I believe music is part and parcel with the structures of power at any given time. Romanticism was perfectly part and parcel with the bourgeois individualism, and of course, the renaissance and medieval music was perfectly part and parcel with the church as the dominant structure of power. So today the dominant structure of power is global capitalism, so music takes on this commodified quality, it answers to that and to that alone. But if we want to enter in a conversation with those works, we have to do it through our own objective, historical moment, using the vernacular, which is as far as I can tell - pop music. I think there’s something really interesting about our music, our language, relative to these other languages. We’ve completely cast off certain conventions, like thematic development, or polyphony, or major-minor tonality. All this stuff is consistent across these disparate musical moments, and then all of a sudden you come to this moment and it’s just four chords repeated over and over again. And I think perhaps that might have to do with power, with The State, with what we’re subject to. Power has sunk its fingers into human being - into art - into thought, in a deeper way than it ever has before - it names so much more. But my wager is that human being continues to exist after the triumph of the spectacle, and it’s our task to share the experience of being here - now, under this cloud, controlled in the ways we are. I mean, we can still speak, I think.
John Maus (via palmsvoice)