Philistines

[sp4cetiger]

I have a friend who I went to school with and who played an instrumental role in my wife and I getting together. Whenever we talk about entertainment-related subjects, he goes on about how John Williams is the greatest composer of the 20th century and no movie is worth watching if it was made before the mid-80s. He especially likes to make fun of me for listening to modern classical music and indie rock. He believes that rock music is uniformly inferior to classical music and that any classical music written after the romantic and early-modern period is garbage.

How do you respond to someone like this? Of course, he has a right to his opinions and preferences, but should I just perpetually ignore him whenever the subject comes up? Is there anything I can say in my defense other than, "To each their own"?

[GeevyDallas]

WRAP MAN UP & PUT MAN IN THE BOOT!

[Listmeister]

[sp4cetiger]

[Kool Keith Sweat]

Your friend is retarded. By being a classical elitist as you describe him, he's not only devaluing rock but all the other music of the world, and it makes him look like a backwater hillbilly when it comes to music. Your description also paints him like a raging autist that sulks in the corner at parties because he can't stand the music. Anyways, here's a philosophical paper arguing that rock music should be valued; sorry for the post length, too lazy to look up how to share PDFs.

For me this musical phrase is a gesture. It insinuates itself into my life. I adopt it as my own.
--Ludwig Wittgenstein, 1948[1]

Not only is rock music (much more than jazz used to be) an integral part of the life of many people, but it is a cultural initiator: to like rock, to like a certain kind of rock rather than another, is also a way of life, a manner of reacting; it is a whole set of tastes and attitudes.
--Michel Foucault[2]

