Pynchon & rap

[jbor]

on 7/9/01 1:53 AM, CyrusGeo at netscape.net at CyrusGeo at netscape.net wrote:

>> My knowledge of music isn't good enough to visualise (auralise?) what the
>> toe-tapping "Air" which Ethelmer plays for them as an example might equate
>> to -- the tempo of a minuet, 32 measures, four stanza, eight bars, sandwich
>> and filling etc (262) -- I wonder if it is the classic verse-chorus-verse
>> structure of the standard three minute pop song?
> 
> As Pynchon mentions a few lines above in the same page (M&D, 262), the name of
> the air is "To Anacreon in Heaven". It was written in c.1780, probably by the
> British composer John Stafford Smith. The melody is well known, since it was
> later used for the American National Anthem, with different words, of course.
> For more, quite interesting, info, go to:
> http://www.contemplator.com/america/anacreon.html

That's extremely interesting. So, the origin of the American National Anthem
was as a British university drinking song, lyrically an ode to a pagan god,
with the musical performance owing a debt to African-American rhythms, which
some insolent young pup played to his aunt, cousins and uncles one lively
Philadelphia eve? Cool! Talk about irony! (Plus there's old Lomax LeSpark on
p. 263 throwing his hat into the ring with 'Home Sweet Home'. But I have no
idea -- musically -- what Aunt Euphy the oboist is talking about.)

But is the suggestion now that the passage as a whole (261-5) doesn't have
resonance for contemporary musical trends at all? Or is it the case that
*both* the history (and historical allegory) and anachronism are at play in
the "finite" number of words and marks on the page?

I admit that that very particular "South" in "South Philadelphia
Ballad-singers" is bothersome in terms of making a definitive connection
with 70s disco/'Soul Train' stuff, as the black ghettoes, and one might
assume the origin of 70s Philly sound and later rap acts such as DJ Jazzy
Jeff and the Fresh Prince (i.e. Will Smith) were on the west side, so
perhaps Ethelmer is actually talking about Italian barber-Shop quartets
(equating, perhaps, to acts like Sinatra and Frankie Valli and the Four
Seasons?) But Ethelmer's reference point is, I think, "Negroe Musick" from
264.20 on until the end of the chapter, and I suspect that this fact also
"colours" much of what Ethelmer was "instructing the Room" about prior to
that point as well. But I'm certainly in two minds now about just how
"direct" or specific *any* of the contemporary references might be in the
text (but if Pynchon is being that thorough and portentous with the
historical detail then I suspect he's saying something a little more nuanced
than "rock and roll and folk music are grouse" in the modern parallel
department!) But, there's certainly something there which might bear keeping
in mind when we read the passage in its larger context within the novel.

What I think is also being overlooked by the "finite number of words and
meanings" brigade is the text's subjunctivity. Pynchon, by deliberately
reifying the subjunctive mood (emphatically here at 264.13-14, hinted at
263.18-19), by the way that the text is made to "allude" to and "parallel"
present trends and customs through depictions of ostensibly past situations
(and thus simultaneously highlights the cyclic or patterning effect which
the perspective/s of "history" produce), likewise invites the reader to
progress the received narrative forwards, into his or her direct present,
and to the future, as well as backwards into the various past perspectives
thus being represented. The talk of "Succession" and musical styles "yet to
be" reinforces this long-dropped mood of the English language (and the
reasons for it being gradually dropped from the lexicon, Pynchon seems to
imply on more than a couple of occasions in the novel, are primarily
*ideological* ones, a hegemonic or colonising cast which is, or has been,
imbedded in and reinforced by the language itself), while the reference to
"the Modal change Plato fear'd" (it seems to me that of all, it's Plato who
cops the most derision in this excerpt) is important as well, in that what
is not happening in _M&D_ is a traditional historical novel with a Platonic
linear chronology from the past into the later past and with the Word of the
'Author-God' finite and sacrosanct, but that the location of literary
signification, or meaning, if you like, is in that somewhat more indefinite
space between the (reader's) present and her or his future, just as the what
was happening "then" of the (text's) drawing room masque reverberated in the
"what was to come" of U.S. history. Pynchon enfranchises the reader thus to
move the interpretation and discussion of the text itself forwards, into
present and future realms of possibility, rather than backwards, into the
rhetoric of retribution and blame to which both traditional "historical
writing", and "globalising" languages such as English, by their very nature,
structure and force, lend themselves.

Thus, rap.

best