Degenerate Music!

[Peter]

Originally posted by Chaszz:
This is true, but there is so much violence in both plays that I think one might question whether some of it is not gratuitious. Shakespeare might have been throwing his groundlings some bones. There is even cannibalism in Titus Andronicus.

I don't think the amount of violence is the question - the first half hour of the film 'saving private ryan' was some of the most horrific and bloody viewing I have ever seen - but it was relevant, historial and intended to shock us to the horrors of war. It is the purpose behind the violence that is the issue - Shakespeare was not condoning cannabilism by portraying it - he was showing us a particularly ghastly aspect of human nature. Whereas Beethoven (Pizzaro in Fidelio) or Shakespeare will portray evil, they never condone it - no true artist would.

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'Man know thyself'

[ann hathaway]

Oh Chaszz, you did make me chuckle, when you suggested shakespeare throwing the plebians some bones, and imagine them baying for more blood!
But Shakespeare knew how the plebians wanted to be entertained.
And for the more sophisticated society he produced more intellectualy challenging plays.

I agree the mutilations in Titus Andnronicus were a bit over the top, but I dont suppose the plebs went home and beheaded their neighbours kids and baked them in a pie! Its all for effect.

As a phlebotomist, I must say I can get quite excited when I see a nice big juicy vein. And when I stock up the blood bank!

Seriously though, when all said and done, the plays are after all a study of the human potential for Evil!

Todays problem with the spawning amoeba
and young mislead muggers looking for some kind of status in society needs seriuosly to be addressed.


The Vampire!

[Chaszz]

Originally posted by ann hathaway:

Oh Chaszz, you did make me chuckle, when you suggested shakespeare throwing the plebians some bones, and imagine them baying for more blood!
But Shakespeare knew how the plebians wanted to be entertained.
And for the more sophisticated society he produced more intellectualy challenging plays.

I agree the mutilations in Titus Andnronicus were a bit over the top, but I dont suppose the plebs went home and beheaded their neighbours kids and baked them in a pie! Its all for effect.

As a phlebotomist, I must say I can get quite excited when I see a nice big juicy vein. And when I stock up the blood bank!

Seriously though, when all said and done, the plays are after all a study of the human potential for Evil!

Todays problem with the spawning amoeba
and young mislead muggers looking for some kind of status in society needs seriuosly to be addressed.


The Vampire!

I suggest Shakespeare was writing for both the sophisticates and the plebians at once, not necessarily in separate plays. As in Macbeth:

"Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood Clean from my hand? No; this my hand will rather The multitudinous seas incarnadine,
Making the green one red."

For the literate, incarnadine; for the non-literate, a prompt explanation.

And just as his groundlings did not go home and en masse commit murder, even after what you admit is the "over the top" Titus Andronicus, the masses who hear Eminem do not either. Maybe they too can tell the difference between the stage and real life. I know that there is too much violence around, but statistically, crime in the U.S. has been DECLINING for a decade (don't know about Europe). Were I to press my views even further, I could ask whether this decline might not be due to the purging benefits of rap music. But my point is that I distrust such linkages in either direction until somehow scientifically proven.

[This message has been edited by Chaszz (edited January 15, 2003).]

[ann hathaway]

Reply to Chaszz,

Yes, plays were written so that the Plebs drew out of it what they wanted, (shock Horror). The sophisticates understood the plays at a profounder level.

LINKAGES.


We cannot wait for linkages to be proven.
Everybody suspects that mobile phones and pylon cables detramentally affect health.
But I am not sure it has yet been proven legally or scientifically. But that does not mean we should not take some prudent action to restrict growth.
Likewise, the spawning sub-moronic gangsta rap music scarcely has a benificial effect on people whatever the precise extent of its negative effects might be.
The other point is that even Titus Andronicus is the product of a dazzling intellectual culture, one only has to look at the language to appreciate that and it can hardly be claimed that pop music is comparable, however superficially provocative its lyrics might be.
So far as crime in the U.S. and Europe is concerned my understanding in America is that gun crime in places like New York has declined. But in L.A. and other cities it has increased.
In Britian thank God we do not have rampant gun crime (yet), but we do have ashamedly widespread anti-social low life hooligan violence which the present Government so concerned to dumb down everything in Britian and destroying our past and does nothing whatever about failing to see the connection between its politically correct agenda and the literally millions of untermensch that reside in this Island.