Taking rock music as a paradigm case of popular music, this essay focuses on two broad issues. First, I examine the evaluation of particular pieces of rock music. Why, for instance, is the Rolling Stones' "Sympathy for the Devil" a great piece of rock, making it better than their "Jiving Sister Fanny"? I want to challenge the emerging orthodoxy that evaluations of this sort are radically different from typical evaluations of novels, symphonies, paintings, and texts of high culture.[3] I will argue that among the various properties of individual pieces of rock music-songs, performances, and recordings--aesthetic properties play a significant role in why "Sympathy for the Devil" is so good, and why "Jiving Sister Fanny" deserves its relative obscurity.
Second, I take up the issue of the comparative value of rock music in general as an institution of contemporary life, as opposed to the high-art traditions in music that are generally lumped together as "classical" music. I contend that evaluations of this second sort, of rock taken as a whole, must consider factors that have limited relevance for evaluations of the first sort. There is more to the value of a kind of music than the aesthetic achievement of its best exemplars. However great "Sympathy for the Devil" is, and however great of its kind Mozart's "Jupiter" symphony (No. 41 in C major) is, the relative greatness of the specific works tells us very little about the comparative value of the two kinds of music in general. There remains the additional difficulty of evaluating an individual's participation in a musical culture. We must evaluate taste.
Following suggestions of Nick Zangwill, some procedural assumptions constrain my arguments. The main one is that, as with any account of traditional art, "we are concerned to understand and explain a common human phenomenon." Our main focus is "not works of art themselves, but behavior which involves works of art. The behavior in question is creative and appreciative activity."[4] Zangwill proposes that a philosophical account of art should be centrally concerned with a theory of interpretation, and with explaining our basic behaviors in desiring and evaluating art. (Intuitions differ about what does and does not count as art, and starting with a debate about what counts as art is going to block a constructive dialogue.) Some will immediately object that "Sympathy for the Devil" is not a work of art, and not what Zangwill has in mind, so his procedural constraints on philosophizing about art have no direct bearing here.[5]
Rock fans desire to hear rock music. They interpret it and they evaluate it. Indeed, rock's detractors are most likely to dismiss rock either because they can make only limited sense of such activities, or regard them as less valuable in relation to rock than in relation to classical music, or believe that they produce undesirable consequences in the case of rock. Yet the comparison presupposes that rock fans exhibit the same sorts of behaviors that Zangwill identifies for art, and so my overriding concern is making better sense of our "desires and evaluations" concerning rock. Because my arguments are only incidentally a "defense" of rock music, my procedure is to ignore the question of whether rock is art, to address the same issues for rock that Zangwill raises for art, and to observe the results.
Another central assumption is that in discussing rock we are primarily interested in recorded music in the popular tradition that flows from white appropriations of African-American musics in the 1950s. In discussing creative and appreciative activity in this tradition, the central "works" in rock are commercial recordings, created for consumption as recorded music. So when I talk about "Sympathy for the Devil," I mean the recording that kicks off the album Beggars Banquet (1968). I am not discussing the song, "cover" versions of the song, or the song in live performance.[6] While these are not incidental variables in the realm of rock, they are not the central occasions for critical response and critical dialogue.
Turning to the first of the two main issues of this piece, to value judgments of specific cases, I want to advance three claims. First, appraisal should not be confused with evaluation. Second, appraisal involves a perception of aesthetic value.[7] Third, while the aesthetic dimension of rock music is very important in appraising rock, it does not exhaust the plurality of values relevant to evaluations of the music. Because this concession introduces a plurality of incommensurable standards into such evaluations, I am entirely skeptical about our ability to defend precise evaluations of particular cases. In this compressed form, my three claims are not very clear, so I will elaborate them all in terms of a common example.
I. APPRAISING AND EVALUATING
I vividly remember the day that I purchased Elvis Costello's third album, Armed Forces (1979). It had appeared in the stores only a day or so before, and although I was an avid reader of the popular music press, I was not aware that the album was due for release. But there it sat in the front rack of Rasputin's Records on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley, and because My Aim Is True (1977) and This Year's Model (1978) were among my favorite recent records, I bought Armed Forces without waiting for the critical word on it. My wife and I were on our way to dinner at a friend's apartment, and when we arrived I asked if I might hear the new Elvis Costello after we had heard the Bob Marley album that was playing on the stereo. I can no longer recall the conversation that evening, but I do recall my response to Armed Forces, which struck me as surprisingly complex and melodic. I was thrilled by my first hearing--it grabbed my ears and pulled me into the music. It was not the sort of music that I expected from Costello, given the first two albums.
Upon repeated hearings, I formulated an evaluation of Armed Forces: it is a superb and daring piece of post-punk, and I concur with Dave Marsh's assessment that it is Costello's very best record,s But as with many books, films, and records, when I play it now, twenty years later, I do not experience the thrill I experienced during the many playings I gave it over the first few days. This loss of pleasure is not due to any change in my sense of its worth; I certainly do not suppose that my loss in pleasure correlates with a reappraisal. In many respects I find it more interesting now, hearing details in the music and lyrics that escaped me in 1979. I mention this decrease in pleasure in order to note that my account of rock's value is not a simplistic hedonism (i.e., the doctrine that pleasure is the measure of all value, so that the value of any object is nothing more than its instrumental value in producing pleasure).[9] I do not want to reduce the value of Armed Forces to the maximum pleasure one might experience when heating it. There is an important distinction between liking something very much--or even in thinking that a great many people will take pleasure in it--and thinking that it is of great value. Rather than suppose that Elvis Costello's music is of value simply for its capacity to please, articulate fans of his music are likely to report that they take pleasure in its achievement. The music does not simply cause pleasure; listeners take pleasure in it, which is psychologically far more complex.[10]
To make sense of this experience with Armed Forces, I will employ T. J. Diffey's distinction between aesthetic appraisals and evaluations.[11] My comparative claims--that is a daring piece of post-punk, and that it is the best of Costello's releases--are evaluations rather than appraisals. Evaluations are fundamentally comparative. Appraisals are not. We expect different experiences and different amounts of pleasure upon repeated appraisals, but these differences are consistent with a single, relatively stable evaluation of Armed Forces.
Diffey rightly emphasizes that some critical judgments stem from an appraisal (aesthetic or otherwise). When this is the case, the critic "do[es] not admire on principle."[12] In contrast, evaluations can be grounded by principles, so one can admire or condemn a work without experiencing it first-hand. Motivated by the moralism of Tolstoy's What Is Art? I might condemn Thomas Hardy's Jude The Obscure without ever reading it,. for I know that it is a complex novel that tends to offend Christian sensibilities. By the same token, I personally try to avoid most gangsta rap, reasonably sure that it will be unmelodic and deeply misogynist. However, these critical judgments are rooted in principles, not in any aesthetic appraisal of the specific novel and any specific instances of such music. When we evaluate works, we order works in terms of criteria that can be specified in advance of our experience with any particular instance of the kind of thing we are evaluating, as in J. O. Urmson's discussion of grading apples in which apples under 2.5 inches in diameter never make the super-grade category.[13]
In contrast to evaluation, aesthetic appraisal is "concerned with the particular without being concerned with other particulars."[14] There is no prior assumption that appraisals must stay within boundaries that can be specified in advance of experiencing the object. One sometimes finds oneself admiring a work that was previously dismissed on principle; although on principle I disapprove of"art rock" or "prog" bands like Yes, I occasionally find myself listening with great pleasure when I encounter them on the radio. Diffey also notes that verbal expressions of appraisals employ descriptive terms that are "irreducibly appraisive" (such as "clumsy" and "exciting").
Instead of looking for specific qualities in the object, appraisal involves discovering whatever is to be found in experiencing a particular work. Diffey observes that "'we can only look to see what excellence is embodied in a work."is One aims at understanding it as the particular thing that it is. But this understanding is not simply a cognitive grasp of it; one can often extract its cognitive message from a detailed review of it. Appraisal aims at something more: "it is to savor it at the same time: ... to 'investigate' its pleasurable possibilities,"[16] Yet as Stephen Davies emphasizes, such an interest in the individuality of a specific musical work does not rule out interest in it "as an individual something" and it does not rule out "bringing to one's experience of that thing; a knowledge of the traditions and conventions within, and against which, it is intended to be understood and appreciated."[17] Much of my pleasure in Armed Forces stems from its subversion of my expectations, expectations dependent on listening to it in relation to its place in British rock in the wake of punk.
So appraisal does not inspect an object in light of its ability to satisfy fixed criteria or a standard that can be formulated in defending one's evaluation to another person. In contrast, evaluation involves inspecting a work in light of a specific, fixed category and as an exemplar of that category. The important "discovery" is the degree to which the work exemplifies its class.[18] In the case of Armed Forces, I have been presuming that the relevant long-playing recording is the American configuration. The British release features the track "Sunday's Best," deleted in order to make room for "(What's So Funny 'Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding." (Cataloguing the minutiae of British life as reflected in Sunday tabloids, "Sunday's Best" was deemed too "English" for American consumption.) To say which configuration is better would be to evaluate. Proceeding on principle, the British release would take the prize, since that configuration better reflects its British origins and obeys the principle of fidelity to the author's original wishes. Yet I prefer to listen to the American version.
