Music, What Music?

As part of the continuing discussion of the present machine-stasis undeath of popular music ("Maybe no amount of bile, no amount of vituperation we can produce can, stir the comfortable zombie from its sleepwalk") K-punk relays, from reader Alex Williams, a stimulating market-based analysis of contemporary music's genre-ghetto ahistorical malaise, a pomo-fragmentation condition of all-invasive Kapital - not uncoincidentally - equally desperately afflicting film and fiction [starting in the late 70s/early 80s], among others. But like many other commentaries, Williams piece, despite his valuable suggestion

- "to evolve new committed positions within the emerging distributive networks and allow a rebirth of the excitement and invention which marked popular music from 1950s onwards in the last century"


- otherwise, ultimately, simply adds to the sense of uncompromising despair, worryingly/ominously replicating the mainstream "reality principle" of nihilist recursive closure that he so seriously wants to annihilate, viz: The major problem is really that the numbers necessary to demand the impossible, to be ultimately utterly dissatisfied and demand and create something better and to disrupt and unsettle the staid conventions of all the mummified tentacles of this octopus of music I doubt exist.


Really? Really, can't they be made to exist? Urgently.