Hello, and welcome to the next in the series of blogcasts on the question of Ottoman “Blind Squirrel” Dietz, read to you by Charles Wilkinson. The music in the background is Stack 7+, from The Stackpole Loop, by Ottoman “Blind Squirrel” Dietz.
Episode Three: Ethnomusicology and the Age of Ultra
You may have heard that this is the Age of Ultra: the age in which there is so much information to absorb that some kindly people (and, lest we forget, corporations are people in the eyes of the law, which is itself famously blindfolded) have determined for us that they should save us the painful time and confusion involved in thinking for ourselves by homogenizing and interpreting our experiences for us. These people seem to be happier if we do not make any independent decisions at all, except for how much we are willing to spend on their brand.
Some who still remember the access codes to their primitive, individual brains find this perhaps more help than they would like, and they long for reminders of simpler, slower, safer times: GMO-free corn that has not been bathed in pesticides during its formative years; eggs that have felt a nest beneath them, or a warm, feathered bottom covering them, however briefly; chicken sandwiches that can pass taste, DNA, and drug tests; news that is just the news (and that is about something more, or at least other, than gleefully immoderate opinions about possibly distressing outcomes of potentially dire situations), and car windows that roll mechanically, without the aid of buttons.
A frivolous by-product of their condition is that some find themselves even more sentimental than their forebears about the simplicity of the (capital P) Past: the musicians of yesteryear, musicians whose rawness we equate with purity: not homogenized into pulp by the machine; unspoiled by agents, contracts, record labels, or, for that matter, fame or financial security. In fact, the more obscure they are, and the poorer they died, the purer we believe them to have been.
In the Age of Ultra, ethnomusicology is a growth industry. It seems that every day someone discovers a long-lost pioneer musician, most often a black man, who has lived in obscurity and died in poverty, the poorer, more obscure, and the deader, the better without, as we say, “… a Wikinote to their nickname …,” and extols the purity of their vision on an unsuspecting public. There also seems to be a direct relation between the artist’s poverty and obscurity and the need his new audience feels to pay homage, among other, more concrete benefits, whether or not the artist will profit directly from his achievements. A curator who may fashion himself to be an informed interpreter is essential for those who fear wasting their time on someone whose discovery will not evince curiosity, or, preferably, jealousy, in one’s peers, if one can be said to have peers, particularly after having demonstrated one’s cultural ascendency when dropping his name casually during the next cocktail party conversation.
“And what,” the astute and increasingly impatient onlooker (or, in this case, on-listener) might ask, “just what does this have to do with Ottoman “Blind Squirrel” Dietz, the ostensible subject of these blogcasts? After all, he is, as you have previously proclaimed, ‘… not actually poor; he is really simply low-class; his obscurity may well prove to be justified; and he isn’t even dead.’ “
I confess that such an observation is not without merit. Indeed, it may be the only other question worth asking when one confronts the question of Ottoman “Blind Squirrel” Dietz in its fretful, if not fruitful, totality. I have asked it myself, and it taunts me most often early in the morning, when the glistening dew calls forth the multitude of wonders that await the intrepid explorer of the new day, or as dusk whispers its lullabies to comfort us at the close of a day once again well-spent in service of our dreams, and to remind us that we have but to dream again. It is then that I must face my lonely and likely pointless endeavor. It is then that I teeter at the brink of the abyss from which no daylight escapes.
And still I persist in this, the Age of Ultra, “acting as if” spackling the patina of substance onto the void might, through sheer dint of repetition, turn nothing into something. Celebrity endorsements are of a similar order, and their progression seems benign enough, in a surreal sort of way: Bob Dylan touts Victoria’s Secret and home mortgages; Kim Kardashian flouts Charmin and Karl, Jr.; Ozzy Osbourne flogs I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter; and if we closed our eyes and shuffled those products without regard for whether they were organic or inorganic, would it make much difference?
And it was only a matter of time before someone in the marketing department postulated that he could combine the efficient packaging of the Age of Ultra with the dazzling appeal of celebrity endorsement, add to it the divine substance of the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup and then take the concept to the next level by removing the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup, revealing that today’s consumer is ecstatic with a fabrication for which its utter absence of content gives it its magnetism. One nation’s current administration has taken the disappearing peanut butter cup approach even farther, combining both a new level and a quality not imagined since George Orwell created a bogeyworld that we realize now is so last century, with such dexterity that it validates each day the scientific principle that nearly 40% of a given test population will respond to its stimulus like dogs to Pavlov’s bell, even if chocolate-bathed peanut butter snacks don’t, and aren’t planned to, follow.
But we are not required, even if it seems to be in vogue, to confuse volume and varnish with value, as though sheer insistence might bridge the gap between wishful thinking and destiny, or between quantity and quality. It is the way of our world, the world of woo and willpower, its dark secret at last exposed and made manifest, and manifestly available, to anyone bold enough to assume its mantle. After all, “In the beginning was the Word.”
And what if the dogged ethnomusicologist can, through sheer persistent insistence, translate his own frivolous subject into something of substance and value? I take my solace in the (as yet unsupported, but isn’t verification the least of our concerns?) optimism of Dietz’s brother, Nehemiah C., who has said, “You just never know.”
Until the next one.