II. AESTHETIC INTEREST AND AESTHETIC VALUE
Turning to my second point, the act of appraising or appreciating Armed Forces involves an aesthetic interest in the music, and appreciative listeners discern considerable aesthetic value in it. This proposal flies in the face of prevailing trends in theorizing about popular culture, particularly the work of Pierre Bourdieu, John Fiske, and Dick Hebdige. Like Nelson Goodman, they maintain that the value of a work of art (and, presumably, of popular art) is its value as a symbol. In Goodman's formulation, art's "primary purpose is cognition in and for itself," where the viewer delights in the "apprehension and formulation of what is to be communicated" in our use of symbols.[19] While I agree that most popular music is of value for its symbolic functions, inviting a cognitive response, I want to dispute the common belief that there is no need to appeal to aesthetic value in accounting for our interest in such music.
Hebdige, for instance, claims that aesthetic analysis of the artifacts of popular culture "misses the point." The clothing and music of everyday life are best regarded "as systems of communication, forms of expression and representation." Any reference to aesthetic appraisal is to be viewed with suspicion, as an attempt to recast popular art into "timeless objects, judged by the immutable criteria of traditional aesthetics" (that is, to mistakenly treat them as high art). For Hebdige and Fiske, the aesthetic pleasure of popular art as such is always an approving response to its "signifying practice," as a transgression of dominant cultural codes.[20] For Bourdieu, popular responses to popular culture involve pleasure taken in the work's content, not in its aesthetic achievement, and the pleasure it affords comes from participating (sometimes literally, sometimes symbolically) in what it represents. Contending that popular taste conforms to the "exact opposite of the Kantian aesthetic," Bourdieu holds that successful popular art always subordinates form (i.e., formal achievement) to function.[21]
Finally, Roger Scruton lambastes popular music precisely because this brand of sociological criticism makes no room for value distinctions grounded in aesthetic appraisal. The interesting twist to Scruton's argument is that he regards such criticism as perfectly appropriate to most recent rock music: there is no attention to the aesthetic dimension of rock for the simple reason that it does not invite aesthetic interest. Where genuine understanding of music involves aesthetic judgment, Scruton offers sociological criticism of popular forms as a mirror of the response of the rock audience; arguing that "in our tradition ... tonality has played the leading role in the building of musical space," he finds nothing but incompetent insignificance in "pop song[s] in which the bass-line fails to move; in which an inner voice is mutilated; in which rhythm is generated mechanically." Offering the audience nothing that would sustain musical interest, the music of U2 and Nirvana works only if we withhold all aesthetic judgment. Scruton damns it as "a kind of negation of music, a dehumanizing of the spirit of song."[22]
However, I believe that a good deal of the pleasure of popular music is uncovered through aesthetic appraisal, in which the listener directly apprehends the music as an object of both perceptual and symbolic interest. The music is apprehended as possessing various excellences and flaws as organized sound, and the listener explores its efficacy as an expressive, representational object. As music, it requires an aesthetic interest: it invites and rewards an interest in attending to the unfolding soundscape. By an "aesthetic interest," I mean interest taken in hearing and grasping the music under a particular interpretation as the sounds unfold, a type of interest that cannot be taken in the music by someone who does not interpret it in light of other music to which it is linked historically. One's understanding of the musical tradition alters the way the music sounds. But I must caution that my claims should not be taken to mean that any sort of unique or detached aesthetic attitude is involved.
To defer to critic Greil Marcus, the aesthetic appreciation of Armed Forces involves perceiving its overall sound as "suppressed, claustrophobic, twitching." Although many of the melodies are catchy and hummable, "it's soon clear that just below the messy, nervous surface of the music is a very stark and specific vision."[23] His description of the record makes it clear that he does not recommend it as entertainment. Its power is related to its serious treatment of complex issues, its major theme being the insidious effects of "secret, unspeakable realities of political life" upon our most personal relationships. But its value is largely a matter of Costello's aural choices in expressing his lyrical themes; in the song "Green Shirt," his voice "bites out a defense," then becomes "a sensitive, rushed lover's plaint," culminating in a cry of "hysteria."[24]
It cannot be denied that Marcus values Armed Forces as an opportunity to reflect on the issues that gradually emerge as one comes to understand it, in short, for its cognitive import. But he also regards it as an object of aesthetic interest: talking about Armed Forces is no substitute for experiencing it. I take it that Marcus wants us, as readers of his analysis, to listen to the recording and to appraise it, hearing it anew in light of his suggested interpretation. Yet there is no presumption that this aesthetic appraisal involves reflection on the music's conformity to general standards for such music.
It will be objected that the receptive listening experience described by Marcus is a cognitive experience; the pleasure of the music depends on its communicating certain themes and its expressively commenting on those themes. In short, it will be argued that I have just admitted that the "aesthetic" appraisal of Armed Forces is really a "reading" of its cognitive import.
In response, I do not see why an aesthetic interest excludes a cognitive interest. For I do not endorse two of the most common approaches to distinguishing aesthetic value from cognitive value. First, I do not believe that this is an interest in the music's transcultural and transhistorical formal properties apart from the material embodiment of that form. Second, I do not agree with Hebdige that an aesthetic appraisal Of Armed Forces necessarily incorporates an appeal to its artistic value, that is, an explicit or even implicit understanding of it as a work of art.[25] Relying on such an assumption would violate my working hypothesis that we can make sense of our desires and evaluations concerning rock without assuming that rock music is art.
I have now narrowed the ground that I can occupy in claiming that the aesthetic value of rock is not equivalent to the cognitive purposes it serves. It is not a detached interest in pure structures. It is not an interest in its exemplification of artistic values. It is not an interest in a purely sensuous kaleidoscope of sound (as such, a great deal of rock music is harsh, ugly, and distinctly unpleasant). So what is it? It is the value that appropriately knowledgeable listeners discover in the music when actually listening to it. When the music has a cognitive value, however minimal, an aesthetic appraisal takes account of how well suited the aural object is to conveying its cognitive element. Aesthetic interest includes an interest in the clarity and force with which the sounds embody the cognitive content. (Clarity and force are perceived in the listening experience.) The audience is interested in the sensuous display of content.[26]
This position on aesthetic value presumes that people are enculturated to understand the structure and cognitive import of any given musical tradition. Yet it also presumes that we are simply the kind of creatures whose form of life will have a musical dimension. We tell jokes because we have a sense of humor and we develop cuisines because we have complex taste receptors; different cultures and subcultures tell different sorts of jokes and develop distinct cuisines, and jokes and food take on a significant social meaning. But it is unlikely that we would invest so much, either as individuals or as cultures, into music, entertainment, and cuisine if they were simply valuable as symbols. While symbolic activity is inherent in a human form of life, as Homo sapiens we are also inherently oriented toward our visual and auditory modes of interacting with our environment. (A canine aesthetic, in contrast, would be heavily weighted toward the olfactory.) An interest in how--and how well--the music functions as music in presenting cognitive insight presupposes an independent interest in aural experience. As Wittgenstein observes, "Appreciating music is a manifestation of the life of mankind."[27]
I now want to push Diffey's very Wittgensteinian language to its limits: in appraisal, "we can only look to see what excellence is embodied in a work." We do not formalize our findings and calculate the degree of excellence: we perceive excellence as a feature of the music, in the very same perceptual experience, through which we perceive its rhythms, melodies, and even the meanings of the words being sung. With Armed Forces, we feel the tension in the interplay of the chipper melodies, the staccato punctuation of the percussion, and the dark, ugly mood of the stories Costello narrates: Kafka by way of Abba. Finally, the American configuration offers the climactic release of the final song, "(What's So Funny 'Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding." In the album's one burst of unmitigated joy, Costello eschews the irony of Brinsley Schwarz's original version of the song. Its surging pulse and exuberant vocal are a burst of sunlight following the dark bile that has come before. To say that we perceive the excellence embodied in the work is to say that it sounds right; one experiences the rightness of the album's sequencing; one feels how it fits.[28]
The fact that Armed Forces is the object of positive aesthetic appraisals--in which we take pleasure in the excellence we perceive in it--does not yet indicate how valuable it is. In this respect my argument differs from that of Richard Shusterman, who provides the most spirited defense of rock music, to date, against the charge of "aesthetic poverty."[29] Although Shusterman follows Adorno and Horkheimer and castigates most popular music as prepackaged and "wearily familiar," he argues that at least some rock music is "intensely absorbing" for its high degree of "aesthetic quality." After dispensing with some common objections, he makes the positive case that "works of popular art do in fact display the aesthetic values its critics reserve exclusively for high art." Specifically, some rock music is aesthetically challenging, possesses sophisticated and satisfying formal properties (including both unity and complexity), and displays aesthetic autonomy and resistance.[30]
Shusterman's argument proves both too little and too much. Armed Forces might reflect the aesthetic values normally reserved for high art, but it does not follow that it is as valuable as a work of high art. Nor does it follow that it is a work of high art. Working from Dewey's notion of aesthetic experience, Shusterman interprets "aesthetic quality" so broadly that it has no essential connection to art. Thus the observation that Armed Forces manifests a high degree of aesthetic quality proves nothing about its value as a work of art, just as the aesthetic merits of natural objects and environments are unrelated to their status as works of art. While this consequence does not trouble me, it undercuts Shusterman's proof that rap music is a genuine art form.
