The Wasteland

Passing observation…

To me “oldies” refers to Purcell, Palestrina and des Prez. Contemporary music after Duke Ellington mostly… isn’t. Music that is. Yeh, there are some truly remarkable exceptions–including a few in rock music. But on the whole the latter part of the 20th Century anno domini was a musical wasteland–especially in the “serious” music category, IMO. And it’s not gotten much better in the first decade of the 21st Century. Still even the worst music can perform a useful function, serving as very good bad examples. Unfortunately, it seems the moral decline in our country (and generally in the Western world) is matched or even overmatched by a decline in musical perception among the masses.

Jose Ortega y Gasset’s “mass man” strikes again…

Writing in 1930 or so, Ortega y Gasset said, “The characteristic of the hour is that the commonplace mind, knowing itself to be commonplace, has the assurance to proclaim the rights of the commonplace and to impose them wherever it will.” And it is even more so today, as the lowest common denominator in morality, in knowledge and in reasoning yields us such nightmares as crap rap and Barack Hussein Obama… Ortega y Gasset’s observations echo the reasons the Founders did NOT structure the United States as a democracy. And yes, I do certainly believe that crap “music” and crappy government are related in a society that has come to think of itself as democratic.