CASA - The Contemporary A Capella Society

(Thanks to AcaGeeks for drawing my attention to the piece and, more or less, inviting me to let myself off the chain.)

According to a recent opinion piece by Chris Haire, Ryan Murphy's Glee is a product of a "dead culture": the show, being structured around covers of already-recognizable music, is taken to exemplify the lack of originality that, when aggressively marketed, characterizes the wasteland--or cartoon graveyard--that is contemporary popular culture.

We could disagree with the terms. Is a culture that values--or, perhaps more precisely, markets repackaged versions of--older materials necessarily "dead"?

Speaking charitably, we might instead call it 'traditional': what has happened already, or been done already, is made to happen again. With an ear to the arts in particular, we might call it 'classicizing': certain works of art, certain 'classics', are referred to more often than others, whether out of reverence or, again, because of their marketability.

Speaking uncharitably, we might call such an artistic culture 'anti-modern': what has been done already is valued more than, or even to the exclusion of, what is happening now or is still to come. But even if we prefer the present to the past, we can't simply equate 'anti-modern' with "dead" or even 'moribund'. Much less is a preference for the past, to take Haire's metaphor--it is largely unexamined--to its logical extreme, necessarily 'morbid' or 'necromantic' or 'necrophiliac'.

For an artistic culture to be mainly classicizing or even aggressively anti-modern doesn't necessarily mean that the culture is no longer viable, much less obsessed with a past that ought to be left to rest in peace … or that, as Haire implies in responding to the resurrection of Journey, had at long last been put down. Loving the past doesn't necessarily mean a living death. There may be life in the culture yet. Or there may be a different kind of life, or different artistic lifestyles, than Haire is prepared to understand or accept.

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The possibility of different kinds of life, of different lifestyles or preferences (whether artistic or otherwise) is, we're continually told, important: actualizing such possibility is one expression of 'freedom'. But we can't afford to stop with 'difference', as if the word on its own is enough to show that Haire's opinion piece is just an opinion and, so, could simply be dismissed. The example of Journey does make clear that part of the argument has to do with opinion or taste: Haire clearly likes Journey less--a lot less--than bluegrass.

But the old adage, there's no accounting for taste? False, or at least misleading. For an industry committed to making money off of popular culture products has in fact found ways to account for taste: first packaging it, then marketing it to you. In the case of a taste for older over newer artistic material, the industry repackages something old and then markets it as if it were new. This makes a certain kind of economic sense. Generally, less time and energy and money must be invested in repackaging an old product than in creating a new one.

But the practice can also be irresponsible, with the goal not so much saving time, energy, and money on the part of producers as it is taking money--and therefore time and energy--from consumers. (Take a look at the Mickey Mouse Protection Act; or at Big Pharma aggressively trying to keep their patents from expiring so that patients can't purchase cheaper, generic versions of needed drugs.)This causes the currency of 'difference' to be debased.

In this context, 'difference' becomes toothless and any extolling of it becomes, at best, self-congratulatory and, more often, self-deluding. One result has been the bursting of every allegedly countercultural bubble since … forever, as would-be revolutionaries unwittingly marginalize themselves by adopting--by literally and figuratively buying into--'lifestyles' that cannot be actively political since they are in fact made possible--packaged and marketed--by the culture industry.

The problem, then, is that, while we figuratively can't afford to self-marginalize (being marginal costs us our freedom), literally we can't afford to be meaningfully political: we--most of us--simply don't have the money.

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By now you may be wondering, What the hell is this guy talking about?

I'm talking about how we owe it to ourselves--as the a cappella community, yes, but as participants in culture more generally--to recognize this situation and to accept our responsibility for it. Because if we don't, we'll keep incurring a special kind of debt that we'll never be able to repay.

This means taking a claim like Haire's seriously. For I think that he's right about something. What he's right about as it pertains to a cappella may be hard to see, hidden as it is by his wider range of examples and a somewhat wandering style. More importantly, his underlying claim may be hard for a cappellans to take. It _should_ be hard, because it cuts to the heart of what we think we're doing: what we spend our time, energy, and money on and, even more deeply, what we think we love.