On the other hand, by agreeing that he must meet the challenge to popular music on the terms set by its detractors, Shusterman tries to prove too much. As he notes, the bulk of his defense of popular music is an attempt to show that such music meets standards of excellence set by its critics. Yet he also counters criticisms rooted in those standards by arguing that successful popular music, particularly within the genre of hiphop, "is dedicated to the defiant violation of this compartmentalized, trivializing, and eviscerating view of art and the aesthetic."[31] In short, he argues that good popular music meets the standards of excellence recognized by traditional aesthetic theory, but it better satisfies another set of standards, inimical to those traditional standards. This position makes the aesthetic value of popular music a mere accident; it is rather like preparing a sumptuous meal and then finding, when challenged, that it coincidentally conforms to the standards of nutrition that its detractors have denied that it meets.
More recently, Shusterman emphasizes the argument that the best popular art is of value as a "defiant infraction" of traditional aesthetic standards; rap's "eclectic cannibalism violates high modernist conventions of aesthetic purity."[32] Rap "warrants particular attention by suggesting fruitful ways to rethink the very nature of art."[33] Having promised to satisfy elitist critics of popular art on their own terms, such arguments beg the question.
I prefer to admit that it does not matter whether rock music, or any other sort of popular art, shares the specific values of any sort of traditional art.[34] What matters is whether appreciating and evaluating popular art and fine art display the same logic of value: what matters is that, among other things, rock is appreciated and valued for its aesthetic properties. Which properties are present is not pertinent to our attempts to determine their comparative value. The paintings of Jan Vermeer are valued for their restrained beauty, their narrative power, and their allegorical subtlety. The paintings of James McNeil Whistler are not. It does not follow that Whistler's paintings are flawed, or not art (although his contemporaries often thought so, as evidenced by his conflicts with John Ruskin). Nor would Whistler's paintings be better works of art for sharing the same aesthetic properties as those of Vermeer. By analogy, it is largely irrelevant whether Armed Forces, hip-hop, or heavy metal possess the sorts of aesthetic qualities that are typical of great works of art. In appraisal, we try to come to grips with the music on its own terms, that is; as belonging to one musical tradition rather than another.
Furthermore, aesthetic value is not the same thing as artistic value. Yet Shusterman seems to incorporate any meaning or value that might arise in relation to a song into the category of the aesthetic, as if that made a case for its value as art.[35] Nor does artistry make a thing art. There can be artistry in flower arranging, leading to arrangements of considerable aesthetic value; I do not conclude that my local florist creates works of art. Flower arranging is a traditional form of art in Japan, but my local florist does not participate in that tradition. If we have learned anything from Arthur Danto, it is that two things may be perceptually indistinguishable, but only one will be informed by the weight of tradition and theory required to make it a work of art.
At the same time, we must be wary of the trap of supposing that only complex, challenging music is of real aesthetic value. (Arguments that privilege classical music or that defend rock by highlighting its most complex cases seem overly reliant on such an assumption.) Simplicity and directness can also be of value, and we find artistic achievement when such aesthetic qualities are embodied in appropriate means. The economy and simplicity of Ernest Hemingway's prose does not indicate a corresponding poverty in Hemingway's artistry or cognitive import.
Early in the rock era, critic Robert Christgau remarked, "The reason rock has engendered such rhapsodic excitement ... is not merely that it offers so much, emotionally and intellectually and physically, but that it does not at first appear to do so."[36] R.E.M.'s "Everybody Hurts" and Bob Dylan's "Knockin' On Heaven's Door" are direct and simple. They do not parade any structural complexity, yet they display a mastery of their means of expression. Furthermore, the combination of simple elements can take on a surprising power. Within the context of albums or compact disc sequencing, combinations or groupings of songs take on a complexity that cannot be predicted from their qualifies when taken as individual songs. On its own, Costello's cover of"What's So Funny" is a blast of uncomplicated, feel-good rock and roll; in the context of Armed Forces, its roaring rejection of easy cynicism is deeply moving, largely in contrast with the bitterness of the self-described "emotional fascism" leading up to it. The virtues of simplicity are too often ignored in aesthetics.
III. EVALUATING POPULAR MUSIC
My third point is that the aesthetic dimension of appraising a piece of rock music does not exhaust everything relevant in evaluating it. Rather obviously, one might value something improperly by regarding it too highly ("Janis Joplin's performance of 'Ball and Chain' is the greatest blues singing ever!") or dismissing it too quickly ("Rap is just a load of noise"). I have already noted that Shusterman's positive recommendation of hiphop relies as much on its oppositional stance as on the density and complexity of its best pieces. As such, an evaluation of hip-hop demands consideration of the degree to which it is proper to value this stance. Similarly, some listeners might agree to everything positive said about Costello's Armed Forces, but might reject it as deeply flawed for what may be read as its racist and misogynist overtones.[37] So while value may be discovered during the activity of aesthetic appraisal--and to that extent the listener may value the music as music--a favorable evaluation of rock must consider other dimensions and multiple uses (and users) of the music.
In contrast to Shusterman, John Fiske argues that the value of most popular texts will not be elucidated by the strategies of "highbrow criticism." Where Shusterman focuses on popular music with a high degree of structural complexity (thus dismissing or simply ignoring less complex rock music), Fiske makes a case for the value of simple, even facile works of popular art. A song like Tom Petty's "You Don't Know How It Feels (To Be Me)" (1994) is simple to the point of cliche, minimizing the authorial uniqueness of the work. Because the "easy" texts of popular music free the audience from any concern with the singularity and creativity of the text, simple works of popular culture "allow for meaningful pertinencies to be made between the specificities of everyday life and the ideological norms they embody."[38]
Fiske emphasizes that popular art can be simple in structure and yet complex in its uses, as diverse listeners make diverse connections between its limited content and their own social relations. The audience for popular music does not treat the music with psychical distance, disinterestedness, or respect; the music is "lived in" with a selective focus, sometimes at the foreground of experience and sometimes in the background of other activities.[39] Thus, much of the audience for popular music may know the music of the song, but will only know the words to the chorus. (Think of the many casual listeners who hear "'Scuse me while I kiss this guy" when Jimi Hendrix sings "kiss the sky.") "Oliver's Army," the single from Armed Forces, qualifies neatly. It is Costello's best selling single, yet it is unlikely that most of those who danced to it in the clubs or sang along on the radio grasped that the title refers to Oliver Cromwell and the song as a whole explores the lingering effects of British military imperialism in the post-colonial period. Functionally, "Oliver's Army" works as a dance tune, and its melody and arrangement provide pleasure to casual listeners who have no idea about Costello's intentions. For those who grasp the words, the result is an ironic tension.
We do a serious disservice to rock when we concentrate on its most complex achievements; simplicity is no less an achievement than structural and semiotic complexity. Chad Taylor, guitarist for the band Live, identifies Neil Young as his favorite guitar player. But Taylor's admiration is not directed at Young's virtuosity: "He is so limited, but there's something beautiful about that kind of simplicity in rock & roll."[40] Rock embraces the near nonsense of "Wooly Bully" (Sam the Sham, 1965) and "Tutti Frutti" (Little Richard, 1956), the direct sentiments of "I Want To Hold Your Hand" (the Beatles, 1963) and "Delirious" (Prince, 1983), the gravity of "Bridge Over Troubled Water" (Simon and Garfunkel, 1970), and the complexity of montage constructions such as Uncle Meat (Frank Zappa, 1969) and "Talkin' All That Jazz" (Stetsasonic, 1988). These "texts" of popular music are valued for a diversity of reasons, and it is a mistake to suppose that all rock is valuable in the same way (as, say, serious and complex aural constreets) or is used in the same ways by its diverse audiences. In accounting for the behaviors displayed by its fans (their desiring and valuing it), the fundamental point is that people do value it. But they value different performers, songs, and recordings for different reasons, and the same ones for different reasons on different occasions. Sometimes rock is valued in acts of aesthetic appraisal. Sometimes its aesthetic value takes a back seat to its symbolic value. Recognizing this diversity, the problem is to avoid evaluating it by appeal to a uniform and limited standard, such as appraisal of the music's aesthetic dimension. Recognizing the diversity of standards, the question is whether these standards are reasonable when considered from an impartial perspective. My intuition is that they generally are.
Earlier, it was claimed that evaluation involves an appeal to standards. When an evaluation involves a comparative judgment of two objects of the same kind (e.g., that "Sympathy for the Devil" is better than "Jiving Sister Fanny"), there must also be a reasonable expectation that the two will share commensurable values; that is, each of the pair can be judged according to the degree it possesses the same specifiable features. By far the most promising avenue for identifying such features is by identifying the object's function.[41] (This move requires inspecting the object in light of a specific, fixed category. As Diffey observes, it precludes neither the development of new standards, nor taking aesthetic considerations into account when making a nonaesthetic choice.)
However, it is doubtful that there is either a distinctive or a unifying function for rock music. As Peter Wicke notes,
Rock'n'roll also broke the conventional functional pattern of popular music forms. Before, popular music had mainly been based on dance and entertainment. Rock had a non-specific accompanying and background function for all possible activities.[42]
