Modern music’s ugliness is a deliberate strategy against a commercially desensitized hearing

Evidence

In this situation, therefore, the new in the older sense is not enough: art no longer has to do with a change in taste resulting from the succession of the generations alone, but with one intensified and raised to the second power by a new commercial exploitation of artistic techniques in every facet of our culture. The new music must come to terms not only with our hearing, as did the old, but with our non-hearing as well. Hence concrete music, which seeks to transform the unconscious contents of our daily perceptual life, the unheard aural stress of the industrial city, into a conscious object of perception. Hence the willed “ugliness” of modern music in general, as if, in this state of pathological hebetude and insensibility, only the painful remained as a spur to perception. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 68

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘willed ugliness as the only remaining spur to perception’ is the Adorno/Brecht shock-aesthetic — and connects to Jameson’s later work on the ‘waning of affect’ and perceptual blunting in postmodernity. — connects to: Modern canned sound degrades the general ability to listen, forcing composers’ audibility.; Capitalist commodification of music causes listeners’ hearing to regress psychologically to infantile passivity. — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History…, 578; Mainstream rock music now insulates listeners from the present rather than registering its tensions. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1295

Broader Connections

• Capitalist commodification of music causes listeners’ hearing to regress psychologically to infantile passivity. #corroborates (0.75) — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 578