Dynamics and Music

I haven’t written in here in a while because I’ve mostly been reading and digesting a lot of stuff on dynamics, reading both these books:

and though I had a lot of preliminary stuff with Chuck Dyke in grad school , this is a whole ‘nother level, especially as I try to envision exactly what this means for a study of aesthetics.

And I’ve kind of been using my writing at Dusted as a staging ground for some of these ideas, much to the chagrin of my editor, who I think is beginning to grow weary of my shenanigans. The problem I run into though is that often the music is uncomplicated enough that any moron can just click on the mp3 embedded in the top of the page and come up with an opinion for herself or just google search the name if biographical data is what the reader is seeking. Combined with my wish to not do the publicist’s job for her, this means that I have to find other things to talk about when I’m “reviewing” things that don’t warrant a whole lot of internal discussion (internal to the album). A lot of albums are like this, frankly. Few artists actually take the concept seriously, and most of the time it’s just a collection of songs in a pleasant order. Part of that’s the format and the economic constraints (give the listener the most bang for her buck), so I can understand it, but that doesn’t mean it’s not condemnable. At least in certain cases where the artists should know better. Obviously not all music is going to serve some grand aesthetic purpose, but why the rest of it needs reviewing then baffles me. Well, not really; the capitalist machinery that makes indie culture(s) no different than mainstream culture except in aesthetic constrains and shapes these structures, so it’s not that puzzling. It’s just a matter of figuring out how the different networks hook up to each other, how the ground-level activity can cause global patterns, etc.

So, I wrote this one review on Gal Costa, the edited version you can see by clicking here. As much as my ego would like to cry foul, it was definitely the smart move on the editor’s part to cut down the insane behemoth I originally wrote. However, although I only have a very basic grasp on some of these concepts, I still think there may be a lot of half-formed but interesting things in the original review which I want to post:

“Of all the things the re-issue of Gal Costa’s 1969 eponymous album opens up for discussion (the recent interest in Tropicalia or cultural flow from core producing nations to peripheral ones and the ethical or aesthetic implications), one of the most interesting is a discussion of what is gained and what is lost when this particular album re-enters the world as a commercial product. A re-release affords us a somewhat unique opportunity; as most of the music that I’m asked to review is new – the album appears on the scene primed for symbolic dissection, with no prior criticism I have to be attentive to – past interpretations or past understandings never enter into the discussion. In this case though,  Gal was an already existing art object. It had some previous context, both a past-historical one and a completely different cultural one, and now it re-emerges four decades later carrying all that prior meaning with it, and in addition gaining new meanings which will interact and play off of all the old ones. The dynamics of the situation are such that the two contexts become linked by this piece of art, and the trajectory for Costa’s album that can be roughly mapped as such: whatever it meant in 1969, whatever transformations of meaning it went through in subsequent years, and whatever it means now as an album that is being once again inserted into public consciousness in a different country from its origins.

The above space is a way we can visualize all the different criteria at once. Or at least three different things because any more and we wouldn’t be able to visualize it in the first place. So, three things, and each axis is labeled, one with position (Global North, i.e., developed country or Global South, i.e., developing nation), one with time, and one with frequency (This is just a measure of how easily available the album is. If you have to scour a P2P in hopes of finding it, it’s not that frequent. If you can go down to your local record store and pick up a copy, well, you do the math.). The trajectory then that Gal takes goes from somewhere in the lower left (there used to be lots of copies in Brazil) then it wavers around the origin oscillating back and forth as copies become available every once and awhile, at least here in America. Rick Wojcik, one of the co-founders of Dusty Groove told me in an e-mail, “We’d actually sold hundreds of copies of the Brazilian CD pressing of the record over the past decade or so — but that CD was always very hard to get, somewhat expensive, and has been out of print for a few years — so our ability to reach Americans with it was somewhat limited.” I’m not privy to Brazilian sales figures, but at the very least, it was rather inaccessible to us. Anyway, the trajectory then moves into the back, top right as the album is reissued. So it appears on the scene, oscillates around the origin, then becomes frequent again in a different position. If it never went out of print in South America, we’ll have to complicate the picture a bit, but for now, let’s just keep it (relatively) simple. That’s what our trajectory looks like.

I want to keep this moderately straightforward, but I think I need to say something about what exactly I am doing here. If you think about what a piece of art means, that particular meaning is dependent on a number of different factors: historical period, culture, sub-culture and I can list factors until I die of old age, alone and in a homeless shelter. But when you pin down the meaning of that piece of art – in a review, an essay, even just talking with your friends – you’ve understood it at that one moment, in that one context. However, there are (depending on that piece of art) hundreds or thousands or more people doing the same thing as you are, and all those people are interacting, maybe in real life, maybe online, and so all those different meanings start interacting with each other to create even more meanings. Then time passes, and previous meanings start to interact with new meanings from another generation of people. Maybe it’s been so long that a certain meaning becomes canonical (interpretations of Shakespeare or Plato). There are millions of scenarios; the point though is to see that the creation of meaning is a dynamic process that oscillates and roils and goes through fallow periods and then periods of large-scale change depending on the art object, and beyond that process being dynamic, it’s also a non-linear one, that is, meanings interact on a number of different interconnected levels that may very well contradict each other.