Rock music has multiple functions, many of them unknown to the musicians in advance of the music's use. In other words, "it has a good beat and you can dance to it" does not exhaust the functions for evaluating rock; Jimi Hendrix's "Purple Haze" was poorly received on American Bandstand in 1967 by a review panel of teenagers, yet it is one of rock's most sublime achievements. No one could have predicted in 1977 that Fleetwood Mac's "Don't Stop (Thinking About Tomorrow)" would become a theme song of the 1992 presidential campaign. And who would have guessed, in the early years of MTV, that Cyndi Lauper's "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun" (1984) would accompany a 1997 television commercial for communications giant AT&T in order to sell teleconferencing services to career women with children? Even within a functional category, such as dance, there is no privileged set of features that will fulfill that function, for dance is itself a range of quite different things. Chuck Willis was the "King of the Stroll" in the 1950s, but his signature tunes were not functional if one wanted to dance the hand jive or, in subsequent decades, do the twist or the hustle or break dance.
Many of the functions of rock are far less obvious than providing background music or a certain sort of dance beat. Although it may appear that the adulation and hysteria of the Beatles' female fans reflected prevailing gender expectations at the height of Beatlemania, in hindsight some of these fans have come to see their adolescent behavior as resistive rather than submissive. Behaviors such as declaring allegiance to a "favorite Beatle" may appear to echo traditional gender expectations of paring with one male; in reality, the young women were actually identifying with the strength and independence of pop stars, in a way that they could not identify with their male peers. And the screaming, crying, and fainting that female fans displayed in response to concert and television appearances were at odds with the decorum and passivity, expected of young ladies; by responding to males who were safely out of reach, they found a way to act on sexual feelings that they were otherwise expected to deny. In short, the Beatles' music served multiple nonaesthetic functions for their female fans, some of them distinct from the functions served for male fans.[43]
This is not to say that all rock music is equally multifunctional. Greil Marcus relates being in a bar in Hawaii in 1981: when Bob Dylan's "Like a Rolling Stone" came over the FM radio station carried by the sound system,
feet began moving, conversations died. Everyone listened, and everyone looked a bit more alive when the last notes faded. It was a stunning moment: irrefutable proof that "Like a Rolling Stone" cannot be used as Muzak.[44]
It is not particularly good for dancing, either; what "Like a Rolling Stone" is mostly good for is listening. Marcus's anecdote is an important reminder that the appreciation of rock music is, at least some of the time, strikingly of a piece with the listening posture thought to be most appropriate for serious music. Rock music is not always a background to other activities. Gordon Graham offers this description of music's special character: "music is the 'foregrounding' of sound, the bringing to primary attention sound itself ... and aural experience becomes the focus of interest in its own right."[45] Rock fans often listen to their music as the focus of aural interest in its own right, and not because they have been trained under New Criticism. In the case of music, it is not at all clear that we should accept Bourdieu's contention that aesthetic interest is due to the "routinizing" action of academic institutions.[46]
So far, I have argued that individual pieces of rock are valued for their aesthetic dimension and for the many functions they perform in the context of everyday life. In either case, they are subject to evaluation according to interpersonal standards. In these respects, the appraisal and evaluation of rock parallels the appraisal and evaluation of cultural artifacts that have the status of high culture. But none of this yet speaks to the question of how rock music fares as a general category of music.
IV. THE VALUE OF ROCK IN GENERAL
Music, like every art, exists in, and derives its life from, a continuous culture.--Roger Scruton[47]
Rock is often dismissed by critics who cannot be bothered to make comparative evaluations of individual instances. Roger Scruton, for instance, complains that R.E.M. and U2 represent a
popular music devoid of taste, in which beat is the unifying force, and harmony and melody have atrophied. ... It will always be a sterile and life-negating force, from which nothing proceeds apart from a habit of distraction,as
Scruton does not even acknowledge that R.E.M. and U2 are two of the most consistently excellent groups working in popular music in the last two decades.
There is Allan Bloom's famous description of the adolescent rock fan, engaged in a typical appreciative activity:
A pubescent child whose body throbs with orgasmic rhythms; whose feelings are made articulate into hymns of onanism or the killing of parents; whose ambition is to win fame and wealth in imitating the drag queen who makes the music.[49]
Bloom believes that rock "has one appeal only, a barbaric appeal, to sexual desire."[50] Rock fans, lost in sexual fantasies, harm themselves in developing a taste for such music. But this is not a criticism that takes such behavior as senseless. Quite the contrary! It claims to make sense of the rock fan's behavior in a way that Scruton's dismissal does not. On this basis, Bloom is able to argue that it would be better if these music fans devoted themselves to Mozart, whose music has the power to make us "whole."
Scruton and Bloom betray little interest in making value discriminations within rock music. Still, there is no inconsistency in discrediting rock while granting the validity of evaluations "internal" to the musical culture (of allowing that Costello's Armed Forces is better than his Goodbye Cruel World). One can know the value in developing a sense of humor while feeling sorry for someone who only laughs at slapstick. Similarly, one might contend that it is good to learn to aesthetically appraise music but unfortunate if one wastes one's time on rock.
I will focus on Alan H. Goldman's version of this position on rock.[51] Arguing that "some tastes (and correlatively some genres of an) are better than others," Goldman concurs with Scruton and Bloom that rock is the clear loser in comparison with classical music.[52] Goldman evaluates kinds of art by examining the sort of responses they can elicit for the ideal listener. A genre or musical form's value is to be measured by looking at the experiences it offers ideal listeners. Generalizing from the value of experiences with individual instances when we consider "the total experience of the works," Goldman contends that those who appreciate Wagner and Mozart have "better taste" than those who prefer rock music. A better taste is a more mature, more discriminating taste. It favors rich, challenging works whose significance is "durable."[53] So much the worse for the Ramones and their rallying cry, "Gabba Gabba Hey!"
Goldman's position has the advantage of conforming to Zangwill's suggestion that we focus on the human behaviors directed toward art. Furthermore, his argument grants the central premise of my reply, which is the idea that developing a taste for rock (as one's preferred type of music listening) interferes with developing a taste for classical music.[54] In the words of Samuel Lipman, the "current weakened condition" of the audience for classical music is due to several factors, chief among them "the destruction of classical-music education in elementary and secondary schools ... [and] the calamitously large availability of meretricious pop music."[55] I am not about to deny that classical audiences are graying because children come of age in a world saturated with rock music. Individuals who might have been supporters of the classical repertoire are instead replacing their scratched Cream and Led Zeppelin albums with compact discs, while the next generation of listeners dances to the sounds of techno. That is to say, rock is a cultural rival to traditional high culture, replicating within itself a full hierarchy of tastes, from lowbrow to high-brow.
But none of this yet makes the case that it is better to have a taste for classical music than for rock. One can recognize their cultural competition for the hearts and minds of listeners without belittling rock. Two crucial steps must be introduced to get from the recognition of competition to the conclusion that rock's popularity is an unfortunate victory by vulgar philistines. First, we must think that the two types of music fulfill at least some of the same functions (i.e., that they exemplify some commensurable values). Second, that it makes better sense to support classical music as our means to fulfilling those functions, all things considered. My earlier discussion of aesthetic appraisal goes a long way toward granting the first, so I will challenge the second.
Even if rock and classical music are similar enough to serve parallel functions, particularly in rewarding an aesthetic interest, the very fact of their rivalry suggests that they constitute relatively independent musical cultures. All of my discussion presumes that I have been talking about rock's value to appreciative listeners, that is, listeners for whom rock sounds like a "natural" musical language. To listen from within a paradigm is to adjust one's listening to the kind of music heard, to understand it with historically appropriate listening habits, and to listen imaginatively, with the expectations or imaginative projections appropriate to the style of music in question.[56] It is, in short, to belong to a specific musical culture demanding distinct cultural capital.[57]
Listening to rock with understanding may demand less cultural capital than listening to Wagner's Lohengrin with understanding. Yet spending a rewarding hour with rock music demands considerably more cultural capital than an hour playing jump rope or Go Fish. The situation is not that classical music yields its pleasures only to those who acquire the right cultural capital, with no cultural capital needed to enjoy rock. No music is of aesthetic value except in light of appropriate cultural capital. The phrasing, intonation, instrumentation, and other aesthetic properties of a musical performance are meaningful only to those for whom such features matter. As Patricia Herzog puts it, musical meaning "exists in an intentional space created by the critical or evaluative interests of the listener."[58] Music's aesthetic value is a function of its use by appropriately knowledgeable listeners.
The issue of rock's general value therefore turns on the question of which cultural capital to acquire. Even Goldman's ideal listener must possess cultural capital. But since there are no standard principles underlying all evaluation, and since aesthetic properties are relative to taste, the ideal listener must be quite indifferent concerning which cultural capital to possess and what sort of taste to develop. Provided that two musical traditions offer varying degrees of challenge and richness "of the perceptual, affective, and cognitive experience they afford,"[59] there is no clear difference in their general value as objects for such activity. Provided one does agree with Scruton's strategy of stacking the deck by assuming that only harmonically complex music can offer such experiences, rock appears to satisfy the basic needs of the ideal listener. However, the debate about the general value of rock is not carried out among ideal listeners. It is waged by partial listeners. The aesthetic and cognitive rewards of experiencing a particular musical work are only two elements in the broad decision frame needed to determine the comparative value of two musical cultures. We must consider factors that have no direct relevance for comparative evaluations within a tradition.
