cardboard adolescent

Every song is a blank slate which we project onto. The mechanics of projection, what can be projected onto what, are socially determined. All music gains definition relative to the mainstream. There are no beautiful songs or ugly songs, no traditional songs or experimental songs, no cool songs or lame songs. When someone explains why they like a song, they aren't really explaining anything.

"I like this song because it has a smooth flow and sounds really harmonious."
"I like this song because it's disjointed and abrasive."

There is no "proper" way to divide time, there is no "proper" way to arrange or combine tones. We have simply come to relate certain arrangements to certain feelings or ideas. A particular song does not have an emotional or thematic content, there is simply an implicit agreement between the artist and the audience to project these emotions or ideas. When this agreement breaks down, music loses its sense and purpose. If, for instance, an audience member is not familiar with the prerequisite idea a certain way of performing becomes associated with, they will say: "I don't get it." The whole enterprise has become meaningless for them.

In fact, this meaninglessness is always present. We must construct the meaning of music, and this construction is always inherited. It needs a ground, and the only ground possible is the musical tradition, or mainstream. This construction is always violent, since it imposes a division between good songs and bad songs. Taste expresses itself more powerfully when it deals with what it doesn't like, because this isn't just a matter of taste defending what it likes, but of taste defending itself.

Freud toyed with the idea of defining all behavior in terms of sex drive and death drive. Sex drive is the impulse for a moment of intense pleasure, whereas death drive is simply the drive to sustain oneself (which, paradoxically, always leads to death). Music that encourages associations of sex, elitism, victory, and sometimes God are linked with sex drive, they beg us to provide our most powerful emotions. Music that tries to express music itself, that toys with structure and tradition, is linked to death drive. Its novelty is just an expression of the fear of death, the fear that music itself could die. Sometimes this fear is even masked behind a push toward the death of music, toward the destruction of the notion of music.

The reason music can even exist as something separate from the ordinary sounds of reality, or as something separate from other art forms, is because music is grounded in an arbitrary differentiation of sounds. Because this differentiation is arbitrary, the more one studies it the more it changes, the more it moves towards its own disappearance. We resist this disappearance because it means the disappearance of good songs. However, so long as we listen and hear a good song, we don't hear what is actually there. Namely, silence.