Riffing on Guitars

OK, well, the battle lines are drawn. Kundera: "Stereotyped harmonies, banal melodies, and rhythms all the more insistent the more monotonous they are -- that is what remains of music, that is music's eternity....That primeval state of music (music without thought) mirrors the human being's inherent stupidity....The history of music is perishable, but the idiocy of guitars is eternal. Music nowadays has returned to its primeval state." Hornby (from Songbook): "I discovered sometime during the last few years, that my musical diet was light on carbohydrates, and the rock riff is nutritionally essential -- especially in cars and on book tours, when you need something quick and cheap to get you through a long day....If I ever had to hum a blues-metal riff to a puzzled alien, I'd choose Zeppelin's "Heartbreaker," from Led Zeppelin II. I'm not sure that me going "DANG DANG DANG DANG DA-DA-DANG, DA-DA-DA-DA-DA DANG DANG DA-DA-DANG" would enlighten him especially, but I'd feel that I'd done as good a job as the circumstances allowed. Even written down like that (albeit with uppercase assistance), it seems to me that the glorious, imbecilic loudness of the track is conveyed effectively and unambiguously. Read it again. See? It rocks....So much of what you consume when you get older is about accommodation: I have kids, and neighbors, and a partner who could quite happily never hear another blues-metal riff or block-rockin' beat in her life; I have less time, less tolerance for bullshit, more interest in good taste, more confidence in my own judgment....In learning to do that, however, things get lost, too, and one of the things that got lost ... was Jimmy Page. The noise he makes is not who I am anymore, but it's still a noise worth listening to; it's also a reminder that the attempt to grow up smart comes at a cost." This he said/he said reminds us, perhaps, of a conversation about the intellectualization of music begun with our recent encounter with Adorno. Where do you fall?!

By the way, in case you end up wanting to refer to it, here's that passage I read from Kundera's The Art of the Novel in which he discusses the word-based, variation-based approach he seeks in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (and which validates our discussion of Schoenberg as a musical model for this novel): "A theme is an essential inquiry. And increasingly I realize that such an inquiry is, finally, the examination of certain words, theme-words. Which leads me to emphasize: a novel is based primarily on certain fundamental words. It is like Schoenberg's "tone-row." In The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, the "row" goes: forgetting, laughter, angels, litost, border. Over the course of the novel, those five principal words are analyzed, studied, defined, redefined, and thus transformed into categories of existence. The novel is built on those few categories the way a house is built on its pillars."