V. VALUE AS REFLECTIVELY DEFENSIBLE CHOICE; VALUE AS IMPORTANCE
Measuring value by appeal to an ideal listener ignores the broader sociocultural context in which choices are made. I have no quarrel with the position that everyone should listen to rich, challenging music whose significance is durable. Mozart's "Jupiter" symphony is of value under such an ideal. Yet nothing at all follows about rock music or about people who develop a preference for it, or at least nothing follows until we know a good deal more about the people in question.
The final stage of my analysis relates these points to Elizabeth Anderson's distinction between something's value and its importance to specific persons.[60] Value can be determined impersonally, as when an evaluation determines how well a thing meets standards for the sort of thing that it is. When guided by appropriate principles, an evaluation can be granted by anyone who grasps the standards involved. Computer programs impersonally evaluate and rank applicants for bank loans by crunching numbers. Humans can learn to grade apples apart from liking apples. Not liking apples, I might recognize and yet be indifferent to the fact that the apples on sale at the market are top quality fruit. Similarly, I know music students who learn to analyze and evaluate the scores of Beethoven's piano music while remaining quite indifferent to such music. Evaluation ignores questions of who is going to want the things being evaluated (whether apples or music), what they will do with them, and what specific situation those persons will occupy when using them.
So we have already set the stage for a distinction between value and importance, reflecting the disparity between an impersonal sense of value (in which anyone can agree that a certain thing is of high value) and a personal sense (in which only some people find such things important). Not all valuable things can be equally important to everyone. We must avoid the hasty inference from a work's being valuable to the conclusion that anyone who listens to music ought to value that music.[61] Because different musics involve distinct cultural capital, the best music of the classical tradition need not be important to (or valued by) listeners immersed in another tradition.
Anderson rightly shifts the focus from the thing to the activity of valuing it: an individual's activity of valuing something is justified when doing so meets "a test of interpersonal reflective endorsability from a suitably impartial point of view."[62] It is not enough to have standards or principles securing the interpersonal dimension of evaluation. We must also reflectively determine whether it makes sense for the individual to internalize those standards and to value the things valued. I value Armed Forces. Ought I to value it? It is not the music that needs justification, but my activity of appreciative listening.
Anderson emphasizes that because individuals have "different talents, temperaments, interests, opportunities, and relations to others," different persons should "adopt or uphold different ideals" out of all those that make sense for various persons to adopt.[63] Let us grant the value of professional sports. Given the demands of professional basketball, it can be shown that a particular athlete, such as Michael Jordan, is a superb basketball player. Jordan has skills that demand the admiration of those who see how he contributes to the sport. However, given the concrete situation of her life, it makes little or no sense for a child growing up within a traditional Mayan family in rural Guatemala to take a personal interest in either professional basketball or in Michael Jordan. Nobody supposes that she should find these things important, despite their very genuine value in accordance with reasonable standards, for she is not suitably situated to make any choices relating to such evaluations.
Similarly, standards for evaluating rock will only have importance for those who have a personal investment in the continuation of that musical culture. Many people possess the cultural capital to have rich musical experiences with rock, and insufficient cultural capital to debate the relative merits of Wagner's Lohengrin and Mozart's "Jupiter" symphony. Critics like Scruton, Lipman, and Bloom fail to evaluate the rock audience from a suitably impartial point of view. Perhaps they confuse their own (quite reasonable) indifference to the value of rock with something else, namely rock's relative lack of value. But once we allow that rock rewards aesthetic interest, there is nothing irrational or unreasonable about its importance to persons suitably situated to take a personal interest in it. The same holds for its lack of appeal to others (e.g., Wagnerians and Guatemalan peasants). But is this a justification of popular taste? Not in itself. The remaining step is to block attempts to justify a taste culture in general. A standard is only justified to the degree that it makes sense for specific persons to care about it, relative to the actual circumstances in which their decisions are situated. What remains is to decide what justifies a personal investment in a specific musical culture.
Any such justification must consider the circumstances framing the decision to listen regularly to a type of music. My sympathies are with Will Kymlicka's observation: "it's only through having a rich and secure cultural structure that people can become aware ... of the options available to them, and intelligently examine their value."[64] But how often are individuals in a position to choose their musical tastes? Cultural choices always arise against an existing context of choice, and one's cultural heritage is the most basic such context. Options concerning taste generally arise after one has acquired considerable cultural capital. While we may criticize a culture and wish for its improvement, and may criticize an individual's choices within a culture, there are seldom reasons that would persuade an impartial judge to endorse a wholesale rejection of an individual's "home" culture. Like it or not, increasing numbers of people occupy a cultural space dominated by mass media and interactions between previously segregated cultures and subcultures. Their tastes are effortlessly informed by mass art and they are well situated to hear, use, appraise, and enjoy rock music. Rock, a polyglot product of that very situation, "naturally" meets the aesthetic and communicative needs of people who want music suitable for multiple, everyday uses in a consumer culture.
Because they are committed to the superiority of classical music, rock's critics hold that rock fans should nonetheless internalize the values of classical music. As Peter Kivy argues, what is most significant about the classical tradition is the flowering of absolute music.[65] Champions of classical music want people to transcend their ordinary expectations about music and its role in everyday life in order to reap the unique rewards of absolute music. That is, they think it best for everyone to endorse the ideals of autonomous music and to join them in preferring music whose appeal is "timeless," transcultural, purely musical, and independent of the social situation of the audience. But it is not clear that everyone currently rewarded by the very real merits of popular music will reap an equivalent reward from absolute music. The process of acquiring a taste for such music (involving personal investment in a new and complex set of evaluative standards) flies in the face of contemporary culture. So it is hardly obvious that impartial judges would routinely recommend acquisition of a taste for classical music on that basis. (Appealing to nonunique rewards does not help, for they are duplicated by many other musics.)
The acquisition of a taste for the absolute music of the classical tradition remains an option for many people, but more often as an auxiliary rather than as a primary source of aesthetic reward. Impartial judges would hardly take the literary merits of William Shakespeare, Alexander Pope, and John Milton as a reason for every college student to major in English literature. At best, a case could be made that everyone in the English-speaking world should have some acquaintance with those authors, if only to be aware of an important element of their cultural heritage. Likewise, we might urge some exposure to the instrumental music of Mozart and Beethoven on educated persons. But this is a far stretch from concluding that everyone should invest in the cultural capital that would lead them to prefer those authors to current authors or classical music to contemporary popular music.
In sum, an individual's social, practical, and personal concerns are not relevant to evaluating individual musical works, but they are quite relevant to evaluating an individual's musical tastes. Music's aesthetic value emerges when one experiences it, yet its rewards are only accessible to persons who possess appropriate cultural capital and to whom such music personally matters. Music's value is therefore a function of the continuation of a musical culture. On this matter I am in agreement with Scruton: "Our aesthetic preferences become values just as soon as ... they become part of the attempt to create a place for ourselves in the world, and to situate ourselves among our fellows."[66] We part company on the question of whether the classical tradition is the only satisfactory approach to musically situating ourselves. The classical tradition that reigned from the eighteenth century until the dawn of the twentieth is no longer our "natural" musical language.[67] Rock is a mass art whose very existence is predicated on distribution to diverse audiences and across gaps of space and time. Although rock is not the only music that large numbers of people have an opportunity to know well, it is the nearly ubiquitous soundtrack to contemporary consumer culture. As such, rock has a stronger claim on contemporary taste than classical. Unfortunately, the ease with which rock is enjoyed (reflecting ample opportunities to do so as well as the relative simplicity of the basic forms that must be understood) is misread as rock's triviality.
Arguments that champion classical music at the expense of rock are ultimately criticisms of popular taste, leaping from the real value of great music to the conclusion that everyone in our culture should value it. Such arguments downplay the degree to which the formation of taste is a function of the situation in which it is to be exercised. Yet elitist critics recognize that rock redirects cultural energy away from classical music. Unhappy that many of the musical achievements of the past do not matter to large numbers of people, their condescension is tinged with resentment. But because our choice of music involves knowledgeable participation in a particular form of life, because rock music provides a vibrant musical culture that speaks to the lived needs of its participants, and because an impartial judge would not advise most people to reorder their lives to acquire the cultural capital that would make classical music significant to their lives, for most people a taste for rock music is perfectly justified. Yet because there are genuine norms for distinguishing better from worse instances of rock, my arguments do not imply that all such music is equally good.
Mutatis mutandis, I believe that the major points made in this essay can be generalized to include many other kinds of popular art whose appraisal involves significant interest in aesthetic qualities.


