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ok so this has been building for a while, and this thread seems as good a place as any to say it.
i do not understand what is being talked about here.
i do not understand how it is that music and its commodity form (recordings) are collapsed into each other to such an extent that recordings are the norm and the making of it ancillary.
another way: i do not understand why folk want to hear the same thing in the same way over and over and over.
i do not understand how folk use recordings, how they use music, what they think it is to do, what their relation to it is.
i do not understand why music is entertainment, distraction, diversion.
another way:
i do not understand how it came about that folk would come to see repetition of static durations within which particular sequences of sonic fetures unfold in the same fucking way every fucking time to be a respite, a space to inhabit and to dream through--when it seems to me obvious that this relation strips these sounds (and by extension sound more generally) of any danger, any development, any change and in so doing relegates change to spaces outside of music, exploration to spaces outside of it.
i do not understand what a perfect commodity could possibly be.
i do not understand what a perfect song is.
i understood the sentences that were offered as a definition in no. 12--the words are easy peasy, the sentence itself poses no problems of comprehension--but the relation expressed through it baffles me entirely.
i do not understand how this notion of a perfect song gets translated into an affirmation of absolute passivity (something "you cannot imagine changing or adding anything to").
i do not understand how music is collapsed into an object, how it gets to be a thing, a thing that you contemplate in the same way, or within a fairly limited range of ways that amount to the same way, over and over.
i do not understand why a song that you love could not just as easily be seen as material for making other sequences, other pieces, why an expression of love for a piece has to be its passive acceptance.
it seems that gertrude stein was right, as she was about many things:
cultural productions, once accepted, become nothing but beautiful.
they loose any possibility of challenging you, any possibility of pushing you to think otherwise.
this is not about questioning what people like--we are obviously free to like what we like, and frankly i dont really care about it so much. i mean, seeing these lists is a mechanism for producing a sense of community, a list of predicates that function to situate the person generating the list socially and culturally, and the sequence of them is an exchange of social and cultural information.
and there are recordings that i think are quite swell and which i enjoy for a while, then put away, then listen to again, hopefully in a different manner, hopefully in a way that enables me to learn something, even if that something is vague, about sound, about the world, about making stuff.
and this is an implicit claim that my relation to sonic objects is better than anyone else's--it is my relation, which i have fashioned across many years of very different types of activity and which i have no interest in imposing on anyone and that because this relation is a function of my particular experience and that experience, like any other, is not transposable.
but one's experience involves certain underlying logics that you bring to it, whether you are aware of it or not, and it is the logic that i see running through this whole thread that baffles me. but it is like this all the time on this particular forum. most of the time, i dont understand what happens here.
what i dont understand, and what this post is about, is the relation to music that gets expressed or enacted by way of the sequences of recordings tacked together as lists of perfect objects above.
i just dont understand it.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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