There is nothing sophisticated about rap music.
When Lavinia in Titus Andronicus is mutilated her father gives a long and complicated speech which is dense with more classical allusions than virtually any other speeches is shakespeare--this is in front of a severely injured child in an almost satiric tongue in cheeck manner which unercuts the effect of the violence, a subtle treatment which is absent in many violent films.

Multitudinous seas incarnadine as you probably know, means, the sea turning red with Macbeths blood, ie, his sin has infected the whole of natural order.

[Joy]

Originally posted by Chaszz:
[B]

I know that there is too much violence around, but statistically, crime in the U.S. has been DECLINING for a decade.
B]

I've read these reports too but you couldn't tell the difference here in Phoenix.

Joy

[Joy]

Originally posted by ann hathaway:
[B]

In Britian thank God we do not have rampant gun crime (yet), but we do have ashamedly widespread anti-social low life hooligan violence.

B]

So do we!! Isn't it true that your police don't carry guns? I think that says something, loudly. You'd never see a policeman around here without a gun!

Joy

[Chris]

Originally posted by Peter:
I don't think the amount of violence is the question - the first half hour of the film 'saving private ryan' was some of the most horrific and bloody viewing I have ever seen - but it was relevant, historial and intended to shock us to the horrors of war. It is the purpose behind the violence that is the issue - Shakespeare was not condoning cannabilism by portraying it - he was showing us a particularly ghastly aspect of human nature. Whereas Beethoven (Pizzaro in Fidelio) or Shakespeare will portray evil, they never condone it - no true artist would.

I usually don't bother to post just a "well said," but this post is particularly derserving of it.

So, well said, Peter!

[Steppenwolf]

Originally posted by ann hathaway:

In Britian thank God we do not have rampant gun crime (yet), but we do have ashamedly widespread anti-social low life hooligan violence which the present Government so concerned to dumb down everything in Britian and destroying our past and does nothing whatever about failing to see the connection between its politically correct agenda and the literally millions of untermensch that reside in this Island.

I don't know if you have been watching the news much lately (I live in London). My impression is that gun crime is in fact spiralling out of control in Britain. England was once a gentle country, but now it is becoming another Los Angeles.
Although I detest garage/rap 'music', I don't blame it for the gun culture. Or at least it is not the primary cause. It is the rash, rather than the inner sickness. The gutless government has tried to lay the blame on this 'music' on the rise in crime, while neglecting to do anything about the root cause, and hypocriticaly failing to take responsibility for making the problem worse through their stupid policies. One of the main causes of the lowlife urban ghetto culture is welfare dependancy coupled with uncontrolled imigration. But will a labour government do anything about that? Of course not. As far as I am concerned the 'new' labour idiots are bigger lowlifes than the rappers! They seem hellbent on turning England's green and pleasant land into a vast, crime infested urban ghetto.
Goodbye Handel and Elgar! The new anthem is of socialist Britian is garage 'music' and gansta rap.

[Steppenwolf]

For all those who think that degenerate modern 'music' is no different to Shakespeare, take note of the lyrics of a song by the very popular American hard rock band, 'Korn'.

Album - LIFE IS PEACHY
Song title - K@#$%


F--k you titty suckin' two balled b--ch with a fat green
cl-t. My big conhoto b--ch. Oh s--t, f---kin a-- licking pi-- sucking cl-t, these nuts on your lips Kentucky fried Kung-Pao cl--s

Saggy t--- swinging between your fat crusty armpits. Big a--hairy mole between your p---y lips. F--k s--t c--k d--k c--t t-t barf p--s. Balls a-- pecker quief oh s--t, f--k, b--ch, d--n, f--king diarrhea slut with hips...

All I want to do.... (you are not my real mother)
Is kill you.... (so I beat and stab and f--k her)
(x2)

Wish! You! Were dead! Now!

