Suzanne Moore writes an interesting piece in the Graun today about The Velvet Underground, the death of Lou Reed, which she feels deeply, and how, as the headline puts it, post-modernism has killed the avant-garde.
All the great Velvets' songs (Sweet Jane, Waiting For My Man, Venus in Furs) were essentially three (or sometimes two, or even one) chord pop songs. The band flattered their fans into thinking they were listening to something radical, whereas essentially they merely took a lot of drugs, played badly, were recorded badly, and wore sunglasses.
All over the anglophone world young people from the suburbs of provincial towns (Moore was born in Ipswich) illuminated their lives by imagining themselves as outsiders, glamorous acolytes of Andy Warhol. The fans weren't so keen on the Velvets' forays into sonic experimentation. As Moore herself says, Reed's most successful solo album, Transformer, pushed boundaries only in its suggestions of transexuality (a trope perhaps borrowed from David Bowie and Mick Ronson, who produced it, and who had been exploiting the sexual ambiguity thing for several years); otherwise Transformer was unashamedly commercial. It's no accident either that Reed's follow up, Metal Machine Music, was returned to record shops in droves as "edgy" fans baulked at its wall of noise.
In a way Reed's career demonstrates only too well what the avant-garde should be, and what pop actually is. The Velvets experimented. People didn't like it. They recorded simple pop songs about the joys of drug taking and S&M, and people who would never indulge in either bought the records in their thousands.
You have to applaud the willingness of artists to experiment and fail (particularly when they don't ask the general public to pay for their efforts); and yet the cult of experimentation has probably got too deep under our cultural skin, so the young and aspiring have for decades now made originality their mantra. Originality is all very well, but Transformer was a much better album than Metal Machine Music even though it was so derivative.
(I have personally always quite liked Nicholas Maw's notion of having inherited a tradition and not wanting to deviate too far from it.)
Moreover the entrenchment of avant-gardism as an artistic practice has been self-consuming. As experiencers of art, we have become unshockable. Our exposure to so much that seeks to startle has made us alive to the likelihood that any new piece of art will attempt to do just that, and accordingly we are inured to its impact. Not so much The Shock of the New as The Predictability of the New.
So I don't agree with Moore that post-modernism has killed the avant-garde. The avant-garde has eaten itself, and I actually don't think post-modernism has killed anything. If there is any kind of argument for this proposition it is that by showing their technical contrivances and by juxtaposing conflicting artistic languages, artists have undermined the persuasiveness of meaning: that we can no longer take seriously an artistic language because we have become too aware of the processes which underpin it and of the possibly of a different language existing alongside.
But here in the world of classical music we have been dealing with this for well over a hundred years. As soon as composers began making specific reference to music of an earlier period the authority of a contemporary style began to be undermined. If post-modernism has killed musical language it's strange that people still play and enjoy the Holberg Suite, or Dumbarton Oaks; or that people can enjoy a piece from 1830, say, when they have just finished listening to one from 1930.
The reality is that in any sphere, not just music, a language which is persuasive will draw in those experiencing it, and persuade them, if only for the duration of that experience, that it represents a convincing view of the world. If a language fails to do that it will atrophy.
You don't seem many attempts today to go beyond (or even as far as) Joyce's Finnegan's Wake. Today's avant-garde usually becomes tomorrow's blind alley.