So, when I discuss these basic features of Gal, features like time, position, and frequency, this is just the very beginning of a much larger analysis. I’m saying, in effect, “There’s too many things to keep track of, especially in what is supposed to be a somewhat short review, so let’s look at the most basic criteria: how many, at what time and where, and see if any meaning can be shaken out of these simple things.” The question then is: does the trajectory carve out an arbitrary path (i.e., is there any significance to linking the two contexts)? If we want to discuss the way meaning transforms, or the path(s) meaning takes from its original release to its present re-release, what is it, if anything, that links the two symbolic arenas? And probably, since this is a piece of art, most people’s initial responses would be to examine the aesthetic connections: what is it about each context artistically such that it actually makes sense to link Brazil in 1969 and the US in 2008? In this case though, I think that might actually be a red herring. The re-emergence of Tropicalia isn’t that mysterious, owing to a good mixture of reissuing, publicity, and endorsement, and aesthetically, I wonder if that meaning has really changed all that dramatically. There are all the intervening people influenced by Os Mutantes or Caetano Veloso, and certainly the social context is different, but other than that, there haven’t been any major evolutionary shifts in pop music in the last half-century. Uncountable micro-changes, sure, but people are still producing music like Costa’s today, so that there is a discontinuous, symbolic shift that so changes the meaning, of that I am skeptical.

The aesthetic connections then, or the connections that occur at the crossroads between the aesthetic dimension (the high-quality, the beauty, the uniqueness of the album) and a measure of frequency, strike me as rather easy to quantify. If an album of sufficient excellence (and Gal (1969) is a fantastic album – Costa achieves this immanent, emotional quality with her voice – a meaningfulness – that I’m hard-pressed to find many analogues to that don’t simply feel manufactured) dips below a certain frequency, it will be re-released. This isn’t to create some law-like universal rule, but rather to simply identify a pattern. If there’s no greater meaning to Gal once again being available than the fact that it’s well regarded and rare, then it is up to us to say something more, and therefore, I think the political connection between the two contexts is worth examining. This is not to lose sight though of the aesthetic concerns but rather to add another dimension to our examination.

When I first sat down to write, what really struck me as rather poetic was the political similarities between the two contexts – the global political tumult in the wake of 1968 and the current crises (global food shortages, major environmental disasters, the war in Iraq, the housing crisis here with its financial repercussions abroad, etc.) that are affecting the political landscape (although sans the concerted and overwhelming resistance of 1968). The current crises aren’t simply disconnected though; they are symptoms or features of the entire world-system of capitalism in crisis, and the current batch of problems had its origins in 1968. As Irving Wallerstein notes, “One plausible moment at which to start the story of this contemporary systemic crisis is the world revolution of 1968, which unsettled the structures of the world-system considerably. This world revolution marked the end of a long period of liberal supremacy, thereby dislocating the geoculture that had kept the political institutions of the world-system intact. And dislocating this geoculture unhinged the underpinnings of the capitalist world-economy and exposed it to the full force of political and cultural shocks to which it had always been subject, but from which it had previously been somewhat sheltered” (World-Systems Analysis, 77). What connects these two contexts then is that the revolution which gave birth to art like Gal is coming to fruition currently (although who knows how long “fruition” actually accounts for).

Recently, Democracy Now! has been running a series of features under the rubric “1968, Forty Years Later”, dealing with a number of topics such as the May uprising in France, Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination, the Columbia student strike and so on, the questions behind these reports being something like the ones I am asking of Costa’s album: what did these things mean then, what have the repercussions been and what do they mean now. Listening to the features, one of the interesting things that results from them is that while there have been many positive changes that resulted from the student and worker’s strike or the civil rights movement, etc., the mythic quality attributed to these events appears overblown, and their long-lasting positive impact has been minimal, at least in relation to say, the long-lasting negative impact of global capitalism. As 2008 reaches its mid-point, while there are many bright spots in terms of world-wide resistance to capitalism, to tyranny and so forth, the coherency and connectedness that existed in 1968, though it should be much easier to attain thanks to technology (the internet as a tool for organizing, for example), is ephemeral at best.

Tariq Ali, in his interview with Juan Gonzalez, explains, “So the demonstrations against the war in Iraq in 2003 were gigantic, much larger than anything that happened in the ’60s, both the United States and in Europe. Gigantic. But it was a spasm. It happened, and then it disappeared. And it was as if millions of ordinary citizens were coming out to tell their politicians, “You’re lying. We know you’re lying. Don’t force us into this war.” But once the war happened and Iraq was occupied, through demoralization, depression, a sense of powerlessness, they retreated. Whereas in ’68 the movement grew slowly and built up to a peak, here the movement peaked to try and stop a war, and then it disappeared.”

