For me, innovation does not consist in composing European and academic music with inserted
“folk” references. It consists in appropriating academic or technical devices and
subordinating them to my purposes as a “folk creature.” An outstanding prototype of this
approach was Bo Diddley’s use of the electric devices of pop music to project the Afro-
American sound. This approach strikes in the opposite direction from that of the era of
picaresqueness and nationalism in classical music. (Most annoying to me, I suppose, is
classical pop, the gypsy rhapsodies, “Bolero,” “Sabre Dance.”)
Although I originally positioned my music in contradistinction to European classical music,
I have learned that European music and its devotees are not my only competition, or even my
main competition. Would that Adorno were the only nemesis!—he certainly isn’t. It was when
commercialism backfired, and unleashed the youth rebellion industry, that my biggest
stumbling block appeared. At that point, I could say that my nemesis was commercially
exploited mass taste and centrally manipulated mass culture. I converge with Adorno here.
When Adorno was writing, again, the problem with mass culture was its artificial,
propagandistic blandness. But as of 1969, commercial mass music began a one-way march
toward grotesquerie and defilement. Popular music metamorphosed into what is called the
“youth rebellion industry”; a more accurate name would be the “youth self-disintegration”
industry. (Cobain, Hoon, and now Layne Staley.)
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