The Aura of a Pop Song: An Addendum

What exactly is the aura of a pop song? Well, broadly, it is the context in which the song is received or rather the context which makes reception possible. I don’t know how this works today for I don’t listen to pop songs that much and what is more if I do they do not, for me, have an aura. In fact, along with polkas and contemporary Christian hymns,most of them belong in the modest category of ‘music I don’t like and can’t imagine even teaching myself to like’. I can, though, recall what gave songs an aura in my day and I don’t think human nature has changed much in the interim. A pop song is part of a social ritual and takes its aura from certain generic features which make it apt to be used in such a ritual. I recall that this used to be bound up with the radio based ritual of counting down songs from an arbitrarily chosen number like 10 or 40. The point of this was that everybody listened and everybody proceeded from the same touchstone of taste. Songs such as these were designed to be objects of quick consensus and this is why they tended to be generic and stereotyped musically and lyrically. 

Take such a list of songs from 1982 (all of which seem to be by John Cougar Mellencamp) and insert a piece of Balinese Gamelan and the effect would be jarring. A pattern would be broken and if a pattern is broken that is potentially polarizing for one must declare whether one is FOR or AGAINST the intrusion. Whatever then goes on it is not the ritual anymore which was directly and immediately consensus forming. The circle is now broken and, as happened to English composer Gavin Bryars when he and some other boys brought a Mingus record to band class, a literal fight may break out. What is polarizing is also individuating: like a Homeric warrior of old I now delineate myself by opposition and boundaries. One can imagine a pimply teenager sitting at the premiere of The Rite of Spring going “yes!” as boos and cheers swelled around him: “yes!” because that is exactly what he wanted, to define himself as other to what is simply given. HE does not want the rites of spring or any other social rites. He is an individual emerging from the background of the collective. 

Hence we have the connoisseur or ‘music nerd’.This is a person who thinks of music primarily as an object abstracted from its immediate social aura and indeed often indulges the vice of liking certain things precisely BECAUSE they are jarring to others: hence his tendency to declare things like Song Cycle or Metal Machine Music to be works of genius. I am absolutely a music nerd and when I returned home from the high school library one day with a Peter Maxwell Davies record my intentions were not wholly innocent. It is probably too late for me to change but one oddity of this standpoint is that to break with one social aura one often appropriates things, like Pygmy chants or Ragas, that belong to another social aura and introduce them as bits of weirdness into one’s own. The omnivorous music nerd is a great abstracter of things from other cultural contexts and while there are many virtues to that stance such abstraction is also, at least in part, subtraction.