Music: Shifting cultural paradigm: Pop music historian on the role of Rolling Stones

Dan Chiasson via Jamie K. S. Smith's blog, Fors Clabvigera (Feb26,2k11):

Anyone reading this review can go to YouTube now and experience Muddy Waters, or Chuck Berry, or Buddy Holly, or the first Stones recordings, or anything else they want to see, instantly: ads for Freshen-up gum from the Eighties; a spot George Plimpton did for Intellivision, an early video game. Anything. I am not making an original point, but it cannot be reiterated enough: the experience of making and taking in culture is now, for the first time in human history, a condition of almost paralyzing overabundance. For millennia it was a condition of scarcity; and all the ways we regard things we want but cannot have, in those faraway days, stood between people and the art or music they needed to have: yearning, craving, imagining the absent object so fully that when the real thing appears in your hands, it almost doesn’t match up. Nobody will ever again experience what Keith Richards and Mick Jagger experienced in Dartford, scrounging for blues records. The Rolling Stones do not happen in any other context: they were a band based on craving, impersonation, tribute: white guys from England who worshiped black blues and later, to a lesser extent, country, reggae, disco, and rap.

When the situation changed in part because the Stones changed it, and suddenly you could hear (and even meet and play with) Chuck Berry or Bo Diddley, the band lost its way. They depended, for their force, on a body-memory of those early cravings for music they knew only by rumor and innuendo. Other cravings, for drugs and fame, were not sufficient, and had much more dire downsides. The early Stones were in a constant huddle, dissecting blues songs in front of the speakers and playing them back for each other and then for their few fans. They thought of themselves, not even as a band, really, but as a way of distributing music the radio never played.

Smith is always good, and here he follows jazz critic Chiasson to pick two figures, Jagger and Richards, as contributing, in music especially, to a broader shift in a major Western culture paradigm that had to do a lot with, in Theodore Adorno's thawt for instance, the Mass Production of Works of Art.


See some Adorno critics:

The critique criticised: Adorno and popular music - Paddison Popular music in theory: an introduction - Negus A social critique of radio music - Adorno More generally, see Lambert Zuidervaart, leading reformational scholar on Adorno.

Adorno's Aesthetic Theory
The Redemption of Illusion
Lambert Zuidervaart
Paper / March 1993



This is the first book to put Aesthetic Theory into context and outline the main ideas and relevant debates, offering readers a valuable guide through this huge, difficult, but revelatory work.








-- Musikos