music & society
June 2010 » It's been a year already since musoc.org burst (all right, 'slunk') onto the scene and the internet's cultural illuminati saw red (as in blood, not socialism!).
Although musoc.org has undergone a minor facelift and a little bit of surgery since those first days - one or two features have disappeared, a paragraph rephrased here and there - nothing much has changed in the world at large. In fact, culturally things have probably - in fact, undoubtedly - got worse.
Last week, for example, BBC Radio 3's ragbag and pointless 'Classical Collection' programme, presented by the equally pointless Sarah Walker, opened ludicrously with one of The Beatles' countless banal pop ditties. Now while it's true that the BBC may well reciprocate with a Schubert song sung by Fischer-Dieskau on Radio 1, 2 or 6, you can be sure it won't happen until there's been a global nuclear holocaust leaving playlists in the hands of mutated cockroaches and the sun has swollen to a red giant.
Leaving aside that epitome of crass/mass culture, the FIFA World Cup finals (whose non-existent relationship was trendily ignored in a cretinous BBC Music article) other predictable but nevertheless depressing current stories include the massive media coverage and eulogisation of the Glastonbury (UK) pop festival: if ever anyone doubted the brainwashing potential of media hype, they need only survey the boozed-up tens of thousands, penned in like sheep at market at their own considerable expense, bawling along word-perfectly to the puerile gibberish of their preening pop idols on distant stages. As Richard Godwin dribbled in the London Evening Standard: "He ['Snoop Dogg', former drugs and firearm felon] seems to be a family entertainer, too - I stood next to a nine-year-old girl holding mum's hand and jiggling to the chorus 'I just wanna f**k you'".
Or the US Library of Congress's announcement of the latest 25 recordings it will preserve in its archives for their 'cultural significance'. Alongside a single piece of art music were numerous items of pop dross (some, like Willie Nelson, beggaring belief), including a virtually illiterate 'song' by one of hiphop's leading thugs, Tupac Shakur.
So it goes. As for decades now, the marketing machinery and sociopolitical homogenisation of postmodern capitalism have thundered on, unswayed by war, environmental disaster or political sleaze. Art music, and art for art's sake, fit poorly into the shiny plastic world of cultural relativism.
So it is that musoc.org is really still only at the beginning of its undertaking to record the cultural vandalism inflicted on society in the name of neoliberalism, to criticise all those who participate in it (not just the obvious delinquents like the Classic FMs, the Warner Musics and the Alex Rosses, but also the likes of BBC Radio 3, Gramophone magazine, Lang Lang and numerous big-name critics), and to campaign for change.
Musoc.org would like to thank all those who have shown their support so far for this generally thankless project by subscribing to the Anti-pop or otherwise by sending letters of encouragement. Please - keep reading, keep thinking.
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