More on the music debate

David Brooks has joined in on the music debate that I (and many others) highlighted a few weeks ago when the New Yorker’s Sasha Frere-Jones criticized indie music for being too white and Slate’s Carl Wilson responded that it is too upper-middle class.

Brooks expresses a similar sentiment, one that can be boiled down to that musical influences are not available through a central media, an authoritative cultural arbiter like “The Ed Sullivan Show.” 

On Feb. 9, 1964, the Beatles played on “The Ed Sullivan Show.” Or as Steven Van Zandt remembers the moment: “It was the beginning of my life.”

Van Zandt fell for the Beatles and discovered the blues and early rock music that inspired them.

Brooks attributes today’s lack of Van Zandts to our modern, “segmented society,” not a unique observation.  (I can link to a paper I wrote about this subject for my sophomore year American Cultural History class, but I will spare you).

However, Brooks de-emphasizes the mechanical reasons  in his explanation for why rock has broken into multiple sub-genres that are increasingly less related to each other.  For one, there is no equivalent to “Ed Sullivan” today because of cable TV and niche marketing.  Anyone who laments this void needs to put the blame as much at the feet of focus group-oriented marketers and the receptive cable television programmers who find that it is more profitable to slice up and target demographics than to encourage programming that appeals to broad swaths of people.

Furthermore, and very obviously, the format of the Internet–increasingly the primary distribution channel of music–facilitates segmentation, because, as we know, cultural products are not coming from a few central sources as they do on TV and radio.  This is not totally a bad thing.

Brooks instead opts for the more exciting cultural critique:

But other causes flow from the temper of the times. It’s considered inappropriate or even immoral for white musicians to appropriate African-American styles.

I have no idea where he got that.  He continues,

And there’s the rise of the mass educated class.

People who have built up cultural capital and pride themselves on their superior discernment are naturally going to cultivate ever more obscure musical tastes. I’m not sure they enjoy music more than the throngs who sat around listening to Led Zeppelin, but they can certainly feel more individualistic and special.

There may be some truth to this.  One thing I find interesting about the musical scene to which Brooks refers–the indie scene–is that bands do not seem to endure the way the Beatles and the Rolling Stones did.  (As someone who has a tepid opinion of the Rolling Stones, I have no inclination to romanticize their endurance). 

I also wonder whether Brooks has listened to the music he is criticizing (maybe he has, but he does write about it in broad strokes), but I will say that I agree with him that the impulse to find obscure music is a kind of hobby of an educated class.  (I also believe that it values novelty for its own sake.  Always eager to find the next new thing, obscurity-hunters can seem attention-deficient when it comes to developing a depth of taste.  This is not to say that all indie fans or even most are like this).

Brooks concludes with this lament:

We live in an age in which the technological and commercial momentum drives fragmentation. It’s going to be necessary to set up countervailing forces — institutions that span social, class and ethnic lines.

Music used to do this. Not so much anymore.

If “institutions that span social, class and ethnic lines” refer to network TV and the radio during the 1940s-70s, it is important to note that such formations were themselves phenomena which had their own unique drawbacks.