There’s been quite a bit of chatter out there in response to Brian Eno’s assertion in Prospect magazine that “the idea that something is uncool because it’s old or foreign has left the collective consciousness.” Is he out of touch with reality or is he the indisputable cool person saying we are all cool now?
Oh, wait, wait, no. Not all. Seems classical music didn’t jump onto this train to popularity:
There are just too many styles around, and they keep mutating too fast to assume that kind of dominance. As an example, go into a record shop and look at the dividers used to separate music into different categories. There used to be about a dozen: rock, jazz, ethnic, and so on. Now there are almost as many dividers as there are records, and they keep proliferating. The category I had a hand in starting–ambient music–has split into a host of subcategories called things like “black ambient,” “ambient dub,” “ambient industrial,” “organic ambient” and 20 others last time I looked. A similar bifurcation has been happening in every other living musical genre (except for “classical” which remains, so far, simply “classical”)
Ah, if only he knew of our nomenclature headaches! But seriously, whether he thinks classical missed the boat to this party or not, if Eno’s core idea is mixed with a bit of Long Tail theory (death of the mainstream combines with the benefits of digital distribution) it seems to suggest that while new opportunities may not be as deep, the pool is now much, much wider. While your shot at a spot in the Philharmonic’s clarinet section may have shrunk, you now have a chance at realizing your previously too far fetched dream of forming a successful bagpipe band.
Or at least I hoped that was where we might be headed. Then the realities of making money in the digital age smacked me on the forehead. Ouch.
…the idea that something is uncool because it’s old or foreign has left the collective consciousness.
Maybe that’s just a roundabout way of saying that we really should stop thinking of artistic innovation in terms of progress, since for most people, progress automatically implies a deference to the “arc of history.”
Thanks for bringing this up. What I read into his piece (I took this a little further and thought about it in terms of music creation), was a sense that as we look deeper to break down categories of genres into sub-genres, we get to uncover some of the fundamentals of said sub-genres, which creates fertile ground for new creation and experimentation. You see this more and more with online music mash-ups. It demystifies some more “exotic” genres, making them more accessible, enabling new musicians to engage with, and thus those genres are no longer uncool or irrelevant as they are an integral part of the creative process. This all stems from morphing cultural landscapes where we are less reliant on established cultural gatekeepers.