Since this conversation has been so dead for so long, I'd thought that I'd start another one. I'm putting up the first chapter of my primer just for fun. It was supposed to be a top ten greatest records list and has been continually expanding:

From An Abbreviated Sketch of the Alternative Sounds of Rock History

The Pioneers

Throughout history there have always been those who blaze the trails, head out into parts unknown, whether these be far off lands or far out ideas. In America, our pioneering spirit is much more recent than for the rest of the world. The European cast-off of prisoners, religious cultists, opportunists and others who found the order of the old world too confining (or had no choice in many cases) created a veritable cross-cultural, cross-ethnic stew of rebellious spirits that took this land by force. Its own internal intensity led to a division that was not really settled by the Civil War, a division between the various religious ideals for a specific kind of existence and those who desired an unfettered freedom. The Constitution itself is a mish-mash of these ideas, where freedom is guaranteed but it’s always for one nation under God. The separation between church and state suited many whose own religious practices had been suppressed in various countries until a dominant Christian force arose in this country and that separation is now eroding quickly.
This division is mirrored and supported by the forces of industrialism and then capitalism that shaped the economic structure of our society. As companies gave way to corporations and the singular economic giants of visionary men gave way to boards of faceless executives the originality of an individual culture gave way to the “culture industry” which became the integrated “Entertainment Industry” that we know today. The uneasy unacknowledged alliance of the twin forces of the mass culture and the desire for mass control of the corporate and the program of the religious worlds has produced the schism of our culture today. The Entertainment Industry has produced a cross-boundary tool that indulges our whims for sex and violence yet reifies family values through this same media. The totalizing effect of corporate entertainment culture has subsumed and re-packaged every relevant avant-garde movement and their art and spewed it back out as product for the mainstream masses. This is because wherever Pioneers go, others will follow though rarely in the same spirit of adventure. A certain type of individual is necessary to face the challenges of creating anew. The history of sonic exploration that I outline below is a fragmented story of the artistic production of those people who engage in the Pioneer spirit in a world of corporate products. These people chose art over entertainment and chose to engage in a dialogue with their audience as opposed to the lecture that mainstream culture provided. The key is in the challenge to an audience that has gotten used to having it easy, to try to reach the intellect of people that have gotten used to the emotional reinforcement that TV provides. The avant-garde always exists at the fringes to point the way that lesser artists will go and the mainstream culture will subsume the advances and reconfigure it as mass product to sell which they have to homogenize to appeal to the largest customer base. In essence the people I want to mention here are those who want to be free. Their story is one of resistance as well as compromise. The real world force of economics contains moments of real need as well as the seduction of excess and no one ever remains innocent.
- posted by letch @ 5:45 PM