How to be (More) Radical

If you want to change yourself / before the times / they do it for you.

This week, my last issue of The Wire came. I’ve been reading and subscribing to the magazine for over thirty years, and writing for it occasionally since 2017. But I’ve been paying less and less attention to what’s in each copy.

When The Wire asked me to contribute to their 2023 Rewind issue, my refection on the year was full of dissatisfaction with the general sameness and safety of what passes for the new, the avant-garde, and the experimental, which is not only an aesthetic but a social and political problem. When faced with the real and dire threat to destroy multi-cultural society, we can’t keep depending on the same old ideas and methods. The aesthetic side of this is that avant-garde and experimental music are now far less a practice or value, but genres with locked-in clichés and signifiers. Music that should always be a surprise in one way or another now, predominantly, has a specific, expected sound that signifies a goal.

When the Rewind issue came, I looked through it, at the other essays and especially the consensus choices for the best new and reissued recordings of the year, and there were all my fears and dissatisfactions in print, surrounding my modest entry. And I realized that the “Adventures in Sound and Music” printed on the cover is more like a guided cruise to familiar and well-trod destinations than anything that promises the unexpected or even dangerous. The contents, including what specific reviews say, have been completely predictable to me for a few years.

This does not make The Wire bad in any way, and if you read it and enjoy it by all means, please go ahead. It is a great guide to these genres. It’s not them, it’s me; every day as I go through life my taste becomes more radical. I am a visceral believer in the avant-garde and the experimental as what they are in their essence, a method of pushing ideas as far as they will go to see what will happen, creative work that doesn’t have a specific goal because the process is the point, and fundamental to that process is discovering the implications of what you are doing, and that they are often unexpected. That music is out there, but the examples of it in The Wire are what you could call the avant-garde establishment. And I’m an anti-establishment critic.

Radical Taste

The assumed general trend as we age is that we become more set in our ways and conservative in our tastes. Certainly that’s easy to see in the world around us, an accumulation of assumptions and instincts taking the place of thinking, the inability to process new information and ideas and to change one’s mind. It doesn’t have to be this way, of course, but it’s an individual thing. It is also critical, because we are faced with atavistic threats from people and institutions that by their nature are atavistic, that can only imagine and desire society organized in the most simplistic and brutal way.

I don’t know exactly what’s in my being or experience or upbringing that has made it natural to become more radical as I age, but I feel like it was turned on by two things. One was Robert Hughes’ critical article in The New York Review of Books on Robert Mapplethorpe (I’ve been a NYRB subscriber ever since), and the other was Joseph Brodsky’s Nobel Prize lecture from 1987, specifically this paragraph:

Aesthetic choice is a highly individual matter, and aesthetic experience is always a private one. Every new aesthetic reality makes one’s experience even more private; and this kind of privacy, assuming at times the guise of literary (or some other) taste, can in itself turn out to be, if not as guarantee, then a form of defense against enslavement. For a man with taste, particularly literary taste, is less susceptible to the refrains and the rhythmical incantations peculiar to any version of political demagogy. The point is not so much that virtue does not constitute a guarantee for producing a masterpiece, as that evil, especially political evil, is always a bad stylist. The more substantial an individual’s aesthetic experience is, the sounder his taste, the sharper his moral focus, the freer – though not necessarily the happier – he is.

How brilliant, how beautiful, and how powerful. Yes, aesthetic reality is a private experience, especially for a critic—even as what I do is try and express and explain that reality to the public. But to borrow a line from Marlon Brando, that idea of taste as a “form of defense against enslavement” is like a diamond shot into my skull. As is the part about not necessarily being happier. But I prefer, in my bones, moral focus and freedom against political evil to being happy. Brodsky’s prescription is for a constant, and constantly increasing and sharper, radicalism of taste.

While he meant reading, it applies to every medium, and the implication is to not settle, to not find something that’s pleasing and stick with it, because eventually times and contexts will change and by clinging to the thing you have determined cannot change for you, you end up being a reactionary. Perhaps that’s harmless, or it only harms you with the self-inflicted damage of claiming, for example, that casting a female and Black actors in Star Wars movies has ruined your childhood, or maybe you end up voting for racism and fascism. Nostalgia is not a path to happiness and satisfaction.

Radicalism, I feel, does you give you the taste to be happy and satisfied, at least in small and momentary measures. Radicalism is not a self-conscious thing, it’s not a public stance, it’s not snobbery. It’s a set of the mind, a practice. It’s essential to everything I write for other publications, all my editing, and everything you get in this newsletter.

And it is constructive, I want to emphasize that. This is a positive radicalism, not bound to any specific style or means. Clichéd music reinforces the misconception that the avant-garde is all harsh noise and atonality, confusing structures and unpleasant timbres. One of the great avant-garde musicians of the 20th century was Miles Davis, he was at the forefront of the possibilities of jazz for decades, pushing every new idea forward until it became the establishment before turning toward new territory, because Miles never wanted to be part of the establishment.

That spirit is something I value, it’s the birthright of every American artist and the foundation of American aesthetic culture. It’s not only us, only now, though, it applies to everyone from Machaut to Mahler to the Monks, not icons but people. Beethoven’s greatness, and eternal relevancy, boils down to him being an everyday human being constantly looking for the best way to express the complexities of existence. Meanwhile, the trouble I have with Schoenberg is that, beyond his reactionary approach to music, he’s the kind of figure who cultivated a heroic posture about himself which was worsened when Adorno fell for it. And if you want to know what having radical taste means, and how I can love Berg and Webern but be mostly meh about Schoenberg, it’s that last sentence.

How to Be a Radical

I’m no expert in this—I’ve got no system—but for the radical-curious I do recommend some things to keep in mind for all your aesthetic experiences:

• Don’t be nostalgic: appreciate the past, don’t be stuck in it, be less Bob Dylan and more Elvis Costello.

• Take the long view: Drop John Dowland into 2024, and you’ve got a hot new singer-songwriter, not classical music.

• Simple, not simplistic: keep it simple but not for its own sake, be honest with what’s needed.

• Analog, then digital: technology is just a tool, and having more powerful tools is material progress but has nothing to say about human progress.

• Distrust institutions: even with the best intentions they regularly end up protecting themselves first, then (possibly) doing something constructive second.

• Expand your horizons: everything can connect to everything else—the Met’s new Carmen was different to me than it was to any other critic because I’ve read Christopher Brown’s Rule of Capture and Failed State and could imagine a borderless, anarcho-capitalist dystopia (and reading genre fiction makes me a better opera critic).

• Kill your idols: really, be ready to kill them because chances are good they’ll just let you down. I mean, have you heard an interesting record come from ECM in the last four or five years? It used to be surprising and daring, now its preserving itself as an establishment.

Good, radical listening to all.

(UPDATE) P.S.: I’m remembering that there was an important beginning that brought me to this, which was the first thing I wrote for The Brooklyn Rail, “BAM Agonistes” in the September 2010 issue, which was all about BAM’s growing institutional complacency.