music & society
December 2010 » If this really is the season of Peace on Earth and Goodwill to All, why is it that every store, bar and TV/radio advert insist on belching out an endless cycle of every single pop banality ever recorded that has ever even mentioned the 'C' word?
For advertisers, it goes without saying, bland, commercial pop is the ideal medium to 'experientially enhance' the real message of (post-)modern Christmas, which is, of course: "Spend! spend! spend!" And whereas musoc.org naturally abhors the nauseating way people are aurally bludgeoned by any pop 'music' every time they need to buy a loaf of bread or a pair of socks (activities far from self-obviously requiring a crooning or thumping soundtrack), at Christmas the situation becomes particularly severe, as fake piety and schmaltzy pseudo-cameraderie - cast in platitudinous doggerel and bawled out over a banal beat and semi-illiterate music-making - are blasted through loudspeakers across the world to massage everyone into feeling as profligate as possible. Some of the primary research into the psychological effects of muzak are discussed in a recent New Scientist article, 'Jingle hells: How muzak messes with your mind'.
Although musoc.org exists mainly to defend the cause of art music, there are many cases - Christmas topping the wishlist - where pop 'music' should, for sanity's sake, be literally silenced; replaced not with real (=art) music, but with blissful quiet. (After all, radio, CD and the internet mean music lovers, whether or not religious, need not wait till Advent to enjoy the genuine Christmas masterpieces of Monteverdi, J S Bach, Handel etc.)
But sadly the truth is that achieving peace on earth is far more probable through the remote likelihood of nuclear disarmament than through the cessation of the pop 'music' hostilities that the advertising industries and all their postmodern apologists thrive on.
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