Robin James looks at two recent NYT stories on urban noise through the lens of Luigi Russolo’s 1913 futurist manifesto The Art of Noise (pdf):
Russolo was worried that traditional musical sounds were too pure to have any affective punch:
In the pounding atmosphere of great cities as well as in the formerly silent countryside, machines create today such a large number of varied noises that pure sound, with its littleness and its monotony, now fails to arouse any emotion (Russolo, 5).
Russolo thought we needed industrial noise to reinvigorate art music. “We get infinitely more pleasure imagining combinations of the sounds of trolleys, autos and other vehicles, and loud crowds,” he argues, “than listening once more, for instance, to the heroic or pastoral symphonies” (6). Modernist aesthetics value transgression and difficulty. The ability to tolerate and appreciate noise was a sign of avant-garde taste; so, cultural elites stereotypically valued “noisy” works, while the unwashed masses preferred kitsch. In the Times article, this modernist association between noise tolerance and privilege is reversed: sensitivity is a privilege reserved for those with means to protect themselves from it and preserve their delicate aural/affective palate, and noise-tolerance is the effect of exposure. …
You can even see this reversal in contemporary pop music aesthetics: mainstream pop–from the Biebs to Skrillex–is really noisy, while hipsters and NPR listeners prefer traditionally pretty, harmonious, folk-y, “new sincerity”-style artists.
Update from a reader:
This is as lazy as Thomas Friedman basing a column on a chat with a cabbie and as wrong as Peggy Noonan’s take on the IRS.
First, the use of the useless word “hipster” alongside NPR listenership as flags of privilege is lazy and tautological. Even if one charitably (in this context) interprets “hipster” as “trust fund kid”, I dare James to come to a show at Brooklyn’s Death by Audio or one of promoter Todd P’s more extreme events and come away insisting that “hipsters” don’t like noise. Likewise, I’d argue that the majority of free jazz fans today are probably NPR listeners. And can we merely stipulate that not all NPR listeners share the musical tastes of the producers who select the acts on the network’s air, as well as that a lot of “hipsters” like Skrillex?
Second, I don’t think it’s folks from Washington Heights, East New York, or Newark who flock to Lincoln Center to see performances of works by Boulez, Messiaen, Ligeti, etc. Or at Poisson Rouge on nights when noisier acts are playing.
Second, WTF does James mean by “noise” here? Bieber’s music is profoundly simple and euphonious. Skrillex is more complex but not by much. So it’s noise because it includes the same high-in-the-mix samples as so much other music today? If so, where would James put the original recyclers of the title of Russolo’s manifesto, The Art of Noise? Because at least here in the U.S., that band’s popularity was confined to college kids and … hipsters.
This is where blogging fails: when it attempts to offer instant and contrarian responses to more reasoned writing. I suggest a new Dish award, or at least a flag alongside the Poseur and Hathos alerts, for cultural analysis this lazy and jejune.
The Dish 