The song consists of these lyrics, not sung but screamed on top of dissonant, a-tonal, screeching noise. What sane intelligent person could possibly deny that this is degenerate? Whoever says this is art is an idiot.
To defend this psychotic garbage by making comparisons to Shakespeare, or some other great artist, is stupidity. And it is equally stupid to say that objecting to this offensive degeneracy is just the same as the silly, reactionary objections to the harmless music of Elvis, or the Beatles, back in the 50s and 60s. Isn't it obvious that things have gone to far, and got out of hand?
Even more repugnant than the actual 'music' itself are the people who wax lyrical and talk nonsense about how clever Emimen is, and how there is poetic meaning and profound irony in his words, as if he was a great poet. Here is one of his masterpieces.

Song title - Amityville


I f--kin my cousin in his a--hole, slit my mother's throat
My little sister's birthday, she'll remember me
For a gift I had ten of my boys take her virginity
Their mother wasn't raped, I ate her p---y while she was 'sleep Pis--- -drunk, throwin up in the urinal (YOU F--kin HOMO!)
That's what I said at my dad's funeral


I suppose some idiot will respond to this and point out that Shakespeare had erotic themes to some of his love sonnets, and Ovid wrote all about the art of love in his poems, and therefore the 'poetry' of Eminem which talks about sex is not really any different to that (forget the fact that the sex depicted in Emimen is the type of sex prefered by psychopaths).

I am not advocating censorship. As I have said in a previous post, I think this is a symptom of a bad social problem rather than the primary cause of it. I am merely asking you come to the obvious conclusion that western civilisation is very ill, very decadent, and that the cutlural/artistic dark age in which we are now living does not bode well for the future. Art is the reflection of the heath of a society and civilisation, and we get grim prognosis if we look at modern music, and modern art in general.

[Jimmyblues]

First off, most music evolves from the low to the high- take jazz- done in low down bars to Coltrane's spirituality. So I give rap a chance.
Second, freedom allows us to be sublime or stupid.
3rd- the arts are undervalued, not taught well in early grades..
4th- it is anyone's right to make music the way they like, it is my right not to listen to it.
5th- the record companies have a stranglehold on what we hear, and crap sells.
last- the society the ancients knew didn't have the kind of freedom we had, so their view about ordered music is not really applicable- in this degenerate society, we have much longer life expectancy, more political debate, instant info- with all the flaws, I'm diggin' it...

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Bird Lives

[Peter]

Originally posted by Steppenwolf:
I am not advocating censorship. As I have said in a previous post, I think this is a symptom of a bad social problem rather than the primary cause of it. I am merely asking you come to the obvious conclusion that western civilisation is very ill, very decadent, and that the cutlural/artistic dark age in which we are now living does not bode well for the future. Art is the reflection of the heath of a society and civilisation, and we get grim prognosis if we look at modern music, and modern art in general.

I agree with your diagnosis of society, but I take a more positive view of the prognosis. We are living in very difficult and troubled times but I predict there will be a renaissance akin to that of the 16th century - it may not be in our lifetimes, but it will come. In the meantime I shall continue to listen to Beethoven and other great composers - Beethoven's message represents truth and truth is timeless and indestructible.

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'Man know thyself'

[Steppenwolf]

Originally posted by Jimmyblues:
First off, most music evolves from the low to the high- take jazz- done in low down bars to Coltrane's spirituality. So I give rap a chance.

Perhaps one day rap will become respectable, and high brow, like jazz, and musical conossiours will sit about discussing it. But I doubt it! Problem is, it has no musical/artistic merit whatsoever, whereas jazz did. Of course you can respond to this with the typical relativism argument, the same argument that says a pile of literal garbage in a modern art gallary is art, and that it is stubborn and too conservative to dismiss it. But the people who don't like to exclude anything from the classification of proper art don't understand the absurdity of their position, the reductio ad absurdum. If art is potentially anything, then it is potentially everything. If it is everything then it is nothing, the word and concept ceases to have any meaning because classifications and labels only have meaning by contrast, to what is different. So we understand the idea of "dog" against the background of everything in the word that is NOT a dog. We understand "red" as opposed to blue, orange, black, white etc.
We can only point to something and say "That is art" if we can also point to something else and say "That is NOT art". Otherwise the word has no meaning.

