IVIV (11) 176

[Joseph Tracy]

On Oct 27, 2009, at 12:14 PM, Clément Lévy wrote:

> - each listening on headphones to a different rock 'n' roll album  
> and moving around at a different rhythm"
>
I felt like this was a rumination on the loss of music as shared  
experience, as dance and poetic group trance, as a human experience  
requiring human artistry. Here we have the idea of music as the   
private consumption of a product no longer related to public  
performance or even  public play on the radio. Perhaps it is to some  
degree an amplification and response to Gaddis's Agape Agape.
I like recorded music, but do feel the loss in my own life of  a  
community of live music affordable by most  incomes.

During the summer I am part of a community with lots of shared art,  
poetry, dance, animation, film; I play  flute with jazz pianists,  
folkies, avant composers old and young, do glass art with sculptors  
and ceramicists. It is so fucking great to be part of this, to feel  
the life and magic that is in all of  us, and I remember the music in  
the 60's when it seemed to say to me that I didn't have to think or  
sound or use words the way I was being programmed to think, sound and  
use words. It was a shared life force in the culture that threatened  
bigger changes. The powers responded , blacklisting and harassing   
artists who had the most dangerous ideas. Fortunately for "them"  
there was always plenty of music that was just a way to have fun and  
make a buck, and plenty of experts to package, and market the  
products.  I personally feel that the 80's 90s , when the commercial  
success of the music biz peaked was a slower time artistically  
especially for rock and roll and that there was little threat from  
music artists to the larger culture. Now I am seeing and hearing a  
new wave of energy and musical creativity that will make fewer rock  
stars , but more outstanding artists. Far from crushing creativity  
the mp3 swapping etc. seems to do little to stop the energy of that  
movement and may fuel its determination to be real and relevant.





> Whenever I(Mucho) put the headset on now,' he continued, 'I really  
> do understand what I find there. When those kids sing about "She  
> loves you", yeah well, you know, she does, she's any number of  
> people, all over the world, back through time, different colours,  
> sizes, ages, shapes, distances from death, but she loves. And the  
> "you" is everybody. And herself. Oedipa, the human voice, you know,  
> it's a flipping miracle.' His eyes brimming, reflecting the colour  
> of beer. (99)
Remember Mucho is both listener par excellence and broadcaster. He is  
part of a community experience and describing the transcendence of  
individual experience through vocal art.
> And Levine's comments:
> « The fact that Mucho is speaking under the influence of LSD lets  
> Pynchon throw out this idea as primarily a joke, although Pynchon  
> demonstrates as well as anyone else how serious jokes can be. In  
> Gravity's Rainbow, however, the idea that "'you' is everybody" does  
> not seem at all like the product of a drug-addled mind; it is built  
> into the very structure of the novel. This realization might make  
> close attention to the ambiguity in Pynchon's use of the second  
> person seem pointless. Yet only by sorting out the possible  
> referents of "you" in any given instance can we see how inclusive a  
> normally exclusive word can be. If "you" should be read as  
> "everybody," realizing exactly who "everybody" is is nevertheless  
> important, if for no other reason than to remind us that it refers  
> to actual people, not merely to an abstraction. » (127)
>
> - more important here is the fact that rock 'n' roll is not going  
> to be free anymore. It is as if Doc only knew music through open- 
> air free concerts. The "glimpse at the other side" shows how Doc  
> realizes that "everybody" is going to prefer private ownership of  
> records bought in stores after a cautious listening via headphones.  
> The major companies will love that until Internet, mp3, Napster,  
> The Pirate Bay and the controversies about Digital Rights  
> Management and public domain. See Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig,  
> a free book on this matter:
> http://www.free-culture.cc/freecontent/
>
> - headphones, a pun explained on the wiki: http://inherent- 
> vice.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=Chapter_11#Page_176
>
> - Dark Shadows, a gothic soap-opera (1966-1971). Pynchon is still  
> very timely.
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Shadows
> and its theme, a rather difficult melody
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WvO1b3f4DGs