Kid AdornoCurtis White

Theodor Adorno’s notorious Dialectic of Enlightenment consists substantially of the movement between the universal and the particular. In art, the universal is the Law of Genre, a "collective bindingness." On the other side, the particular (or the individual and subjective) represents the theoretically boundless world of human possibility and play (which Adorno attempts to capture through the word "spontaneity"). Art’s fundamental concept from the perspective of the particular is autonomy. Art realizes its own concept when it makes itself not through the conventions of the universal (genre: the rules for the proper construction of sonata or sonnet, etc.) but "by virtue of its own elaborations, through its own immanent process." To be sure, these elaborations can only deploy themselves in a context made available by the world of convention; nonetheless, when an artwork is successful, it is in spite of the presence of convention and not because of it. This is why, ultimately, craft has little to do with whether or not a work is a successful piece of art.

The most powerful and sinister gambit of what Adorno calls "administered society" is to promise

the freedom of individuality while simultaneously prohibiting it. For example, consumers have been

promised the "freedom of the open road" by automakers for the lasthalf century, but with each

passing year the realization of that freedom becomes more unlikely for all the familiar reasons (not

least of which is the perverse insistence of other "individuals" to use the same roads promised

for your freedom).

By extension, the critical artistic question for Adorno is how an autonomous or free art can be

produced in a context of enduring societal unfreedom. (Actually, the logic of Adorno’s aesthetic

might also lead to the conclusion that art can only happen in the context of unfreedom. Art is a

response to repression.) The exemplary works of artistic autonomy were, for Adorno, the

"experimental" works of modernism, especially the music of Arnold Schoenberg and in literature the

antinovels of Samuel Beckett. For us, however, the failure of, or, we might say, the passing of the

opportunity for modernism leaves us in a situation that can still be thought through in Adorno’s

terms but not with his examples.

The administration of reality in the second half of the twentieth century succeeded in separating the

arts into the public arts of commerce (i.e. the Culture Industry and its aesthetics of hedonism; art is

for "enjoyment" just like your Coca-Cola), and the private arts of the "serious." The private arts are

the "finer" pleasures of the privileged (art collectors and patrons of symphonies, ballets, and

distinguished not-for-profit literary presses). Of course, nobody—especially the privileged—is

obliged to take the "serious" seriously, that is, as the suggestion of an alternative to the Ruling

Order of Things. "Serious" art remains merely a class marker.

The one area in contemporary culture in which the administered universal and the particular (with its

impulse to freedom) continue a consequential and sometimes deadly engagement is in the theater

provided by "rock." In an otherwise domesticated art world, rock still has the potential for "social

explosiveness" (Adorno). This is not news that Adorno would have been happy to hear. For Adorno,

the idea that the struggle for the virtue of "spontaneity" was being waged within pop culture would

have been the assurance of its failure.

I wouldn’t contend otherwise. I would only contend that this profitable and well-managed sector of

the Culture Industry, the Music Industry, is also the place where the question of authenticity

(understood as the freedom to wander from convention) is most broadly and dramatically engaged.

It is here, and not in the experimental novel or in poetry, that artists can still have broad social

consequence as the Beatles, Sex Pistols, and now perhaps Radiohead can testify. But the fact that

the dialectic of the universal and particular, the Dialectic of Enlightenment, is still forcefully and

fatefully alive in popular music does not mean that it is not also doomed, and well in advance. For

rock music, too, must seize its possibility in the context of its impossibility.

Consider the instance of Radiohead and its recent and controversial album Kid A. The music of Kid

A and its public reception make explicit the drama implicit in the relationship between an

autonomous art (or, at least, an art with the desire for autonomy) and an administered culture. Take,

for example, the review of Kid A, written by novelist Nick Hornby ("Beyond the Pale," New

Yorker, October 30, 2000).

Hornby’s review is not an objective evaluation of an artwork. It is the reassertion of a familiar, grim

and very repressive aesthetic. Hornby begins his review with the obligatory homage to Ray Charles

and Elvis Presley, thus establishing his orthodoxy, his faithfulness to the one true Church of the

Commodified Vernacular. Hornby can then begin to lay out the aesthetic grounds for Radiohead’s

heresy to what Hornby calls "the old-fashioned dynamics of rock."

"Kid A demands the patience of the devoted; both patience and devotion become scarcer

commodities once you start picking up a paycheck."

Could he be any plainer? Art is about exchange. We give the artist our hard-earned money and the

artist . . . what? Doesn’t try our patience?