(On second thought, considering some of the intellectual, high brow classical music of the 20th century, a lot of which is absolute rubbish - and in a sense worse than rap because it is pretensious rubbish, rubbish which takes itself too seriously, whereas rap is not pretensious and is sincere in its perversity - perhaps the idea of rap becomming high brow is not so far fetched after all!).

Second, freedom allows us to be sublime or stupid.

Quite true. And I am not against freedom. I am not advocating censorship.
I am merely saying that if a person, or group of people who are given freedom consistently choose to be perverse, then that reveals a problem with those people. If a society ceases to reward brilliance, and instead rewards degeneracy, then there is a problem with that society.
Say you have two children. One of them starts banging his head against the wall and tries to burn the house down, the other plays with his toys and seems contented. Obviously the child with the erratic behaviour is disturbed. Rap music is likewise the product of a disturbed society. It is not a question of censorship, just recognising and diagnosing a problem.

3rd- the arts are undervalued, not taught well in early grades..

Agreed. Why do you think this is?

4th- it is anyone's right to make music the way they like, it is my right not to listen to it.

No argument there. Ditto my comments about the disturbed child.
Although, let me play the devils advocate here. I as an adult can choose not to listen to Eminem. But do young impressionable children have the same ability to make such an informed choice? If they are brainwashed and bombarded with all the negative aspects of modern pop culture on MTV, and other media outlets, and at school etc, do not parents have the right to demand that they be protected from these poisonous influences? If Emimem is promoted as being cool, as being a role model to young children, they are likely to accept that without critical thought.
Do you think there should be ANY restrictions on music? What about, hypothetically speaking, some singer came up with lyrics glorifying racism, singing about lyncing black people and making a joke of it, or singing about molesting young children in the same impersonal, brutal way Eminem sings about having sex with women. Would that be OK with you? What then if that music was promoted as being cool and the next best thing in modern culture to your children? Would that be any different?



[This message has been edited by Steppenwolf (edited January 17, 2003).]

[Steppenwolf]

Originally posted by Peter:
I agree with your diagnosis of society, but I take a more positive view of the prognosis. We are living in very difficult and troubled times but I predict there will be a renaissance akin to that of the 16th century - it may not be in our lifetimes, but it will come. In the meantime I shall continue to listen to Beethoven and other great composers - Beethoven's message represents truth and truth is timeless and indestructible.

I hope you are right! I think you are. But I fear that things may have to get a lot worse before they get better. Degeneracy in art is merely the first warning sings of impending doom. It is like a cancer victim first experiencing a mild fever. Perhaps we will have to go the way of the Romans and suffer another dark age before mankind has another renaissance. It might be a good idea to get the scores of all the works of the great composers - along with great works of western literature etc, and bury them in a time capsule. Classical music is out of step with modern times (and that is a compliment to classical music, not a criticism!) so it will become more and more neglected as time goes on.

I really do hope I am wrong on this, and that I am being too pessimistic. Hopefully the social problems we are having now are just the pangs and pain of labour before a new birth, a painful transition to something greater. But I have a horrible feeling, when I look at past trends in history, that the gloomy prognosis may be correct.

[Chaszz]

Steppenwolf wrote "...I suppose some idiot will respond to this and point out that Shakespeare had erotic themes to some of his love sonnets, and Ovid wrote all about the art of love in his poems, and therefore the 'poetry' of Eminem which talks about sex is not really any different to that (forget the fact that the sex depicted in Emimen is the type of sex prefered by psychopaths).'...

I assume I am the idiot referred to here, so I will reply. First, I don't put rap music on the same level as Shakespeare or anywhere near it; I was trying to point out that you can find shock and gore in the great arts of the past, and it is SOMETIMES gratuitous as it is in our day. I think it doesn’t always have a moral purpose, as has been claimed above. In ‘Titus Andronicus’, the baking of two men into a meat pie and their mother’s eating of it was probably not really necessary to make a moral point. Likewise in ‘Macbeth’ the repeated gory murders and the murders of children are somewhat more than is necessary, in my view, to portray overweening ambition. In ‘Henry V’, a bloody war begins only because the King of England decides to enforce a feeble old claim to be also King of France. Where is the noble moral here? Shakespeare was obviously patronizing and glorifying the English monarchy in a chauvinistic way which is no more moral than is any unprovoked war. Was Shakespeare ALWAYS gratuitous or amoral? Of course not.

