So, I got to spend a lot of time on hold today with the State of Ohio. And, the State of Ohio has decided that during my wait time the best thing for me to have playing in the background is Muzak. Why? I ask! “WHY?!” Why would anyone decide that the best thing for me to have drilling into my aural canals while growing impatient and wasting my day, are the innocuous notes of some forgettable tune played even more forgettably by an unknown artist of unknown ability. Why? Because it’s inoffensive. There’s no need for virtuosos or virtuosity – and indeed, the music has no virtue!
Muzak is inoffensive – and that’s why it’s so obnoxious. It offends me in its inoffensiveness. It’s utter unwillingness to do anything dangerous, risky, threatening, bold, or brave evinces the cowardice of Muzak. Great music is honest. Great music is passionate. Great music is threatening.
And you might think, sure, maybe Rock and Roll and music with Lyrics can be threatening – but what about instrumental works – classical works. Oh friends, these are just as political, theological, cultural and anything else. Music, truly great music has the power to threaten the powerful and the threaten society. Beethoven famously had to change the name of his 3rd symphony from “Bonaparte” to “Eroica”. Rite of Spring caused a riot – not the good kind, but the “peaceful protest in Portland” kind. And, perhaps most famously, Shostakovich’s 5th was ironic obsequy towards Stalin and his henchmen.
In the face of the goonery and thuggery of autocracy and absolutism, music has found ways to speak without words! Like the celestial bodies in Psalm 19, classical symphonies have no speech, they use no words, but their voice is heard and sometimes the faintest notes of a pastoral can portend the Sturm und Drang coming upon society. That’s because music, even instrumental music, is saying something. Very rarely is music just pure sound without a story or a meaning.
Older musicians would have been aghast at the thought of music that didn’t have a meaning – that didn’t deliberately evoke images and ideas and even worldviews. The idea of Absolute Music – music without meaning or narrative or story – is, according to some, the aesthetic ideal. But human beings hate this. We are always imposing narrative and meaning on the notes and themes and motifs we hear in music. Of course, musical language is both shallower and deeper than the written word – particularly prose. But that doesn’t mean that people don’t seek meaning in music – because we do. We do because we look for meaning in all things, and beautiful things are no exception.
Great music has meaning; it’s based on something – it has to have a theme, and idea, something to “talk about”. And the higher and loftier the theme of the music, the higher and loftier the music can be. It’s hard to image a 3-act opera with the libretto being people reading VCR instructions. I mean, I CAN imagine that some Postmodern, Deconstructionist composer would do something like this as a “commentary” on the state of opera and that would somehow tell us how contemporary opera is racist and too tied to European musical traditions, and who says Italian is so good anyways! It would be banal for the sake of being banal – as though stating vapidity is vapid is some great discovery!
But, again, the higher the theme the higher the music can go; the loftier the subject the loftier the treatment of that subject can be. But Muzak has no theme. It’s whole point is that it has no point. It’s background noise whose sole purpose is NOT SAYING ANYTHING. But saying that you aren’t saying anything is saying something! It’s going out of your way to say that you have nothing to say. Moreover, it’s saying that there IS NOTHING TO SAY! And that, is not Music, it’s Muzak. It’s not Art, it’s Artifice. It’s ersatz, empty, fake – and worse than fake: fraudulent.
Muzak is a fraud. It’s masquerading as music, when it’s nothing of the sort – it has no meaning, no theme, no purpose. Muzak just fills the empty space where music should be. And isasmuch as it replaces music, it deadens the soul. Where music could challenge us, lift us up, enlighten us, threaten us — yes, even OFFEND us! — Muzak just exists, offering us neither beauty nor truth but vacuous vapidity, crying out vanitas vanitatum omnia vanitas. In its efforts to be inoffensive to all it’s become obnoxious and is rejected by everyone, because it says that there’s nothing worth being offensive about! Muzak’s durability exists not as a proof of its popularity, but of the cowardice of the people who manage calling services or major buildings or department stores. Everyone hears it and everyone hates it – not because it’s offensive but because it’s so inoffensive that it is awful.
And I think everyone would agree that Muzak is awful. Most people who actually care about Art would agree with me: I don’t care if I AGREE with your art, but say something! Go ahead, offend me! and say your piece; then we’ll get down to the debating, and I’ll respect you for having the courage to say something meaningful. But if you say nothing. If you say that there’s nothing to say, I’ll still be offended, and I’ll still want to debate — but I won’t respect you, because you aren’t worthy of respect. Muzak doesn’t even have the courage of nihilism — it’s utterly unworthy of respect or consideration as art because it isn’t art. Even nihilists can say that there is no meaning — Muzak says that even saying there is no meaning is meaningless. It is utterly deplorable, kitschy, horrendous, disgusting, moronic, life-denying garbage, worthy of all hate and despite. And I think you’ll agree.
Now, all I have to do is get people to agree that the same thing is true about value-neutral Secularism and this post might have a purpose other than the hot-take ranting of somebody who waited too long to get a simple question answered. But I’m not too confident. As long as the world is populated by cowards living in a divided world, value-neutrality will be seen as the safest course – a world of Muzak, trigger-warnings, safe-spaces, and godlessness.