in dancing bars, or wherever it is, on the public who like to dream away with such repetitions, but he should be very careful, because the public will sell him out immediately for something else, if a new kind of musical drug is on the market.' 

'Dancing bars' - ah, bless the old master. Taking the high ground (where he naturally lived, of course, in a tower), Stocky having none of the kid's beat music is, on the one hand, hardly surprising, although it could have gone another way. He may have been the type who understood that Youth loves repetition, the Rock beat being an old invention by then, and accepted it for what it is. Yet something about his total disdain for contemporary electronica/techno pleases me. It's an almighty slap down from a God rather than an attempt to understand.

In a way, trying to understand is unbecoming in the same way that middle-aged folk try to understand what their kids are listening to, not because they really want to but because they feel they should. Why? Because they want to bridge the generation gap in order not to be like their parents and unlike the older generation they had Youth Music of their own, so they feel they should be able to relate. Parents today dread appearing 'old', whereas parents before them had no problem with it.

Whilst Stockhausen understood the principal aim of Plastikman's Techno (which by current sell-out DJ dance music standards may appear somehow intellectually rigorous) he failed to grasp that it and the other examples came from another universe to his. Perhaps it was obvious to him, yet he makes comparisons with his own music and even recommends examples that the young ones should hear. The cheek! As for being sold out by the public, yes, unless any music-maker stays on top of their game people will move on. That said, Richie Hawtin still seems popular as a DJ. Perhaps that's where the real money is, a week's residency in Ibiza and one-off appearances at super clubs. I know Scanner still has a career in music. 'He has a good sense of atmosphere' according to Stockhausen. 'But he is too repetitive again'.

From another angle we can look at Electronica circa 1995 and see that whilst some of it really was avant-garde compared to cheesy 4/4, the urge to repeat had such an unshakable hold on most of it. Detroit Techno was, after all, a sacred reference point. When shown Stockhausen's response to his music, Scanner said 'What I like about repetition is that it can draw the listener and lull you into a false sense of security.' We've heard this idea expressed many times, of course; the listener is seduced by the ancient lure of the beat and once trapped is treated to mind-blowingly advanced ideas.

Mmm, I'm not convinced it works like that. Or rather, I believe it's a dangerous game for artists to play. If the trick works, they're trapped behind bars (to the beat) of their own making, knowing that people are buying because of the beat and feeling unable, or afraid, to jettison it for free music. I suspect Scanner is one of the more adventurous with regard to this. He does play the more 'intellectual' circuit and get interesting commissions rather than playing beats on a beach.

To state the obvious, that generation didn't come from a tradition of conservatory study in neo-classicism or need to know about complex musical theory. Moving on, all that seems even more old hat today, when High Classicism is redundant in all art forms. What music today does prove is that without having studied in the classic sense, music-makers can be as avant-garde as anything that went before. The noises you can hear in abundance on Bandcamp may not have the rigid structure or finely-honed compositional skills of the neo-classical/electronic tradition, but it is free from the need for repetition, the desire to lull anyone into a sense of security.

The downside of this free-for-all is that some folk are making very long tracks without the faintest idea of how to hold a listener's attention. It might fall into the 'ambient' category, but much of it is little more than music that's 'like a drug', to use Stockhausen's phrase. The drug it's like is Temazepam and some people love to take it. Ambient in its worst sense is just a silence filler for those who hate not to have music on. That and perhaps they fool themselves (or genuinely believe) that because it refuses Stockhausen's dreaded repetition it must therefore be 'deep'.

When he's very old and regarded as a master musician (what, you mean he already is?) perhaps Aphex Twin will be handed music by youngsters and asked what he thinks. He too may warn them about music becoming 'a whore'. One thing's for sure, he won't be condemning them for using too much repetition.