I don’t know why anyone was surprised at my last post claiming that Nietzsche was condoning the love of pop music in Beyond Good & Evil. Since I wrote that I have discovered that I am far from the first person to link pop and philosophy. In the comments to my Nietzsche post, Tim (who himself proves that pop music and philosophy are happiest sat side by side in his blog, The Wrong Side of Capitalism) quoted another philosopher who I had not previously heard of, called Gilles Deleuze, who cleverly noted that “We criticize things which are superficial for having no depth, but we never remember to criticize things which are profound for having no surface.” I found this quite amusing and so was rather excited to see Deleuze mentioned again later that week, in the Stylus Singles Jukebox no less. And guess what? It turns out that the name Bodies Without Organs comes from Deleuze too! And that’s not the only link between my favourite Swedish group and philosophy – last night, reading a post on the Club Contact MP3 blog, I learned that Alexander Bard (BWO member, kind of Swedish pop and writer of a genius Popjustice column) is a teacher of post-Capitalist philosophy, whatever that entails, in Stockholm. If only I knew a bit more Swedish, I’d be applying to study there right away.
So if that isn’t reason enough for me to continue my foray into the idea of pop music philosophy, nothing is!
We’re still studying Nietzsche in my philosophy class, as we will be until June, so I’ve had plenty of time to develop my “Nietzsche loves pop” theories. I realised that one of Nietzsche’s main theories in Beyond Good & Evil could be translated into pop terms. Nietzsche says that there are three moral stages in human evolution, and I think the same can be said for the a person’s taste in music.
First, there was the pre-moral stage, where people followed their instincts. This represents the time when we first discover music. We have no idea what is cool to like, so our tastes are at their most genuine, hence the naive love of pop music or at least novelty records.
Second is the moral stage. This is where we are taught to deny our instincts, replacing them with “herd instincts” (following the crowd), and we care for the weak, disregarding the Darwinian “survival of the fittest” theory. Therefore we pretend to like what we are told is cool, and support the sensitive singer-songwriters, stagnating the evolution of music. Luckily my moral stage lasted about 2 minutes before I got bored.
Finally there is the extra-moral stage. This is a return to the pre-moral following of desires, which represents the time I and most of you reading this now are experiencing. Having survived the moral stage we have now become aware of the general wrongness of denying our desires, so we love pop music in a more rational, educated way. We have learnt about other genres but wisely returned to pop.
So I think that proves it once and for all – philosophy is just a load of analogies for pop music!