Hornby gives more content to what it is we expect in return for that which we’ve given from our

paycheck. Hornby argues that Radiohead’s previous album, OK Computer, had "some

extraordinarily lovely tracks," and in Kid A’s best moments "something gorgeous floats past." So, in

the World of Art according to Nick Hornby, the first and highest principle is that it should be a fair

exchange, you should "get your money’s worth" (as his mother probably told him), and aesthetic

tenet #2 is that the art should be "gorgeous" and also maybe a little bit "lovely." Now, beyond the

obvious fact that this is an old romantic tautology and Hornby has no idea what he’s talking about, it

does reveal that the fundamental premise of Hornby’s aesthetic insistence is pleasure. My money is

well spent if I "enjoy" the album/movie/sitcom/football game.

As Adorno put it, pithily, "whoever concretely enjoys artworks is a philistine; he is convicted by

expressions like ‘a feast for the ears.’ " Hornby’s aesthetic is the aesthetic of the balance sheet:

"heard the Ninth Symphony last night, enjoyed my self so and so much." As Adorno concludes, and

Hornby substantiates, "such feeble-mindedness has by now established itself as common sense."

Not to cheat Hornby of the full import of his thought (feeblemindedness not withstanding), he also

suggests that it is good for art to have a message. "Pablo Honey [Radiohead’s first album] . . .

contained one song, "Creep," that gave voice to everyone who has ever felt disconnected,

alienated, or geeky . . ." So, in summary, art should be a fair exchange of money for pleasure and

it’s nice if it also can "give voice" to something, a message, or something that someone somewhere

once "felt."

To be sure, there is also ad hominem innuendo in case the reasoning behind this hatchet job is too

subtle for you, reader of the esteemed New Yorker. Radiohead is a "band that has come to hate

itself;" it has suffered a "failure of courage;" and, that old kumquat served to the experimental, the

band has been "self-indulgent" in making its music.

Well, I can’t defend Radiohead from these charges because, to tell you the truth, I’ve never met the

guys and as far as I know they might hate themselves, they might indeed lack courage and they

might be self-indulgent as all get-out. Hey, some folks are. But I do have an alternative hypothesis,

one that strikes me as being very probable indeed: this is a band that hates you, Nick Hornby, you

and your ilk, with your philistine taste and the abominable arrogance which allows you to claim you

know what rock-and-roll ought to be about. Rock-and-roll is about "fair exchange of money for

pleasure"?! You are the very Soul Man, aren’t you?

***

The real basis of Hornby’s critique is this: Radiohead is perverse. Hornby imagines his ideal art

consumer yelling at Kid A, "You’re supposed to be a pop group! . . . You’re supposed to use your

gifts for songwriting, and singing, and playing."

You’re supposed to be a commodity, stupid! Just make your money and give us what we expect.

But, of course, Radiohead has made it loudly and widely known that it did not set out to be a

commodity; it set out to make art, which is to say that no band since Nirvana has made it more

abundantly clear that its "intention" (for what that’s worth) is to seize freedom from the context of

unfreedom. As we’ve argued, only the popular music scene allows for this as a possibility on such

an international stage, but the crazy-making irony is that this intent cannot be realized in the only

context in which it is possible to express the intent.

"Fuck Corporate Rock!"

"Can we put that on a T-shirt and sell it at the concert?"

Commodify your dissent. Ask Kurt Cobain about how it works in practice.

Fortunately, Radiohead is politically savvy in a way that Cobain rarely was. Radiohead’s

political bête noire is what Adorno called "instrumental rationality." A techno-totalized world. Its

artistic quandary is not how to prosper within this totalized context (as their well-wisher Nick Hornby

encourages) but how to respond to it in a way that is adequate to what the artist wants: the feel of

the authentic, the spontaneity of autonomy, even a tiny gap between itself and the universal other,

the Corporate Life World.

Call it a self-indulgent refusal of their job description (why, "there’s no room for anything

approaching conventional pop music," Hornby whines), but this is the obligation or the duty, if you

will, that art itself feels it owes to the social. It’s as if art’s primary function is simply to remind us that

there is a difference between freedom and repression, that change is real and the possible is

possible.

The problem, though, is that a strategy to create this gap works for a period but is then used-up

("entombed in the pantheon of cultural commodities," as Adorno put it) and a new strategy must be

discovered. At times, Kid A seems like a catalogue of devices that have been used to create this

gap between the artwork and the law of the universal:

  dissonant orchestral waves ("How to Disappear Completely")  avant-garde free jazz extrapolations á la Mingus ("The National Anthem")  surreal lyrics and aural landscapes ("Treefingers")  punk/grunge crudeness in bass lines and guitar crunching ("The National Anthem")  homage to Beatles avant-gardism in the echoes of Ringo’s drum rhythms on "Strawberry

Fields Forever" ("Kid A")  electronic ambience á la Brian Eno ("Motion Picture Soundtrack")  psychedelic noodling in guitar lines ("In Limbo")  homages to Led Zep vocal and guitar breakthroughs, what Jeff Beck called the sound of

"my guitar being sick" ("In Limbo")  sampling and a general feel of the aesthetics of pastiche (rooting the band not only in hip-

hop but also in Dada) ("Idioteque").

