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Hyperian History Of The World (20th Century, Part 7)

Cinema was perhaps the most significant art form of the century. It unified the arts magnificently and, though it often got very experimental, it never alienated the popular audience, becoming a key part of the artistic consciousness of ordinary people.

The idea that popular entertainment could now be considered as high art was significant. Something similar happened in the 20th century with music. While classical music grew ever more experimental and obscure, popular music exploded, ceasing to be mere entertainment and leading to one of the most widespread outpourings of human creativity in history.

At the beginning of the century, in New Orleans in the USA, the huge melting pot of cultures led to the development of a new genre of music. Musicians got together in bars and clubs to perform for the people. The music was based on various folk traditions of the various cultures represented in the city, yet the musicians tended to be highly skilled and were often playing what would normally be considered ‘classical’ instruments, such as trumpets, trombones, clarinets etc. The sound of all these instruments playing together was something quite new, especially when anchored by a rhythm section of piano, guitar, bass and drums. The skill of the musicians led to them playing in a far more complex way than the folk traditions called for, often showing their skill in improvised solos, both individually and in groups. This new music became known as Jazz.

Jazz benefitted, as did most popular music of the time, from the new technology of sound recording. The first Jazz record was released in 1917, initially as a kind of novelty, yet soon Jazz grew in popularity and spread all around the US, becoming the soundtrack to the prohibition era of the 1920s.

Whilst beginning as a form of popular entertainment showcasing the improvisational talents of Jazz musicians, such as Louis Armstrong’s masterful trumpet playing, eventually Jazz would develop into a far more serious art form, an entirely new way to compose serious music.

One of the first, and greatest Jazz composers, and one of the most important and significant composers of the century, was Duke Ellington. Ellington was the man who first raised Jazz music to a serious art form, easily rivalling the ambitions of any classical composer. His compositions for large Jazz band became ever more elaborate, combing strictly composed music with elements of improvisation and even pushing the boundaries of recording technology as Ellington’s compositions grew ever longer, requiring more and more records and leading, ultimately, to the development of the long-playing record, which would become the standard format of all popular music.

While classical music was being appropriated by an academic elite, Jazz composers became far more appealing to ordinary people, as they were expressing the struggles of everyday people using a musical language that was both familiar yet also exciting and new.

In the 1940s, brilliant performers such as Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie developed Bebop, a new form of Jazz which emphasised smaller ensembles and intense and highly expressive improvisation. In the 1950s Miles Davis pioneered firstly Cool Jazz and then Modal Jazz, before, in the 1960s, Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane and others developed Free Jazz, which saw the start of Jazz’s descent into avant-garde experimentation. All the while, the true heir to Duke Ellington was the great composer Charles Mingus, who, in 1963, released ‘The Black Saint And The Sinner Lady’, perhaps the most brilliant Jazz composition of all time.

However, at this time Jazz was becoming more and more experimental, eventually falling out of favour with popular audiences. Yet now another new form of music had emerged, Rock And Roll.

US blues musicians had switched to electric instruments after the invention of the electric guitar, which would become one of the most important and expressive instruments of all time. Eventually, in the 1950s, Rhythm And Blues developed into Rock And Roll, a wild, exciting form of entertainment aimed towards rebellious teenagers. The music industry saw the potential of this new form of music and launched Elvis Presley, who became a huge sensation all over the world. Although a phenomenal performer, Presley was ultimately just another pop star, a singer singing songs written by songwriting professionals. The true spirit of Rock And Roll was better represented by the first great composer of Rock music, Chuck Berry.

Chuck Berry truly created a musical revolution. He brought the electric guitar to prominence, switching it to the lead instrument of the rock band and playing it in a brilliant, wild and at times aggressive manner. He also sang songs which addressed the everyday issues of young people, giving them something to strongly identify with. But most significantly, Chuck Berry was singing songs that were his own. With Chuck Berry the composer and the performer became one and the same, and subsequent Rock musicians weren’t taken seriously unless they were the authors of their own material.

Chuck Berry’s wild music, with its themes of adolescent love (and, implicitly, adolescent sex) was met with great resistance by the conservative society in the US of the 1950s, and Rock And Roll was repressed and replaced by more streamlined pop singers, who had assimilated the Rock instrumentation, yet were singing far more acceptable material. Rock And Roll might only have been a brief fad, yet it had not been defeated, but had simply gone into exile.

