manufacture music
Eric Long
Fitter, Happier
Music means quite a bit to me.
Accordingly, I want to thank the University for bringing U2 to campus. I offer my thanks in spite of the bizarre decision to sell better tickets for less money, and to offer the majority of seats at a high price — but I'm not about to get all Eddie Vedder up in here.
I offer my thanks in spite of the ticket distribution system, which resembled Chinese algebra in its complexity. I offer my thanks because I find spiritual and physical renewal in music, and I'm glad the University is willing to nurture the love of music.
That said, I saw an amazing concert two weeks ago in Chicago. David Byrne, ex-lead singer for the Talking Heads, came to the Riviera. I'm not the biggest Talking Heads fan, and I know only a few of Byrne's songs since he went solo, but this was a great rock show. Byrne was as weird as ever and he danced around on stage as though the music he played flowed directly from an essential place inside of him.
At a point in the show, Byrne finished a song and the crowd erupted in applause. The applause continued long after the appropriate time for applause to end. This was no longer the polite, automatic clapping that follows a song. The audience poured out pure joy. On stage, a thousand-watt smile illuminated Byrne's face. For that moment, everyone in the concert hall experienced a beautiful, revitalizing collective breath. It was the right feeling at the right time, coming a few days after the tragedies in New York and Washington, D.C.
I'd call my experience elevating. Music can elevate like this all of the time. For this reason, I think popular music is an important art form. In its best forms, popular music is passionate and profound; it is the dedicated effort to express a transcendent truth in an immediate, impermanent form — sort of like lyric poetry. Good popular music captures a shared moment, it digs into common experience and thus transforms the experience into something extraordinary. Good pop consistently nourishes and re-establishes an organic human community.
Importantly, pop music is accessible to the masses. Anyone with a few dollars can enjoy music. If you have a radio, the music is free. I just wouldn't recommend turning on the radio these days. Don't expect to find good popular music there. You will be disappointed.
The Backstreet Boys do not promote the human community. Britney Spears does not foster a sense of elevating shared experience. Limp Bizkit does not appeal to any fully human emotion or experience.
I don't want to offend any fans out there, and I'm not insinuating that I'm a better person for the music I listen to. Everyone listens to music for different reasons. Some people want to get angry and run into things, some people want to chant lyrics over and over again, some people just want to zone out and forget about daily stressors. I simply argue that music can bring about amazing transcendent experiences, and anyone who listens to the soulless drivel on the radio is being robbed of these experiences.
Unfortunately, bad music is a necessary side effect of consumer culture. Humans are opportunistic creatures, and when they think they know what is good, they seize it for themselves. Money seems pretty good — how do humans get a lot of money in capitalist economies? Make something, put it on the market and, through deep understanding of human nature or dumb luck, convince several million consumers that they need whatever it is that you made. The manufacturing of desire is a skill too, so I say bravo to Fred Durst the marketing agent.
Fred and his Korn-wannabe protégés figured out how to sell anger to boys in the suburbs. Britney Spears figured out how to sell her body to men (not such a difficult thing to do) and her own skewed version of girl power to women. Or maybe people buy her records for their even more dreadful than Debbie Gibson sound. At any rate, Fred and Britney sure do sell a lot of records and get to be on television.
Consumerism fits in with the pop ethos. There's no denying it. But there is a difference between crass greed and simply having a large audience. Consumerism is part of pop's accessibility. I mean, if an idea doesn't sell it's not worth very much because no one will have heard it.
Which takes me back to David Byrne. No one has heard of him. But Byrne's concert was the best I'd seen in a while. Anyone would have enjoyed Byrne's show. The secret of Byrne's music, and all good popular music, is that its meaning transcends the words, chords, beat and even the way the band looks. The songs speak a simple human language, and one need only be human to relate. People talk about great concerts for years, spreading a secular gospel if you will. Few things compare to the joy and human unity created by a good concert.
And now, we get U2 in a couple of weeks. With hope, U2 will demonstrate my point: rock-and-roll can save your soul. After all the misfortune and pain of September, I think a good concert in October is just what this campus needs to bring it together as a community.
Eric Long is a senior PLS major. He can be reached at Long.31@nd.edu. His column appears every other Wednesday.
The views expressed in this column are those of the author and not necessarily those of The Observer.
All Viewpoint Stories for Wednesday, September 26, 2001