The fountainhead of Western literature, Homer’s ‘Iliad’, is the bloodiest thing I’ve ever read. The moral point is that Achilles’ anger at not being respected leads to his leaving the Greek army, and this comes back to tragically punish him when his lover Patrocles is killed in battle while Achilles, instead of being there to help protect him, sulks in his tent. Meanwhile, we have lengthy battle scene after scene of the most extreme violence one can imagine. There is a catalogue that runs thru the whole poem of the different places a javelin can pierce, the stomach, the intestines, the spine, the pelvis, the neck, the thigh, etc., etc., as the cracks of broken bones sound, organs squish and phoomph and blood spurts prodigiously. The fields are over and over again filled knee-deep in blood and gore, much more than in 'Saving Private Ryan'. All this gore is obviously not necessary, but was put in to interest the audience as the poem was sung over several evenings. Why else is it there? Homer and Shakespeare were working poets who had audiences to please in order to earn their livings, and were not sitting in ivory towers.

Secondly, of course a truism, adults are often shocked by the culture of younger people. The most staid of current day dances, the waltz, was considered very shocking when it appeared in the mid-19th century. Ragtime shocked the older people of 1900; the young who embraced it got older and were themselves shocked by the frankly sexual and scatalogical jazz music and lyrics of the 1920s. Steppenwolf says Elvis was ‘innocent’; well, I was a teenager when he became popular in the 1950s. Very many people thought his openly sexual pumping hips heralded the decline of civilization, along with the youth violence known as ‘juvenile delinquency’ at the time, which later ebbed. The newpapers screamed with this stuff.

Shock has been a feature of much great 'high' and popular art for two hundred years now, and admittedly of a lot of junk also. As Jimmy says, it’s partly a result of free speech which is a recent thing of about the same vintage. Free speech brings good and bad but on balance, like him, I’d rather live with it than without it. Shock has often been used in the arts to upend the conventional thinking of the middle class. Sometimes it may be in service of a vision and sometimes gratuitous, or ‘shock for shock’s sake’, but I think it’s often difficult distinguish between the two. Goethe was only one of many older people who thought Beethoven went unnecessarily too far with his musical effects. A close friend of mine, and my wife, who both love Baroque music, are still startled and made nervous by some of Beethoven’s heavy dramatic banging chords, and ask me why he thought he needed to do that. Though I love Beethoven, I find it difficult to reply beyond mumbling he needed it to express his ideas and feelings. They find this a kind of circular logic that doesn’t really explain anything. Rod sees little value in Picasso; as a painter myself maybe I have an advantage there. His first cubist painting ‘Demoiselles D’Avigonon’ (which was so shocking in 1907 that the artist showed it to nobody for 15 years), is to me one of the greatest of all paintings. http://www.moma.org/collection/depts...culpt_006.html
Yes, it’s full of shock, but in this case I think in the service of a tremendous plastic vision. Not always true with Picasso. Did he need to do this? He could draw like an old master. Evidently he thought he did. The premiere of Stravinsky’s ‘Rite of Spring’ caused one of the notorious riots of modern art. To me it still sounds like just gratuitous shock, but a musician I know who is conservative in many ways loves it. Abstract painting seems empty to many. Most is to me too, but some of these artists I think are great, such as Mark Rothko. Abstraction, which many saw as the nadir of art, was followed by conceptual art like that of the Londoner Damian Hirst who slices up dead cows and sharks and imbeds the pieces in huge plastic cubes. I don’t like rap at all, but, as Steppenwolf says, I can see a sincerity of purpose there lacking in such as Damien Hirst.

Given the ubiquity of shock, the boundaries must be pushed further each time, if it is still to be shocking. Kids tend to get over it and grow up, and society goes on. What’s shocking next? I haven’t seen too much of people being baked into pies except in ‘Hannibal’, and in Shakespeare’s Titus, and in the House of Atreus legend from ancient Greece (where, unlike the other two examples, CHILDREN are baked into pies and eaten, unbeknownst, by their parents. Was this really necessary as background to ‘Agammemnon‘ or was it gratuitous?)