Like Jazz, Rock music had begun as a quintessentially American form of music. Yet after its suppression, it travelled across the Atlantic and arrived in Britain in the form of record imports. British kids of the time became enamoured of the likes of Elvis Presley and Chuck Berry, but in Britain there was far less resistance and Rock music there flourished and developed into something truly magnificent.

Eventually, British bands of the 1960s would take Rock music back to the US, and this time, there was nothing which could stop it. The British Invasion, spear headed by The Beatles, who became mega stars, also featured bands such as The Rolling Stones, The Kinks, The Yardbirds, The Animals And The Who.

While The Beatles were the heirs of Presley, pop stars whom the industry used to make millions, the true spirit of Rock music was better represented by The Rolling Stones, the true heirs of Chuck Berry’s Rock And Roll. Wild, rebellious and often overtly sexual, the Stones turned everything up to maximum and made Chuck Berry look quaint as they unleashed the true Dionysian spirit of Rock And Roll.

This is truly the most significant element of Rock Music. The Ancient Greek God Dionysus had been known as the god of wine and intoxication and his followers indulged in wild lascivious behaviour and, in retrospect, it might be better to designate him as the god of ‘sex, drugs and Rock And Roll’. Although Rock music didn’t exist in Ancient Greece, that spirit had always been there as a fundamental part of the collective human psyche. Christianity and other religions had so heavily repressed humanity that, with the fall of ancient paganism, the Dionysian spirit had all but been wiped out. With the arrival of the Rolling Stones in the mid 1960s, Dionysus was back with a vengeance. Music had always had the potential to release the Dionysian, yet the artistic heights of classical music had usually been far more Apollonian in nature. Rock music, however, was exactly what humanity had needed. Dionysus was back and Rock music conquered the world. In the subsequent decades a truly astonishing quantity of brilliant music would be made, as more and more ordinary people came to realise the creativity they had within them. To be a Rock musician did not require years of training and Rock often favoured low skill levels, yet it was still capable of producing great artistic masterpieces. As such, this became the music of choice for humanity. Whilst it may have never reached quite the artistic heights of the great classical composers, Rock music is nonetheless one of the most significant developments in the entire history of humanity.

During the early 1960s, when Rock had been driven into exile, there had been a brief fad for folk music in the US, with Bob Dylan rising to stardom with his political protest songs. In 1965, after the British Invasion, Dylan saw the potential of Rock music and quickly converted, to the outrage of many of his fans. Dylan took Rock music and combined it with his own style of visionary songwriting and, on his album ‘Highway 61 Revisited’, delivered the first major artistic statement of Rock music. After this, the floodgates opened and Rock began producing a huge quantity of great music, from the psychedelic rock of Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead in San Francisco, Pink Floyd in Britain, the astonishing guitar playing of Jimi Hendrix which inspired Jazz musicians to accept Rock as a serious art (with Miles Davis pioneering Jazz-Rock fusion), the harder blues rock of British bands such as Cream and Led Zeppelin, the experimental genius of composers such as Frank Zappa and Captain Beefheart and folk rock masters such as Van Morrison and Tim Buckley.

The Dionysian heart of this era was best represented by The Velvet Underground, perhaps the most influential band of all time, and the mesmerising presence of Jim Morrison, lead singer of The Doors, who pushed the boundaries of acceptability in his live performances.

Into the 1970s many Rock musicians began creating ambitious compositions to rival classical composers, with Progressive Rock in Britain and a particularly creative school of German bands such as Can and Faust. Singer-songwriters of the age also took the art of songwriting to levels it had never before risen to, artists such as Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen, Neil Young, Tom Waits, Bruce Springsteen, Peter Gabriel And Tom Petty.

Then, in response to this complex creativity, came Punk Rock, loud, aggressive and more musically simple, yet a magnificent unleashing of the real fury and frustration of ordinary people. The Sound had been pioneered earlier by The Stooges, then by the Ramones in the US, before British bands such as The Sex Pistols and The Clash created an explosive movement of a new generation of Rock Music.

