Non-random observations

[ll-xn!uwvax!astroatc!gtaylor (G.N. Excelsis-Deo)]

>Random observations:

These aren't random. You're merely coming up with a pattern which emerges
from what initially seem to be unrelated concerns. I've tried in my
usual circumlocutionary way to suggest that I share what seems to be
your collection of observations. I also don't really have anything to
gain from claiming that I've got anything that looks like answers and
erudition, either. It might make me feel cool, but I can get that from
someplace else a little better (having my wife praise my coffee or
getting that next soundtrack job or getting a raise). Once you've got
the pattern pinned down, this might seem a bit more like a dilemma, but
one you've seen before in other places.

>We can't agree whether or not rock is a fad. 

That'll be a problem all right. Why not talk about the fact that the
concept of a fad presupposes a whole culturally elitist apparatus
that nearly all of us love to manipulate at the drop of the hat.

>We can't justify putting down
>"commercial" music and hence cannot give good reasons why people
>should listen to progressive music instead of top 40 

I suspect that it's because you've not asked Wicinski and 
Hofmann about it, and they've had their hands full thinking
about other stuff. Ditto Krajewski and Ingogly. I'm merely the
sort of aging and ineffectual boffin who's read enough Frogspeak
to go about answering that question by asking another one: What
are we attempting to justify when we "put the stuff down". Or
perhaps "who" is better than "what." It gives away the answer 
somewhat, though. If there's one thing that Hofmann has a real
handle on, it's the notion that the labels and the stances are
being co-opted and we're just sitting there like chumps the whole
time. Perhaps the Hof does go in for the critical equivalent of
"cut and burn" agriculture, but he's got the right idea at heart:
we're looking for something besides the single crop starvation
plans that put sugar in the tea of the Big Boys. How about a little
subsistence ag of our own (as Candide put it...cultivate our own
gardens)?

>(at least without using 
>quasi-moral arguments "Madonna promotes pathological materialistic values"
>or vague quasi-elitist statements "Residents are more challenging music
>because they deconstruct pop :-)"). 

Here's where I think I'll draw the flames. I don't think you'll have
any choice BUT to make value-based arguments. If you're deft and lucky,
you'll be charged with elitism perhaps or dismissed as someone who
thinks too much. If you're lousy, you'll pretend to make value-neutral
pronouncements that will succeed only in making you look like a buffoon
or a bigot-whether you're a Baptist, a Skin, a Trotskyite, or just another
fan. At the bottom of all this, the question for me is not "What is Art?"
but "What is GOOD Art?" How is Art good? A nice place to begin is to
stifle the urge to capitalize the word, perhaps.

>We can't argue against trendiness
>because if rock is a fad, then we're all guilty of trendiness. 

This dilemma is a part of what my mother called "Good Trouble." It
is the kind of semi-insoluble dilemma from which one emerges as
either an escapist or as a better person. I prefer personally to 
locate myself solidly in my own time, be suspicious of my urge
to make all other times look like mine (thanks to old Heidegger,
but may I never have to read him again!), and puzzle out whether
there is, after all, something of an "essential core of being"
(We call it "soul", Aretha and I) in either the net of Greg-In-The
Present, or any of those other objects out there. Those nasty and
shifty PostModernists have bandied about the notion that art functions
as a "system of self-knowledge". Perhaps that's what I am suggesting.

>Anyone wants to try to sort this out? Where's Greg Taylor when we 
>need him? :-)

Everyone, I hope, *should* want to sort this out. That's why most of
us are here. As for me, I'm obviously still cranking out the elliptical
verbal fogbanks-waiting to head home and kill off a righteous heap of
Red Beans and Rice and a bottle of New Beaujolais and listen to the
cassette that Hofmann sent me. Any of you ugly weasels going to 
Uselessnix?

"As one who sees within a dream, and, later/the passion that had been
imprinted stays,/but nothing of the rest returns to mind,/such am I-
for my my vision almost fades/completely, yet it distills within/my
heart the sweetness that was born of it."(Dante/Paradiso,XXXIII 58-63)