[68]
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, ed. G. H. Von Wright, trans. Peter Winch (University of Chicago Press, 1980), p. 73e.
Quoted in Michel Foucault and Pierre Boulez, "Contemporary Music and the Public," in Perspectives on Musical Aesthetics, ed. John Rahn (New York: W. W. Norton, 1994), p. 85. From a conversation originally published in 1983.
It is not assumed here that texts of"high" and "low" culture are different sorts of things; instead, it is assumed that "high" and "low" describe two poles of a continuum of cultural practices.
Nick Zangwill, "Groundrules in the Philosophy of Art," Philosophy 70 (1995): 536. Intentionally or not, Zangwill follows Wittgenstein's suggestion: "The word we ought to talk about is 'appreciated.' What does appreciation consist in?" Ludwig Wittgenstein, Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief, ed. Cyril Barrett (University of California Press, 1967), p. 7.
See Ronald Shusterman, "In Defense of Elitism," Philosophy and Literature 18 (1994): 242-252. As he puts it, "I love entertainment--but I do not feel so guilty about the fact that I have to find a way of calling it art" (p. 247).
Contra Simon Frith, Performing Rites (Harvard University Press, 1996).
As with other sorts of perception, this process is fallible: misperception is not uncommon. Such value has traditionally been called "intrinsic value," but this is not a particularly useful way of thinking about it. I am a noncognitivist about the values that we perceive when we perceive good music; I think that such value is a culturally emergent and holistic feature of the music, dependent on the degree of understanding brought to the listening experience. However, nothing in what follows hinges on my being able to justify these points.
Armed Forces is the only Elvis Costello album to which Marsh gives five of five stars; see The New Rolling Stone Record Guide, eds. Dave Marsh and John Swenson (New York: Random House/Rolling Stone Press, 1983), p. 115,
To this degree I agree with Gordon Graham that "the tunes Abba used to produce" are generally more pleasurable to hear than is Brahms's Violin Concerto, but "this does not make them better music." But when Graham says that the Brahms piece is "a superior piece of music," compared with Abba's "Dancing Queen," he offers an inappropriate comparison. A good concerto and a good song are very different sorts of things. Employing a more appropriate reference class, a song by Beethoven or Haydn is not so obviously superior to a song by Elvis Costello or Lennon and McCartney. See Gordon Graham, "The Value of Music," The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 53 (1995): 141.
Stephen Davies nicely formulates the point: "The pleasure of appreciating music is not some frisson to which the musical work stands merely as the cause or occasion, for, whereas such pleasure is indifferent to its cause, the pleasure of appreciating a musical work ... is not indifferent to the individuality of its object." Stephen Davies, "The Evaluation of Music," in What is Music? An Introduction to the Philosophy of Music, ed. Philip Alperson (New York: Haven, 1987; Philadelphia: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994), p. 316. Perhaps it would be better to speak of one's interest in the music, and how rewarding it is to appreciate it, with pleasure one aspect of that reward. See also Kendall L. Walton, "How Marvelous! Toward a Theory of Aesthetic Value," The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 51 (1993): 499-510.
T. J. Diffey, The Republic of Art and Other Essays (New York: Peter Lang, 1991), chap. 12; originally published as "Evaluation and Aesthetic Appraisals," The British Journal of Aesthetics 7 (1967).
Ibid., p. 185.
J. O. Urmson, "On Grading," Mind 59 (1950): 145-169.
Diffey, p. 186.
Ibid., p. 193.
Peter Kivy, "What Makes Aesthetic Terms Aesthetic?" Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 36 (1975): 201.
Davies, "The Evaluation of Music," pp. 314 and 316. Davies's position has had considerable influence on my description of aesthetic interest.
Some texts are highly unsuitable for appraisal; although I extract information from telephone books on a regular basis, I would not know how to go about appraising one. Perhaps specialists in graphic design, better able to consider them as the kind of thing that they are, appraise them when they use them.
18. Although Diffey does not make the connection, the distinction between appraisal and evaluation has important parallels to Kant's distinction between reflective and determinate judgments in the third Critique.
19. Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1976), p. 258, and Ways of Worldmaking (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1978), pp. 57-70.
20. Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (London and New York: Methuen, 1979), p. 129. See also John Fiske, Understanding Popular Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1989), chap. 6; for Fiske, as for Pierre Bourdieu, some of the pleasure is a jouissance of audience participation. Contrast Fiske with Rose R. Subotnik, Developing Variations: Style and Ideology in Western Music (University of Minnesota Press, 1991), p. 288; Subotnik contends that popular music is valued as an expression of the "general values" of Western culture in the late twentieth century.
21. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Harvard University Press, 1984), p. 5.
22. Roger Scruton, The Aesthetics of Music (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997), pp. 239, 501-504.
23. Greil Marcus, Ranters and Crowd Pleasers: Punk in Pop Music, 1977-1992 (New York: Doubleday, 1993), pp. 34-35. Since Scruton regards the melodically sophisticated pop of Buddy Holly and the Beatles as different in kind from the "dehumanizing" music of Nirvana, R.E.M., and U2, he might regard Elvis Costello as likewise on the proper side of "the divide between popular and classical culture" (The Aesthetics of Music, p. 501). Since I do not want to beg any questions by my choice of examples, I must note that Greil Marcus practices the same mode of critical analysis on music that Scruton would surely damn; e.g., discussions of the Clash, Gang of Four, and the Au Pairs are included in Ranters and Crowd Pleasers.
24. Marcus, Ranters and Crowd Pleasers, pp. 35-36. Contrast this with another Costello record, Goodbye Cruel World (1984), in which an uneven collection of songs is mined by a series of cluttered arrangements and weak vocal performances.
25. Since some works of art do not possess aesthetic properties, aesthetic value will not explicate the value of every work of art as art; conceptual art makes it very clear that we are not going to get very far if we insist that all art is interesting for its aesthetic value. Nor am I persuaded by Malcolm Budd's argument that artistic value is the intrinsic value of the experience a work offers, where aesthetic value is simply one way of realizing artistic value. Budd assumes but does not defend the thesis that there is an essence of artistic value. See Malcolm Budd, Values of Art: Pictures, Poetry, and Music (London and New York: Penguin, 1995), pp. 1-3. Two writers who emphasize that art is not limited to objects with aesthetic properties are Timothy Binkley, "Piece: Contra Aesthetics," The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 35 (1977): 265-277, and Arnold Berleant, Art and Engagement (Temple University Press, 1991).
26. This position is very close to that of Rose R. Subotnik: "what the public hears in [popular] music is what is always heard, not autonomous structure but the sensuous manifestation of particular cultural values" (Developing Variations, p. 288). I do not endorse her position that all popular music expresses the same "general values" of Western culture.
27. Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, p. 70e. Goodman's subsumption of aesthetic value under cognitive value strikes me as incorrect, therefore, for neglecting the rewards of the experience valued simply as an experience, apart from any cognitive benefits that might accrue. Goodman's analysis of aesthetic value shifts the question to the general cognitive benefits of listening to music.
28. See Wittgenstein, Lectures and Conversations, pp. 5-8.
29. Richard Shusterman, "Form and Funk: The Aesthetic Challenge of Popular Art," The British Journal of Aesthetics 31 (1991): 204. Subsequent references are to the expanded version of this essay in Shusterman, Pragmatist Aesthetics: Living Beauty, Rethinking Art (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1992), pp. 169-200. The rewritten version substitutes "shortcomings" for "poverty." I am in complete agreement with Shusterman that aesthetic experience does not differentiate art from nonart, yet is central to the point and value of art; I am making the further point that it is also central to popular art that we may not want to regard as full-blown art.
30. Richard Shusterman, Pragmatist Aesthetics, p. 200. Much of his positive argument comes in a lengthy analysis of the lyrics of a single example of popular music, Stetsasonic's "Talkin' All That Jazz" (1988); see Shusterman, pp. 215-235.
31. Ibid., p. 212.
32. Richard Shusterman, "Art Infraction: Goodman, Rap, Pragmatism," Australasian Journal of Philosophy 73 (1995): 269 and 276. Reprinted in Art and Its Messages: Meaning, Morality, and Society, ed. Stephen Davies (Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997), pp. 114-124.
33. Richard Shusterman, "Rap Remix: Pragmatism, Postmodernism, and Other Issues in the House," Critical Inquiry 22 (1995): 151.