Following the Punk revolution, the sheer quantity of great artists increased to the extent that they can’t all be related here. Rock music in the 1980s became incredibly diverse, Punk, Hardcore, Heavy Metal, Synth Pop as well as completely new styles like Hip-Hop which had little to do with the original concept of Rock Music. The darker, more Dionysian strain of Rock was kept alive by Gothic Rock bands, Singer-Songwriters such as Nick Cave and Industrial rock going into the 1990s with a masterpiece like ‘The Downward Spiral’ by Nine Inch Nails representing a high point.

Perhaps more than any other art form in history, Rock music represents the heavily repressed Shadow of humanity desperate to be unleashed. Is there anything quite like the Dionysian mayhem of a great Rock concert?

This major unleashing of human creativity at the end of the 20th Century shows just how ripe humanity is for major revolution. Rock music is the human collective unconscious literally screaming out for release.

We have suffered centuries of repression, but Dionysus will have his due!

Brice Merci – hyperian

Hyperian History Of The World (20th Century, Part 6)

In the 20th Century, the turbulent political events, resulting from the fracture of humanity, were reflected in the arts of the time. Music, visual art and even literature began to descend into extremes of experimentation, with the discarding of many, if not all, of the traditions of the various forms. Whilst this produced many brilliantly innovative results, it also had the effect of alienating popular audiences. Art ended up being almost appropriated by an intellectual, academic elite, with little regard for the tastes of ordinary people.

The greatest art throughout history had tended to find a balance between tradition and innovation. One of the most powerful art forms of the ancient world had been Greek Tragedy, which had been the model for Wagner’s concept of ‘Gesamtkunstwerk’ which he had utilised in his epic operas. The idea was to combine many art forms all at once in a single work. Greek Tragedy had been a visual experience, an aural experience, thanks to the singing of the chorus, and also a literary experience, with the retelling of ancient legends.

Yet the problem was that these works had no final, fixed form for posterity. The words of the plays were written down, so we know the basic content of the plays, and archaeology can give us an idea of what the visual elements might have been, yet we have no real idea what any of the music sounded like.

Since medieval times, composers had devised ways of writing down the music they were composing, so, for Wagner’s works for example, we know exactly how Wagner wanted the music to sound, as he wrote down the score, and we know what the text of the operas are and we also know some of the visual elements, thanks to a brand new technology of the 19th century, photography.

At the end of the 19th century, another brand new technology was developed which would transform the world – sound recording. Now, specific performances of music could be preserved for all time, rather than just the notes the composer wanted to be played being written down.

At around the same time, a final major technological innovation took place. The idea was to have a camera which took pictures continuously in rapid succession, and then for these pictures to be projected onto a screen also in rapid succession as they had been taken, to give the illusion of a moving image on the screen. This led to the birth of an extraordinary new art form, Cinema.

Cinema, although it began as a novelty, became the most complete art form, in terms of Gesamtkunstwerk, as it completely combines visual, aural and literary elements in a fixed form which can be reproduced over and over again.

Initially, of course, films were silent, as sound recording wasn’t yet able to combine with moving images. Very quickly after the invention of the new art form, Cinema developed from simply capturing events in reality, to showing fantastical creations of film directors. Sets were built to show wondrous worlds and actors were employed to act out stories in front of the camera. Directors also realised that they could combine footage in different ways after the footage had been shot, and films became edited together in all sorts of innovative ways, in order to produce films which told ever more challenging stories and produced every more fascinating imagery. Soon, the movies became big business as their popularity with ordinary people increased. In Hollywood, California, the movies became a huge phenomenon.

In 1915, American director David Wark Griffith, produced the first ‘Hollywood Blockbuster’, the 3-hour long ‘The Birth Of A Nation’. The film caused a sensation, and for all manner of reasons. Firstly, from a technical point of view, it represents the first complete expression of the art of cinema as we know it today. The film’s substantial length allowed for a long, complex story to be told. Griffith utilised all sorts of techniques of cinematic narrative, such as montage editing, camera angles, camera movement etc. to create a higher degree of emotional effect for the viewers. He even worked with a composer to create a musical score, specific to the film, the first in cinema history. Unfortunately, the other reason the film caused a sensation, was due to its highly controversial, and, frankly, despicably racist content, as the film tells the story of the American Civil War and its aftermath, focusing on the formation of the Ku Klux Klan who, in the film, are portrayed as the heroes!

