I am not an AM radio person. I detest the motor-mouth babble that often fills radio silence with what is nominally intended to be a comforting human presence—to help people evade the emptiness sometimes called the blues. That goes for most pop music too. Is this just old age ranting about the next generation? Or is there something more to such disaffection? Informative talk shows do exist and so does deeply moving music. But conventional drivel seems to dominate the air waves today—and perhaps all of modern life.
Digital electronics facilitates the facile. For example, it makes it easy for a musician to create or find a background rhythm section to set going automatically, and then compose or improvise on top of that. But why exactly has that become such a formula? Why, indeed, do rhythm and repetition dominate popular music? Why must everything have a steady beat?
I am not a musician. But I see that life and meaning are organized between poles of chaos and boredom. We cannot live in a completely unpredictable environment, which would be overwhelming. Nor can we live well with total monotony, day in and day out. There is a happy medium, a balance of order and disorder that captures interest.
On the other hand, the modern human environment has become hugely automated, even in the music industry. Machines, mechanized systems, and algorithms have taken over every aspect of life. What machines do perfectly is to repeat the same thing over and over exactly. Isn’t that what rhythm is? Isn’t that what routine is? What algo-rhythms do is make things predictable. But isn’t that what boredom is? The balance is hardly “medium” and perhaps not so happy.
Certainly, there is order in nature. There are natural cycles, natural rhythms. But there is also variation, unpredictability, uncertainty, randomness. Life is precarious—a fact that humans have never much cared for. From the earliest times, we have striven to make the human world as exempt as we can from the contingencies of the natural world. Half of humanity now live in man-made environments called cities. But even in the village of ten thousand years ago, people found ways to order their surroundings, to create culture, and to distinguish themselves from their animal cousins forced to live in raw nature. There was face-painting and scarification, for example, and other forms of body decoration. There were elaborate customs and rules of behavior, as well as technologies like cooking. There was ritual and dance. There was rhythm.
The body has its natural rhythms, of course. The beating heart may be the original drum. But neither breathing nor heartrate are constant or regular. They elude deliberate control. The rhythm patterns of drumming, in contrast, are intentionally regular or varied. We had the idea of perfect repetition long before we created the ideal repetitions of machines and engines. The clock is the ideal metronome. Mechanization simply abstracts and automates natural rhythms.
Rhythm is an obvious way to coordinate group movements, as in dance—or for military marching and troupe movements, as in war. Ethnic dances often involve an ensemble doing the same steps in sync, as do modern line dances and many choreographies. Modern dance, whether choreographed or improvised, responds to and interprets the music. Music is the common reference to keep everyone together, for which the drum and the beat play a key timing role. Even in social dancing, couples stay in step with each other through the music.
Music and dance may have arisen together, but music can be produced and appreciated without reference to movement. We sit deliberately still during classical concerts, for example, indicating that we expect the music to do something to us besides induce a sort of reflex physical response. When we say “That piece moved me deeply,” we don’t mean it literally. Rather, by “deeply,” we mean that something inside responds in a way that is precisely not habitual or conditioned. It is unexpected, the opposite of cliché, a welcomed disturbance or awakening, which is interior and not dissipated in physical movement.
No matter how poetic or evocative the lyrics, to be moving in that way, popular music must work against a disadvantage when tied to the baseline of a rhythm section, a clichéd downbeat that automatically induces movement rather than heartfelt contemplation. We expect to dance at dance concerts—whether, rock n roll, country western, blues, etc.—where the beat is fundamental to the impulse to move, and the whole point is to enjoy that. But concerts of such music often take place in theatre venues where, like in the classical concert, there is no place to dance. Then there is a conflict between the physical impulse and the setup of the venue. A similar situation exists when such music is played on the radio. We are invited to listen, as though for an inner meaning that can stimulate us psychologically, to sounds that invite us to move like automatons when movement may be restricted, for example while driving in your car. What does that conflict do?
Culture is founded on sublimation, which is a transformation of energy from one form to another. According to Freud, that often involves repression. The impulse to move, for example, may sometimes have to be suppressed, as when you are confined to your seat and there is no place to get up and move. You may find a compromise, such as tapping your foot to the beat. But why put yourself in such an untenable situation? More importantly, does repression in itself lead to the sublime? Does the relentless beat help you toward a higher vision or does it just exercise your muscles while dulling your mind?
What, indeed, is the purpose of art—in this case music? Many people will balk at the notion that it should serve any purpose and not simply be its own worthwhile end: art for art’s sake. Or that it should serve a singular purpose, as it more or less did in the Christian Middle Ages. Art, as a general phenomenon, now seems to be intentionally divergent, to resist definition altogether. At its best, it seeks to be playful, even rebellious, to defy category. That seems to fulfill a definite social function, as a counterbalance to the over-rationalism and pragmatism of our age, the complement of science in particular. Yet, popular music is singularly homogeneous, tied to the obligatory beat. Far from being transformative (as its exponents may hope), it is a numbing pablum that serves to keep everything the same. You can hardly escape it in public places, such as restaurants and stores, where the staff may prefer it because it energizes them to make it through a shift of fundamentally unsatisfying drudgery. But isn’t that numbing?
Art can be transformative—if the intention and the conditions are right. Music can “move” us— out of our conditioning instead of further into it. It can only break our habits, however, by breaking its own. It must surprise us by defeating expectation. Our anticipations are strengthened with every expected mechanical downbeat and musical cliché to which we have been conditioned, and which we may rely upon for their reassuring predictability. The listener, like the musician, has a moral choice between the mundane and the sublime.
It might seem that randomly generated sounds would at least defeat any anticipation one could have about the next note. But there are good reasons why noise is not interesting. For, it is not the absence of intention that inspires us, but its perfection. Sublimation means deliberately making sublime, which is a collaboration between the artist and the audience. Both must invite it. If you hope to be “moved” by music and not simply made to move, you must seek out that sort of experience and the music and art which has that effect.
Everything conventional and familiar serves to keep us in the middle zone of mediocrity, between bludgeoning regularity and the blues of the structureless void. There’s always the risk that confronting the sublime leads to an encounter with the depressive edge of one’s comfort zone, when the supports of the familiar are absent. Music (and art) outside that captive zone does exist, but is rare. It is calculated to throw you off your perch. It probably doesn’t have a down beat or induce frenetic movement. More likely it brings a state of inner stillness and soul-searching. If welcomed, such an experience might be called sacred.