Of no earthly use or interest to anyone
My Winamp playlist recently provided inadvertant confirmation of my long-standing belief that aesthetic formulae (such as those which govern the production of popular music) are unsatisfactory vehicles for artistic communcation. Case in point...
The other night Winamp was guiding Ute Lemper's version of Lilli Marlene smoothly into my ears, a tune which, in varying guises and for varying reasons, always seems to pop up at moments of, er, emotional weakness in my life. Now, this is a particularly marshal rendition of the song, complete with military percussion etc, and since Germans (in general, and Ute Lemper in particular) tend to find even such faint hints of militarism disconcerting, the latter half of the track segues into Lemper's recital of Paul Celan's (perforce) bleak Holocaust poem, Death Fugue, presumably as a form of artistic atonement. The track draws to its conclusion with Lemper solemnly intoning the words "Der tod...ist ein meister...aus Deutschland..." and ends in abrupt silence...
...shattered equally abruptly by the jaunty opening notes of Pulp's His & Hers (a bawdy track omitted from the album of the same name and subsequently relegated to B-side status.)Thematically, emotionally, by all reasonable standards of propriety, this was probably the most jarring transition imaginable (from genocide to "Are we going to do it again, shove it in sideways?" in a matter of seconds.) However, the thought that crossed my mind at that instant was more along the lines of, "Hey, that sounded pretty cool!" Musically, it just sounded "right."
And this, for me, epitomises the unbridgeable chasm between entertainment and art. The entertainer does not CREATE, per se. He or she merely plunges into an (admittedly vast) box of disparate pieces to produce a (yes, it's the jigsaw puzzle analogy again, kids, where would we be without it?) jigsaw puzzle (told you, I saw it coming a mile off) which meets or does not meet with public approval based on the congruity (or incongruity, the mirror image of that phenomenon) of the image displayed. The image may change, but its constituent components always remain the same.
Essentially, what I'm struggling to articulate is this; even at the very apogee of his or her communicative abilities, the best outcome an entertainer can hope to achieve from his transaction with his audience is one of verification. In other words - to the entertainer, we say, "That is correct." To the artist, "I understand."
The other night Winamp was guiding Ute Lemper's version of Lilli Marlene smoothly into my ears, a tune which, in varying guises and for varying reasons, always seems to pop up at moments of, er, emotional weakness in my life. Now, this is a particularly marshal rendition of the song, complete with military percussion etc, and since Germans (in general, and Ute Lemper in particular) tend to find even such faint hints of militarism disconcerting, the latter half of the track segues into Lemper's recital of Paul Celan's (perforce) bleak Holocaust poem, Death Fugue, presumably as a form of artistic atonement. The track draws to its conclusion with Lemper solemnly intoning the words "Der tod...ist ein meister...aus Deutschland..." and ends in abrupt silence...
...shattered equally abruptly by the jaunty opening notes of Pulp's His & Hers (a bawdy track omitted from the album of the same name and subsequently relegated to B-side status.)Thematically, emotionally, by all reasonable standards of propriety, this was probably the most jarring transition imaginable (from genocide to "Are we going to do it again, shove it in sideways?" in a matter of seconds.) However, the thought that crossed my mind at that instant was more along the lines of, "Hey, that sounded pretty cool!" Musically, it just sounded "right."
And this, for me, epitomises the unbridgeable chasm between entertainment and art. The entertainer does not CREATE, per se. He or she merely plunges into an (admittedly vast) box of disparate pieces to produce a (yes, it's the jigsaw puzzle analogy again, kids, where would we be without it?) jigsaw puzzle (told you, I saw it coming a mile off) which meets or does not meet with public approval based on the congruity (or incongruity, the mirror image of that phenomenon) of the image displayed. The image may change, but its constituent components always remain the same.
Essentially, what I'm struggling to articulate is this; even at the very apogee of his or her communicative abilities, the best outcome an entertainer can hope to achieve from his transaction with his audience is one of verification. In other words - to the entertainer, we say, "That is correct." To the artist, "I understand."