Nonetheless, the film is a technical masterpiece which created the language of cinema that is still used today. Cinema would become the most influential and popular art form of the century, combining all art forms into one in ever more creative ways. Unfortunately, the big business side of the movies, particularly in Hollywood, has often had the effect of restraining the artistic elements in favour of more commercial ideas, and film directors have ever had to battle against producers to get their work to be how they want it.

In the 1920s, Cinema spread all over the world. In Germany, the most innovative were the expressionist directors like Fritz Lang and Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau, in Russia new technical ground was broken with the montages of Sergei Eisenstein, and in Hollywood the comedy genius of Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton flourished. Then, in 1927, the major revolution came. For the first time, in the film ‘The Jazz Singer’, spoken dialogue was heard, with Al Jolson uttering the immortal line, “Wait a minute, you ain’t heard nothin’ yet!”

Prior to this, the aural element of cinema had been purely musical, but now dialogue and sound effects became an integral part of cinema. The 1930s saw the solidification of the film soundtrack with great composers like Max Steiner and Erich Korngold, Hollywood went through the golden age of both gangsters films and horror films, and world cinema expanded with French director Jean Renoir and Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu.

The 1940s saw the appearance of one of the greatest figures in the history of cinema, Orson Welles. At a young age, Welles had already found great success in the theatre, both as an actor and as a director. He had then moved on to the radio and, in 1938, had caused chaos with his radio production of ‘War Of The Worlds’ in which he presented the alien invasion as if it were a breaking news story, which caused panic amongst many listeners who believed that actual aliens from Mars were invading Earth!

Welles then went to Hollywood where, thanks to his fame and notoriety, he managed to get an almost impossible contract. Despite being just twenty five years old and despite having never worked in cinema before, Welles managed to get a contract to write, direct and star in a film, with a sizeable budget and even complete artistic control, all much to the envy of many seasoned directors, many of whom had worked in Hollywood for decades and had never even dreamed of such a contract. The result was ‘Citizen Kane’, still regarded by critics as perhaps the greatest film ever made.

Welles had no real idea how to make a movie, yet used his considerable artistic genius to basically make it up, leading to one of the most original and innovate films of the time. Citizen Kane pioneered all manner of techniques, resulting in a masterpiece featuring beautiful visuals, great acting, a great script, brilliant use of sound and a wonderful score by Bernard Herrmann, all balanced into a single work of art which serves as a powerful meditation on the search for meaning in human life.

Unfortunately, despite this artistic triumph, Welles never again received such a contract and his other films, many of which were still masterpieces, never matched up to that first artistic success.

Nonetheless, Welles is a pivotal figure in cinema history. Welles showed that cinema had become a serious art form whilst still being a form of popular entertainment. Film directors now saw themselves as serious artists and cinema went on to give us the wondrous creativity of Alfred Hitchcock, John Ford, Akira Kurosawa, Elia Kazan, Ingmar Bergman, Federico Fellini, Luis Bunuel, Stanley Kubrick, Roman Polanski, Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, Theo Angelopoulos, Andrei Tarkovsky, Terry Gilliam, Quentin Tarantino, Bella Tarr, David Lynch and many others.

Despite these brilliant filmmakers, who have crafted cinema into one of the most powerful and expressive art forms in human history, the industry of the movies is a great example of the evils of modern capitalism. Unlike other art forms, cinema requires substantial capital in order to produce masterpieces. As such, directors, in order to acquire funding, have to make concessions to the money men, rarely enjoying the artistic freedom which Orson Welles had on Citizen Kane. Modern cinema is a pale imitation of what it once was. Despite technological advances, most movies today are simply rehashes of older ideas used to make vast amounts of money. Just look at the ‘Star Wars’ franchise which now churns out substandard material where the original films were brilliant, populist masterpieces.

Cinema has the potential to release the best of human creativity, yet is hampered by the evil of capitalism. In the Hyperian New World Order, once capitalism is brought under control, creativity and artistic quality will be the only reasons to make movies, freeing the artists from the chains of capitalism.

This magnificent synthesis of the arts, one of humanity’s greatest innovations, must be set free and allowed to create true wonders once again.