Best before… Best?
A usual scene in the classroom – a game of cards. To chase away his boredom and to enhance mine, one of the players takes out his hi-tech mobile phone, mp3 included. So, a dull, syncopated and monotone rhythm floods the class. ‘House’, they called it. Or ‘trance’, or ‘drum ‘n bass’… My lack of (quasi-) musical culture is obvious in this domain.
Under these auspices I heard the following reaction of one of my classmates, some seconds after the song had started. ‘This song is sooo old’… It wasn’t the fact that the song could be recognised at all, and furthermore so easily, that bewildered me. No, what truly puzzled me was the age statement. ‘So old’ meant 6 months old.
To me it was a revelation. The axiological dimension of music is strictly perfunctory nowadays. Musical quality bears the stigma of ‘being fresh’. A sort of ‘best before’ label is attached to every trendy song. 3 months have passed. The song’s ’so last summer’. Half a year gone, the melody’s entombed. On the other hand, the utter lameness exhibited shamelessly on MTV and other ‘hit music stations’ has triggered this sort of reaction. Songs are seldom really good, therefore their only fitfully given attribute is freshness. I guess it’s a form of natural selection, as in biology. Just that nature’s law does not apply here. The weak and untalented do not perish, they resurface, again and again… One ear-scorching masterpiece after another. And, all in all, why did Body’n Soul have to vanish, for instance? To let Morandi rule today?