34. Thus the recent debate between Bruce Baugh and James O. Young is largely beside the point; see Bruce Baugh, "prolegomena to Any Aesthetics of Rock Music," The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 51 (1993): 23-29; James O. Young, "Between Rock and a Harp Place," and reply by Baugh, "Music for the Young at Heart," The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 53 (1995): 78-83. See also Stephen Davies, "Rock versus Classical Music," in this issue.
35. Shusterman has more recently clarified his views; see Richard Shusterman, "The End of Aesthetic Experience," The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 55 (1997): 29-41.
36. Robert Christgau, Any Old Way You Choose It: Rock and Other Pop Music, 1967-1973 (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1973), p. 128; from an article originally published in 1970.
37. In character as songs' narrators, Costello uses the phrases "darkies" and "white nigger." See also Renee Cox, "A History of Music," The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 48 (1990): 395-409. Cox explores her attraction to music of the Rolling Stones in the face of her awareness that it denigrates women.
38. Fiske, Understanding Popular Culture, p. 120.
39. Ibid., pp. 144-146.
40. Quoted in Robert Doerschuk, "Live: Topping Copper," Musician 221 (April, 1997): 55.
41. As Barbara Herrnstein Smith argues, evaluations of a work's function(s) are contingent upon assumptions about an implicitly defined audience in implicitly defined circumstances. Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Contingencies of Value (Harvard University Press, 1988), pp. 13-16. I return to this point in my discussion of evaluating rock in general.
42. Peter Wicke, Rock Music: Culture, Aesthetics, and Sociology, trans. Rachel Fogg (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 11. Shusterman may be arguing for the same point, as well.
43. See Lisa A. Lewis, Gender Politics and MTV: Voicing the Difference (Temple University Press, 1990), pp. 152-155. Simon Frith proposes that three social functions are central to the value of popular music: "in the creation of identity, in the management of feelings, in the organization of time." Simon Frith, "Towards an Aesthetic of Popular Music," in Music and Society: The Politics of Composition, Performance, and Reception, ed. Richard Leppert and Susan McClary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 144.
44. Marcus, Ranters & Crowd Pleasers, p. 174.
45. Graham, "The Value of Music," p. 151.
46. Pierre Bourdieu and Alain Darbel, The Love of Art: European Art Museums and their Public, trans. Caroline Beattie and Nick Merriman (Stanford University Press, 1990), p. 59.
47. Roger Scruton, "Notes on the Meaning of Music," in The Interpretation of Music: Philosophical Essays, ed. Michael Krausz (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 201.
48. Roger Scruton, "The Eclipse of Listening," The New Criterion 15 (1996): 12; reprinted in The Future of the European Past, eds. Hilton Kramer and Roger Kimball (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1997). The same complaint is recapitulated within rock music, as when a writer who admires a good deal of rock music denigrates heavy metal bands: "Rather than promoting personal autonomy, they foster robotic automatons. ... Most metal music is abysmal, asinine, atrocious, and just plain awful." B. Lee Cooper, "Awarding an 'A' Grade to Heavy Metal: A Review Essay," Popular Music and Society 17, no. 3 (1993): 100.
49. Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987), p. 75. For a detailed reply, see Theodore Gracyk, Rhythm and Noise: An Aesthetics of Rock (Duke University Press, 1996), chap. 5.
50. Bloom, p. 73.
51. In large part, I do so because I share more assumptions with Goldman than with Scuton and Bloom. For instance, l agree with Goldman that we cannot specify principles that map objective properties of musical works to the value of the resultant listening experiences.
52. Alan H. Goldman, Aesthetic Value (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1995), pp. 30-31,172-173; quotation from p. 172.
53. A parallel argument has been advanced by Herbert Gans. Herbert J. Gans, Popular Culture and High Culture: An Analysis and Evaluation of Taste (New York: Basic Books, 1974), pp. 125 and 171 n.
54. I accept this assumption so long as it does not take the stronger form of holding that a taste for rock is incompatible with a taste for classical. Violin prodigy Leila Josefowicz has recorded Bartok's Sonata for Solo Violin, yet she has a passion for the music of U2. But most people develop a taste for one kind of music at the expense of all others, a pattern that I will defend.
55. Samuel Lipman, Music and More: Essays 1975-1991 (Northwestern University Press, 1992), p. 17.
56. See Aaron Ridley, Music, Value, and the Passions (Cornell University Press, 1995), chap. 3, and Stephen Davies, Musical Meaning and Expression (Cornell University Press, 1994), chap. 7.
57. For a review of the relevant literature, see George H. Lewis, "Who Do You Love? The Dimensions of Musical Taste," in Popular Music and Communication, 2nd ed., ed. James Lull (Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications, 1992), pp. 134-151. The notion of cultural capital stems from Bourdieu's Distinction; Bourdieu links it to formal education and subsequent social status, but it can be broadly understood to be education in and facility with the codes that permit individuals to gain social status. Empirical studies regularly demonstrate that age is one of the surest indicators of musical preference within popular music, suggesting that Bourdieu overestimates the importance of formal education and that he makes too few distinctions within popular culture. Because such codes must also be acquired informally, in order to operate within subcultures that have limited social status, we can also speak of subcultural capital; see Sarah Thornton, Club Cultures: Music, Media, and Subcultural Capital (Wesleyan University Press, 1996).
58. Patricia Herzog, "Music Criticism and Musical Meaning," The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 53 (1995): 300. Compare: "Our interpretation of a work and our experience of its value are mutually dependent ... simultaneously causing and validating themselves and causing and validating each other." Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Contingencies of Value, pp. 10-11. Contrary to Zangwill, it is not clear that an account of interpretation is prior to, and the foundation for, an account of value.
59. Goldman, p. 150.
60. Elizabeth Anderson, Value in Ethics and Economics (Harvard University Press, 1993), pp. 7, 23, 48-49. Anderson's distinction parallels Kendall Walton's distinction between internal and external judgments of value, capturing the difference between evaluations that only make sense within a given institution (which team is better? which song?) and evaluations of the institution (is it a good thing to have such an institution?); Walton, "How Marvelous!" pp. 500-504.
61. It is difficult to see what is prescribed in the prescriptive judgment that one ought not to like a certain type of music, unless it also prescribes changing one's tastes. See Anita Silvers, "Aesthetic 'Akrasia': On Disliking Good Art," The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 31 (1972): 227-234.
62. Elizabeth Anderson, "Replies to Sturgeon and Piper," Ethics 106 (1996): 549. Appraising music does not invoke standards, so appraising music does not mean endorsing it as a vehicle for the appreciative activities of everyone else. As such, appraisal does not directly invite reflection on our standards.
In shifting the focus from a determination of the work's value to a reasonableness of valuing it, we can avoid a realist commitment to the values perceived by knowledgeable listeners. For arguments against a realist construal of values, see Gilbert Harman, The Nature of Morality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), pp. 4-7. Harman's argument is an expanded variant of Mackie's "argument from queerness" against values being "part of the fabric of the world." See J. L. Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (New York: Penguin Books, 1977), pp. 38-42.
63. Anderson, Value in Ethics, p. 7.
64. Will Kymlicka, Liberalism, Community, and Culture (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), p. 165.
65. Peter Kivy, The Fine Art of Repetition: Essays in the Philosophy of Music (Cambridge University Press, 1993), chaps. I and XIX, and Philosophies of Art: An Essay in Differences (Cambridge University Press, 1997). With his emphasis on instrumental music in the tonal tradition as paradigmatic of the best of "our" tradition, Scruton would seem to agree.
66. Scruton, The Aesthetics of Music, p. 370.
67. See Lipman, Music and More, particularly the introduction: "classical music today is in deep trouble" (p. 25), and Subotnik, Developing Variations, chap. 5.
68. I would like to thank Kathleen Higgins for her helpful comments on a draft of this paper.

[sp4cetiger]

Thanks! That's an interesting read and it's good to know that there are academics standing up for rock music.

[Wombi]

Does he have any redeeming features?

[Guest]

John Williams is shit.

As to how to deal with your philistine friend, I would say to leave him to his own devices. If he gives you shit for disagreeing with him, then tell him to fuck off (or, depending on your relationship with this fellow, say the same thing in however polite a manner you feel to be appropriate).

[Wombi]

[Guest]