I was listening to Bill Burr’s podcast with one of my favorite rockers: Josh Homme (Queens of The Stone Age), when something clicked in my head. Towards the first ten minutes or so, they start discussing QOTSA’s new album, In Times New Roman. “Our record is a fiftieth-listen kind of record, you have to give it a chance”, says Homme, before commenting how easy, accessible music you “get” right away, quickly bores you. What is this process, I said to myself, of “unraveling” art little by little? Isn’t beauty supposed to be instantaneous, universal and direct? If you deny something’s beauty, only to reconsider later and classify it as beautiful, what has changed? Is it the perspective, the advancement of time, or even the essence in the art itself?
Truth as unraveling
In the collection of lecture conferences given by Martin Heidegger in 1932, he tackles what he calls the “essence of truth”. Using Plato’s allegory of the cave, his description of Truth as something unhidden implies a very interesting movement of unraveling that seems to mirror my own, personal esthetic experiences. Like Josh Homme says, good, transcendental art has that capacity of hiding itself and rewarding those patient enough to bask in the esthetic experience long enough to see the pure art form. Let’s take a look at how all this operates and see if we can find agreement on some points.
I’m not going to go over all the details of Plato’s allegory. For a quick reminder, here’s a 6-minute video that’ll refresh your memory. Once the scene is set, says Plato:
“-Consider what would necessarily happen if the following were to occur. Suppose one of [the prisoners] were unshackled and compelled to suddenly stand up, turn his head, and look and walk towards the light; but all this would be painful, and because of the flickering brightness he would be too dazzled to see properly the things whose shadows he used to see. What do you think he would say if he were told that what he used to see was so much empty nonsense, and that he was now nearer to beings and turned to more meaningful beings so seeing more correctly? (…) Don’t you think he’d be at a loss, and think that what he used to see was more unhidden than what was now being shown to him?
-Absolutely.
-And if he were made to look directly into the light, would this not hurt his eyes, and would he not turn back and retreat to the things which he had the power to see, thinking that these [shadows] were in fact clearer than the things now being shown to him?
-Yes”.
This unhiddenness of beings is what Heidegger establishes as “Truth”: the essence of Dasein. Without complicating things too much, let’s say that the shackled prisoner has trouble seeing that the new objects are more unhidden than the shadows. He doesn’t want to accept this and prefers to cower back into the comfort of his cave. Why? Because the prisoner didn’t want or ask to be free in the first place. He has no will to be free, he has done no effort or sacrificed anything to see the more unhidden beings. Says Heidegger:
“The released prisoner does indeed will, but he wills to return to his shackles. Thus willing, he wills not-willing: he does not want to be involved himself. He avoids and shrinks back from the demand to fully give up his previous situation. He is also a long way from understanding that man truly is, in so far as he demands this of himself”.
Another Brick in the Music Wall
You can probably see the parallels I’m trying to establish, here. The prisoner not only has to will or desire his ascension towards the light, he must calmly plow through a difficult, rigorous process that destabilizes him and even hurts his eyes. Now, I’m not saying that listening to Queens of The Stone Age is difficult or hurtful (far from it), but good art has that extremely gratifying quality of rewarding the patient spectator.
In our analogy, facile bubblegum pop music would be a shadow whose unhiddenness is tantamount to that of the original form. Between your first listen of the song and the fiftieth, nary has changed. You got it the first time: the object revealed all of its unhidenness in listening session number one. There is nothing else to reveal: the shallow, pandering and populist tune does exactly that, it pleases the prisoners in the cave for a little while until they get on to the next shiny, new thing. Five years from now, nobody remembers the band or even cares about the song anymore.
Deep, profound compositions have the adverse effect. They might seem jarring at a first listen, catching the audience by surprise. Risk-taking bands who experiment with new sounds are like this: you regret the shift from their established esthetic, hoping they’d made the continuation of that album you love. Then, as the album grows on you, you wind up loving the new sound and kicking yourself in the head for not having “got” the album earlier. Think Radiohead, making a seminal, profound album in OK Computer and then coming back playing electronic music (kind of). Those guys don’t even play their biggest hits at concerts, and good for them.
You can insert any genre you want, here. For example, the album Kulu sé mama by John Coltrane was an unlistenable bleating cacophony the first time I heard it. The hoarse screeching of his saxophone just didn’t make any sense. I’ve got a headache! Where’s my easy-listening pop? However, at some point, I got it. No longer did it represent inarticulate sounds, now it was the desperate cry of an artist on a downward spiral. The frenzy, the madness: how come I didn’t see this before? How stupid was I?
Chasing Ecstasy
One of my first real experiences of artistic transcendence came when I was around twenty years old. I liked music, and I knew what I liked, but I’d never had the feeling of being part of something bigger than me listening to something until that point. I was studying Wittgenstein’s idea of ethics, and his assertion of perceiving the world sub specie aeternitatis, in an eternal way, outside of time. Since he kept on fawning over Gustav Mahler, I thought I’d have a crack at the old Austrian composer. Well, here’s the thing: music scholars agree Mahler’s most important work is the 7th Symphony, with the 5th coming in at close second (or reverse, depending on the music-head). However, my very personal and idiosyncratic appreciation of Mahler was that the work that talked to me the most was… The second symphony, which no one pays a lot of attention to. Why? Heck if I know! But it was always the case that, when I heard the crescendo crashing into its peak in the second, I just felt I was out of this world. I would “meditate” (or try to - didn’t know much about this at the time), because Wittgenstein meditated, and listen to the 2nd symphony with my eyes closed, paying attention to every detail. And it got me, every single time, as long as I didn’t start rationalizing and talking in my head (“here it comes, brace for it”, etc.).
I’m going to stop here, because this is getting too long ;-) I’ll just finish by saying that I broke up with a girlfriend over my frustration since she couldn’t see the unhidden being of Mahler’s second symphony, playing it while doing chores or dismissing it as, “real cool”. Nah, girl. This is where we part ways. I’m going up, out of the cave, you can stay here with your pop stuff…
P.S.: Before you judge me, take into consideration that this what the shit she was listening to all day, while I’m blasting Mahler, Coltrane and Radiohead. It wasn’t meant to be!
Says Heidegger:
“It is not the case that everyone, without further ado, has the same right and the same strength to every truth. And every truth has its time. In the end, it is a sign of education to withhold certain truths from knowledge and to keep silent about them”.
Catch you next time.
V.