What’s interesting then about the re-emergence of Gal is that it re-appears on the scene merely as an artifact of a bygone era. Where it once had real political significance, it, like a number of the Democracy Now! subjects, has lost that meaning, or rather, not lost it per se, but had it covered over, buried under the intervening years. Part of the immediacy of Costa’s voice that I noted above, both in contrast to her later work and the previous self-titled album, comes directly out of the politics of the age and place: five years prior to the recording of the album, a military coup overthrew the government. In the wake of the insurrection, politicians, labor leaders, artists and regular citizens faced brutal repression, torture, and execution. This intensified in 1968 when the “president” General Costa e Silva introduced Institutional Act 5, effectively creating a dictatorship. This continued into the following year bringing with it opposition in the form of a host of revolutionary acts until Silva’s death. The context that Gal was created within, and the political and artistic repression that specifically affected members of the Tropicalia movement (see this interview with Sergio Dias for more information) imbue the album, at that originary time with a meaning that just isn’t accessible to us today but that still resides dormant in the music. In other words, the album is that period rendered concrete, but without that political context, it comes across now as merely a pop album, an amazing pop album of course, one that can be appreciated for any number of its aesthetic qualities, but still lacking a central importance: the facet of resistance.

While the Tropicalia’s movement’s politics might have been left-leaning but as inchoate as some of their influences (ahem, The Beatles), it’s her voice that truly embodies the resistance of the age. I hold out hope that that immediacy in Costa’s voice and in the music, a quality that we can still viscerally recognize, can bring it’s former meaning to the fore and in addition can further inspire both artistically and politically positive action. I suppose my own overwhelming pessimism forces me to believe it will not, but even so, the aesthetic qualities are more than enough to draw upon. Unfortunately, as an American audience, all we can (without knowledge of Portuguese, that is) draw upon is that immediacy, as the political content of the lyrics is lost as is the phenomenological feeling of resistance that it originally brought out in the listener.”

Right. So, you can see why maybe that was whittled down. Regardless though, I think starting to see art in this way is going to be overall a really important thing. Not perhaps the way I did it above; but there’s still some interesting things to talk about. For example, I don’t think I really accurately described the trajectory well enough because it’s not going to be a linear path, but rather, at some point, it will be available within both the global south and the global north, and therefore the trajectory bifurcates, moving according to the other parameters as time goes on and frequency waxes and wanes in each geographical region. In addition, geography itself hides a number of dimensions within that parameter, as one breaks it down by region, and frequency should properly break down into a measure of population x availability (That is, what if there’s a lot of CDs, but they’re stuck in a warehouse somewhere. Then they’re not frequent. Or if there’s one copy that everyone in the world shares, it’s the same thing).

Now this system might not be anything special to look at but I think the non-linear play of meaning that results from the bifurcation could in principle be an early version of what I am imagining a full study of dynamic aesthetics would entail. Levins and Lewontin in the above book discuss genotypic and phenotypic plasticity in terms of interactions between the genome and the environment (my jargon might be a bit off). So, this one graph measures the viability of certain genotypes of drosophila against temperature ranging from 16.5 to 25 degrees Celcius. There are a few that are uniformly poor, no matter the temperature, such that it’s always the case that less than 15% survive. For the other genotypes though, there’s no linear relationship between viability and temperature. One genotype might fare well at 16.5 degrees and 90% survive, whereas at 25.5 degrees, the same genotype, only 30% survive. What it does in-between though isn’t to move steadily down frmo 90%, but could go all over. At the same time, there are other genotypes that at 16.5 have a 90% viability and hover at that point even raised to 25.5 degrees. In other words, there’ s no clear cut linear relationship between the two parameters, and when we move to the realm of hermeneutics, I think meaning is going to have analogous patterns.

Some pieces of art will definitely be linear, there not being a lot there or being so universal (at least for certain populations). But others will exist as a function of the interactions between different populations of meanings, as unresolved contradictions, i.e., hermeneutic bifurcations. I’m sure the philosophical literature on this is large, Derrida most likely, although I’ve only barely scratched the surface. I’m sure this is all already either fleshed out somewhere or will undergo many transformations before being something viable in and of itself. Regardless, the point is to begin to see pieces of art not as static things at some here and now but as developing through time, both physically and hermeneutically, and not to see these things as some essentialized present with an easily sussed out origin (Derrida’s understanding of logocentrism and the understanding in complexity theory that you can’t simply wind back the clock to figure out the origin since all complex adaptive systems are dependent on contingencies perhaps have much in common).

Filed by andyb at July 7th, 2008 under Complexity, philosophy