All Art Aspires To The Condition Of Muzak

The title of this post comes from the last instalment in the Cornelius Quartet. As a lad, I started Moorcock by reading Elric (naturally), but finding the Jerry Cornelius books in university blew my mind and set me on the path to an MA in English.

If you haven't read them, you should. I need to order and reread them myself.

The fourth book (which won the 1977 Guardian fiction prize) follows Jerry through a shattered and surreal London as he searches for his sister/lover Catherine. The book is a trippy exploration of identity, and Jerry takes on a Harlequin persona to forward his plans. It reminds me a lot of Thomas Pynchon's work, unsurprising as Moorcock published Pynchon's early work, the story 'Entropy' (ahem), in New Worlds. Both authors share a tendency to question authority, a fascination with breakdown, and a subversion of non-literary genres into post-modern works of great depth.

Little did I know at the time, but Moorcock was actually referencing Walter Pater's 1873 opus The Renaissance, and its assertion that 'all art aspires to the condition of music.' To Pater, music was the ideal art form because it annihilated the divide between object & form, collapsed narrative for pure abstraction, and directly pushed listener's emotional buttons. Oscar Wilde was inspired by Pater, and Schopenhauer agreed that music is purer due to it being non-representational.

Of course, later critics have noted that this kind of ranking of arts has lots of issues.

So how are we to parse Moorcock's modification of the question?

First, the metaphor of art as music implies that it trends upwards to a pure form. Pure art, pure emotion as one sits listening in a salon, theatre, or sitting room. This, Pater argues, is both what the artist should aspire to, and the direction in which art naturally trends in the face of intensifying modernity.

By contrast, art as muzak implies a downward trend to a base, commodified form, good only for passing time in an elevator or NHS office. It makes me think of the Blue Harvest parody of Star Wars, where the elevator scene in the Death Star (TM) is extended and accompanied by an Imperial March that trades the militaristic drums and sinister brass for a syncopated, bouncy vibraphone bossa nova version, complete with bubble popping sounds.

So, what does this imply about Moorcock's work, and the forces of art in general?

First, Moorcock's oeuvres in fantasy have become 'muzak' versions of themselves, as evidenced in such derivative works as Game of Thrones and The Witcher, two series that I tried and failed to get interested in. The experience reminded me of when Dan Brown's simplistic DaVinci Code became all the rage, and I could only shake my head at how such a pale imitation of Eco's Foucault's Pendulum could eclipse the original. Ditto Harry Potter's fantasy slop eclipsing A Wizard of Earthsea and The Books of Magic (not to mention gaffing its name from Troll 2).

Second, all art now aspires to background status. Films are shorter and more bombastic, music lyrics have become simple and repetitive, and art is now mass produced prints. I saw this first in Japan, which is always ahead of the curve in social change, a cultural canary in the coal mine. When I arrived in the 90's, my fellow foreigners and I marvelled at how Japanese friends would put on a movie then walk around cooking, doing laundry, and talking on the phone as it played. Meanwhile, we outsiders all sat enraptured.

Now I see the same change here in Canada. When I went to see The Backrooms recently, I was also privy to an endless drama from the cellphone of the patron sitting beside me.

In a word, art is aspiring to entropy. This is only increasing as AI replaces creativity with endless pastiche, social media whittles our attention spans down from hours to minutes, and platforms for books and music push only the safest, anodyne works.

However, all is not lost.

There are spaces where amazing Indie books like This Is How You Lose The Time War and music like The Mountain Goats are trumpeted. More and more, it is not the art or artists themselves who are choosing the baser forms, but instead the corporate platforms that decide what the popular works are based on their algorithm. 

But there is a resistance. Sierra Ferrell is singlehandedly reinvigorating American music with her Heavy Petal tour and moving country music back to Hank Williams levels of poetry after decades of cold beer and MAGA petulance.

(Yes I respect country music. Moorcock lives in Texas, REH did as well. Don't come for me.)

Hell, I remember when Moorcock was in every Chapters I visited, now they are rare finds.

We see this in rpgs with the how the marketing wizards for the supposed World's Most Popular RPG has helped it eclipse other games, becoming a synonym for TRPGs to the media and newcomers. But there are greater games out there, Bluebeard's Wife and Mork Borg and Mothership and Coyote & Crow and an endless embarrassment of indie or small press riches that go largely unnoticed on itch.io and Drive Thru RPG.

They are all waiting for you to find them.

With NUNA and Giri-Ninjou, I will aspire to the condition of music.

Thanks for all the support. NUNA is now 3/5 of the way to Bronze.

Sleep beckons...