Andy Battaglia
Harry Nilsson was a ramshackle musical savant with a weakness for misbegotten life decisions and career-sabotaging swerves. Or maybe he was a scheming genius whose monastic devotion to idiosyncrasy made him a visionary in ways that have not yet been fully revealed. Either way, he was maybe the most innately talented rock star of the 1960s and ’70s— among stiff competition—as well as an enigma who jams the signals of standard stories of rock-star rise and fall. Music has been made by means of technology for nearly as long, if not exactly as long, as music has been made. Except for the voice (as well as the effects of clapping, slapping, and snapping), the sounds we agree to designate as musical rely on the use of tools, whether those tools be sticks, synthesizers, banjoes, electric guitars, or flutes carved from the bones of whales. The contemporary question of what kinds of music rank as technologically borne, then, is less a matter of provenance and more a matter of what kinds of sounds—and what types of tools—we choose Serious music fans fetishize moments of future-shock rupture—those moments of fruitful confusion and ecstatic release that attend the arrival of new movements and new sounds. Whether charting the erratic patterns of pop novelty or the ideological progress of the art-music impulse, a significant body of music literature works to survey the conditions and consequences of future shock. These books organize histories forever in flux and push music in new directions. The best among them teach us how to listen—and think—anew. The following books are essential reading from future-shock music literature, beginning with the early years of avant-garde classical composition and As befits a music invested in wiping itself away, the story of dub has been chronicled in an erratic fashion. Often cited as a precursor to just about everything musical since the 1970s, dub nonetheless subsists officially in the form of footnotes: as an adjunct to reggae, as a foundation for techno and house, as the fundament of a remix culture so pervasive as to go almost unnoticed in the present day. It would seem to be a novel stunt: A working music critic, versed in historically vested value systems and steeped in subcultural arcana, stoops to listen to a colossal pop star and pledges to dissect the cult she inspires. The scenario only ripens when the pop star in question is Céline Dion, an enigma who tends to be critically regarded with a mix of contempt and confusion when critically regarded at all. Television has been omnipresent for so long that it’s hard to conceive of a time before it existed, much less one when art and design weren’t inextricably linked to the all-inclusive mess we know as TV culture. But such a time did exist, and the realms of television and art weren’t necessarily fated to be so closely allied.