On the surface, of course, Haire's opinion is that an artform consisting primarily of covers, as opposed to originals, sucks. At a deeper level, though, Haire's claim isn't just that Glee sucks, although it does: his claim is that it kills. The more people who spend their time with Glee and things like it, the fewer people there are liking or doing something new, and what is new withers on the vine.

I'll go further: the more people who say--and seem to believe--that they "love" something like Glee, the fewer people there are loving something new or, I believe, truly loving anything at all, and what 'truly loving' means, what love is, itself withers on the vine.

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According to the rhetoric of 'difference', 'lifestyle', and 'opinion', I'm supposed to say that, even if this matters, none of it is your fault. After all, in line with discourse about the culture industry, you've just been doing what you've been told, almost all your life, to do.

Fuck that.

And if you think that just doing what you've been told gets you off the hook; if you feel you can live with it; if you can sleep at night knowing that your time, your energy, your money, your very being are all earmarked in advance for an industry's taking?

Then my heart goes out to you, but only so far. For you're wasting your heart's potential by taking part in a wholesale commodification, a crass and tawdry simplification and sale, of what should be our most complex and most meaningful emotions.

Because you know--I know you do--that whether or not you share Haire's opinion about Glee, you don't love it.

And if you think you 'love' Glee? Then you don't know what love is.

I'm supposed to say, again, that that isn't your fault. And this time I will, because it isn't: it really isn't. You've been told what to love--what you are allowed to love--for so long that you think your response to that limited range of things is what love is. It isn't; you know that it isn't. You don't "love Glee"; you know that you don't, because those words together don't make any sense: what you feel in response to Glee isn't "love".

What do you truly love? What do you love--what kinds of things--when the culture industry isn't looking at you, holding up Glee just as if it were a mirror?

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Maybe you love a cappella music, truly love it. And you're free--as they say--to tell me that I'm wrong.

And you know what? I want you to.

I want you to tell me to my face. I want you to get all up in my stupid, hypereducated, left-leaning, liberal, bourgeois American grill and tell me that you know what love is, and what love is, is how you feel about Glee.

Better yet, tell me--prove it to me--by covering some shitty, non-threatening-for-Boomers song, some babyfood-for-inner-child song, that everybody can agree on because everybody thinks is shitty: only find something in it that no one else has found or made public. Better still, but still not best of all, cover something nobody else has covered because only you seem to know about it and love it like no other.

In either case, you have to--sigh--make it your own. Wait. Make it your own? Please. We're way past that; there's no time for that.

What you have to do is make it so new that the original artist is heartbroken and amazed. You have to cast the original artist into your shadow as it monsters its darkly magnificent way backwards against the timestream. Why? Because when you're told to start with shit, you need to be just like a scientist turning human feces into edible 'steak'.

Here are two hints to get you started. One, Sinéad O'Connor's definitive performance of "Nothing Compares 2 U", which Prince wrote and, with The Family, recorded unmemorably. (When O'Connor performed it, Prince wrote a letter that read, "Thank you." She is the 'original artist' in the only sense that matters.) Two, Robert Hazard's "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun" à la Nirvana at the time of MTV Unplugged in New York.

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Better still, again, and best of all, tell me--prove it to me--that you know what love is by WRITING YOUR OWN MUSIC. I don't mean to argue that adaptation isn't a vital and fruitful and fascinating part of the arts. I've just said that it is; those of you who have worked with me know that I believe it. You can't win by saying something I've just said. You can only win by silencing me with your music. YOUR MUSIC.

I DARE YOU TO BREAK MY HEART WITH YOUR MUSIC. So come back to terms. I want you to redefine 'contemporary a cappella' as it might best be: original music, new music that casts all that old, continually repackaged crap into silence.

And trust me, our friend Chris Haire is right: this will be much easier to do if you don't start with absolute shit.