Maybe incest is next? Although we now know it goes on a lot in real life on all levels of society, I haven’t seen much of it in the arts except in Wagner’s ‘Die Walkure’ (which shocked the hell out of people in the 1870s) and in one or two modern novels.

Hooligamism in Europe may be due to welfare dependancy and/or to the shock and seeming nihilism of the modern arts, including rap, but I don't think we really know. Sooner or later the public will react and put in governments that reduce welfare dependancy as the U.S. has started to do. In my opinion much of gang activity everywhere may be due to the inhuman nature of public housing projects fostered by the Swiss architect Le Corbusier, who preached tall isolated towers in parklike settings. Many critics hold that numerous smaller, more connected buildings with shops built in would have prevented this anomie and violence. (For me, even this has two sides, as I love Corbusier's other buildings). I could also plausibly blame European hooliganism, so much of which centers around soccer games, on soccer itself, with its almost complete lack of scoring leading to huge pent-up angers in the crowds. Who really knows?

Third, a great period of art does not necessarily mean a healthy society, but often quite the opposite. The great age of classical art in Athens was also the time when the city arrogantly forced its allies to pay it tribute. When the people of Melos refused, the Athenians massacred them all. Soon Athens had no moral standing among the other Greek cities, lost the Peloponnesian war to them, and its glory was gone forever. Renaissance Italy produced superb art but was a divided, anxious land ruled by rampaging mercenary warlords and the corrupt popes they put in power. It was conquered by Germany and France and was run by outsiders for almost 400 years. At the same time the Church lost much of its power to the Protestant Reformation which began in 1506 at the height of the Renaissance. French painting from 1780 to 1950 led the world thru great movement after great movement. During that time France went from a first class power to a second rate one and lost three major wars. Along the way it had the permanant seething battle between left and right which produced its bloody abortive revolution, later the massacre of the Commune of 1870, and still later the Dreyfuss affair that demonstrated a morally corrupt society.

For the three reasons above, for me it’s not really possible to make a blanket statement about decadence such as Steppenwolf makes. By the evidence of the three golden ages of art I mentioned above, one might argue that poor art rather than great art may herald a a healthy society. But I’m not saying that either. I don’t like rap any more than anyone else here does. I just think that all-embracing judgments on the health or decadence of society, and their relation to its arts, seem very difficult or impossible to make, especially when one is living through the times that we are. And when, like myself, one has tried and rejected not all of modern art, but only some of it; and has had deep responses to a good deal of the remainder, shocking or not.


[This message has been edited by Chaszz (edited January 17, 2003).]

[Peter]

Originally posted by Chaszz:
For the three reasons above, for me it’s not really possible to make a blanket statement about decadence such as Steppenwolf makes. By the evidence of the three golden ages of art I mentioned above, one might argue that poor art rather than great art may herald a a healthy society. But I’m not saying that either. I don’t like rap any more than anyone else here does. I just think that all-embracing judgments on the health or decadence of society, and their relation to its arts, seem very difficult or impossible to make, especially when one is living through the times that we are. And when, like myself, one has tried and rejected not all of modern art, but only some of it; and has had deep responses to a good deal of the remainder, shocking or not.

There is much in what you say, and I particularly agree that it is not possible to judge a society by its art - after all just look at society in the 18th and 19th century when western music was at its peak. The injustices, poverty, slavery etc were hardly proof of an advanced or civilised society!

When it comes to rap I am rather ignorant as I don't listen to it, but from the lyrics I have read I do not see anything clever or artisitic in preaching violence. As Steppenwolf pointed out, can anyone seriously think the examples he posted are of any value artisically? This music is originating from an ill-educated sub-culture whose command of the English language does not go beyond a few four letter obscenities. Maybe Shakespeare is guilty of gratutitous violence in places (I'm no expert) but at least he does it with a superb command of the language and a vocabluary unmatched today.

Incidentally I agree with you about Picasso!

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'Man know thyself'