In the most expansive and forceful cuts on this album—"The National Anthem" and "Idioteque"—it seems as if nearly all of these strategies are brought to the fore. But no one of these strategies is sufficient for Radiohead’s ultimate purposes. It’s as if they wanted to provide a historical reprise of oppositional strategies before coming to their own most central concerns.

In short, as its name, the titles of its last two albums, most of its lyrics and all of the graphics

clearly indicate, Radiohead is centrally concerned with the following questions: what does it

mean to be a human being in a context in which every relationship is mediated by

technology and technical rationality? (How can we "live and breathe" when "everyone is

broken," they ask in The Bends, explicitly echoing the ethical thinking behind Adorno’s

concept of "damage".) And Radiohead asks, what does it mean to be artists opposed to

technical rationality when we are obliged not only to create our art through computers, in

highly technical and utterly engineered recording studios, but also in cooperation with

international mega-corporations? (These boys are not Ani DiFranco with her own

publishing, recording and distribution setup; these boys are with EMI/Capitol.) For the most

prominent stylistic force on Kid A is techno, synthetic sound, synthetic rhythm. And what is

most plaintive and appealing in Radiohead’s art are the moments in which it contrives to

allow its own voice, its created "style," its humanity in an utterly nineteenth-century sense,

to transcend, to rise above the unfreedom of their context and even the conventionalized

unfreedom of their own medium, pop music. In these inspired moments of Mahlerian

sweetness the band rises above the shit of our shared condition (what else does Mahler try

to do, in symphony after symphony, but dramatize this one desire?). In a cut called "Exit

Music" on OK Computer, the angelic but synthetic background chorus makes it seem as if

Radiohead wishes to inspire even the androids to claim humanity. And there is a weird

pathos in the computer-processed speaking voice on "Fitter Happier" and the lead vocal on

"Kid A," a song that could be called "The Robot Child’s Lament."

Radiohead’s aesthetic strategy is not to avoid the enemy but to inhabit it and reorient its

energies. As Buddhists would argue, there is nothing inherently evil about machines, even

Computers are OK, it’s the Mind that inhabits the machine that can be malign. What really

bugs critics like Nick Hornby is that as Radiohead’s albums have progressed, this strategy

has been taken up less through an explicit "message" in the lyrics while the music remains

more-or-less standard pop rock (even if very good pop-rock) and gets taken up more

integrally in the textures of the music itself. This is what sends Kid A "beyond the pale." In

fact, I would argue that Radiohead’s intuition that its politics are best made not explicitly in

their lyrics but integrally with the music is a very good indication of the artistic and political

health of the band. By so doing, they not only elude Hornby’s commodity fetishism but they

also refuse the error of politically correct art which seeks to make its artistic effect

dependent on the virtue of its political message. As Adorno writes, "Artworks that want to

divest themselves of fetishism by real and extremely dubious political commitment regularly

enmesh themselves in false consciousness as the result of inevitable and vainly praised

simplification. In the shortsighted praxis to which they blindly subscribe, their own blindness

is prolonged."

Don’t misunderstand me, Radiohead’s Kid A is "dead" more often than it is alive. It is a pop

band. Its music is finally "acceptable." The harmonic structure of its music is often

conventional. How else could it be second, in USA Today’s best-of-the-year evaluation,

only to U2 (those other artist-critics of the same Culture Industry that made them rich and

famous)? As Thom Yorke has said, "That’s how they get ya," and they have got them, but

it’s never enough, and any part that escapes the great maw of the universal is ipso facto

subversive and dangerous. And so enough light escapes to allow us to imagine that

perhaps they’re not entirely dead, and so perhaps we’re not entirely dead, and so perhaps

something other than the smothering present is POSSIBLE.

With admirable frequency, Radiohead’s music realizes this enormous purpose, to achieve

the human in the midst of the inhuman, the free in the midst of the unfree. In an instant. The

wonderfulness of that instant is all we have any right to ask of them. As they say on "Exit

Music (For a Film)":

"Breathe. Keep breathing."

FUENTE: http://archive.is/8BTG1