Thumbs Up on iPod: Thumbs DOWN on iTunes: And, Some Reflections on Musical Aesthetics

The iTunes interface is the worst! Arrogantly, it is a Mac application written by trolls who don't know thing one about writing a Windows-compliant application. It is completely opaque as to do simple things such as rename "songs" or reorder them.

We're apparently supposed to open iTunes, and on gazing at the button style, etc., say, oooo a visitor from the planet Mac: we're trolls! we're not worthy! we're not worthy! we're scum!

Furthermore, I find it VERY offensive that everything is a "song". Not all music is a damn "song". There are also ricercare, fugues, sonatas, ragas, and Scots rants for bagpipes.

Also, many important compositions such as the Art of Fugue or das Lied von der Erde, dammit, are organic structures consisting of an ordered sequence of movements intended by the composer as a sequence of states with an internally-generated motor.

The Kunst der Fuge shows a cellular structure which evolves to a six-voice finale which Bach, knowing that he was like Jacob wrestling with things beyond the power of man to express, did not finish when the internal logic of the work demanded a fugue on his own name.

Das Lied von der Erde, dammit, shows that nothing resolves the meaninglessness of the interruption of the dinner party by the howl of an ape except *der abscheid*, the Chinese poet's farewell to the world, which must, dammit, take into account beauty and that particular feeling of loneliness in autumn (einsame in Herbst, verdammt).

But in the administered world of iTunes, we're supposed to be without an internal motor, just atomised consumers buying brief songs.

That's ok, sonny boy, you have five minutes to express the utter loneliness of America in Heartbreak Hotel:

The bellhop's tears keep fallin'
The desk clerk's dressed in black
They been so long so lonely
They ain't never coming back

Which fragments we must shore against the ruins: we're then oh, so very "free" to assemble into "playlists". That is, if you LIKE a Windows incompatible application with candy buttons.

Missing is the necessary sado-masochism of art, in which for lack of anything better to do, you go to the cinema, der kino, in the little town in the jungle and you are transfixed, masochistically to your seat by something like Fritz Lang.

Missing is the way you must sit still and you must listen at the symphony in the city. Yes, in modern music, this dissonance is what's happening baby, and the modern plutocrat must be offended by it. He doesn't listen to the classical shit he demands but with half an ear, anyway.

But in the world of the iPod, we all listen uncollectively, having been organized to neglect our inner motor by iTunes.

Dammit, the sound of the iPod is a miracle. After swearing (like my Dad used to swear at imperfections in his own hi-fi) for a half hour at iTunes, I plugged the iPod's earpiece into my hairy ear and out came something better than booze, better than sex, better than drugs, and maybe even better than smoking: the sinfonia from the Bach Cantata Wachet Auf.

But missing is the collective experience. You never see anybody (except some crazy white aging fool like me: call security!) actually moving to the music generated by the iPod. People consciously avoid looking like the ads while the ads get them (and me, one must admit) to buy the shit.

The iPod becomes what the pack of cigarettes used to be: an anodyne:

The Soul seeks pleasure first
And then, release from pain
And then, those little Anodynes
That deaden suffering.

-Emily Dickinson

I can't shake the idea on the MTR that EVERYONE hears the opening chorale of Christ Lag in Todesbanden, Bach's triumphant setting of Martin Luther's rewrite for Protestants of Victimae Paschalae Laudae. I can't shake the idea that EVERYBODY hears Bob Marley, or (to name another of many selections that I downloaded with many a *verdammt*) my first Yi former only wife's "torch" songs, which she recently recorded on a CD, songs inspired by the blues and feckless men I wonder why:

Surabaya Johnny, warum bist du so roh (Surabaya Johnny, why are you such a shit?)

What's better: Wild Teenage Beatnik Parties organized here on The Island of the Ghost Teachers by an arts collective in an abandoned house where I go to dance solo to ease the pain of living and the drug of dreams. It is collective and it is tribal.

I'd get a group to play Bach in the jungle. Bach in the jungle is very beautiful. The trouble is that if you play Bach in the jungle, you must leave off playing and attend to the humblest creature's distress, like Albert Schweitzer.

Why? Because an old recording, remastered on CD, of Yehudi Menuhin playing the D minor concerto, which I heard live from the master himself just before he died with my first Yi former and only wife, is absolute truth. Dietrich Fischer's shout of triumph "der Wurger kann uns nicht meer Schaden" from Christ Lag is absolute truth convergent with absolute beauty in such a way that you cannot name what their almagam is.

Beethoven's protest against suffering in the final fugue from the Diabelli variations, and Bob Marley, are in this class of music.

The trouble with playing it where there is any suffering, as there is in the jungle, as there was for Albert Schweitzer once his evil king Leopold had had his evil way with the people of the Congo, is we now know to what you converge when you continue this type of music where there is pain, such as intimate pain you caused in Surabaya long ago, you are Hans Frank, Reichs-Gauleteir of Poland and art appreciator, or what I feared my Father was becoming at his worst, or what I feared I was becoming...when I allowed my work hours to permit me to neglect my former first Yi and only wife's pain.

The central problem of aesthetics has never been addressed, to my knowledge, and this is the nexus between aesthetics and ethics, whether in fact we must accomplish all unmet ethical tasks before we "appreciate art": and notice the vulgarity of the abstract and general reference to "art": it would take Fred Flintstone, wouldn't it, to say, "Wilma and me have come to Paris to eat fine food and appreciate art, Barney."

And what was it that Bob Marley said?

Don't turn your back, Trench Town rock
Give the slum a try, Trench Town rock
Never let the children cry, Trench Town rock
Cause you got to tell Jah, Jah why

I thank all readers who have come this far with me, and no, I no be smoking de reefah I done be come by these thoughts cleanman. You get to be my age, and you must bid farewell to Jack Daniel's, sex and dope. But you still may listen to music. And you may dance.