Voto:
Festwka, how can you say that what kills music is the pretense of finding meanings in it?? Come on?? Look, all the music we listen to, even the most trivial, carries meanings, more or less deep. And if the music we listen to has certain characteristics, it’s because it was conceived and created in a specific historical, geographical, cultural, social, ideological context, etc.? All music, even the most unconventional, is "the child of its time," born from a precise contingency? What do you think? That music appears out of nowhere, immune to any relationship with reality? That music is simply music, without sense, without meaning, without a REASON? Come on? Then I really don’t understand all this demonization of criticism, analysis, rationalism? Do you remember what Dante said? "You were not made to live like brutes, but to follow virtue and knowledge?" Well, I agree with Dante: for heaven's sake, are we men or are we beasts?? With all the good one can wish for an animal, it seems obvious to me that we humans have intellectual and cultural capacities that any walrus or bison does not possess? Has a wild boar ever passed by Debaser to write a review? I don’t think so? Let’s not mortify the reflective, intellectual, and analytical capacities of the human race (and this applies to both critics and musicians). Now, I believe that rock is dying for reasons exactly opposite to those you mentioned, dear Fester, namely due to decontextualization, due to the pretense of stripping music of any possible meaning, due to the tendency to make music an end in itself, without sense, without a connection to individual or collective experience? Let’s not kid ourselves that our beloved Minutemen appeal to us just because they made "good music"; we like them because their "good music" stemmed from aesthetic skills, but above all from the fact that Dennes, Mike, and George conveyed their vision of life through notes and sounds (which was the case because it depended on belonging to a very specific context)? I also subscribe to Easycure's thoughts about the instinctiveness of musicians and I’ll try to reinforce it with an example. Let’s take post-rock: now, it’s clear that Slint, Bitch Magnet, Bastro, etc. didn’t sit down and say, "Oh guys, look, rock is dead, so from now on we’re going to play post-rock." It is evident that albums like Tweez, Ben Hur, Diablo Guapo were born in a genuine and spontaneous way? But it’s also true that Grubbs and company were the first (before the critics!) to realize that rock, as it had been understood up to that moment, had largely saturated its expressive potential and so they tried to do something different, more evolved, contaminated, etc.? Then the criticism came to "rationalize," to theorize, to scheme, and finally to label all of this as "post-rock": criticism did, with the tools of analysis, what the musicians had achieved instinctively? To each their own, then, but don’t tell me that Slint and company aimed to play the good old healthy and fucking rock’n’roll! Best wishes to all.
